Shaping words, one letter at a time

Tired of fitting Indian letters into a Latin mould, Peter Bilak and Satya Rajpurohit created a typeface for Indian scripts. Next up, they will create fonts for Indian languages that don't feature in our word document's drop-down menu, and digitalising the Tulu script

As a third year student at the National Institute of Design in 2007, Satya Rajpurohit completed a three-month internship with a German firm, Linotype, where his work involved developing a Devanagari companion for the Frutiger typeface. Rajpurohit's job was to pluck the Hindi letter out of its 'danda' and fit its curves into a mould created for Latin characters.

Peter Bilak and Satya Rajpurohit at The Hague in 2007

"It was very tough. Everything from defining a relative height for the Devanagari characters to the fact that they hang from a bar made it challenging to match them with the Latin counterparts," he says. Soon after, Rajpurohit began to assist Slovakian graphic and typeface designer Peter Bilak, founder of design company Typotheque. Bilak was interested in exploring Indic versions of a typeface that he had created in 2001, known as the Fedra. Made for the Latin script, Fedra could be used for the English alphabet as well as another 50 Latin-based languages. It needed some serious designing to bring it to Indian scripts. Together, the duo created the Hindi companion for Fedra Sans, which they launched along with their company Indian Type Foundry (ITF) in 2009.

The Kohinoor Gujarati font during development

"After working on Devanagari companions for Latin fonts like Frutiger and Fedra Sans, I felt that this was not the right way. The Latin script has a different design history and uses up to 400 characters, whereas Indian scripts like Bengali and Devanagari have up to 800 characters. We needed to make fonts specially for Indian scripts," says the Ahmedabad-based Rajpurohit.

Bilak, who is based in The Hague, agrees. "In a country as linguistically diverse as India, I was surprised to see little happening in the field of typography."u00a0 Bilak first came to India in 2006 as a speaker for the first Kyoorius DesignYatra, organised by Rajesh Kejriwal. When ITF was set up in 2009, Kejriwal offered to market their work.u00a0
The duo began working on Kohinoor Multi-scriptu00a0-- a typeface family that support a variety of languages and scriptsu00a0-- for Devanagari (used in Hindi, Marathi and Nepali), Tamil, Bengali, Gurumukhi, and Gujarati. They released Kohinoor Devanagari, Tamil and Latin last September, and plan to release Kohinoor Gujarati and Bengali in the next few months.

"We have created a Latin companion, since we use certain English words like FIR or PIL in regional languages too," adds Rajpurohit. What's more, both fonts are Open Type Unicode-compliant. This means the font can be rendered across computers and printers that support Unicode values.

Besides creating typefaces for major Indian languages, ITF also does research to standardise regional languages on the brink of extinction. "It is estimated that 80 per cent of India's 400 local languages will disappear by the end of the century. Languages take thousands of years to develop, but decades to disappear. Tulu, for instance, has a script, but no digital fonts. So people use Kannada to write it digitally, which is not only inadequate, since some of the sounds are not rendered fully, but also threatens the lifespan of the language," says Bilak. ITF is working on standardising a character set and digitalising the Tulu script.

The duo also focuses on bespoke fonts, which includes modifications of their retail fonts, creation of different language versions of fonts, or entirely new fonts to fit their customer's needs. "We recently completed a custom typeface for a Hindi News channel. Our brief was to keep it simple, so viewers can still identify the channel, despite the font change," reveals Rajpurohit. Star TV, he adds, has adopted Kohinoor as their new corporate typeface for their HD channels.