Since 2017, Pooja has been conducting guided typographic tours in Delhi and Bangalore that re-acquaint 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. For news on upcoming walks, subscribe to her newsletter.
These walks are one of many ways, including self-published zines, that Pooja uses to share her learnings from documenting street lettering in India for over a decade.
To learn more about what goes into preparing these walks, and the motivations behind them, listen to Pooja talk about them with Tanya George at TypeWknd 2020.
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Drift with Matra Type
As part of the activities happening at Lab59, 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.
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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, 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.
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Nicholson Cemetery Type Walk
In this walk, participants took a stroll in Delhi’s Nicholson Cemetery to look at some of the oldest Latin letters to be seen in the city: ranging in styles from blackletter to grotesque to tuscan, some of them dating back almost two centuries. As the group spotted letters on gravestones, Pooja talked about the stories of the typographic styles, as well as the stories of those who are buried here. The protagonists, among others, include John Nicholson, on whom the cemetery is named; American founding father, Benjamin Franklin; and of course, the man who introduced moveable type to Europe, Johaness Gutenburg. This walk is a unique way to learn about the history of the letterforms we see everyday, and discover how deeply intertwined they are with the important events in world history. (Illustration above by Sarthak Sinha)
