Pakko
Typecraft Initiative
Pakko: A Highly Intricately Embroidered Typeface
Region: Kutch, Gujarat, India
Craftspersons - Ganga ba, Pawan ba, Mancha ba, Chandu ba, Daksha ba
Designer and Craft Co-ordinator - Ishan Khosla, Charvi Dixit
Font Development - Sol Matas
Project Supported by - Synergy Consulting Inc. and Mon Ami Foundation
NGO - Shrujan
Pakko is characterised by its sturdy denseness. Initially it was known only as a single stitch embroidery. Pakko means strong, durable in Kutchi.
Typecraft Initiative
The Typecraft Initiative is a self-initiated and self-funded project by Ishan Khosla Design LLP. The goal of the project — through the creation of typefaces based on various crafts or tribal arts of India — is to inspire, create awareness and generate further interest in the history, context, work and life of the people we collaborate with. The mandate of The Typecraft Initiative is to raise funds for collaboration and involvement of diverse groups of tribal artists and craftspeople from India in creating typefaces based on their arts and crafts. Whether we make money or not, the crafts person always gets paid in advance. Funds raised from the sale of the typefaces is first used to cover all costs and initiate similar new projects with other tribal and craft artists groups.
Project brief
Gujarati Font Inspired from Embroidery
On this particular project for the Gujarati typeface we collaborated with Shrujan, a non-profit organisation working with various craftswomen in Kutch. The embroideries that Shrujan helps revitalise are all indigenous to the Kutch region, and the particular embroidery we’re working with is called Pakko.
About the Community
Pakko belongs to the Sodha and Jadeja Rajputs. The Jadeja community has lived in Kutch ever since we can remember. Some say they did a little Haramjee Bharat, but the Jadejas did not have an extensive embroidery tradition. The Sodha community although originates from Sindh and migrated from Pakistan during the war. The women we were working with were part of one closely knitted family and have been working with Shrujan since the past 50 years. They were really young when the craft was taught to them, they say they would often run off to play when they were actually supposed to sit and embroidery, referred to as ‘bharat bharna’ (भरत भरना) but as they grew up they realised the importance of the craft and that how it helps them economically. With such dependence on embroidery for earning a lively hood, the women have very little time to devote to embroidery for personal use. The women say they cannot afford to spend four to six months embroidering one exquisite piece, they would rather spend the time on embroidery that earns them an income.
“The embroideries aren’t just craft or hobbies for the communities, it’s their identity.”
About the Embroidery
Pakko and Neran are the two embroidery styles practiced by the Sodha and Jadeja communities.
Pakko is characterised by its sturdy denseness. Initially it was known only as a single stitch embroidery. Pakko means strong, durable in Kutchi. It has curvilinear, floral, bird, animal and figurative motifs. Craftswomen render the wide pakka ni aank (Chain stitch) stitch (also known as cheereli aank) in a dense manner to create the motifs. They use colours that have the same tonal values. And they highlight the motifs with the khann stitch or with a few mirrors. The highlighting helps to lighten the denseness. Shrujan’s understanding of Pakko was that its motif repertoire was limited. A concerted effort was therefore made during the Design Centre on Wheels project to create new motifs and designs. The expanded repertoire brought a newness and freshness to Pakko embroidery. But it still remained primarily a single-stitch embroidery. All this changed in 2013 when field research began with the Sodha and Jadeja communities. The researchers’ interaction with the grandmother generation of craftswomen unearthed long forgotten and ‘lost’ elements - including 54 stitches, 56 ornamented mirrors and over 119 motifs and 31 border styles. These are exciting times for the craftswomen. Only they can decide how they wish to use this newly discovered abundance to reinvent Pakko.
Two ways to embroider:
1. By drawing the design on the base fabric
In most embroidery traditions, the basic drawing is hand-drawn on the fabric. Traditionally, a thin stick sharpened at one end served as the drawing instrument. Natural pigments derived from certain and stencils are also used. Not all the craftswomen who embroider have the skill to render the drawings on the fabric. There are, however, one or two artists in every village or group of villages who are also well versed in their embroidery tradition. They draw the designs on the fabric as per the requirements of the embroidery craftswomen.
2. By counting the threads of the base fabric
In embroideries such as Soof, Khaarak and Jat-Garaasiya, there is no outline or drawing done on the fabric to guide the craftswomen. Instead the design is conceptualized by counting the threads of the base fabric and mentally working out the composition. Embroideries done in this manner are known as counted thread embroideries.
Embroidery Elements
The interplay of five elements — stitches, mirrors, motifs, borders and styles
— creates the embroideries of Kutch.
Understanding the letter forms
When I joined the team, the initial ideation and the derivation of the style of form of the font inspired from the embroidery was already in place.
After that the goal was to incorporate aspects from the embroideries into the form of the letters — especially at the ends, the knots and the borders (since curve ending is a peculiar characteristic of Gujarati script), while creating the structure of the font that is proportionally correct with fairly simple letter design visible at least till 72-90 points. And at a much later stage the vectorised pattern of the intricate embroidery treatment in the letter forms. The next step was to understand the writing system and then how to take the style finalised with the team forward and make it into a display font.
Left: Initial drawings shared with me of the derived style inspired from the embroidery
Right: Trial of embroidery done in the derived style
Gujarati is written from left to right. It is an abugida, that is, every consonant letter contains an inherent vowel. There are forty-five basic symbols; thirty-four consonants and eleven vowels. Despite the loss of the headstroke, letters are still aligned as from a hanging.
