Dr Santosh kshirsagar, Dean of Sir JJ school of applied arts is a design educator and has been teaching since 2 decades. Mumbai based calligrapher completed his PHD in handwriting acquisition in devnagri script from IDC, bombay and is an academic consultant to government organisations and many private institutes in India. He has been on advisory board of typography since 2009.
His most noticed work are his typefaces in gujrati and oriya for Microsoft XP. The first kind to be designed in OTF format. He explained typography and calligraphy in detail while interacting with people. According to him calligraphy was first before type according to dictionary calligraphy is decoded means art of writing with beauty. Later on with world moving forward to advancement of industrialisation and mass communication purpose the TYPE was invented. Type is for print and production and one needs standardised and balanced letter form. Calligrapher back then gave a crucial input in invention of type as they gave their thought to most ideal letter form look and size for print media. The TYPE was first done in 16th century and lateron it became typography.
Certain people feel once the type is produced and it's so easy to do these days that we don't really need calligraphy, but for him being a calligrapher calligraphy gives an artist the freedom to experiment with art style. What People miss on is the thin line between typography and calligraphy. Typography was invented solely for readers where as calligraphy gives a person the satisfaction of writing beautifully.
While talking about scripts experienced observed says every script changes after a time period. In context to India devnagri has been changed over the centuries, devnagri has been modified 20 times in 3000 years. The habit and practice is reciprocal people practice what they're habitual of, calligraphers try something new and change their habit to an extent. When asked about standardisation in calligraphy he says one can not say there is no standardisation, the moment we started writing writing standardisation came into existence otherwise any picture would've not been converted into a sign and then into letterform.
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