Alphabettes Soup is Served!

a stack of three books showing the spine of Alphabettes Soup with the word ALPHABETTES set vertically on the spine. The cover is bright green and features a large A made of smaller characters and glyphs

Grab a spoon and get ready for some big SOUP updates!

On April 1, Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type was printed and bound at Gráfica Maiaduoro in Portugal. I was so fortunate to travel to sunny Porto with my daughter and hold the very first finished copy: a 2.4-pound, 400-page beauty! We held a soft launch on Thursday, April 2 at the Bikini Books HQ. Over forty people came, books were sold and signed, and it was an absolute thrill to share it with the world for the first time.

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Devanagari Typography 101: A guide for typesetting with Latin

Evolved from the Brahmi script, Devanagari is used to write Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, and Nepali, and remains an important Indic script used in South Asia and beyond. Its technological advances have been slow, and design advances are just starting to pick up. South Asia, and specifically India, has a multilingual cultural landscape, and it is not uncommon for street signs, periodicals, newspapers, and other printed ephemera to typically use two to three languages—English and a regional language or two, or two to three regional languages together. While Indian street signs have long featured beautifully painted, built, or set Devanagari signs, often integrating Latin numbers or words seamlessly, translating this to digital typesetting has not been an equally easy task, owing to the differences in setting the two scripts, the difference in anatomy and reading of the scripts, and the limited availability of Devanagari fonts as compared to Latin. There are also knowledge gaps in multilingual typesetting where a script is often forced to follow Latin typesetting principles. This write-up aims to develop a guide for effectively setting Devanagari alongside Latin type, while honoring the nuances of both scripts.

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