With all the travel I’ve done in the last few months, I’m really beginning to miss the small rituals that make up every day home life. The truly mundane things, like making the glass water bottles sparkle and re-organising the credenza drawers. Still a couple of weeks before I can hang up my boots for the year and slip into quiet domesticity, so I’m making the small wins count until then. Wins like a late night, trans-Atlantic phone call with two of my favourite people. I can’t remember when I last laughed that much, or felt so understood.
WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING
1.
Over a couple of hectic weeks this summer, Harshay and I made a short film about the typographic charms of Bangalore’s M.G. Road. We did this using only previously-captured footage and photographs of the neighbourhood due to lack of a travel budget. This was no mean feat, and honestly, made possible thanks to Harshay’s ingenuity. The exciting news is that our movie is screening at the B·LORE Short Film Festival on December 10, as part of the Showcasing History cohort. If you’re in Bangalore, please come for the screening and say hello to us: we have some shiny poster zines to give away.
Along with the screening, I’m also exhibiting a small collection of photographs of Bangalore’s public lettering at the Bangalore International Centre during the Carnival of Culture happening on the same weekend. It was so unnerving to select photographs and write texts for the exhibition. The thrill and fear of showing one’s work never goes away, I suppose.
2.
Given the events that are coming up and the many well-intentioned reprimands I received this year about not having any business cards, I finally sat down to make myself some. The last time I had any fun doing that was almost a decade and a half ago while I was still in university, and had Ambika by my side to indulge every silly idea I could muster.
I was, at least, a little bit excited by the prospect this time around, because earlier this year I drew a new logo for Matra Type that (surprise!) I am still happy with. I wanted the cards to be tactile, so once the design was in place, the printer and I experimented with screen printing. Sadly, the result wasn’t quite what we were hoping for. So now I am waiting to see what they will look like with a touch of embossing instead.
3.
Work has been quite rewarding lately on the writing front: I have been working on a couple of bilingual projects, which is a first. For one of those, I decided to write the original draft in Hindi and then translate to English, instead of going the other way around, which might have felt more natural. I did the translation this week, and overall, I am happy with what we were able to achieve. Writing about design and typography in Hindi is hard, but I hope that the more I do it, the more comfortable I will become with the vocabulary and tone.
4.
I finally signed the paperwork for a new project I’m really looking forward to working on. It only took seven months (!) to get all our ducks in a row, when the time to do all the work is, in fact, shorter than that.