At some point during her bachelor studies at NIFT, Kimya found herself fascinated with letterforms and typography; not yet aware of the vast field of type design that existed beyond. To pursue this growing interest, after completing her Masters from IDC, IIT Bombay, she took an internship with Linotype in Germany. The internship validated her interest in type design and opened new doors to learning type design and production. Her internship project, DIN Next Devanagari, in collaboration with Akira Kobayashi, was released by Linotype Design Studio. She later went on to pursue the Typeface Design Intensive (TDi) summer program at the University of Reading in the UK.
Kimya now lives in Berlin and alongwith Rob Keller runs the type foundry Mota Italic, designing retail and custom fonts in Devanagari and Latin. Mota Italic has catered to to custom type requirements for clients like Škoda, Audi, Google, to name a few.
Kimya believes there is reinvent the type design learning environment in India and encourage vernacular typography. When drawing letterforms Kimya used to teach typography and type design courses at various design institutes, like Indian School of Design and Innovation (ISDI), Pearl Academy, NIFT, Symbiosis Institute of Design. She has conducted workshops at NID, Typography Day and at international conferences like TypeCon in Washington DC.
After graduation, Kimya gave herself two years to decide if she wanted pursue type design professionally, it’s been 10 years since and she is very happy that she did.
