Modak
Type with Purpose
Good typography guides attention, improves understanding, and makes communication effortless.
The Anatomy of a Typeface
By FontSide · June 2026
Every typeface is a system of decisions — about stroke contrast, x-height, spacing, and rhythm. The best ones feel invisible: you stop seeing the letters and start hearing the voice behind them. That transparency is the hardest thing to design.
A high x-height opens up the counters and makes small text breathe. Tight tracking pulls a headline together; loose tracking gives a caption room to exhale. None of these choices are accidents — they are arguments about how reading should feel.
Uppercase
Lowercase
Numerals
Symbols
Package Manager
The recommended way to use fonts in modern web projects.
1. Install Package
pnpm add @fontsource/modak2. Import in App
// Please select at least one weight and style3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Modak", system-ui;
}Google Fonts CDN
Use Google's CDN to embed the fonts directly via HTML.
HTML <head>
<!-- Please select at least one weight and style -->Fontsource CDN
Skip the build step by adding this directly to your global CSS file.
Global CSS
/* Please select at least one weight and style */Background & Story
Modak is a sweet plump Devanagari+Latin display typeface with portly curves and thin counters. It is Unicode compliant and is open sourced under the SIL Open Font License v1.1.
Modak began as a heavy hand-sketched letterform exploration in Devanagari with cute, adorable characters whose curves merged into each other, forming distinct counter shapes. As we translated these into a functional font, each character was fine-tuned and multiple matras designed to match precisely with every character. Unlike the conventional approach the post-base matras in Modak overlap the consonants. Likewise overlapping ukars were also designed leaving thin counters in between. Rather than being a mere composite of 2 separate glyphs, every conjunct was redrawn as a single entity. The challenge was to maintain legibility and consistency in the thin white counter spaces across all characters irrespective of their structural complexity.
The resulting typeface is one of its kind and most likely the chubbiest Devanagari typeface to be designed so far. Modak Devanagari is designed by Sarang Kulkarni and Maithili Shingre and Modak Latin by Noopur Datye with support from Girish Dalvi.
We are immensely thankful to Santosh Kshirsagar, Pradnya Naik and Yashodeep Gholap for their suggestions and feedback during the font design process. We are also grateful to our friends from the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay and Sir J J Institute of Applied Art for their support and encouragement.
This project is led by Ek Type, a collective of type designers based in Mumbai focused on designing contemporary Indian typefaces. To contribute, see github.com/girish-dalvi/Modak
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource/modakDesigned by
Ek Type
Links
License
OFL-1.1