Meet Satya, an Indian typeface expert who Apple, Google, Amazon come to for Indian fonts

Meet Satya Rajpurohit, an Ahmedabad resident who began working with fonts back in 2009 after he founded his company - the Indian Type Foundry.

Little had he thought back then that Apple, Samsung and Star TV would be his clients one day.

Becoming a typeface expert, he says, was not his dream. He was more interested in motion graphics after school, while his parents wanted him to become a doctor.

After he failed at clearing the exams, he began applying to art colleges and was finally accepted at the prestigious National Institute of Design. It wasn’t until he found an internship in Linotype, a renowned type foundry in Germany, that Satya considered it professionally.

His internship led him to Dalton Maag, London, the next year where he met Peter Bilak, a type designer from Netherlands, whose company made Latin fonts, but needed someone for the Indian fonts.

Satya who had begun to develop his own Devanagari fonts by then, set up Indian Type Foundry with Peter as business partner in 2009.

In 2014, two years after Peter left the company, came the first big client. Apple placed a request to license two ITF fonts. While the project took a few months, it was a landmark moment for the company.
Today, the Indian Type Foundry boasts of over 200 fonts, in various Indian and Latin languages.

“We have 130 retail fonts, and about another 100 custom fonts or so,” Satya told Betterindia.

These retail fonts are available for sale online and are open for anyone to purchase. The custom brands are created on special request by clients — these include the designs Satya and his team have for brands like Star, Sony and Samsung, among others.