‘Poster boys’ of typographic revolution in Tamil

One may miss the typography in a movie poster, but there is much that goes into the decision of what to use. A group of designers from Chennai are creating fonts in Tamil which are being used in posters that fans make. Some of their work has been recognised by big production houses. 

Aswin Chandar, 25, started his career as a web designer in 2009. It was only in 2013 that he started exploring typography. “I was impressed by the fonts used in the posters of English movies and started creating them in Adobe Illustrator and putting them on social media. Fellow designers, who make fan posters, started approaching me to do the typography,” says Aswin.

He recently did the typography in Tamil for the poster of the Malayalam hit, Charlie, which caught the fancy of the filmmakers. “I was so impressed with the movie that I made a Tamil version of it and the post went viral. A few days later, I got a call from the producers, who were offering to buy it from me. They really liked my art,” says Aswin, who was among the first to have his art recognised. 

Poster typography may go unnoticed because it is an unobtrusive art most of the time, subservient to the star’s picture or graphics. Ashok Kumar Pandiyan, another designer, says, “There are plenty of options when it comes to fonts in English, but designers are at a loss when it comes to variety in Tamil fonts. Most of them settle for the default fonts. Also, most of the Tamil fonts are created in Malaysia.” 

Most designers also take inspiration from Hollywood movies. “If an English movie is dubbed in Tamil, default font is used mostly. What we do is look at the intricate design and create similar fonts in the native language,” says Ashok, who has been working on these fonts for a while now. He shares them with big production houses on social media platforms, hoping that they’d recognise the work. 

Most fonts today are 3-D and creating them takes anything between 30 minutes to three days, depending upon the difficulty level. “I have created over six types of fonts for over 247 characters – it’s hard work. Most of the time, we do not get the respect we deserve and there have been incidents where we have not even been credited for our work. We do this only for our interest. There is no monetary gains,” says Vasanth S, a digital typographer.