Nick Lovegrove

On the 2nd February the typographer and graphic designer Peter Bil’ak gave a talk at the college. Peter is one of the most well-known and respected type designers in the world, so was a privilege for such a high profile guest to visit Bangalore and speak on a public stage. There was a decent mixture of our students, students and faculty from other colleges and professionals at the event. Some even came from as far as Delhi and Kolkata to attend.

I asked Peter if he could come to Bangalore after reading an interview with him in Eye Magazine. In the interview he explained about his latest venture, the Indian Type Foundry, the company he co-founded that aims to design and release quality fonts for the Indian market. He mentioned that an important aspect of setting up the company would involve educating India on why good type matters and why font piracy is harmful. So, after a remarkably brief email discussion he agreed to visit, having never previously been to Bangalore.

Most of the existing fonts for Indian languages use character sets which, over the last few hundred years, have been much-simplified from their handwritten origins. There are all sorts of reasons for this: colonial rule, imported technology that was made for much simpler latin scripts, a lack of government guidance and almost no kind of financial incentive for type designers. The Devanagari fonts made by ITF have over 800 glyphs, many of which have never been incorporated into a digital font before.

Also, Peter and his partners at the ITF plan to create fonts, not just for the most popular Indian languages but also for the smaller, less common variations that are struggling to survive in the digital realm. Unless there are fonts for these languages, they will almost certainly die out within a few decades. If published material can’t be produced these ancient languages will forever have to be handwritten, which severely limits the potential audience.

As part of the college’s marketing campaign we invited the press to the event. I was expecting one or two of the westernised arts-focused magazines like Time Out to take an interest but in the end, rather surprisingly, three newspapers asked for interviews. This meant Peter had to spend a challenging 3 hour stint with journalists trying to explain what he does for a living. Two of the interviews went fairly smoothly, one of them i suspect because the hack didn’t understand a word, the other because she’d done a decent amount of research beforehand. The third interview was a real struggle. The journalist had a real difficulty understanding the differences between language, alphabets, type design and typography. She was far from stupid, she simply had never thought about the subject before. Peter and I tried coming up with all manner of analogies to explain what the ITF does, eventually with some success.

Following this dialogue Peter decided to change the content of his talk to include explanations of these terms, to make it easier for typography newbies (and there were quite a few in the audience) to understand the importance of what the ITF is doing. He also felt the need to communicate the idea that a well designed font take a huge amount of skill, time and dedication to create.

He also spoke about the design process he went through for the postage stamps he designed for the Dutch postal service, saying that the final design was more of a last-minute attempt to try a new approach, even though the client was happy with the existing solutions. It has now been in use for 8 years, with hundreds of millions of copies having been printed.

He went on to talk about the importance of programming in modern design. As an example, he showed a project he’s currently working on, a series of book covers for a Slovakian publisher. He’s developed a programme using Python coding to merge decorative letterforms into a semi-randomised pattern. This is simply an updated version of the idea of the book jacket template pioneered by Tschichold at Penguin. However it allows a much wider range of possible outcomes, yet doesn’t take any more time to produce.

It was a pleasure and an honour to spend the day with such a high-profile figure. Having spent so much time and effort organising the event, even down to designing the promotional poster, invites and backdrop, it was really satisfying to see a room full of people there to hear him speak.

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Further coverage of the event:
Times of India
Bangalore Mirror
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www.typotheque.com
www.indiantypefoundry.com