Kimya Gandhi
Kimya Gandhi is a type designer from Mumbai with a passionate interest in Indic type design. Kimya holds a Bachelors degree in Communication Design from National Institute of Fashion Technology, Bombay. She further went on to pursue specialisation in the form of M.Des in Visual Communication at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay. She got her professional start interning at Linotype in 2010. Over the next few years she freelanced for several type foundries catering to their multi-script requirements. In 2015 she became a partner at Mota Italic and now focuses on Indic and Latin designs for retail and custom corporate projects.
When not drawing typefaces, Kimya regularly teaches type design and typography at several design institutes.
Talk: The Act of Pressing a Key: The Journey of a Letterform on to Your Screen
We live in a world where we encounter letterforms every day. We type on our phones, read books, glance at advertisements on the train, follow signage to reach our destinations. Letterforms don’t just carry information – they are a means of expression, shaped by history, culture, and context.
These forms have evolved over centuries, across regions and writing systems. One such script is Devanagari, used to write languages like Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit, and read by hundreds of millions of people.
Join Kimya on the journey of a letterform – from its conception as a drawn shape to its behaviour as digital text on your screen. Drawing from my own experience designing Devanagari typefaces, she’ll reflect on what it means to work with a script that carries cultural memory while constantly being reshaped by new tools and contexts. What does it mean to design for a script you grew up with? And how can type design become a way of re-seeing and re-claiming what feels familiar?
