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Poppins

About

Geometric sans serif typefaces have always been popular, and with support for both the Devanagari and Latin writing systems, Poppins is an internationalist addition to the genre.

Many of the Latin glyphs (such as the ampersand) are more constructed and rationalist than is typical. The Devanagari design was particularly novel when it was first published in 2015, and was the first ever Devanagari typeface with a range of weights in this genre. Just like the Latin, the Devanagari is based on pure geometry, particularly circles.

Each letterform is nearly monolinear, with optical corrections applied to stroke joints where necessary to maintain an even typographic color. The Devanagari base character height and the Latin ascender height are equal; Latin capital letters are shorter than the Devanagari characters, and the Latin x-height is set rather high.

The project was developed by Indian Type Foundry (ITF). The Devanagari was initially designed by Ninad Kale, while the Latin was initially designed by Jonny Pinhorn. Following their principal phase of designing the first 5 styles, the typeface was later refined, and expanded to include multiple weights and italics, by the ITF studio team.

To contribute, see github.com/itfoundry/poppins

Designers

Indian Type Foundry (ITF) creates retail and custom multilingual fonts for print and digital media. Started in 2009 by Satya Rajpurohit and Peter Bil’ak, ITF works with designers from across the world. ITF fonts are used by clients ranging from tech giants like Apple, Google, and Sony, to various international brands.

Github | Twitter

After completing an MA in Type Design at the University of Reading, Jonny went on to design Karla for Google Fonts. Karla is a popular and quirky sans-serif typeface that supports both Latin and Tamil scripts. His continued fascination with India and Indian languages led him to ITF, where he worked for three years. Jonny continues to work exclusively on Indic scripts—including Shrikhand and Atithi most recently.

Jonnypinhorn.co.uk | GitHub | Twitter

Choosing type

When you have some text, how can you choose a typeface? Many people—professional designers included—go through an app’s font menu until we find one we like. But the aim of this Google Fonts Knowledge module is to show that there are many considerations that can improve our type choices. By setting some useful constraints to aid our type selection, we can also develop a critical eye for analyzing type along the way.

Poppins - Google Fonts