R K Joshi, 1936–2008
Sad news reached us that renowned calligrapher and typographer professor R K Joshi, who served as the ATypI country delegate for India, passed away in San Francisco on February 5th, at the age of 72.
After a meritorious 30 year career in the mass communication industry, Prof. Joshi spent 15 years teaching design courses IDC/IIT in Mumbai. He later served as a visiting design specialist at the Centre for Developed of Advanced Computing in Mumbai.
Prof. Joshi helped develop font design software, Indian language word processing packages and designed series of Indic fonts for Microsoft Windows and Linux. He organized exhibitions, workshops and seminars on various aspects of Indian letterforms and exhibited his calligraphic works at educational Institutes and public places. He also wrote poems, staged multilingual happenings, planned multilingual communication campaigns and undertook the first ever calligraphic research in Indian manuscripts and epigraphic writings.
Prof. Joshi spoke on Indian design, calligraphy, type design, compugraphy for ATypI, TDC, Icograda and other organizations. He received numerous awards including the CAG Hall of Fame (1992) and the Ad Club Distinguished Achievement Award (2004).
A recording of a 2007 interview with Prof. Joshi is available in the TypeRadio archive: http://www.typeradio.org/loudblog/index.php?cat=Joshi,R.K.
More information about Prof. Joshi is available at the CDAC website: http://www.cdacmumbai.in/index.php/cdacmumbai/prof_r_k_joshi
Adam Twardoch