Arts Thread

India is a country with over 700 languages, each with their own dialects and often with their own unique scripts. Google Font, one of the largest free font libraries in the world only represents 9 of these languages. These nine languages collectively have only 56 font options between them. Compare this to a staggering archive of over 1400 Latin fonts. This disparity isn’t because there aren't enough speakers. For example, my mother tongue, Hindi, with its many regional variations, is the third most spoken language in the world with over 700 million speakers. That’s twice the population of the US. But the lack of representation can leave a language even as popular as Hindi marginalized. Lipi is a Devanagari keyboard that reimagines the typing experience beyond QWERTY. It is a speculative keyboard that questions the assumed universality of widely-used design tools by highlighting the nuances of the Hindi language that are often forced out of the keyboard due to standardisation practices.

Context The pandemic forced businesses in India to suddenly go digital and begin catering to an audience of over 900 million internet users, leading to an increase in demand for digital design services. To cater to this rapidly increasing user base, designers in India constantly need to find localized content for their designs. Problem Due to the lack of geo-specific content from India on popular image banks such as Unsplash, Getty, and Pexels, visual designers in India spend lots of time to find the right image and make compromises with their designs. Workaround Many designers even use Instagram to directly source images from creators in the absence of regionally diverse content on popular image banks. But Instagram is not an easily searchable platform. It is ruled by an ever-changing, often unresponsive, algorithm that makes it easy to drown in a sea of content. You need to know the right people to reach the right image. Most importantly, Instagram isn't designed to be a design tool. Solution Vividh is a hyper-localized online marketplace for designers, with curated images that capture both everyday and extraordinary life in India, clicked by ordinary users from the country. The platform allows designers to search by location, save and purchase images sourced from Instagram through its wide base of regional content partners.