Professor R. K. Joshi (1936, in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India – 5 February 2008, in San Francisco, USA) was an academic type designer and calligrapher.
He was brought up in the town of Kolhapur, Maharashtra, where he developed an interest in alphabets, their shapes, styles and design.
He created some stunning logos including the Welcome Group,[1] capturing the ethos of an Indian welcome and Punjab National Bank, aptly utilizing the alphabet P in Punjabi.
[2] He brought the concept of multilingual ad campaigns in India, opening up to languages crossing states.
He studied the rarest manuscripts in Indic languages, of which his inspiration was a book titled Bharatiya Pracheen Lipimala by an Indian Author Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha.
There were conflicts about highlighting the picture of the saint, Prof Joshi found the solution as a logo for the philosophy itself of Advaitvad (non-dualism).
His R&D on the Desha Coding Scheme in 1982, under the guidance of Prof R Narsimhan; design of Pa Latino a software for digital typeface design, in collaboration with Dr. P K Ghosh; innovative computer graphics with Indian letterforms; dot matrix fonts and PS fonts as a step towards multilingual text processors like Aalekh (Hinditron), Vividha(CMC), Vidura(IGNCA).
He actively conducted national and international workshops, seminars and lecture tours for the spread of typography.