Sachindra Kumar Mohanty

Bhubaneswar, Oct. 22: Type designer and calligrapher Sachindra Kumar Mohanty is working on creating fonts for the Odia script, among other Indian regional languages, for use on smart phones.

He has created an “Open Type” font to use on Android-based smart phones for a few Indian mobile phone companies.

“I have already worked on seven scripts, among which Bengali was tough since it is an artistically written script. Shortly, you will also be able to see Odia on smart phones,” said Sachindra Kumar.

Son of legendary sculptor Bipra Charan Mohanty, Sachindra Kumar is known for his contribution to the development of Indic scripts that are used on computers.

After completing his first degree in applied art from Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Arts, Mumbai, in 1984, Sachindra Kumar received a masters in design from the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, in 1990.

“When computers were first introduced in India in early 90’s, the government wanted to make use of regional Indian languages on computers for the benefit of the common man. It was a daunting task. But before we started working for this, our industry used to depend completely on the USA and Europe,” he said.

Mohanty had to standardise digital codes for font design of Indian scripts since our scripts are extremely complex unlike European or other Western scripts.

“We use symbols all around the letter to make syllables and words. While Chinese is one tough language to create designs for technological use, the entire country uses that one pattern and hence at least once done, the problem is solved in China. But in India, we have at least 10 major scripts and 22 official languages. It is very complex indeed,” he said.

Today, he is the only type designer who has worked extensively on type design of all the major 10 Indic scripts for professional use by computer industry.

After computers, he created the digital type design of Indian languages for dot-matrix printers and Motorola pagers. And then came the time to design them to use on television.

“Earlier, they had to hand write the message and shoot on camera,” recalled Mohanty.

He has designed more than150 digital typefaces for various output devices for professional use, in different Indic scripts. More than 200 typefaces in Indic scripts have been designed under his creative guidance. His contribution includes Typeface designs in the complex Indian and some south Asian scripts, which include Devanagari, Bengali, Assamese, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Bhutanese and Tibetan.