Rediffusion creates 'Bharat' font to commemorate 75 years of India's independence

Rediffusion’s sister agency Everest has created ‘Bharat’ a commemorative font on the occasion of 75 years of Indian Independence.

The font was launched in Mumbai over the Independence Day weekend by Mahindra Group chairman, Anand Mahindra in the presence of Sandeep Goyal, Managing Director of Rediffusion and Kalyani Srivastava, its Joint President.

Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, educate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. The team at Everest thought along the same lines when they thought of doing something special, something memorable, something long-lasting, and something beautiful to celebrate 75 Years of Everest which coincide with 75 Years of Indian Independence.

Over the last six months, a team of typographers at Everest and Rediffusion Design Studios, led by Virendra Tivrekar, had been hard at work creating a commemorative font that would intrinsically and eternally be Indian.

‘Bharat’ font is the labour of love of a team of five designers: Virendra Tivrekar, Ajit Rakhade, Rohan Parab, Arif Khan and Akash Sharma who have researched, ideated, planned, executed and beautified the font.

“We looked at all the letters of the alphabet in all the Indian languages to draw inspiration and figure out which of these we could adapt, reshape and redesign into a uniquely different font that would coalesce the goodness of India’s diversity into a visual unity,” said Virender Tivrekar, Executive Creative Director, Rediffusion Studios, who is a JJ School alumnus, and has a specialisation in typography.

Goyal said, “Happily for us, the 75 years of Everest coincided with the 75 years of independence of our great nation, India. The agency team set its heart on designing a befitting tribute to India that would have utility and memorability beyond just a date. Hence was born the idea of the Bharat font that would epitomise the spirit of India. It was not till 2010 that India got itself a symbol for the rupee currency. So having a font that is nationalistic and invokes pride by its usage is the driving force behind the creation of Bharat.”

Bharat has a strong phonetic underpin. Every letter of the alphabet is rooted in the letter’s phonetic sound in the parent Indian language – be it Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Devnagari, Gurmukhi, Kannada and more. For example, the ‘Q’ is a combination of half ‘ka’ and ‘va’ of Hindi, and rendered accordingly.

Bharat has been tested with consumer groups on easy readability. After initial exposure, there were no reading or usage issues. Initially, the font will have to be downloaded from a digital link, but can subsequently be used on both computers and mobiles without any difficulty.

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