Today we looked at typography in relation to Balvir Nandra’s
hero Ragunath Krishna Joshi, who was also a friend and colleague, because of
which he was able to witness the creation and evolution of this deshanagari
font. Typography professor R. K. Joshi, born in 1939, was a poet, calligrapher,
designer, researcher, teacher and type specialist. His best years were from
1983-1996 when he was the professor of visual communications at the Industrial
Design Centre of IIT, Mumbai, India. He was also a part of the FCB Advertising
agency in the USA which was classed as the top three advertising agencies.
He made many contributions to the type world. Quoting CDAC
(the company he used to work for in Mumbai):
“He made pioneering efforts to establish aesthetics of
Indian letterforms through workshops and seminars, international conferences,
exhibitions and demonstrations. He revived academic, professional and research
interest in Indian calligraphy, typography and computer-aided type design.”
He created Vinyas, a digital type font design environment
providing a comprehensive set of interactive tools for the generation of
calligraphic fonts (callifonts) using a skeletal approach. His creation of
typecases included Vishakha (Devanagri), Vibhusha (Oriya), and Viloma (Tamil).
He made his first OpenType font for Hindi (Mangal) and Tamil (Latha) and Mangal
became a Microsoft face. He is the developer of Deshanagari, a common script
for all Indian languages. He was also involved in the standardization of codes
for Marathi and has worked exhaustingly to implement Vedic Sanskrit codes for
Unicode.
“Advanced typography is about looking at how language came
about and how we use it today.”
Throughout his, Balvir talked of how long a time and
research it took to create a new typeface, Deshanagari and the persistent
effort it took. Being in contact with him, Balvir told us how he used to get
postcards from him with examples of his work so that he could have opinions on
how to improve them. This portrays someone who is passionate about his works
and wants to create something unique and new and educate people about it. It
also made me realize the beauty and elegance of something handwritten, looking
at R. K. Joshi’s clean crisp script which is done by hand in times when
computers were not available, to the most common typefaces available on the
computer. I started seeing the importance of typography in society.
I looked at some scripts from other languages such as Urdu
and Arabic as I understand them more than gujarati. I would like to try my hand
at it, maybe starting with calligraphy.
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