Week 52/2023

I was technically on holiday all week, but some small things continued to simmer in the background. A lot of that had to do with starting the new year with as clean a slate as possible — clean studio, clear to-do lists, and a new computer.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

1.

One of the tasks I just couldn’t shake off in the holidays was the preparation for my half-day workshop at UXNow later this month. I was afraid that unless I thought things through in advance, I won’t have sufficient time to buy all the material, prepare worksheets and get any printed paraphernalia made. That wasn’t wrong, to be honest. I tried to keep my focus on trying out the activities I am planning for the workshop, so I would do some creative play as the year winds down, rather than pretend to relax, all while stressing out. I did some paper weaving after years, and it was fun. The most exciting, of course, was to do a bit of LEGO letterpress. The results were quite satisfying and the process wasn’t as hard as I was expecting. I am looking forward to planning some new personal projects that use the technique.

2.

I have a new M2 Macbook Air, which is replacing my previous M1 machine. My last laptop was a bit of a disappointment — it became awfully slow with only a couple of years of use, and started to come in the way of my working at the pace I’d like. I have my fingers crossed that this new one will be different. Instead of transferring everything using Time Machine, I decided to start afresh with this laptop. This was straightforward enough aside from all the junk I had accumulated in my Downloads folder over the years. Going through those files was like a bit of time travel, and it threw up a lot of memories, terrible and joyful.

3.

After losing the steam to do them while I was traveling non-stop, I re-started my morning pages practice. I believe it made me feel more centered over the summer, and I hope that experience will continue.

4.

Inspired by our trip to Sunder Nursery last week, and by Amber, who has started doing drawing exercises everyday, I picked up my drawing notebook a couple of times. I’ve always wanted to draw and colour with oil pastels, but feel scared of the mess they create. Putting that fear aside, I just, sort of, dove in. And I’m very glad I did.

Week 51/2023

It is Boxing Day, and I’m hitting publish on this week’s notes as I get ready for a day of watching cricket. Where I was itching for little household errands a couple of weeks ago, now I am saturated. I wish the house would just take care of itself, and take care of me too while it is at it.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

1.

Amber and I joined my cousin, Aditi, and my uncle, Alok, on our maiden trip to the Surajpur Wetlands. The wetlands are just 40 mins away from where we live, but everything we had read had always painted a very dreary picture of the place. And so, we’d never made the effort. The trip turned out to be an adventure because when we arrived at the gate marked on Google Maps, it was locked. No amount of banging on the gate led to any response (even though that is what the helpful neighbours told us we should do). With some rough directions, we left in search of the other gate. We almost gave up and drove to Okhla Bird Sanctuary instead, but thankfully, a last ditch effort took us to the right spot.

The wetlands were surprisingly well-maintained, and we saw about forty birds in about two hours of leisurely ambling around. I was very happy to see a large flock of bar-headed geese up close. I’ve always found them to be beautiful creatures, but had never had the good fortune of seeing them very well.

2.

Most of the week was eclipsed by the mammoth task of cleaning and organising our primary bookshelf. It lines one long wall of my studio and houses the majority of our combined books. You won’t believe how long it takes to pull down 1300-odd books, dust them, check whether they are properly cataloged and then put them back where they most belong. We were at it for days. This annual tradition always starts with a lot of excitement and ends with us being bone-tired and questioning why we ever bought a single book.

3.

This year we started the bookshelf cleaning with my collection of Pelican books. Because of the aforementioned excitement, I decided that I would take the opportunity to photograph all their covers. A makeshift studio was built, the tripod set up, and the camera connected to its phone app. After a couple of hours of sitting cross-legged on the floor and pressing shoot after placing each book in the right spot, I was done. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and I’m glad to have finished step one. I hope that I can find some time late in January or early February to clean up and organise the photos. I couldn’t resist working on a few yesterday.

4.

As the last of my “work tasks” before the year ends, I sent out an issue of my newsletter on Tuesday. This issue was co-published with 3 Sided Coin. For the main essay of the newsletter, I wrote about three recent Devanagari typefaces that broaden our imaginations of the script. This essay is available in both Hindi and English. With that, I also shared some Air India first flight covers from my ephemera collection, and mused about faux-script lettering.

Week 50/2023

I’m back from what I pray and hope is the last trip of 2023. A fantastic few days in Calcutta that were booked months ago before we knew how hectic the end of the year would get.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

1.

I finished the last of my work, meetings and emails before the holidays — some boring, others exciting. But that’s all for the new year now.

2.

One last newsletter issue will be coming your way before I shut shop for 2023, and I spent some time putting the final touches on that. I’ll send it this week, so if you’re interested and not signed up, today is a good day to subscribe.

