News

Kohinoor super type family

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:03:42 +0200

The Indian Type Foundry is proud to present Kohinoor, a new super type family supporting Latin, Devanagari and Tamil, three of the most commonly used writing scripts of India.

Kohinoor is an elegant low contrast typeface suitable for both body and display text. It comes in 5 upright styles, and where available also with corresponding Italics. As all ITF fonts, Kohinoor is a Unicode-compliant font and has full support for the conjuncts and ligatures.

Bengali (Bangla) and Gujarati versions will be available in 2011.

New fonts: ITF Devanagari, Kohinoor Gurmukhi

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:34:58 +0200

The Indian Type Foundry is pleased to announce two new font families: ITF Devanagari, a classic-styled Hindi typeface, and Kohinoor Gurmukhi, another addition to Kohinoor super-family.

ITF Devanagari is a Devanagari typeface in classical proportions with higher contrast between the thick and thin strokes which makes it suitable for setting books, magazines, and strict demands of the newspaper printing. It consists of five weights and it optimised for superb legibility and use at small sizes. Its higher contrast makes it ideal to match serif Latin typefaces.

Kohinoor Gurmukhi is a lower contrast typeface suitable for both body and display text. A highly functional typeface family that is easy to work with and inviting to read.

Kohinoor super-family currently supports Latin, Devanagari, Tamil and Gurmukhi, over 150 languages and 1.5 billion native speakers. The long term plan is to make Kohinoor support all official writing scripts of India. Kohinoor Gujarati is at the last stage of development and will be published soon. Kohinoor Bengali, Kohinoor Malayalam, and Kohinoor Kannada are scheduled for 2012.

Saguna Gujarati: A hard-working text typeface

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 12:04:10 +0200

Saguna is a Gujarati typeface created for immersive reading. Text faces like Saguna set passages of text that appear even in colour. An even text block is calming, as it is free from visual distraction. At the same time, Saguna’s letterforms include contrast. This helps heighten the visual excitement of a document’s content. Even colour and memorability: the best typefaces found in today’s publication design strike a delicate balance between these two requirements.

Saguna is a hard-working contemporary family. Its five weights compliment each other. They help lend structure to documents, just as their precisely drawn letterforms add clarity to content. Saguna is best suited for print-based environments like editorial or information design. Although primarily intended for use in text-sized typography, Saguna may also be used for headline-setting, especially when the main text is set in the typeface already. For instance, both the Light and the Bold members of the family work well in larger-sized headlines, while the Regular, Medium, and Semibold are intended for smaller point sizes.

As a family of OpenType-formatted fonts, Saguna supports the Unicode standard. Each font includes 738 glyphs. Their slightly compressed style, combined with the fonts’ extensive use of conjuncts, allows for clear and accurate Gujarati rendering – all while making the typeface space-saving and economical, too.

A script’s heritage is the foundation for its appearances in print. Much of our comprehension during the reading process relies on the intrinsic structures of a typeface’s letterforms. Our familiarity with these is built up through a lifetime of reading. Inspired by the Gujarati calligraphic tradition, Saguna will quickly feel at home to readers of the script. The typeface was designed keeping an implied writing instrument in mind. Due to its degree of contrast and the angle of its strokes, Saguna produces a similar colour in blocks of text to the serif style typefaces often used in other scripts – including Latin typefaces with an oldstyle axis and a relatively high stroke contrast. Stroke contrast itself appears to vary slightly across the Saguna family’s weights. Although the lighter weights do contain a degree of contrast, they appear more monolinear than the heavier weights.

Since text typefaces often need to be combined with other families or writing systems, Saguna was optimised to work together with other ITF typefaces like ITF Devanagari and Kohinoor.

Jonny Pinhorn, a long-time ITF collaborator, designed Saguna during his stay in Gujarat. Jonny is a graduate of the Master of Arts in Typeface Design course at the University of Reading in England.

