by Pooja Saxena
As a typeface designer and lettering artist, when my work doesn’t revolve around Indic scripts, it is focused on imparting a local flavour to the Latin alphabet, which may be foreign but has long been adopted as our own. It is my belief that good design always finds a foothold in the cultural continuum of a region and community. Whether it is building on familiar visual cues or subverting them, it can only be done authentically when one has a grasp of local design paradigms, both past and present. This is easier said than done, because in India, design histories are often poorly recorded and articulated. My response to this problem has been to weave research into my practice. I am also a collector and documentarian, building humble design archives that can propel my work and thinking forward. One such archive is India Street Lettering, a decade-long effort to record signage letterforms from around the country.
Street lettering is a volatile landscape. Signs chip away as they brave the elements. Shops shut down and take their boards with them. Fashions come and go, and cheaper methods of production not only change the appearance of signs, but also the livelihoods of those who make them. Urban beautification efforts paper over rich typographic variety. Not to mention, local regulations and linguistic tensions keep altering how different scripts are to be used in public spaces. This unpredictability makes street lettering simultaneously important to study and challenging to record.
Despite the increasing proliferation of digitally-printed flex, many sign boards are still replete with Indic script letterforms that are crafted using non-digital tools such as a paint brush, or in unconventional materials like wood, metal, tile, plaster or neon. That makes them an invaluable typographic resource because they contain the possibility of circumventing the functional limitations of mainstream printing and typesetting technologies, while offering ways to imagine letterforms in a way that may be absent from canonical representations in type, whether it is abstract shapes or fluidity in how letterforms react to the baseline and headline.
Right from the introduction of the printing press in India in the mid-16th century, Indic scripts have been reproduced using a succession of technologies that were originally devised with the Latin script in mind. Compared to its Indic counterparts, Latin is relatively modest: it needs fewer characters to render text, and they combine with each other in rather straightforward ways. The process of retrofitting Indic scripts to these technologies has often been to the detriment of their appearance, even legibility. In such a situation, space for design niceties and experimentation has been small. This is in contrast to lettering, whether on sign boards or other media like book covers, where local scripts have been adeptly fashioned into a variety of styles, from staid to dramatic.
Creative expression is not just limited to the look of letterforms. It also manifests in how different scripts and typographic styles are paired together. The multiplicity in successfully executed signs flies in the face of dogmatic design advice that preaches restraint. Unlike approaches to multi-script typesetting that prioritise visual homogeneity across writing systems, whether in style, scale or composition, many hand-painted signs have a more eclectic slant. They lean into the complexity of their multilingual context, and each script responds to local tastes. The overall composition also places different scripts in a way that best responds to the establishment’s needs.
Many, if not most, local sign makers are exposed to Western design trends without having undergone a Western typographic education. This affords them a unique perspective when translating these ideas to Indic scripts.
Even sign makers’ renditions of the Latin alphabet using tools and methods traditional to Indic scripts open up compelling conversations about how a global script can be localised.
Over the years, the growing archive on India Street Lettering — the source for images in this essay — has taught me that annotating my photo-documentation as richly as I can is just as important as the photographs themselves. Without that, the process of making meaning is little better than shooting in the dark. The arguments I make here, for instance, or the type walks and zines I put together, would be tough to coalesce or illustrate without that foundation. This and the typographic lessons from street lettering have helped ground my practice in the expansive expressive possibilities that exist within Indic scripts, and bring more curiosity, play, and rigour to my work.
About the Author
Pooja is an award-winning typeface designer, lettering artist and typographer, with a focus on Indic scripts and local typographic and visual cultures in India. She divides her time between her independent design and research practice, Matra Type, and being a team member at TypeTogether. She is a devoted collector of ephemera and chronicler of street lettering, and writes a newsletter about type and design curiosities called I Spy with my Typographic Eye. Find her on Instagram, Mastodon and Bluesky.