Pria Ravichandran
Typeface Designer, Director, and Mother
Dr. Pria Ravichandran is a type designer, researcher, and co-founder of Foundry5, an independent type design studio. She has worked internationally as Chief Design Officer at URW Type Foundry and has designed fonts for Google Fonts and Monotype.
She studied Typeface Design at the University of Reading, earning her Master’s degree and later completing her PhD in 2020. Her doctoral research, “The development of typographic forms for the Kannada and Telugu scripts”, examined how Western foundries and printing environments influenced the standardization of South Indian typeforms.
Pria is the designer of several widely used typefaces, including Catamaran, Palanquin, Neue Frutiger Tamil, and Peridot, which support both Latin and Indic scripts and are distributed through platforms such as Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts.
Her speaking engagements include the Justin Howes Memorial Lecture at the St Bride Foundation, London (2021) and her presentation at TypoDay 2017 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where she spoke on Indic type design and typography.
Her academic work includes “Western foundry founts in the Kannada and Telugu scripts” (ProQuest, 2024), based on her doctoral research.
Born in Tirunelveli, India (22 May 1984), Pria is bilingual in Tamil and English. She currently lives in Thessaloniki, Greece, with her partner, typeface designer Kostas Bartsokas, and their son.