Mr. Udaya Kumar received his M.Des. degree in Visual Communication from the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in 2003. Prior to this, he had obtained a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the School of Architecture and Planning at Anna University.

He is the designer of the Indian rupee sign. Keeping cognizance of the deep impact a simple design has over people’s minds, Mr. Kumar derived the symbol from Devanagari script and integrated it with the Latin script. The two horizontal lines with an equal negative white space (imaginary space) between them create a foreground and background effect of three strips (tricolour). The strips subtly represent the tricolour of our Indian national flag flying at the top. The horizontal lines also denote the arithmetic sign “equal to’. The symbol is in visual harmony with symbols like $ € £ W¥P.

Mr. Kumar has also designed a Tamil font named “ Parashakti” as a mini project at IDC. His domain of research is typography, to be more specific Tamil typography. His doctoral research was an attempt to develop rigorous and concrete research material on the subject of typography. Mr. Kumar’s other interests include graphic design, type design and design research.

Mr. Kumar has done extensive work in print medium. His body of work includes a wide variety of projects such as identity design, posters, brochures, books, covers, illustrations, information graphics, certificates, banners, hoardings, etc. While working for a monthly magazine, he has conceptualized and executed several story layouts, covers, illustrations, packaging and info graphics. He has also done entire designs for conferences.

Mr. Kumar has won numerous prestigious awards. Among them are Designer of the Indian Currency Symbol; Young Indian Leader by the CNN-IBN; Communicator of the Year by the Association of Business Communications of India; Young Achiever Award by the St. John’s International Residential School, and Lifetime Achiever Award by the Lion’s Club International.