Sidharth Jaishankar

The project

Tac is an informal editorial family for Latin and Tamil, drawn from expressive hand-lettering and unconventional writing tools. It takes inspiration from Tamil book covers and magazines of the 1960s-80s that used hand-drawn elements and paste-up composition, returning to that tradition of playfulness and expressivity in both type and graphic design.

Its letterforms derive from extensive writing explorations focused on speed and rhythm, using a folded pen that incentivises quick, energetic shapes. The family spans Title, Header, and Text styles across a range of weights and italics, built as an editorial system where each style serves a distinct function within the text hierarchy while sharing the same expressive, hand-drawn texture.

Concept

The project began from a desire to get better at hand skills and to explore the expression of materiality in digital type: how tools leave traces of their identity even in a digital end-product decoupled from physical material. Jaishankar grounded the project in the graphic context of 1960s-80s Tamil book covers and magazines, whose hand-drawn lettering and paste-up composition felt distinctly idiomatic before becoming more globalised and less interesting with the arrival of digital media. Three principles guided the references he gathered: play, the non-standard or unexpected use of a tool; speed, letting construction at speed show through in the forms; and simulation, imagining a hypothetical tool whose logic could be applied consistently across all letterforms, or simulating a physical quality like speed through its visual sub-effects alone.

Process

Jaishankar started exploring speed with a Pilot parallel pen, then moved to a folded nib after feeling limited by the parallel pen, producing more expressive and fast letterforms; customised folded nibs made from aluminium cans, in different sizes and on different surfaces, gave further variation. Writing in capitals helped him focus on inter-letter relationships rather than falling back on cursive shapes, and from these explorations came the letter groups that founded the whole family. Building digital drafts was iterative, tracing over old drafts and moving between the folded pen, digital sketches, and digital tools, deliberately setting aside conventional rules of node placement and overshoots in favour of matching texture and rhythm between the Latin and Tamil scripts before refining details.

For the text styles, an initial reverse-stress modulation felt too calligraphic and lacked the liveliness of the title styles, so Jaishankar removed the serifs and stroke modulation to build sans serif drafts across weights from extra light to extra bold, then reintroduced serifs once the underlying structure was established, keeping low contrast in lighter weights and increasing it with weight. A Header style, based on an extrabold sans serif draft, was added as a bridge between the Title and Text styles, giving the family three distinct levels of hierarchy.