Featuring hundreds of images captured by Pooja Saxena over the last decade, India Street Lettering is an archive of letterforms seen on signage across the country.
It includes signs from sixteen cities, and in eleven scripts. Through exhaustive and ever-evolving annotation, the project offers a dynamic way to understand design and typography in India.
Recent Sightings
Dispatches from the Field
Recaps of recent events, deep dives into signs and sign making, and peeks behind-the-scenes
In Pursuit of Typographic Cityscapes
A quick look back at a zine-making workshop at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (Bangalore), focused on documenting and sharing street lettering.
India Street Lettering Zines: Tiles
Announcing the first batch of India Street Lettering zines, which are bound by the common thread of using tiles as a material for signage.
Extinct – C. Lal & Sons Dispensing Chemists
When the wooden sign of Delhi’s first 24×7 chemist shop was suddenly covered with a flex sign in late 2017.
Type Walks
Experience your favourite cities through a typographic lens
Drift with Matra Type
As part of the activities happening at Lab59 organised by Ajaibghar, Pooja led a type walk around the famed Pichola Ghats of Udaipur. Along with the walk participants, she identified noteworthy signs in the neighbourhood with an eye on understanding regional variations in Devanagari letterforms, and pinpointing sign painters who were responsible for striking visual styles and forming the typographic landscape around the lake.
What’s Happening
Zines
Since 2023, Pooja has published various zines that bring together the stories, patterns and ideas she has coalesced through her work with India Street Lettering. Printed in small batches locally in Delhi, you can find them in independent bookshops and craft stores.
Exhibitions
Photographs from the collection, as well as the zines based on them, have been the centrepiece of exhibitions that celebrate the typographic culture of Indian cities. The zines have also been featured in exhibitions focused on alternative publishing initiatives.
Workshops & Lectures
The archive is the subject of several public lectures and workshops by Pooja: from establishing the place of street lettering in the design canon to using it as the foundation of typeface design and speculative thought experiments.