Whether at conferences, or in university classrooms and studio environments, I relish the challenge of presenting a lecture or facilitating a workshop that introduces participants to the nuances of design, typography and type design. My focus is usually on Indic scripts, design and visual culture, pixel type, and the use of analog materials.
I also conduct type walks.
Draw with Devanagari TypeCooker
Online / June 2024 / TypeLab Asia 2024
The workshop began with an informal talk where I introduced Devanagari TypeCooker, a tool to generate prompts to draw Devanagari letterforms, and the concepts that drive it. This was followed by a drawing session facilitated in collaboration with Namrata Goyal. We explained the prompts we brought, drew along with the participants, and gave friendly but nuanced feedback on the results. This practical session was an easygoing way for a designer interested in Devanagari lettering and type design to get past their hang-ups and get drawing.
In Pursuit of Typographic Cityscapes
Bangalore / April 2024 / National Institute of Fashion Technology
Through the course of this workshop, students of publication design explored public lettering and signage in Ulsoor, and then made prototypes for zines that tell typographic stories from the neighbourhood. The activity was a way to introduce them to new ways of thinking and seeing that I have learned through documenting and studying street lettering in India, which compel us to discard prescriptive rules that come from Western typography, appreciate local visual histories and artists, and build knowledge about Indic script letterforms. In making zines, we talked about the importance of trial and error in the design process, and different approaches and methods that can be used to organise photographic materials, and make meaning from them.
Bringing the ABCs Home
Bangalore / May 2024 / City Scripts 2024
At Indian Institute for Human Settlements’ City Scripts festival, I led a speculative design workshop where we explored how the Latin alphabet could look if it embraced design and material cues from Indic scripts to imagine new typographic pasts and futures. The workshop kicked off with a history lesson of sorts, which was followed up with progressive drawing exercises that began with visualising new letterform skeletons, to which calligraphic strokes were later added, ending with exploring decorative features.
India Street Lettering: A Typographic Archive in the Making
Online / March 2024 / BLAG Meet: Inside Issue 04
In a free-wheeling talk set against the backdrop of striking images of hand-painted signs from my archive — India Street Lettering — I shared stories of the letterforms I have documented in the last decade, and explored how distinctive typographic choices, often at odds with conventional wisdom, make them compelling. In addition, I spoke about the methods and perspectives I employ to make meaning from the collection, and the many enquiries and dialogues it helps initiate, including independently-published zines that showcase street lettering from India, as well a short film focused on the letterforms in a single neighbourhood in Bangalore. This talk was part of a series of presentations by folks featured in the fourth edition of Better Letters magazine.
Pixel Type by Hand — from textile to arcade games
New Delhi / January 2024 / UXNow
At the start of 2024, I was invited to conduct a workshop at UXNow. For the workshop, I focused on pixel letters and their connection with textiles and needlework. Over four hours, participants made pixel letters through sketching, using stickers, by paper weaving, and finally printed them using LEGO letterpress. Together, we also pored over books that showed early digital type and arcade game fonts, knitting and embroidery patterns of alphabets, and Indian scripts rendered in textiles. Most importantly, we talked about the mutability of material, and how what might seem like an artefact of the digital era may have an analog past that we are overlooking.
#NannaBIC — Reinvigorating the BIC Identity
Bangalore / December 2023 / Bangalore International Centre
For Bangalore International Centre’s two-day Carnival of Culture, I designed a self-directed activity that encouraged visitors to give shape to the institution’s visual identity in forms that showcase how they view and experience it. Visitors were provided with a canvas of the logo along with a range of materials — straws and yarn, bindis to paperclips — and tools — like colored pens and crayons, scissors and glue, to bring their visions to life. Bangalore International Centre’s lush natural surroundings ended up being a recurring motif, while other artworks filled the logo with provocative questions about being a Bangalorean.
Devanagari typography with 3 Sided Coin
Online / January–February 2023 / 3 Sided Coin
Through weekly sessions, conducted over a month and a half, I worked with the team at 3 Sided Coin to strengthen their foundations of typography in Devanagari. Indian design institutions are notorious in their lack of instruction in Indic script typography, and this workshop offered a practical remedy. The participants — designers of varying experiences from the studio — were introduced to core concepts about script anatomy, letter proportions and guidelines, and typographic styles. From there, they worked to develop skills in font pairing and typographic design. Among the medium-term results of the workshop was the initiation of Hindi language publishing on 3 Sided Coin’s blog, Fox Pass, which offered them a chance to experiment with their learnings in a practical environment.
Glug Birmigham: Collector’s Edition Part I
Remote / November 2020 / Glug Birmingham
Alongside Anthony Burrill, Iancu Barbărasă, Jane McDevitt, Hugh Miller, Elizabeth Goodspeed and Richard Baird, I was invited to speak at the remote edition of Glug Birmingham, which focused on designers who collect. In my presentation, I shared my experience of attending lessons centered around ephemera during my graduate studies at the University of Reading, and talked about how returning to India forced me to start collecting when access to archives became challenging. I showed a glimpse of my collection of newspapers from around the world, modernist Indian stamps, Amar Chitra Katha comics and Pelican books, and discussed how each of them have helped me shape my cultural outlook, and have in turn influenced both my design and research practice.
Introduction to Devanagari through Pixel Type
Online / May 2020 / University of Applied Art, Vienna
For an elective course at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, I introduced students to the Devanagari script. The goal set out for me by their instructor, Liza Schultz, was to broaden their horizons and allow them to see how letters in scripts other than Latin may look and behave. After a crash course in Devanagari and looking through Toshi Omagari’s Arcade Game Typography, students created the name of the script in pixel letters in Fonstruct. Through rounds of iterative work and feedback sessions, they were able to get a better grasp of the underlying structure of Devanagari, as well as build an understanding of how they may approach an unfamiliar design question in the future.
Typographic Storytelling and Augmented Reality
Online / July 2021 / Adobe Design Shots
In the summer of 2021, I was invited for Adobe Design Mix’s series of remote talks Design Shots to speak to their team of designers across India and Europe about my journey as a typeface designer, and my explorations with augmented reality as a way to appreciate street lettering. Among the experiments I shared included ways to use well-known public signage as a trigger to learn type anatomy and guidelines; recreate cityscapes that are unique for their collection of street lettering so they can be used for teaching purposes without travel; and restore shop signs that can have been damaged, removed or replaced by new ones by superimposing photographs on live video.