3.

I started preparing for a workshop I’ll be facilitating at UXNow in Delhi in January. It has been a long time since I’ve done anything like it but I am looking forward to playing around with pixel type. It is always so much fun to introduce new folks to how letterforms are designed, and I hope this will be no different.

4.

While in Calcutta, I spent lots of time photographing street lettering. I had some concrete plans to capture some signs for upcoming zines, but there was also ambling around and discovering what the city has to offer. The latter was helped by an afternoon with Ankush, Karthik and Arindam of Friday Kollective, who offered to show me and Amber around. We walked for as long as our legs would carry us and ended the evening with delicious mishti.

Expect an avalanche of new posts on India Street Lettering in the coming weeks as I sit down to organise, edit and publish all the photographs I clicked in Panjim, Mapusa and Calcutta in the last month.

Week 49/2023

I am writing this post embraced in the warm afterglow of an excellent weekend spent in Bangalore. I still have trouble believing that Harshay and I made a movie and people saw it, then there was the exhibition — a first for my project India Street Lettering, and oof the zines, scores and scores of you got yourself a copy, wow! None of this, of course, would have been possible without Amber, who likes to kid that everyone must believe he is my intern, but is, in fact, the best partner one could ask for.

My parents decided to come down for the screening and exhibition, and it was incredibly fun to have them there, and introduce them to our old life in Bangalore, and to our friends who live in the city.

Writing this week’s notes, which are being published late as it is, is proving to be hard. I seem to have forgotten most of last week in the excitement of the weekend. But here it goes, anyway.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

1.

At the Experience BIC festival, we were lucky to see an exhibition of Paul Fernandes’ work and attend a walkthrough with him. Paul was so gentle, kind and funny. I left with a renewed appreciation of his work, knowing how personal it is to him. He talked about drawing Bangalore in a way that allowed others to weave in their own memories, rather than imposing a vision that was only his.

2.

My favourite movie at the B•LORE Short Film Festival was Naveen Tejaswi’s Imaana. It told the story of his village and his undying love of aeroplanes, and left me so moved that I couldn’t help but cry. If you get a chance, please, please watch this film.

3.

Earlier in the week, I transcribed and edited the first draft of an interview I conducted a couple of weeks ago for an object history that I am writing. It really is a testament to how much my mental health has improved piece by piece that now I can suggest an interview to a client, rather than shirk away from one.

4.

I also had the unenviable job of reviewing an in-progress typeface for a consultancy I am doing. Of all the writing I do, it is probably these notes that I find most challenging. I would much rather talk and explain. Setting that preference aside, I put my head down and prepared a document with feedback and sent it off before I took off for Bangalore.

Week 48/2023

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.

Week 47/2023

We traveled back home this week, and before we could settle in, we got bad news: Amber’s grandmother passed away. She was 96 going on 97, and had a very particular brand of joie de vivre about her that one can only hope to emulate. Amber traveled to be with his family for a few days, while I tried to make sense of pending housework in his absence. It is not how we imagined this week would end, but that’s life.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

1.

Earlier in the week during the regular TypeTogether call, our new intern Sondos Abdellatif, shared her undergraduate degree project, Qeyas, with the team. Qeyas was conceptualised as a basic tool and set of guidelines for digital publishers that work with Arabic in order to help them create properly typeset layouts for online use. During her presentation, she talked about not finding any books about contemporary Arabic grids, layouts and typesetting, and what a challenge that was. Her complaint really struck a chord with me, in the context of what we experience with Indic scripts.

2.

Reopening my online shop has come with tonnes of extra administrative work that I abhor. For a few months now, I’ve been trying to set up international payments because there has been a lot of interest in buying the zines from outside India. The bureaucracy and poorly-documented technological solutions have been very discouraging. While we were still in Goa, Amber and Prateek helped me get some building blocks in place, and I have my fingers crossed that this will get resolved soon.

3.

Jane, who I didn’t get to meet in Goa this time, sent some newspapers she had collected for me on her travels along with a surprise: an old Letraset catalogue. I’m curious about how she got her hands on it (a story, hopefully, for another time) and can’t wait to go through the catalogue properly when I have some time.

4.

Most of all, this week has been about preparation: for my trip to Bangalore, especially the new printed things I want to carry with me; for an interview I have to conduct in coming days for an essay series I’m writing; for my next newsletter issue; and for completing TypeTogether’s year-end publishing targets for Primarium.

