Letter by Letter: Short film & exhibition

2023 was an exciting year for India Street Lettering: I received a small grant from the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) as part of their B•LORE programme to make a short film about street lettering in Bangalore’s M.G. Road. I collaborated with my friend and photographer, Harshay Jha, to create a short typographic tour through this […]

India Street Lettering zines: Tiles

In the summer of 2023, I took the plunge to turn my typographic discoveries and theses from India Street Lettering into honest-to-God printed matter: pint-sized, self-published zines that each centre on a tiny sliver of public lettering in India, catalysed by a medley of influences such as material, script, location, function and historical context. The […]

Men of Faith, Letters of Commerce: A Typographic Tour of M.G. Road

Organised by the Bangalore International Centre, I conducted an updated type walk in M.G. Road in June. Using the signs and landmarks of M.G. Road as provocation, I 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 […]

Type Tour of Indiranagar

This is an abridged form of an that essay first appeared as Issue 7 / A Type Tour of Indiranagar of my newsletter I Spy with my Typographic Eye. Read the original, which includes a look at Kannada newspaper nameplates, and subscribe to the newsletter. Last autumn, I found myself in Bangalore and as I spent […]

Letters of Connaught Place

This is an abridged form of an that essay first appeared as Issue 3 / Letters of Connaught Place of my newsletter I Spy with my Typographic Eye. Read the original, which includes a list of Instagram accounts that focus on capturing street lettering from Southeast Asia, and subscribe to the newsletter. For some years now, […]

Bengalee Association for Champaca Books

For a postcard that went as part of Champaca Bookstore’s book subscription parcel focused on English translations of Kannada texts, I drew an homage to one of my favourite Kannada signs in Bangalore, that of the Bengalee Association in Ulsoor. The Kannada is part of a trio of signs, which also includes Latin and Bangla. […]

M.G. Road Type Walk

Last month I conducted my very first type walk in Bangalore. A group of us walked from Koshy’s at Anil Kumble Circle to Cauvery Emporium at the beginning of Brigade Road, and ended the morning with breakfast at India Coffee House. I spoke about a range of subjects — a bit of printing history related […]

Nicholson Cemetery Type Walk

I debuted a new walk this month in Delhi’s Nicholson Cemetery, where a group of us got the opportunity to look at some of the oldest Latin letters to be seen in the city: ranging in styles from blackletter to grotesque to tuscan, a few even dating back almost two centuries. We spotted letters on […]

36 Days of India Street Lettering

For this year’s edition of #36DaysOfType, I tried to shine a spotlight on the ingenious letter designs of local sign-makers in India. Every day, the letter or number I posted was based on a sign that I have spotted in the wild. The inspiration came from signs in Udaipur (Rajasthan), Panjim and Mapusa (Goa), Mumbai […]

Paharganj Type Walk and Show & Tell

I was thrilled to run an updated avatar of my type walk from Delhi Walk Festival a few times this winter. It follows one of the main market streets in Paharganj, a neighbourhood that has existed since the Mughal era and dates back to the early eighteenth century. We start and finish at two important […]

Extinct – C. Lal & Sons Dispensing Chemists

According to the Delhiwalla, Kashmere Gate’s C. Lal & Sons Dispensing Chemists has been in business since 1935, and was, in fact, the very first chemist shop in Delhi to be open twenty-four hours a day. I first spotted its wooden sign in July this year. And when I went back to the neighbourhood a […]