Mythila is perhaps the first Devanagari and Indic typeface made with a folk art or craft.  As a display typeface, it is the marriage of the rich wall art of the bucolic Madhubani villages—such as Ranti, Jitwarpur and Rashidpur on the edge of India-Nepal at the foothills of the Himalayas. Home of the Hindu Goddess Sita—wife of Lord Ram—Mithila art celebrates scenes from The Ramayana, as well as the kobhar ghar (nuptial chamber) for newly weds. Traditionally painted by hand using natural pigments on mud walls by women folk, the art form has gone through a tremendous change in the past fifty years. Going from mud to canvas and now to screen via this typeface, takes the art form to new possibilities from storytelling to education and use in graphic design.
 
Also known as Madhubani art—named after the honeyed forests of the area—the visual forms are inspired entirely by nature’s bounty—specifically flora and fauna found in this region of Eastern India at the foothills of the great Himalaya mountains. Drawing from this visual tradition—plants and trees of various kinds (Banana, Tulsi, Mango, Neem) water, birds, fish and snakes—become the building blocks of each character.
 
We would like to highlight the challenges in bringing out Mythila Devanagari typeface—which is a marriage between the layered complexity folk art and the minimal proportionality that type design requires. But also between mythological figuration and typographic possibilities. A key difficulty was to balance the tension between expression and legibility—between the intricacy of the artwork with the structural requirements of Devanagari and the technical demands of a digital font. Each letter needed to retain its individual character while working as part of a coherent typographic system.
 
It took over four years to create this typeface due to various challenges, such as each letter having its own shirorekha (headline) which meant overlapping them which is typically done for spacing and kerning couldn’t be done. In some cases, the drawings had to be reimagined or tweaked to match the constraints of type design while not compromising the richness of this ancient folk art. 
 
Nature is a central theme in Mithila art, reflected in its depictions of the natural world and its place in everyday life. Drawing from this visual tradition, trees, water, birds, fish and snakes become the building blocks of each character. The letterforms were developed through the artists' own practice, carrying the imagery, patterns and visual vocabulary of Mithila art into the script. These handmade forms were then digitised and refined into a functional display typeface, retaining the expressive qualities of the original artwork while establishing consistency across the character set.
 
We designed the letters like a stencil, keeping the stem and the shirorekha separate to allow for variation of letter designs and yet making the typeface as functional as possible. Made in collaboration with renowned contemporary Madhubani artists, the project explores how type design can be a receptacle of rich folk and indigenous art and craft—and how that can not just change the way we understand these crafts but also type itself.
 
Made in collaboration with folk artists—Pushpa Kumari, Hira Kanth, Rekha Rani, Shanti Devi, Pradyumna Kumar—from the Madhubani District of Bihar where this art form originates. Taken over 4 years to draw, render and develop, this has been a true labour of love! Art Direction: Ishan Khosla | Font Development: Ishan Khosla, The Typecraft Initiative and Vaibhav Singh, Typeland | Student interns: Ashima Kaushik, Jessica Gomes, Soumya Nair, Megha Sharma, Girija Kshirsagar and Aastha Lathia.