Font Designing: The New Age Career Options
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The Government of India officially released the symbol for the Indian rupee in July this year. IITian Udaya Kumar from Chennai's design won the design contest announced by the government last year. But the question that arose was how could it be typed into a document on the computer? A firm, Foradian Technologies, came to the rescue. It not only designed a font for the rupee symbol, but also mapped it to the keyboard within 24 hours of the announcement of the official symbol.
"The idea to create the font came up after I came across a word document sent by my client with the rupee fond - and they had reportedly faced a lot of problems cutting and pasting it in the document. I spoke to some friends about the matter and realised that everyone was confused about how to incorporate the font into the computer. That prompted my team to create a font for the Rupee," says Unni Koroth, CEO and co-founder of Foradian Technologies, a Mangalore-based start-up.
As soon as the new Indian rupee sign was approved, Foradian Technologies published a free font on their blog. The font and the blog became a viral phenomenon with 1 million visits in just two days of the launch of the font. There were 5,000 downloads within an hour and so the company created an improved version of the font and uploaded it. It created two versions within 24 hours of the announcement of the symbol. The third version of the rupee font was released at the end of July.
When the government said it would take more than a year for the symbol to become commercially available, "we thought of doing something about it. Due to the rupee font viral (phenomenon) that was created, the symbol got approval from Unicode within three months and we consider it as a great achievement," he says. (Each symbol has a position in the Unicode chart. It could have taken a year for the Indian rupee symbol to get a distinctive position in it.)
Koroth, a rank holder in electronics and communication engineering, was always interested in history, typography and logo designing. He initially worked with a cellular company as a network engineer and later started Foradian Technologies along with his batchmates. His advice to students wanting to take up font design as career is to take up engineering in computer-related fields and go for a course in graphic design.
A font designer should possess an artistic sensibility, be technically savvy and have basic understanding of fonts such as OPEN type and TRUE type etc. Also, to go for a full-time job as a font designer may not be sustainable, at least initially, he says. "Font design is an evolving field in India. My suggestion to youngsters is that they can also pursue logo designing as an option, to ensure a steady flow of income, at least initially." He adds, "There is a lot of scope in India for font designers because there are more than 300 Indian languages. There will be a huge requirement for fonts in regional languages in the future."
Tell us something about your work.
In India, there is a demand for specialised fonts and requirement-based font development (such as for advertising and greeting cards etc). I have worked on cursive writing fonts in English and Hindi.
A font designer designs fonts with application in software. Before the invention of font software, development of fonts was a long process but now it is a relatively simple and much easier.
How does one become a font designer? Is specialised training required for this work?
Most font designers are trained in communication design, visual arts and applied arts. All these courses have typography as an important subject.
It is advisable to go through a graphic designing course to become a font designer.
What are the challenges before a font designer?
The greatest challenge before a font designer today is to find the right avenue to sell it.
The product also needs to have a competitive edge over existing fonts available on the Internet and with software development companies.
One needs an organised channel to sell one's fonts such as software development companies, websites etc.
Author: Vandana Ramnani (HT Horizons)
Date: 11th December, 2010
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