Yatra mimics the high-contrast, modulated, chunky style of Mumbai rail sign painting. Like the rail signs, Yatra includes basic Marathi support. Yatra aims to illustrate how typography for civic contexts, rather than aiming for simplicity and universality, can instead retain local and historic qualities.
The Latin in Yatra shares a brush angle with its Devanagari, which is part of why it looks so quirky. The Devanagari was designed first. The Latin characters mimic Devanagari forms in an extreme way without being too cheesy. The typeface attempts to capture the liveliness and error that make painted signs endearing.
Yatra was designed by Catherine Leigh Schmidt. It was funded in part by a Fulbright-Nehru Student Research grant and by Google Fonts. Please feel free to get in touch with thoughts, questions, or criticism by emailing me.
Final GIF edit by Tom Moody using these images of Indian textile patterns.