The Indian Type Foundry

by Shagun Singh

India does not have a tradition of type design even though it has a rich heritage of diverse scripts. Coming across Indian Type Foundry (ITF) was a pleasant surprise. ITF was founded by Peter Bilak, a noted Slovakian typographer and Indian designer Satya Rajpurohit. Peter was in India to give a presentation at the Design Yatra conference in 2006 and presented a project made with Arabic typography. He was approached by Satya soon after to work on an Indian version of Fedra Sans. Fedra Hindi was born out of two years of hard work by both the designers.

The Reserve Bank of India as well as some prominent Hindi television channels are using Fedra Hindi. Next on the charts is Tamil, Bengali and Gurmukhi versions. Peter doesn’t read or speak any of these languages but did preliminary research before starting on Fedra Hindi. As the Indian economy picks up,  there will be a high demand of well designed typefaces for local languages for use in the publishing companies, television and even technologies like the IPad. IT companies in Bangalore are making new software every day that need different fonts so there is a large market of local type in the Indian IT market as well.

ITF’s intention is also to promote the knowledge of type design by conducting workshops and lectures to get the discussion around typography going in India. High rates of font piracy can also explain the low use of type design in India. Badly designed fonts are available for free downloads. With the lack of good design education, most people including designers cant differentiate between a well designed font and a bad one.

India has 9 scripts and the Devanagri script is used to write in Hindi which is India’s national language hence it was a natural choice to be picked for development first by Peter and Satya. However, ITF is working on a big typeface family called the Kohinoor Multiscript that will be available in all the 9 scripts along with Latin. There are still technical difficulties and Fedra Hindi is not supported by any design software except Adobe CS4.

ITF takes font submissions and anyone can submit a font. Designing typefaces for large number of Indian languages will help preserve them in a digital format since a lot of these languages are facing extinction. The intention of Indian Type Foundry is to bring uniformity that will help usage of type styles that will work in a big array of languages and cut across cultural and linguistic barriers of international borders. Educating people and making them aware of typography is just the first step in the long road that entails taking pride in local scripts, understanding the nuances that make good type and then eventually buying and using them legally.

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