If you ask type designer Satya Rajpurohit what he thinks of the new restaurant that’s opened up in the city, don’t expect to hear about the food. Instead, he’ll probably tell you how the menu could have looked better with proper leading between the lines or how the logo might have stood out better in a different point size. For Satya, the world is a carelessly scribbled-over slate, a cluttered mess in which one is occasionally confronted with true brilliance — a perfectly designed typeface that can turn an ordinary detergent brochure into a veritable masterpiece.With mass production as its ultimate goal, typography compels calligraphy, an art form, to conform to the science of automation. To serve the purpose of rapid reproduction, written forms need to be altered and standardised in their overall appearance, yet look aesthetic. Typography then, is a curious discipline where art meets technology, linguistics and culture. As Dutch type designer Peter Bilak puts it, “Good typography doesn’t just reside in forms of letters but in how those forms relate to the place where we live and the particular era.”Historically, Indic fonts have had a strong Western influence. Western type manufacturers Monotype and Linotype brought their printing machines to India, but struggled with the complexity and multitude of languages here. The first Hindi types for books and newspapers were made by Europeans in the 18th century, altered in their visual appearance to accommodate the limits of machinery built keeping Latin letter forms in mind. Today, Monotype and Linotype fonts still dominate digital and traditional publishing in India. As digital technology silently fuels the cultural dominance of Latin typefaces, non-Latin type designers are forced to forgo authenticity and legibility in order to make their typefaces available in the market.Remarkably, most of us in English-literate India are largely unaware of this acute technological disadvantage, our eyes accustomed to glazing over texts in regional Indic scripts wherever we encounter them. This is where Satya’s work with Peter Bilak at the Indian Type Foundry (ITF) comes to play. “We at ITF see it as our responsibility to develop fine quality Indian fonts and make Indian typography as popular in India as Latin typography is in the West,” he says. Satya and Peter set up the ITF in 2009 to meet the specific typeface needs of Indian scripts. The duo has already won critical acclaim with their first creation, Fedra Hindi. As the Devanagari script was new to Peter, they collected handwritten samples for preliminary research. “Analysing handwritings helps one understand how people approach different letters and how they deal with different strokes, joineries, etc., along with how much one can distort a letterform while maintaining its legibility. Extensive research gives you the freedom to make intelligent choices,” says Peter. Fashioning Fedra Hindi threw up some interesting challenges. For one, they had to select the right proportions for the Devanagari characters in relation to the Latin ones. As Devanagari characters don’t have upper and lower cases, Peter and Satya had to design the characters to work well with both upper and lower case Latin characters. They also needed to match the colour of the Devanagari and Latin text; Devanagari by its very nature is dense, so its letters had to be slightly lighter than their Latin counterparts. Their greatest challenge, however, was in dealing with technical issues. Currently, most fonts made in India are created to work only within certain applications. ITF is trying to emancipate the type design profession by making fonts which follow international standards, and can be used across various media and applications. “Fedra Hindi is an advanced OpenType font family that can render Devanagari as it should be in a traditional sense, but the support for these features is almost nonexistent in most of the commonly used software,” says Satya. Except Adobe CS4 to some extent, no other popular design software supports complex Indian scripts at the moment. Another obstacle to the development of Indian typography is the issue of piracy. While copyright laws exist, they are seldom put into practice. Subsequently, professional type designers hesitate to put in the time and effort to create good typefaces, leading to the spread of hastily made inferior fonts in the Indian type market. Through workshops and articles, ITF hopes to increase people’s awareness of typography, opening up access to high quality fonts in India, while encouraging their legal and commercially viable use. With Fedra Hindi under their belt, ITF is currently working on a couple of other projects, including a super family called Kohinoor Multiscript, which will eventually support all the nine major Indian scripts — three standalone Devanagari, Bengali and Tamil typeface families.To find out more about ITF or to buy their fonts, visit www.indiantypefoundry.com 

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