The original Adelle Sans font family, José Scaglione and Veronika Burian’s award-winning sans serif, provides a more clean and spirited take on the traditional grotesque sans. In 2013 Veronika and José began a Devanagari project during a concentrated course at the University of Reading (UK). Erin McLaughlin and Vaibhav Singh continued consultancy and design a few years later, and the Adelle Sans Devanagari family came into its own when Pooja Saxena joined TypeTogether in 2017. In all, this family is the culmination of five years of sweating the details.

Adelle Sans Devanagari translates the Latin’s forms into the voice of over 400 million people, or over 1/3 of all India. As is typical with TypeTogether typefaces, the most demanding editorial design problems were taken into consideration when creating Adelle Sans Devanagari. The combination of lively character and unobtrusive appearance inherent to grotesque sans serifs make it an utterly versatile tool for every imaginable situation. Whether for branding, signage, editorial, or advertising, the keyword behind Adelle Sans Devanagari’s use is flexibility.

Adelle Sans Devanagari is TypeTogether’s first Indic and Devanagari offering. It is available in seven weights that capitalise on legibility and provide the designer a wide range of text emphasis within their layout. By creating weights from Thin to Heavy, the Devanagari is a perfect counterpart to the Latin in tone, vertical proportions, and functionality. This ensures harmony between both type families in the same block of text and a pleasing change of texture when used at similar point sizes.

Rooted in the belief that broad language support is crucial to modern type design, Adelle Sans Devanagari is yet another push in TypeTogether’s ongoing multilingual efforts. Adding language support is not a simple act of matching geometry stroke for stroke; each script must harmonise with the others while still maintaining its own identity. Devanagari script has more round shapes than Latin, with connected, arched, and flowing strokes. It also has deeper vertical metrics and a headline that makes drawing heavy weights a challenge. Adelle Sans Devanagari is therefore rounder and significantly more complex than its Latin counterpart. The Adelle family’s naturally clean and spirited shapes lend themselves to a graceful Devanagari translation of the Latin’s colour and feel, matching the overall functionality, purpose, and cultural awareness.

Across the entire multilingual family — Latin, Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Greek, now Devanagari, and with more on the way — each has been engineered to optically match the proportions of its counterparts. (Note: In addition to Devanagari, this font includes our full Latin character set, which supports hundreds of languages. Please refer to the digital specimen for more information.) Adelle Sans Devanagari’s exhaustive character set and OpenType support delivers consistent, flexible, and personable results in digital and printed multilingual documents and multicultural branding.

CREDITS
Concept:
Veronika Burian & José Scaglione (Latin & Devanagari)

Design:
Veronika Burian (Latin & Devanagari)
Erin McLaughlin (Devanagari)
Pooja Saxena (Devanagari)
José Scaglione (Latin & Devanagari)
Vaibhav Singh (Devanagari)

Engineering:
Joancarles Casasín
Pooja Saxena

Quality assurance:
Azza Alameddine

Graphic design:
Pooja Saxena
Elena Veguillas

Copywriting:
Joshua Farmer

Consultancy on Devanagari:
Fiona Ross
Vaibhav Singh