Tulika Bengali

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:09:53 +0200

Tulika is a text typeface inspired by traditional Bengali calligraphy. It features distinctive, sinuous shapes and a high contrast between thick and thin strokes. Bengali is one of the most complex Indic scripts, requiring the design of over 700 glyphs for each of Tulika’s 5 styles. Jyotish Sonowal, in-house designer at ITF and native speaker of Assamese, did extensive research while defining the character set and included support for the Assamese, Bengali, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Garo, Kokborok, Meitei, and Mundari languages. Tulika is a set of Unicode fonts suitable for setting books, magazines, newspapers and any other material which can benefit from its five weights and high legibility at small point sizes.

Akhand Devanagari

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 06:40:02 +0100

Akhand Devanagari is a family of compact mono-linear typefaces. The letterforms are dynamic; typically round shapes appear more compact, as their verticals have been flattened. This ‘straightening out’ gives text set in the typefaces a streamlined look. Indeed, Akhand Devanagari is designed according to a modular system. All shapes bear a strong commonality to each other, without becoming repetitive. However, the curves in the modules have all been optically corrected, removing the mechanical nature that would otherwise become too dominant.

Developed for display typography, Akhand Devanagari is primarily intended for headline setting. Nevertheless, the design performs well in shorter-length text, too (in call-out text blocks, for instance). The family’s lighter styles are suitable for short paragraphs of running text, as the negative spaces inside of the letters – as well as between them – remains more visible than the letters’ strokes. The typeface’s mono-linearity invites parallels with sans serif style typefaces often used for other scripts. Indeed, this universality enable users to mix Akhand Devanagari with texts set in other languages, helping to make Akhand Devanagari an excellent choice for use in corporate identity work, in addition to a broad range of editorial design scenarios.

The base character height in the Akhand Devanagari fonts is ‘big on the body’. Across a line of text, the consonantal forms take up the majority of vertical space. Vowel marks above and below have been shortened – keeping these to a minimum allows for lines of text to be set more closely together vertically. The reduction of interlinear space is paramount for successful headline typesetting, and Akhand Devanagari performs much better in display applications than similar fonts with more elongated vowel marks. Because of their reduced height, the typeface’s vowel mark forms have been simplified somewhat out of necessity, but this stylistic reduction is in keeping with the modular feeling of the typeface’s overall design. Dot-shaped marks appear rounded in order to help maintain their differentiation from other marks.

The Akhand Devanagari family includes eight font styles. This broad range of weights makes combinations with a strong degree of contrast possible; the lightest and the heaviest styles may be mixed to create a powerful effect in your design. Each font style contains 892 glyphs, offering full support for conjuncts and ligatures. Akhand Devanagari was designed in Ahmedabad by Sanchit Sawaria in 2012.

Peter Bilak Is Leaving ITF

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 20:29:29 +0100

Peter Bilak, the co-founding partner of ITF, is leaving the company to focus on his other activities, effective immediately. Peter has worked for ITF from his office in the Netherlands, and during regular visits to India, since 2009.

‘Starting ITF was one of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved in. Since the first time I visited India, I have been fascinated by the country, which resulted in starting the company together with Satya Rajpurohit,’ said Peter. Biľak and Rajpurohit have worked together on a multitude of projects — custom newspapers (more about this soon), typefaces for TV stations, research into regional languages, and localisation of well-known brands. ‘There is still more work to be done, but for me personally, I feel that ITF is on the right track, and can continue to prosper without me. We have talented in-house designers, and Satya Rajpurohit will take on full responsibility for ITF’s future projects and direction.’

Peter will focus on his personal work and the launch of a new design magazine. We wish him the best of luck, and hope to impress him with new work to come.

SND Delhi lecture

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:34:56 +0100

ITF presented a lecture at the first Indian (and first Asia Pacific) news design conference last week. The conference attracted editors, journalists, designers and art-directors from across India to hear selected local and international speakers.

Out of all the widely varied presentations, we especially enjoyed the talks of Javier Errea. He spoke about the emerging profession of visual journalist, someone who intimately understands the needs of traditional journalism and is also well versed in graphic design and communication. Douglas Okasaki of Gulf News gave a passionate presentation about information graphics and how they enrich the quality of storytelling. Abel Robinson, the art director of the new economic daily MINT, presented their experiments with tablets and MINT's iPad version.

ITF’s Peter Biľak spoke about the role of typography, how it can shape the reader’s experience, enrich the identity of the company, and contribute to legibility and readability. India is the home of more than 400 languages and a dozen of writing scripts. Designing fonts for this environment presents particular typographical challenges, and Peter spoke about typical problems encountered by regional newspapers in India:

Bengali newspaper using a single typeface, distorted indiscriminately, resulting in a page with low information hierarchy.

• Because of the lack of high-quality fonts, many newspapers suffer from poor legibility.

• Because of the lack of fonts offering variations in height and width, many newspapers are unable to create a satisfactory hierarchy of information.

• Perhaps most importantly, because of the lack of quality fonts to choose from, the same font may be used by numerous newspapers and magazines, a severe impediment for publishers striving to build a periodical with a unique identity in an increasingly competitive environment.

Analysis of an existing Kannada-language newspaper and its most common typographical problems

Peter also presented a number of case studies in which ITF reviewed a newspaper’s current situation, suggested improvements, and then designed exclusive fonts which became part of the publication’s DNA. ITF is involved both in design of retail fonts as well as exclusive custom fonts, and some of those projects will be presented online shortly.

List of criteria for selecting newspaper typefaces

First Asia Pacific news design conference

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:24:54 +0100

WAN-IFRA and the Society for News Design (SND) will join together to present a conference Jan. 23, 2012 in New Delhi, India to show the participants the “best practices” in creativity, originality and the efficiency in producing news for all platforms.

A good design gives added value to the editorial content. Today, newspaper designers, infographics artists and editors face the challenge of creative design to adapt to the four main news platforms — print, web, mobile and tablet.

The ITF will contribute to this first Asia Pacific news design conference, with our lecture of the state of newspaper typography in India. The full conference programme is below:

23 January 2012, 9.30 am — 6 pm

In Journalism We Trust, Visual Journalism
Javier Errea, Principal, Errea Comunicación, Spain

Experiments with News Design
Deepak Harichandan, Design Head (West), The Times of India

Information Graphics to enrich the quality of storytelling, and in consequence, a better visual product for your readers
Douglas Okasaki, Senior Designer, Gulf News, Dubai

Indic Language Typography for Print and Screen media
Peter Bilak, co-founder, Indian Type Foundry

And the winner is: Your Sports Page
Hans Peter Janisch, Design Consultant, Germany

Transformers: The Rise of the Hybrid News Designers
Adonis Durado, Design Director, Times of Oman

Breaking News on the Tablet
Abel Robinson, Art Director, MINT, HT Media Ltd, India

Designing Vernacular Online Newsites
Sukriti Gupta, CEO, MMI online, Jagran Prakashan, India

Adventures in Interactive News Design
Tyson Evans, Assistant Editor – Interactive Newsdesk, The New York Times

Find out more, and register for the conference on the WAN-IFRA page.
http://www.wan-ifra.org/events/news-design-conference

Free Indian Rupee Symbol Font

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:15:34 +0200

A new sign for the Indian rupee was introduced exactly a year ago and was immediately assigned a position in the Unicode standard. Many people were skeptical as to whether the new symbol would be accepted and used, but looking at the publishing and advertising world in India today, we have to conclude that the adoption rate for the new rupee sign is stunning. Our unscientific estimate is that 75% of prices now use the new currency symbol. The rupee symbol, a blend of the Devanagari ‘Ra’ and Roman ‘R’ gives India a symbol of confidence and recognition in the global economy.

Both Euro and Rupee symbols were originally conceived as logos, with fixed proportions, so they have no relationship with the style of the font that they have to work with.

Compared to the adoption of the Euro symbol, the adoption of the rupee sign has been much faster, but there are some similarities. For example, both symbols were introduced as logos rather than glyphs, meaning that the symbols had a fixed appearance that worked well with surrounding text in regular width fonts like Helvetica, but not with light, heavy, or more ornamental fonts.

Note how poorly the Rupee symbol works in this sample from the Times of India. The symbol is too light and too small for the bold and condensed headline.

We at Indian Type Foundry have decided to adopt the symbol and to include it in all our fonts. Furthermore, we have decided to design and release a free font with the new rupee sign in various styles and weights. While the Unicode value of the new glyph is 0x20B9, in this font we encoded the 20 variations under capital letters A–T. Feel free to use it and show us examples of how it works for you.

Download the font in OpenType or in TrueType format.

The free ITF Rupee font comes in a range of styles — from Sans to Serif, to Condensed and Rounded, each in multiple weights to match any style of numerals.

Unicode in India

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 11:14:33 +0100

During a recent visit to Bangalore, ITF had a meeting with Gautam John of Pratham Books.

Pratham Books is a not-for-profit trust dedicated to publishing high-quality children’s books in multiple Indian languages at a affordable cost. They produce over a million books a year in 11 languages, but some of their own content has already been rendered inaccessible due to its being stored using non-standard font encodings. We spoke with Gautam about literacy, languages, accessibility, and Unicode. While ITF has always advocated Unicode standards as the way forward for Indian typography, we were pleased to hear that a large organisation such as Pratham understands the importance of standardisation and is moving towards full adoption of Unicode.

Gautam followed up our conversation with an email where he formulated an internal case for adoption of Unicode at Pratham Books.

—Given that Pratham Books publishes in Indian languages, using Unicode fonts is the only way to achieve cross-platform interoperability compatible with a global standard.
—Given India’s push towards copyright reform for the visually impaired, it is imperative that Unicode fonts be used in the creation of Indic content (because otherwise there is a huge barrier to conversion to print-friendly formats).
—Unicode, as an open global standard, guarantees content accessibility in the future and ensures no proprietary font and vendor lock-in.
—There is a severe lack of high quality and varied typefaces that are both screen and print optimised OpenType Indic Unicode fonts.
—Given the importance of linguistic diversity to India’s cultural heritage, it is imperative that greater attention is paid to the development of high-quality Indic fonts with flexible licensing.
—Use of Unicode will significantly reduce bandwidth/storage, making operations more efficient on the longer run.
—Unicode guarantees accessibility of content, e.g. search/sort functionality, text-to-voice and voice-to-text, machine translation, and search engine optimisation.

ITF shares this perspective and is prepared to work with publishers and content developers, advising them how to adjust their workflow to achieve greater efficiency and meet current and future needs.

Workshop at MIT Pune

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:40:35 +0100

ITF conducted its first typographic workshop, in collaboration with the MIT Institute of Design in Pune.

The intention of this two days workshop was to examine and understand the anatomy of the alphabet through a formal analysis of letters, and propose two new graphemes.

Students started with an analysis of Latin alphabet system, studying the relationships of upper and lower case, formal and informal writing (constructed vs cursive writing) and grouping and categorising of letters. In the first day, students proceded with handwriting exercises aimed at deeper understanding of the existing structure of the alphabet. In the day two, students analysed existing typefaces, and tried to integrate the new symbols in the chosen typeface. They used vector drawing tools to define the shapes following the given design parameters.

This short workshop demonstrated that type design is more than just drawing individual shapes but it is about understanding construction principles and structure of the chosen writing script. Thanks for the MIT students for their hard work!

2010 SOTA Catalyst Award winner

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:25:47 +0200

Congratulations to Satya Rajpurohit, the first winner of the SOTA Catalyst Award. The SOTA Catalyst award was created to recognize a person 30 years of age or younger who has shown both achievement and future promise in the field of typography.

The competition was very close, with 55 entries submitted from 20 different countries. Satya’s work was selected by the committee as representing the outstanding quality required by the award, and as meeting the spirit of its purpose as well. He has been notified of the award and has confirmed that he will speak at Typecon in LA.

Satya is co-founder of the The Indian Type Foundry (ITF) in Ahmedabad, India. ITF is India's first digital type foundry providing Unicode compliant fonts. He studied at the National Institute of Design (NID) in India and interned with Linotype in Germany. He has also worked at Dalton Maag and L2M3 . He now works full time at ITF, creating original fonts in all the major Indian scripts along with their Latin companions.

The Society of Typographic Aficionados Press release:
http://www.typecon.com/talk.php?id=354

The Essential Structure of Letterforms

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:26:01 +0200

When you set out to design typefaces for a language that you don’t understand, it is important to do some preliminary research. True, typeface design is necessarily systematic, and it is possible to draw abstract shapes based only on the interaction of foreground and background, creating balanced letterforms that connect to form words, sentences and text. Still, it helps to know something about a language when you design typefaces for it. It simply makes the design process faster. Knowing, for example, what letter combinations are used in the language keeps you from wasting time evaluating combinations that never occur.

Just as it is difficult to distinguish individual words when listening to a foreign language, it is difficult to recognise individual characters when looking at an unfamiliar writing script. And it is doubly difficult to distinguish the essential structure of the letters from the decorative elements. Studying fast handwriting helps: it is usually free of any decoration, utilising just the essential strokes required to identify each character. It was fascinating to study the same text rendered by different people, find possible letter alternatives, and discover culturally preferred forms. Once the structures of the letters became clear, the design process became a formal game of black and white again.

For the preliminary research for Fedra Hindi we collected samples of handwriting in Indic scripts. These samples of Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali became the foundation for our future designs. With this material in hand, we could choose the letter forms which suited our purposes. Without it, we would have merely replicated what had already been done, probably propagating common errors in our lack of knowledge. Thorough research doesn’t restrict you; on the contrary it gives you the freedom to make intelligent choices.

See all images on Flickr.

ITF nominated for the Designs of the Year

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:26:11 +0200

The Design Museum, London is currently preparing to host its annual exhibition and awards Brit Insurance Designs of the Year for 2010, showcasing 100 projects from seven design disciplines; architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport.

The Indian Type Foundry has been nominated for the Designs of the Year for 2010, for its Fedra Hindi project, and for starting up the foundry.
http://www.designsoftheyear.com

The winners will be announced in March 2010.

Welcoming type submissions

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:26:23 +0200

Indian Type Foundry is looking for submissions to expand its type library. Since ITF develops typefaces for all major scripts in India, we welcome submissions of Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu typefaces.

We accept submissions in digital format via email or in physical via post. We will respond to every submission, but please allow several weeks, for the deliberation.

Your submission must be your original design. Please don't send designs which are modifications of existing designs.

If you choose to email your submission material as an attachment, please send PDFs, and limit your files to under 4 MB. Do not send other file types, and please include your full contact details on all submissions.

Starting up, press release

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:26:33 +0200

Mumbai, The Hague, 4 September 2009

The Indian Type Foundry will be the first specialised company to develop and directly distribute Unicode-compliant digital fonts in India.

From high end technology to the creative arts, India is rapidly becoming a major global player. The growth of the IT industry in India is phenomenal, fuelling the explosive economic expansion that is set to overtake China.

Despite this astounding technological progress, India has long lacked one essential component of global communication: typefaces, the media that render language on paper or screen. The very few which exist were designed by foreign software giants to support their operating systems, or as corporate fonts for the exclusive use of some global company. There are virtually no typeface collections that can be licensed by Indian designers.

There are many reasons for this: There are several hundreds of languages spoken in India and written in any of the 9 Indic scripts, all of which are very complex and extremely time consuming to digitise. There is little standardisation, and major design applications such Adobe Creative Suite do not support any Indic languages. Furthermore, the high level of piracy discourages potentially interested parties from pursuing development activities in India.

The Indian Type Foundry (ITF) is the first company to develop and directly distribute digital fonts in India. ITF was initiated by Peter Biľak of Typotheque in partnership with SN Rajpurohit and Rajesh Kejriwal (Kyoorius Exchange). “Rajesh has been incredibly active in bringing the Indian design community together. He has created the first Indian design magazine and first Indian design conference, and been a catalyst behind many collaborative projects in India”, says Peter Biľak. “That’s why I was very pleased that Rajesh agreed to join us to create ITF. And I have worked with the very talented Satya Rajpurohit for the past two years on Fedra Hindi, our first typeface specifically designed for the Indian market.”

ITF will develop typefaces for all major scripts in India: Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. Besides designing and directly distributing them in India, ITF will also serve as an educational platform for typography. ITF is committed to organising lectures and workshops, as well as to actively promoting the publishing and exchanging of ideas. The intention is to give the same attention to Indian typography as Latin typography has received in the last few decades.

Fedra Hindi, the award-winning Devanagari companion to Fedra Sans is the first typeface in the ITF collection. It is a typeface developed for visual identities, designed to work equally well on paper and on the computer screen. Fedra Hindi comes in 5 weights with full support for conjuncts.

www.indiantypefoundry.com

About the partners:
Peter Biľak was born in Czechoslovakia and studied in England, the USA, and France before ending up in the Netherlands. He works in the field of editorial, graphic, type and web design, and teaches part time at the Royal Academy in the Hague. He launched his type foundry Typotheque in 1999, and Dot Dot Dot magazine in 2000. He is member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale).

Rajesh Kejriwal established Kyoorius Exchange in 2005 as a not-for-profit organization to build a platform for design and creativity. Kyoorius Exchange has been widely recognised throughout the design community globally as the organiser of the successful design conference Kyoorius Designyatra.

SN Rajpurohit is a graduate of NID. After brief periods of work in Germany (Linotype) and England (Dalton Maag) he returned to India to work as an independent designer. He worked closely with Peter Biľak on Fedra Hindi, and partnered with him to start ITF.

ITF at the Kyoorius DesignYatra

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:45:57 +0200

Indian Type Foundry will launch new products and the brand new website at the Kyoorius DesignYatra 2010 in Mumbai. We'll have a stand at the conference, so please join us and say hello to ITF founders. You can get a free copy of the new ITF brochure, just hot out of the press.

New ITF fonts will be available with 20% discount, just for the duration of the conference, that is 3 and 4 September. And everyone who buys our fonts directly at the conference will also get a free T-shirt.

Looking forward to seeing you in Mumbai!

Full-Time Type Design Internship

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 15:34:50 +0200

The ITF is seeking a motivated and enthusiastic intern passionate about typography and type design. This person will draw type, assisting us with current projects and developing new ones. Must be able to work independently, with good drawing skills and some knowledge of FontLab. Knowledge of South Indian languages is a bonus.

The internship is full time for the duration of 3 or 6 months, and you will work in our office in Ahmadabad. If you are interested, please send us your CV, and samples of work.

Three typography lectures and workshop

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 21:38:25 +0100

The Indian Type Foundry (ITF) would like to invite you to three typography lectures (Ahmedabad, Pune and Bangalore), and a workshop that ITF will hold in Pune. Lectures are public and free of charge.

First lecture will be in Ahmadabad, at the National Institute of Design.
NID auditorium on 28 January, 5:30pm
Paldi, Ahmedabad 380 007, India

Second stop will be MIT Institute of Design, Pune where ITF will speak during Quasar 5, the annual design festival.

Peter Bilak of ITF will conduct a type design workshop on the 31 January and 1 February for a small group of type enthusiasts.

Lecture: 31 January 2011, 10:30 am

MIT Institute of Design
Loni Kalbohor, Next to Hadapasar, Pune 412 201, Maharashtra

And finally ITF will speak in Bangalore:

Lecture: 2 February 2011, 7:00 pm

Raffles Millennium International
HM Vibha Towers, 4th Floor, Luskar Hosur Road, No. 63, Koramangala
Bangalore, India

Numbers are limited so, if you wish to attend, please call 080 4341 8888 or email kirtivarma@educompraffles.com to reserve your place.