Since 2017, Pooja has been conducting guided typographic tours that reacquaint participants with their neighbourhoods from the vantage point of signage and letterforms. These walks are an excellent way for designers and non-designers alike to learn about how typography and lettering in public spaces shape our experience of them, and how they are, themselves, a product of social, cultural, even legal developments.
To learn more about what goes into preparing these walks, and the motivations behind them, check out this talk from TypeWknd 2020.
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M.G. Road Type Walk @ DesignUp
Pooja offered a type walk around M.G. Road as a special workshop experience for participants of DesignUp, a community led and volunteer driven conference for product creators, designers, makers and thought-leaders in India and SE Asia. The focus was on the changing typographic landscape of the city, and lessons for designers about making for multilingual and multiscriptual audiences.
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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.
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Men of Faith, Letters of Commerce: A Typographic Tour of M.G. Road
Using the signs and landmarks of M.G. Road as provocation, Pooja talked about the myriad letterforms on display on shop and building fronts — from fast disappearing neon signs to ubiquitous sans serifs and multiscript branding — and discuss their historical and cultural legacies. Together with that, she reminded participants of snapshots of printing history and initiatives driven by colonial missionaries whose presence is still felt at M.G. Road. This type walk was a public event organised by the Bangalore International Centre.
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M.G. Road Type Walk
With stores that date back over a century, the erstwhile South Parade has a wealth of signs that help us see how the typographic character of Bangalore is changing. From photographers to newspaper publishers, banks to saree emporia, restaurants to bookshops — the wealth of signs in a striking variety of materials are a visual treat, which is easily missed in the cacophony of this busy market street. In this type walk organised by OwnPath, Pooja helped participants explore neighbourhood anew, see its multilingual signs in a whole new light, and discuss the beginnings of missionary-led printing in the city.
