The Typography of Indus Seals

Although most discussions treat the Indus seals as inscriptions, they are not dissimilar to printing presses and their inscriptions can be characterized as typefaces. They have a degree of standardization and sophistication that makes them comparable to modern fonts. While designing the Ida font for the Indus script, I had the opportunity to study this typography in detail and this paper attempts to compare it to our modern one. Unlike our evolution from Gutenberg’s Blackletter to Serifs and finally to the Sans Serifs in the past century, the Indus seals standardized on “sans serif” typefaces right at the start. A full repertoire of techniques we use today to make typography clean and elegant was already in use by the Indus artisans more than 4,000 years ago. The history of Typography stretches right back to the beginning of human civilization and the Indus civilization was an important part of that story.