The head stroke is the most immediately visible thing about Ranjana, a heavy horizontal bar from which the letters hang and along which the eye travels, and the compound vowels are the marks that use the space above it. That gives the script a second register. Below the bar are the consonants and the marks for u and the vocalic liquids, and above it are the marks for e, ai, o and au together with the sign for a nasal. A line of Ranjana therefore has activity on both sides of a strong horizontal, which is a large part of why the script reads as ornamental rather than merely legible, and why it was chosen for display work. The thick and thin contrast of the strokes reinforces it: the bar and the descending stems are heavy, the connecting strokes and many of the marks are fine, and the wedge shaped terminals catch the light of a page in the way a formal hand is meant to. This is the quality that carried the script beyond Nepal.
Tibetan tradition took it up under the name Lantsa for headings, book covers and the inscriptions on painted works, where a script that fills a panel with a strong horizontal and a set of marks above and below it does exactly what a decorative border needs. The mark for e is a good illustration of the economy involved. It is a small stroke, it costs the scribe almost nothing, and it uses space that would otherwise be empty, so the syllable grows in information without growing in width. A script whose vowels were written in line, as a Latin alphabet writes them, would need more of the page for the same text and would lose the even vertical rhythm that makes a Ranjana line look ruled.