How to Dance the Alphabet

Communication design / Exhibitions

The two latest type projects of Peter Bilak include Hindi fonts and a Dance Writer which converts text into a gracefully choreographed dance sequence.

By Jeanne Tan / 17-09-2009

It's been a busy month for Peter Bilak of Typotheque, with two new type launches: first, an initiative to develop digital fonts in India and second, a new version of Dance Writer at ExperimentaDesign Lisbon.

Initiated by Czechoslovakian-born, The Hague-based designer Peter Bilak in partnership with SN Rajpurohit and Rajesh Kejriwal (Kyoorius Exchange), the Indian Type Foundry (ITF) will be the first specialised company to develop and directly distribute digital fonts in India. While developing digital fonts might not sound like a big move for the western design world, it is a huge step for India, considering the complexity of the hundreds of languages spoken in India which are written in any of the nine Indic Scripts.

Despite the rapid growth of their IT industry, India has lacked typefaces - the very few which exist were designed by foreign software giants to support their operating systems, or as corporate fonts for the exclusive use of a global company. There are few typeface collections that can be licensed by Indian designers. Obstacles to standardisation include the complexity and time-consuming nature of digitising the scripts, major design applications do not support Indic languages and the high level of piracy discourages the potential of development in this field.

ITF will develop typefaces for all major scripts in India: Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. Besides designing and directly distributing them in India, ITF will also serve as an educational platform for typography with the intention to give the same attention to Indian typography as Latin typography has received in the last few decades.

Fedra Hindi, the award-winning Devanagari companion to Fedra Sans is the first typeface in the ITF collection. It is a typeface developed for visual identities, designed to work equally well on paper and on the computer screen. Fedra Hindi comes in 5 weights. Bilak has spent the last three years working on Devanagari fonts as well as Latin fonts has also developed Armenian, Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek fonts.

Moving over to Europe, another project debuted this time at ExperimentaDesign (EXD:09) in Lisbon. A new version of his Dance Writer was created for the feature exhibition Quick Quick Slow, which surveys the dimension of time in graphic design. First developed by Bilak in 2007, Dance Writer converts text into dance moves performed in real time by a real dancer. Visitors type in the letters or a message at the computer and a dancer dances the text out in a special pre-filmed choreography. The face of the dancer is never revealed, only her profile: the only time she turns to face the audience is with the letter I. The letters are performed by Valentina Scaglia. Watch her dance A-Z below.