I took to looking at the practice of calligraphy which is traditionally done with a reed pen, we started looking at old Gujarati books and various calligraphy references and digital fonts based on gujarati calligraphy.
Then we moved on to segregating the calligraphy letter forms with respect to their strokes. This way we knew which the most unique glyphs were.
Deciding the glyph set
After a few discussions and feedback from native readers as well as type designers we came to a conclusion as to how to limit the number of glyphs in Gujarati for a decorative display typeface-
1. Use half forms of letters to design most 2-3 letter horizontal conjuncts.
Since it is a decorative display typeface, it should be okay even if the half form and consonant are placed close to each other and do not join perfectly (ક્ષ જ્ઞ ક્ક ક્ય છ્ય ઝ્ય ટ્ય ઠ્ય ડ્ય ઢ્ય ત્ત ફ્ફ ફ્ય ષ્ક ષ્ફ સ્ક and Ra conjuncts will have to be designed separately for sure)
2. Design ‘matras+Chandrabindu’ and ‘matras+RephChandrabindu’
3. One can avoid 3-4 letter conjuncts (just make additional half forms of ક્ષ, ત્ત, ત્ર)
4. One can avoid the following characters
vertical/3 letter conjuncts/ vowel forms for a decorative display typeface
Letter Forms
The outer or the main structure is mono-linear although wherever you see the calligraphic strokes go thin that is where we chose to add the transition between the inner segments.
From sketches to embroidery
The embroidery is done with silk threads and mostly bright colours with the same tonal values are used. Although, we spoke to the artisans and told them that we’re going to choose the colour pallet for them but they will decide what colour goes where as they fill the letter forms stenciled on the base cloths. Each embroidered letter consists of five colours including the border called Bakhio (Back stitch). We asked them to explore the patterns and bring variations in the filling the letter forms.
and back to the drawing board - how to digitally use the embroidery pattern?
The next and more vital step was to once again study the embroidery and figure out ways to incorporate it in the font. Two things were to be kept in mind while doing this, first, to keep the embroidery treatment as natural and handmade as possible and the other was the number of nodes.
Below you see the most minimal representation of the embroidery’s shape and structure and on the side you see what it looks like after adding some volume.
The other challenge was to retain the embroidery pattern at different scales, densities, corners, and with all the twists and turns in a Devanagri typeface.
The look and feel of the embroidery once determined then we moved to simplifying the structure and the number of nodes present in it
Revisiting the letter forms & Taking letter to Glyphs App
After the embroideries were done in the letter forms we designed we re-vised certain forms that needed more work to produce the font family.
Forms like ક, ફ, ઙ, ટ, ડ, ર, ઘ, ઇ, ઉ, છ, મ and ન when looked at together with the other forms looked a little out of place.
For example, the ક shown in Fig. 1 (left) looks a little unbalanced compared to the revised ક in Fig. 2 (right).
Fig. 2
Fig. 1
Comparing letters by printing out glyphs and putting them up on a wall
Figuring out what is the ideal counter, loops and knots shapes in selected glyphs
When I started transferring the glyphs from illustrator to Glyphs App, the number of nodes in each letter where ridiculous, we consulted with Sol Matas, Co-founder of the collaborative type foundry Huerta Tipográfica. She has developed font projects in Latin, Cyrillic, Devanagari and Greek.
ol guided me through the process of using glyphs and drawing the letter forms. We establish certain rules with respect to the stroke widths, lengths and letter heights and widths., how horizontal stroke widths would be a point lesser than the vertical strokes for better visual balance as horizontal strokes seem to look wider than the verticals.
Number of nodes and node placement
Before
After
Bringing the embroidery treatment to glyphs app
Once all the alphabets were drawn in Glyphs the next step was to figure out how to incorporate the embroidery.
The first thing I tried was to copy and paste the embroidery pattern I had made in illustrator in the aa--Matra.
And it’s result (Left) which shows the number of nodes is 77.1K which results into the file being so heavy that it’s impossible to work with.
After this I tried exporting the simplified pattern in a small group to get an idea as to how many nodes does one pattern has.
The attempt didn’t work as scaling the pattern down to fit the width of the letter stroke would cause it to deform because in glyphs the nodes stick to the grid, so scaling anything down would result into deformation. And the number of nodes per pattern were still a problem. (Below)
Challenges
1. Maintaining the details of the embroidery.
2. Number of nodes
To resolve the stated issues I took to drawing the embroidery pattern from scratch in Glyphs. Then simplified it further reducing the number of nodes.
(Shown Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 respectively).
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Now, a really interesting thing about the glyphs software I was introduced to was "components". In this context a component is a glyph that you define once, and can be added to many other glyphs. If you edit the original Root Component, it updates all the Component Instances in the other glyphs but it does so by adding no extra nodes.
So, what we did is, we created a glyoh of embroidery pattern and turned that into a component - now the embroidery component could be duplicated as many time as we wanted without adding any nodes to our letters.
The placement of the component, however, has to be done manually.
And there was no provision to rotate the glyph other than entering the degree value you desire it to rotate at. Now, since you cannot rotate the component with the help of the bounding box the challenge lies in figuring out the curves.
Final embroidery pattern
Here (left) you see the reuse of the glyph as a component and the pattern is being formed out of it.
Digitised glyphs
Matra Placement
Matra Placement
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