Workshops & Lectures

Acknowledging the challenges she has faced in annotating the multi-script letterforms in this archive according to their styles, Pooja has set out to learn and devise the language she needs to achieve that. In a short talk, she will talk about why this effort is important for the project and her journey thus far.

Register for the event here.

Pooja took the India Street Lettering project to Lucknow’s leading cultural festival through a public lecture that examined the multifarious reasons why she documents letterforms on public signage. She illustrated her motivations, which ranged from a curiousity for local histories to an interest in the constraints of different materials and techniques, and building typologies of letterforms to memorialising diversions from canonical forms, using her vast collection of lettering photographs from around the country, and from Lucknow, in particular.

She was joined on stage by Mohd. Rafi Sahab, a sign painter from Machli Mohal, who gave a live sign-painting demonstration, shared stories from his four-decades long painting career, and answered audience questions with her.

As a design practitioner whose work focuses on under-represented cultures and scripts, Pooja spoke about the need to don the additional hat of a documentarian to participate in the creation of design resources and archives needed to succeed as an individual and a community. Among the projects she highlighted was India Street Lettering, discussing what an asset it has been to her practice by teaching her to look beyond the confines of typographic expression that she learned in educational environments.

For the staff at Monotype, Pooja put together a short talk outlining lessons for Indic typeface design that can be drawn from the works of local sign-makers in India. Challenging the conventions established by the Western design canon, she touched upon ideas of stylistic appropriateness, technological limitations and typographic niceties.

Her presentation was complemented with a display of books, zines and other materials about lettering and urban signage from around the world for the group’s perusal.