Professor R K Joshi (1936, in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India – 5 February 2008, in San Francisco, USA) was an academic type designer and calligrapher. He designed the core Indian fonts used in Microsoft Windows. Early life Joshi was born into a middle class Indian family. He was brought up in the town of Kolhapur, Maharashtra. He developed an interest in alphabets, their shapes, styles and design. In 1952, he decided to study art at Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai. During this time he found a scarcity of typefaces in Indian languages. He took up extra classes at the Government Institute of Printing Technology, located within the institute premises, where he learned that Indian typefaces were intricate and had many problems in typesetting. He participated in the first exhibition on Indian typefaces at the college. Professional life His first professional experience was with D.J. Keymer & Co. (now O&M) in 1956. In 1961, he joined ULKA Advertising (now DraftFCB+Ulka) as Art Director. He started designing campaigns on issues regarding Family Planning and Farmers and to unite the entire country, he designed the campaigns in various Indian languages. His efforts were questioned, but he stuck to his philosophy and thought process. He created some stunning logos including the Welcome Group, capturing the ethos of an Indian welcome and Punjab National Bank, aptly utilizing the alphabet P in Punjabi. He designed several advertisements for Nerolac Paints and Crompton Greaves using Indian calligraphy, designed exclusive menus for the Taj Group and stationery for Chimanlals. He brought the concept of multilingual ad campaigns in India, opening up to languages crossing states. The first ever such campaign was the Ashok Jain Campaign. Tryst with Types Influenced by the books of Italian Masters like Arrighi, he found a new world of calligraphy to explore. He applied it to the Indian context and explored Indic scripts in Calligraphic styles. He studied the rarest manuscripts in Indic languages, of which his inspiration was a book titled Bharatiya Pracheen Lipimala by an Indian Author Ojha. This book brought to him the world of ancient scripts, like Brahmi, Sharda, Kautilya and Gupta scripts. After an intense research on these scripts, in 1966, he designed his first two fonts. One of his challenging works was the design of the Adi Shankaracharya stamp on the occasion of Shankaracharya (Philosopher) Commemoration. There were conflicts about highlighting the picture of the saint, Prof