India's Font Guy

Everything by Design Satya Rajpurohit Ought to Have Been a Doctor Luckily for Font Design, He Failed Those Exams, Clearly, There Was a Different Design to His Career.

- Mansi Kapur

THERE’S A LITTLE bit of India in every Apple device, and I’m talking with the man responsible. Unassuming, almost shy about his success, Satya Rajpurohit is in his minimalist office-cum-studio in Ahmedabad, from where he runs India’s first type foundry. Set up in 2009, Indian Type Foundry (ITF) does exactly what it says: it designs fonts. It sounds like an extremely niche business, until you think of this: Fonts are in everything you read, whether on a page or on a screen or on a packet of tea or a bottle of wine.

What’s that got to do with Apple, you may well ask. Two words: system fonts. These are fonts that come installed in a device, and almost always include dozens of languages other than English. And in February 2014, Rajpurohit received an e-mail from Peter Lofting, known to most as the Font Guy at Apple, who said Apple wanted to licence two ITF font families. “This was Apple wanting to license our fonts to use as system fonts,” says Rajpurohit, a trifle breathless about this even three years later. “This was big.” It is a big deal; basically, every time a user switches to an Indian language on an Apple device, that’s Rajpurohit’s work.

Till the Apple project came along, ITF was chugging along. Yes, it had lasted five years without a deal of this size, but Rajpurohit admits there were times he wondered if he should expand the scope of the company to include other elements of graphic design. “I had often asked myself if this narrow focus on type design would be a good idea. Apple settled all those doubts.”

For Rajpurohit, this was the project that turned him into an entrepreneur from a designer.