Week 46/2023

Inspired by Sathyajith Bhat’s week notes that Ninad Pundalik has been religiously sharing on Mastodon, I am here to give weekly notes another try. Maybe in a different format? Maybe with more photographs? We’ll see. I wondered, at first, if it might be something to start in 2024. After all, the new year is not too far away. But I have realised that these artificial markers of time mean little to me, and chances are I’ll be more successful if I don’t tie myself to them. Case in point: sharing more of what I do for India Street Lettering on Mastodon.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

1.

I traveled to Goa right after Diwali to escape the air pollution in Delhi and to spend time with Prateek and Rhea. It has been a few years since I was in Goa (thanks to the pandemic, grr!) and I’ve enjoyed every minute of being here. Staying in Fontainhas has been amazing, except for the throngs of tourists who are constantly disregarding the privacy of residents and blocking pedestrian and vehicular traffic to take selfies. In fact, they made me terribly conscious of my own attempts to photograph the street lettering in the neighbourhood, and I’ve been making an extra effort to be as considerate as possible in doing so. I had planned a few photography expeditions for India Street Lettering in advance, and they went really well, so the website should see dozens of new pictures in the coming weeks.

We also spent a morning at the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary, where I saw not one but eight lifers. Among them, the lesser adjudant and white-bellied sea eagle were majestic beyond words.

2.

Because I was in Goa, I missed Opn Art House in Delhi, where my India Street Lettering zines were exhibited last weekend. That did little to dim my excitement about this, though.

3.

Harshay and I worked together on a little project earlier this year and while it still needs to stay under wraps for a couple of weeks longer, I got some exciting news about it last week, which means that we’ll be traveling to Bangalore pretty soon. Just when I thought it was not possible to fit in any more travel this year, I’ve somehow managed to add another trip to my schedule.

4.

Over on Primarium, I finally added all our essays about handwriting education in India, which feels quite special to me. It was fascinating to learn about the history of the handwriting style I learned as a kid, and trace how it may have arrived in India.

Week 12: Embracing Unproductivity, Hobbies v. Hustles, Back to Teaching

It feels stupid to even say it, but I have finally come around to accepting that on some days I will not be “productive.” I have our 35-year old house to thank for this reorientation. This house is older than I am, and I can only hope that I am not as run-down as this house in a few years when I turn 35. One fine morning last summer, part of a ledge collapsed. Two weeks ago, we were without power for half of Sunday because the electrical wiring has some unforeseen trouble. We are fortunate enough to have a garden, but it comes with occasional battles with pests. I spent the first year or so of living in this house feeling very frustrated. But after one such mini-disaster, I accepted that this is so. There are days that the house will unexpectedly need our attention, and on others, someone in the family or a friend need will our urgent help. I will fall sick sometimes, and there are days when my brain will simply not co-operate. No amount of urging will make it concentrate on the task at hand. All of this is ok. Instead of being angry, frustrated or disappointed, if I can, I accept that it is not a good day for work. Of course, I make up for the day, but it is not, by any means, a lost day to me. “Productivity” is not the end of the world.

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In February, my type walks were featured in an article in The Hindu about creative practitioners and entrepreneurs. After sharing the piece on Instagram and Twitter, I re-read it and realized that I didn’t quite manage to get something important across. I love type walks, and run a few every year, but they are side-projects. I do them besides all the paid work that sustains my life, and it is only because of this paid work that I can afford to do them. The fees I charge cover the costs of the materials I give away, but not much more. They are a labour of love, and I enjoy sharing something I am passionate about with others, but calling them an entrepreneurial venture is taking it too far. The realization, unsurprisingly, came a few days after reading an article at Man Repeller about the obligation that so many of us feel to turn our hobbies into money-making projects, and at the very least, share them on social media.

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I went back to a bit of teaching recently – nothing too involved, just a half-day workshop. And it was a good reminder of both how much I enjoy it, and of the amount of preparatory work it takes. Between 2014–2017, I ran different versions of the same introductory type design course at three design schools. And while that was great, it was fun to come up with a new workshop this time around. The workshop was for a group of young fashion design students (year 1 and 2), and the goal was not to introduce them to the rigours of type design or lettering, but to bring to them an appreciation of letterforms and their potential as patterns. I think we all ended up having a fun morning, and as always, I had a good time introducing a new set of people to the pleasure of working with letters. If you are interested in seeing what we did during the workshop, I have some photographs and a short description here.

Week 8: Travel disruptions, Seeking the Work I Want To Do

I am back with abridged notes after missing yet another week because I was traveling. Even though I love travel (much more so for pleasure, than for work), it also feels like a disruption. If it is me traveling, I miss home, and the food, sleep and general sense of routine that come with it. If it is my partner traveling, while I enjoy the quiet time, I miss the magical completion of chores that he does and my daily human contact. And if either of us is traveling for work on a weekend, it is heretical in my books.

