In India Street Lettering: A Journey Through Typographic Craft & Culture, Pooja Saxena shines a spotlight on the country’s urban letterforms—and the surprising stories behind them.
Take a short walk in any Indian neighbourhood and you’ll find signboards in a profusion of languages, styles, materials, and colours. So far, this living typographic archive has existed on the fringes of mainstream design discourse. India Street Lettering brings it to the fore, celebrating the artistic expression, linguistic diversity, and historical intrigue found in the vibrant letterforms around the country.
ISBN 978-93-80636-97-9
Hardcover
8 inches × 8 inches
208 pp
Published by Blaft Publications
Drawing from a decade of documentation and research, India Street Lettering: A Journey Through Typographic Craft & Culture is a showcase of the country’s lively public lettering landscape, and an emphatic call to give this artistry the place it deserves in the design canon.
The book is divided into five chapters that scrutinise how signs are imagined — on shops, restaurants, cinemas, banks, post offices, even homes — and the role that typography and cultural history play in their design. Together, the chapters feature over 300 photographs from 17 cities and in 13 scripts, painting a vivid picture of urban neighbourhoods in India.
Accompanying this wide-ranging collection are stories of local signmakers, which give a rare peek into their design process, and how they view their vocation in a time of rapid technological change. Finally, the book includes four itineraries for the intrepid typographic traveller: guides for exploring the lettering gems of Kolkata, Chennai, New Delhi, and Mumbai.
CONFIRMED EVENTS
17/01/2026
Champaca Bookstore, Bangalore
01/02/2026
The Bookshop Inc, Delhi
07/02/2026
Champaca Bookstore Pop-up, Panjim
08/02/2026
Museum of Goa, Pilerne (Goa)
14/02/2026
Mehrab Bookshop, Kochi
For event registration details, follow on Mastodon, Instagram and Bluesky. If you’d like to invite Pooja to speak about India Street Lettering: A Journey Through Craft & Culture, please get in touch.
Praise for the book
India Street Lettering is a warm, thoughtful look at the signs that quietly shape India’s streets… It’s part archive, part love letter, and a deeply satisfying record of India’s everyday typography.
Sheya Kurian, The Nod
For anyone concerned with preserving craft knowledge, [India Street Lettering] is a reminder that some archives only exist if individuals commit to building them, sign by sign, before the digital printers arrive.
Tom May, Creative Boom
