Suman Bhandary, a graduate with a master’s in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, United Kingdom, is the new assistant educator of graphic design at Wichita State University. He will work alongside director and professor of graphic design Jeff Pulaski and assistant professors of graphic design Irma Puškarević and Joshua Smith.
“I became connected with Jeff and Irma, we discussed needing a person like me for this department,” Bhandary said. “My core expertise lies in typography, type design, printmaking and graphic design.”
Bhandary was also a recipient of the prestigious Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship as he pursued his master’s.
“It is probably one of the major milestones that changed me as a professional and as a student,” Bhandary said. “This scholarship changed my life a great deal. I could actually think about a Ph.D. and plan on applying soon.”
Bhandary has worked as a typeface designer and typographer for 10 years. He began his career in advertising, and then worked independently for Google. After receiving his master’s in 2018 and getting out of advertising, he realized his calling was to teach. Bhandary taught for around four years prior to accepting a position at WSU.
“The bug hit me in terms of my eagerness to teach,” Bhandary said. “While I was going through the MA program, I did a few workshops with students, and I felt connected to them instantly.”
Bhandary was also a recipient of the prestigious Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship as he pursued his master’s.
“It is probably one of the major milestones that changed me as a professional and as a student,” Bhandary said. “This scholarship changed my life a great deal. I could actually think about a Ph.D. and plan on applying soon.
Bhandary discovered graphic design in art school, despite the fact that he was not studying the subject at the time. He always beautified writing for his peers in school and was surrounded and intrigued by letterforms growing up.
“When I joined advertising as my first professional career, I got exposed to letterforms in a much wider span,” Bhandary said. “To a great extent, that started pushing me towards typography and type design.”
Letterforms are the shapes of letters. Letterforms are stored in groups called typefaces, which are further grouped into fonts.
Bhandary assisted Google as an untrained type designer. He attended a workshop in Mumbai, India, where he became connected with supervisors and shared some of his work. Through communication chains, he was given the opportunity to design a new font in the Bengali script.
“It was learning on the job kind of a process, where I was very fortunate to collaborate with people all around the world, not necessarily knowing the language,” Bhandary said. “It was an outstanding sort of experience.”
After that project, he worked on a larger project handling four scripts: Devanagari, the Hindu official language; Odiya, which is another regional language on the eastern side of India; Bengali, which is his mother tongue; and Latin.
“It is very exciting for me to be able to come from a region which is as diverse as India,” Bhandary said. “Where sort of a lot of scripts are spoken and used. That allowed me to diversify my approach towards type design as well.”
