Ishan Khosla I founded The Typecraft Initiative in 2011 as a collaborative to work with type as a basis for inclusion. We work with marginalized communities—women, refugees, minorities and people from subordinate castes—in South Asia and beyond.
We see type design not just as an final outcome to construct a font; but as a genesis to build a tool of creation, and, a repository of rich cultural knowledge and heritage that are embedded in the shapes of letters. Oral traditions are made visual through embroideries with their own hidden language which are carefully translated first as physical hand embroidered letters and then traced and honed on the screen, with an intent to keep the material traces alive.
Embroidery is a critical expression of the Rabari desert culture said to have come to India from far away lands such as Uzbekistan. It is a means to communicate their identity, rites of passage and social mores.
As this knowledge is waning, can the embroideries with its motifs and borders that now find their way as icons included in the typeface to tell new stories but also to not forget the old?
This project takes type design to the limits of digital possibility and physical materiality and celebrates nomadic cultural expression, whose footsteps might get lost in the sands of the desert, but not in these experimental typefaces.
The Rabari typeface comes in two versions, one which has different degrees of contrast, based on its varying density—and the other, Rabari Rangeela, which emphasizes the dazzling nature of this community’s maximalist embroidery that belies the bleakness of the desert.
I will also be talking about two other desert-based crafts made into typefaces of Kutch and Rajasthan (India) and Sindh (Pakistan), that are both crafted by the muslim Khatri dyeing community of the region—bandhani or tie-dye and Ajrakh block printing. The former as a Arabic (Urdu) typeface and the latter as a modular, Latin-script typeface.