For designers used to working with digital typefaces and model tips, India’s city streets current another typographic universe. It is a frenzied, vibrant kaleidoscope the place painted indicators compete with neon, mosaic sits alongside metallic, and a number of scripts layer on prime of each other in compositions that may by no means go a company design overview.
But as typeface designer and lettering artist Pooja Saxena has found by means of 15 years of documentation, this huge visible archive holds classes that formal typography schooling typically misses… but it is vanishing sooner than anybody is recording it.
Her forthcoming e book India Avenue Lettering, a 200-page hardcover releasing this December, represents the results of what started as a standard designer’s obsession. “My beginnings weren’t very totally different from another aspiring typeface designer, again once I was in college: who does not get obsessive about all manners of discovered lettering?” she notes. However what began as an informal curiosity turned one thing extra critical after she accomplished her MA in Typeface Design on the College of Studying.
“India, after all, was a colony of the British till 1947,” she factors out. “So huge repositories of archival materials about Indian typography and print tradition dwell in establishments within the UK, somewhat than within the areas the place they belong. Ironic as that will sound, I had simpler entry to those sources within the UK in comparison with India.”
Constructing on this information, she started photographing, geotagging and annotating hundreds of indicators throughout greater than a dozen Indian cities.
Watching indicators disappear
The urgency of the venture turns into clear when Pooja describes how she’s watched these historic indicators vanish in actual time. “I photographed the signal for Kolkata’s Elite cinema in late 2023, and by spring of subsequent 12 months, it was gone together with the whole constructing,” she remembers. “Just a few years earlier, the signal for Bengaluru’s iconic Parade Café noticed the identical destiny.”
In Mumbai, an Artwork Deco signal on Queen’s Courtroom was just lately hidden by new building. “All I’ve of that signal is an outdated, not-so-great {photograph} from 2017,” Pooja admits. “Each time one thing like this occurs, the town loses a bit of extra of its visible character.”
The substitute is usually flex printing: digitally printed vinyl that may copy a painted signal’s look however lacks its materials high quality and proof of craft. In Lucknow, Pooja watched as “most painted indicators from Qaiserbagh Chowk have been changed by near-identical flex indicators in a matter of months.” Digital printing means any shopkeeper can fee signage cheaply, however the signpainter’s distinctive hand disappears within the course of.
What she paperwork
Pooja’s method to constructing her archive is rigorously thought-about. “I’m wholly biased in direction of indicators which are handcrafted or made utilizing analogue strategies,” she explains. “A lot in order that I virtually by no means {photograph} printed indicators.”
Extra particularly, she appears to be like for painted indicators displaying distinctive kinds or distinctive ability, and tries to doc a number of works by particular person signpainters, “virtually to create a visible monograph of their work”. However she’s additionally acutely aware of trying past paint. “I like indicators in mosaic, as an example, or metallic ones that mimic ribbon lettering and invite the play of sunshine and shadow.”
As a typeface designer, she’s notably drawn to “indicators that function unconventional building of letterforms, or native interpretation of worldwide design paradigms”—precisely the form of vernacular innovation that not often makes it into design historical past books.
Tracing the makers
Pooja did not have a lot hassle figuring out the makers of the indicators. “Many painters, as an example, really signal their creations, full with their contact particulars,” she says. “Signmakers throughout mediums—paint, wooden, neon, and so forth.—are often well-known of their neighbourhoods and communities; how else would they discover work?”
But conducting interviews introduced actual challenges, with language proving the most important barrier. Throughout a current journey to Kochi, she met Narendra, an indication painter working throughout the road from her resort. “He spoke Malayalam, a language that’s alien to me; I spoke Hindi, which was unfamiliar to him.” The interview solely occurred as a result of “the store proprietor inspired him, and the receptionist at my resort agreed to be our interpreter.”
How documentation feeds apply
Questioning whether or not this work has sensible worth? Pooja’s personal apply reveals its potential. She describes how “the type of Indic scripts that we often find yourself seeing right this moment is filtered by means of the conventions and constraints of Western printing and typesetting applied sciences.”
Many scripts have been tailored to go well with movable sort, altering their look. “Handmade lettering on signage is a useful typographic useful resource,” she argues. “It incorporates the potential for circumventing the practical limitations of mainstream printing and typesetting applied sciences, and gives methods of imagining letterforms which may be absent from canonical representations in sort.”
And this is not simply concept. In 2024, Pooja designed the identification for an exhibition referred to as The Previous Has a Residence within the Future at Delhi’s Dhoomimal Gallery. The venture required learning archival pictures of Connaught Place to hint the evolution of painted indicators over the a long time.
“By means of this analysis, we have been capable of discern attribute typographic kinds from Connaught Place that captured the optimistic, industrial zeitgeist of the early to mid twentieth century,” she explains. “The ensuing typeface household was a recent interpretation of years of inventive expression from Connaught Place, one thing that I hope will likely be a considerate contribution to the continuum of artwork and design discourse emanating from the neighbourhood.”
It is a terrific instance of how documentation feeds again into up to date apply, not by means of copying, however by means of understanding formal potentialities that industrial sort manufacturing has traditionally excluded.
Why this issues
For designers exterior India, India Avenue Lettering gives a case research in how native visible traditions resist and adapt international design norms. For these working with non-Latin scripts, it reveals how letterforms evolve when free of industrial constraints.
Extra broadly, for anybody involved with preserving craft data, it is a reminder that some archives solely exist if people decide to constructing them, signal by signal, earlier than the digital printers arrive.
The e book is on the market for pre-order at £14.98, with an e-book version additionally deliberate. Given the tempo at which Pooja’s topics are disappearing, it could be documenting a typographic panorama that appears markedly totally different, even by its December launch date.
