Ways of Working : Vaishnavi Murthy on Type Designing
Ways of Working. Issue 03.
“If someone comes to me today and says that they are trying to revive the Tulu script, I’d be like, what false narrative are you trying to propagate now?” Vaishnavi Murthy says this about the very script she spent years working on.
She works as a creative type director at Monotype, and the Tulu–Tigalari Unicode proposal is closely associated with her name. When she first chose to work on type design as a student, she didn’t realize how complex this discipline really was. Historically, technically, and socially. If she had known, she now says that she probably wouldn’t have chosen it.
Before It Was Research
Vaishnavi grew up in Bangalore in a Tulu-speaking household. Her schooling brought along English, Kannada, and Hindi. At home it was Tulu or a coastal dialect of Kannada, commonly referred to as Managalur Kannada. Every summer she went back to her grandfather’s house in Mangalore, a village in the middle of lush fields, where she spent close to three months a year through most of her childhood.
The Tulu she absorbed there was far from the structured, formal language education. It moved through stories, instructions, and small conversations. Her grandfather was the only person she knew who could read and write in a script no one else around her seemed to use. He said he would teach it to her the following summer. He passed away before that. The script stayed with her as something mentioned, novel and enigmatic.
There is a small detail she found out much later. Her great-grandfather had been a professor at Madras Christian College, working alongside missionaries studying the region’s past, as a historian specializing in language studies. In his own notes, he had already written that the term Tulu script was a ‘so-called name’ implying that it’s not one that came from within. The very same sentiment we see echoed in published manuscripts by great historians like Dr. Gururaja Bhat and B. L. Rice. She arrived at the same conclusion through archives, decades later.
The project she should have said no to
At NID, when it was time to choose a graduation project, that unfinished thread came back. She wanted to work on type properly. Mahendra Patel, trained under Adrian Frutiger and known for teaching type at NID, had not taught her batch. “Everybody else before us learned from him and we didn’t get to.” That absence stayed with her. Type design still remained a discipline very much associated with branding or symbol design. “You think you’ll construct some shapes and it becomes a font.”
The script felt approachable at first. It was not. Visits to Tulu organisations and libraries produced nothing stable until she was directed to Dharmasthala, where an archivist named Vignaraj shared a thin booklet of basic character references. More a skeleton of an alphabet list than a structured system. From there, the work shifted from drawing letters to identifying their structures and reasons behind their forms. No fixed character list, no consistent orthography, sources that contradicted each other. What she submitted at NID was a concept and a framework. The complexity had long outgrown the brief.
What the manuscripts actually said
After graduation, the research continued. She traveled to meet scholars and archivists, compiling her findings into small booklets and bringing them to meetings. Not everyone was welcoming; one scholar threw the booklet across the room and told her to leave. She did not understand why at the time. She does now.
The familiar public narrative, that Tulu once had a rich written culture suppressed when missionaries introduced printing, did not hold up against the material evidence. The manuscripts she discovered were predominantly in Sanskrit, with Tulu and Kannada appearing only in the margins as practical ritual notes, alongside a few translations of Sanskrit texts into these regional languages. Yet this language thrived on a rich oral tradition, epic ballads like the Siri Paddana, which lasts over two days of continuous singing and were passed down through generations. Far from interrupted, it endured unbroken. The unexamined assumption she had long held, that an oral language without script is somehow incomplete, now stood exposed as a bias.
The script appeared under different names across different sources: Tulu script, Tigalari, Western Grantha. The nineteenth-century scholar A.C. Burnell used these names inconsistently within the same work. The same script, documented in the Kannada-speaking hills of Karnataka, was known to scholars there as Tigalari. Two communities, one script, two names, each convinced the other was mistaken. The hybrid term Tulu-Tigalari was coined to honor both claims at once.
It was a small gesture, but a meaningful one. And it shifted the focus from an argument about naming toward something more patient and more necessary: exploration and archiving.
What Reading made clear
Alongside her manuscript study and restoration efforts, she pursued formal training at the University of Reading, focusing on Malayalam typeface design, a sister script to Tulu-Tigalari. At the Monotype Archives, then linked to the university’s type design department, she uncovered the original correspondence between Mathrubhumi Newspaper and Monotype UK office, regarding the first Malayalam typeface commissioned by the Newspaper.
Letters going back and forth about conjuncts, character sets, how handwritten forms should translate into metal type. Reading those exchanges showed how decisions actually got made, character sets defined, ligatures redrawn. Others were dropped or modified for various carefully thought through reasons. Shapes were adjusted for casting and printing. “You see how fluid handwritten forms become a set of repeating structures. You see what gets formed and fixed.”
In manuscripts, forms shift. In print they settle, and digital encoding brings them close to getting frozen. “You encode something that is stable. Not something that is still shifting.” That understanding stayed when she returned to Tulu–Tigalari.
You encode something stable
The Unicode process had its own friction. Competing groups had their own versions of the script, their own encoding proposals, each submission arriving with a different character set, rethought from scratch each time. “In general, encoding is most effective when applied to something stable, not something that’s still under construction.”
The proposal stretched over several years. She worked on it with Vinodh Rajan, drawing largely from manuscript evidence and from studying how structurally similar Brahmic scripts had been handled across India and SE Asia. When it was finally accepted, the credit was claimed publicly by an uninvolved lobbyist. The record was public. She was too tired to engage.
Off the Grid
The politics wore her out. She left type entirely and went to work as a scuba instructor, off the grid, with almost no connectivity for several years. No scripts, no proposals, no competing narratives about whose language owned what. She stayed until COVID made it impossible, then returned to Bangalore and found herself back in the world of script and type she had left.
The script is now encoded in Unicode as Tulu-Tigalari. The font exists, but is not released in public. Scholars working with manuscripts can reach her directly. The work was always about documentation, not about giving a contested narrative more tools to travel with. Not to fuel a narrative of othering but to bring about a reasonable understanding of our collective histories.
A set of repeating behaviors
Type design work is practical. Which characters a language needs, how shaping behaves, what real usage actually demands. Type design, she says, is usually about constructing a set of repeating patterns. Key letters define proportion and movement. Stroke logic carries across the script. Frequency determines scope.
For what falls outside that scope, the principle she works from is graceful decomposition. Unsupported combinations should break predictably and cleanly, not collapse into a mess. A font that fails gracefully is still doing its job.
Tools have changed. FontForge gave way to Glyphs. Python scripts that once took hours are now generated in seconds with AI assistance. “AI answering a lot of my prayers and causing a lot of problems.” The efficiency is real. So are the questions around ecological cost and data at scale.
Outside of work, she writes everything down. Every single thing done in a day goes into a notebook, not as a productivity system but as memory. For things that do not fit in a notebook, she keeps separate Instagram accounts, one per subject she is curious about. Each account holds only what it is for, nothing else. It is the same logic of keeping one notebook per subject.
What has changed more than the tools is her thinking. She is more careful now about the assumption that oral languages need to become literary to survive, or that a script is what gives a language legitimacy. She has seen how funding shapes which narratives get amplified, and how communities end up adopting formats whose logic belongs to another language entirely.
The irritation in how she speaks about it is not opposition for its own sake. It is about certainty. About stories that flatten what is genuinely complex, and the damage that travels with them. The work continues between form and behaviour, between what a script was and what people need it to be now. About noticing where ideas about language become habits, and how those habits travel.
The best one yet! :)