Her connection to letterforms began early, as her father named her “Lipi,” meaning script in Hindi, an origin that now feels uncannily prophetic. Raised in a home shaped by her parents’ artistic and architectural sensibilities, and in a childhood where books outshone television, she developed a deep visual curiosity that followed her into her studies at the MIT Institute of Design in Pune. There, her interests in illustration, journaling, and the expressive potential of form gradually converged into a passion for type design. She completed her graduation project with the Indian Type Foundry (ITF) in 2013 and went on to work with them closely.

Alongside her professional practice in Ahmedabad and later London, Lipi continued to expand her typographic education, most notably as a 2017 graduate of the prestigious TypeMedia program at KABK (The Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague. Her work spans multiple scripts, with a primary focus on Devanagari and Gujarati, and is informed by India’s rich craft traditions, many of which are upheld by women. This connection to heritage, including textiles, weaving, folk motifs and painted signage, deeply shapes the aesthetics and intentions behind her typefaces.

Lipi has contributed several widely used fonts to the global typographic landscape. With Jonny Pinhorn, she co-designed the Google Web Fonts Kalam (2014), a handwriting-style typeface supporting both Devanagari and Latin with over 1,000 glyphs, and Tillana (2015), a spirited, rounded, angular script. In 2016, she designed Mogra, a cursive Gujarati-Latin typeface also available through Google Fonts. These works exemplify her commitment to creating high-quality digital tools that reflect the flamboyance and nuance of India’s lettering traditions, an effort driven partly by her early frustration with the poor-quality Indic fonts often used in local packaging and signage.

Her process oscillates between deeply researched, slow-brewing explorations and more structured, client-driven work. Projects like her pixel typeface Ikat emerge from expansive studies of textiles, weaving techniques, folk motifs, and even 1-bit graphics guided by a mindset of why not? Ikat was also born out of personal resilience: during a long recovery from a debilitating hand injury, she reconfigured her practice through patience, alternative tools, and the willingness to allow her creativity to adapt.

As Lipi’s work evolves, so does her voice. She seeks to bring Indian visual languages into the digital present, honouring the cultural knowledge embedded in craft while building bridges to new typographic possibilities. Away from her desk, she enjoys long walks, swimming, ideally in Olympic-sized pools, ice cream, foraging, and time with her dog, Roo. Through all of this, she hopes simply to be heard, and to help the scripts she loves be seen.