I am constantly in awe of friends who have to travel for work often and have taken that into their stride. I want to say that I am jealous of how well they cope with travel, but I have been trying hard to remember that the grass always seems greener on the other side. Last year, I asked a friend about it, and she said that she simply doesn’t think of travel as a disruption because that is what her life is, and she finds thinking of it like that counter-productive. At the time, I found her answer insufficient. But the more I have thought about it since, I think what was insufficient was my own follow-up – I never asked her how she got there, or if she has always felt like this.

2019 has already been full of travel, and I expect the rest of the year to be the same. I have been whiny as hell every time a trip has been forthcoming, but I haven’t found being alone at home half as bad as I was expecting. I am also very excited about a conference that I hope to attend soon. So maybe this year will be the one when I figure out this travel thing?

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Two weeks ago, I won an award for the book cover I designed for Zubaan Books’ “Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India.” I really enjoy designing book covers, even though I have worked on less than a dozen in all my time working as a designer. Why don’t I design more book covers? This is a question I have asked myself a few times over the years, and this award has given me just enough validation to ask it more often that I would like. Time to do something about it! Here’s my short to-do list –

1. Add book and book cover design work to my website. This is a no-brainer and was always supposed to happen, but working on this website somehow always takes the backseat.

2. Take some action on the self-initiated project about book covers I have been mulling over for a year and a half. Yes it will be work and yes I probably have too much to do as it is. But I need to find a way to make it happen.

3. Catch up with people I know who do work in book cover design, and better understand how they get business and how they approach the work.

4. Maybe cold-email a few people? I don’t imagine this works and I am so terrible at this, but no harm in trying, right?

Week 6: Gendered chores, Learning to draw, Preparing for conversations with journalists

I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided I would write and post Week Notes on a Monday. The end of year festivities likely clouded my judgment. So here I am, back after a two week break, and on a Saturday. Last night, Twitter brought up this blog post written by computer scientist Jean Yang. This exercise of roughly mapping out where my times goes is something I tried back in 2010. I was working at one of my first jobs, juggling a couple of freelance opportunities, and feeling as if I didn’t have enough hours in the day. Little did I know that managing time would only get trickier.

If I am being completely honest, on most days it is not work, but other aspects of life that take up more time than I ever imagined. Staying on top of bills and taxes (despite my best efforts, I still don’t understand the workings of GST, but then who does?); meal planning and cooking; taking on more responsibilities for our families; doing the laundry, trying to be a good, or at least ok, friend; on and on, I could go. Despite the fact that we try to run our (two-person) household with gender equality, and attempt to dismantle the gendered expectations our families might have of us, I end up feeling like I am getting a raw deal more often than I would like.

Seeing Yang’s blog post, at a time when I am discussing these issues a lot with those closest to me, has made me wonder if I should start documenting the time I spend doing these tasks. It would help me see my life in an honest way, and have more meaningful conversations with my two best male allies – my partner and brother.

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For over a decade, I have told anyone who has said to me that they cannot draw, that everyone can. I strongly believe that, and encourage everyone who wants to draw to do just that. And yet, I shy away from my own desire to get better at it, and even pick up the skills and mindset to (maybe one day, professionally) illustrate. Last year, I started making a drawing every day, but stopped in only two weeks. After seeing Tiffany’s drawings on Instagram, I am trying again – a quiet New Year’s resolution, if you’d like. Let’s see how I fare.

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In my second week notes, I wrote about my anxiety when I have to speak with journalists, and I realized this morning while preparing for one of those engagements, that I shared nothing about how I go about preparing. I have started putting together short documents, one each for every project that I tend to get asked about, where I jot down –

1. what got me involved in the project;

2. when I got involved, and how long did the project run;

3. if the project if self-initiated, what are my motivations;

4. who were/are my collaborators, and how did they contribute to the project;

5. a description of the project;

6. what I feel were my biggest challenges, and how I tried to overcome them;

7. what are the resources I referred to;

8. how I failed and succeeded, and what I would do differently or more;

9. who are my peers working on similar projects and what successes have they had (since 2017, I have made effort to highlight the work of my women peers whenever I get the opportunity);

The documents – not very different from the Reflection on Practice essays we wrote at the end of the MATD programme – are still not ready, but already they are a big help. They are not well-written, and that is not the point. Often I will copy-paste from texts I have written elsewhere.

Plus in the spirit of saving time, I have begun doing what I should long ago, prepare images for projects that I can share at a moment’s notice. All the agonizing and hard work needs to be done in advance.