Workshops & Lectures

As part of a series of talks by folks whose work appears in the fourth issue of Better Letters, Pooja deconstructed common idioms present in the design of various painted signs from around India focusing on the variety of typographic styles and the interplay between text and image. Along with sharing snippets from local sign-painting and lettering books, she spoke about the making of the first batch of India Street Lettering zines, which were featured in the Book Club section of the magazine.

Watch recordings from the event on BLAG.

In a free-wheeling talk set against the backdrop of striking images from this archive, Pooja shared her impetus for maintaining India Street Lettering for a decade and investing in outreach for this research. She shared the methods and perspectives that she employs to make meaning from her ever-growing collection of photographs, focusing on the collections she has built through annotations — signs on Chennai’s hardware stores, