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.
ITF nominated for the Designs of the Year 18 Jan 2010
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 09 Nov 2009
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 04 Sep 2009
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.
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.
