I design in Hindi. I design in Latin. The difference in available tools, fonts, and best practice resources is staggering. Here's the problem and what I think needs to change.

**The scale of the problem**

600 million Indians read Hindi. 80 million read Tamil. 75 million read Telugu. These are not niche use cases — they are among the largest language communities on Earth. Yet the majority of Indian digital products are designed in English first and localised into Indian languages as an afterthought.

**Why Devanagari is harder to design for**

Latin letters are individually wide and relatively simple. Devanagari glyphs are complex, combining base characters with matras (vowel signs) that appear above, below, before, and after the base. A single "word" in Hindi can span significantly more vertical space than its English equivalent. Most design systems break on Hindi text.

**The font problem**

There are perhaps 15 genuinely good Devanagari typefaces for digital use. Compared to the thousands of quality Latin fonts available on Google Fonts, this is a desert. Noto Sans Devanagari is doing essential work but it's the only real option for many use cases.

**What designers can do**

Always set Hindi copy at 10-15% larger than Latin equivalent. Test every component with Hindi text. Never assume Latin text length equals Hindi text length — it doesn't. Advocate for bilingual design from day one in your product process.

**What the tools need to do**

Figma's complex script support is still not good enough. Variables don't handle bidirectional text well. Text styles that work in English often break in Devanagari. We need to push tool teams harder.