Indian Type Foundry Announced

Mumbai, The Hague - 8 September 2009

The Indian Type Foundry will be the first specialised company to develop and directly distribute 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 Bilak 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 Bilak. “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