R K Joshi was born in 1936, in Kolhapur, India. He was an academic type designer and calligrapher. He designed the core Indian fonts used in Microsoft Windows. He was brought up in the town of Kolhapur, Maharashtra. He developed an interest in alphabets, their shapes, styles and design. In 1952, he decided to study art at Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai. During this time, he found a scarcity of typefaces in Indian languages.
He took up extra classes at the Government Institute of Printing Technology, located within the institute premises, where he learned that Indian typefaces were intricate and had many problems in typesetting. In 1961, he joined DraftFCB+Ulka as Art Director. He started designing campaigns on issues regarding Family Planning and Farmers and to unite the entire country, he designed the campaigns in various Indian languages.
He designed several advertisements for Nerolac Paints and Crompton Greaves using Indian calligraphy, designed exclusive menus for the Taj Group and stationery for Chimanlals. He brought the concept of multilingual ad campaigns in India, opening up to languages crossing states. The first ever such campaign was the Ashok Jain Campaign. Influenced by the books of Italian Masters like Arrighi, he found a new world of calligraphy to explore. He applied it to the Indian context and explored Indic scripts in Calligraphic styles.
He studied the rarest manuscripts in Indic languages, of which his inspiration was a book titled Bharatiya Pracheen Lipimala by an Indian Author Ojha. This book brought to him the world of ancient scripts, like Brahmi, Sharda, Kautilya and Gupta scripts. After an intense research on these scripts, in 1966, he designed his first two fonts. He was a professor of Calligraphy, Type Design and Typography at IDC, IIT, Mumbai from 1983 - 1996.
He was associated with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) since 1976. The Microsoft Project, a series of O/S fonts were developed for Microsoft for their Windows 2000 to enable typing in Indian languages on Windows. He held several exhibitions like Aakar in Delhi, Prathama in Mumbai, Akshara in Germany.He also wrote poems and undertook the first ever calligraphic research in Indian manuscripts and epigraphic writings.
He was one of the featured speakers in ICOGRADA, India in 2008. His passion for letterforms brought a new trend on the streets of Bombay. Around 16 Multilingual ‘Happenings’ were staged in a single year. The main aim was to expose the rich heritage of Indian scripts to the common man. The look and sound of Indian alphabets were brought out as an experience through music, theatre and dance. He was awarded by Bukva-raz, an International Award for his ‘Raghu’ font. He also received Lifetime achievement award by Ad Club, 2004.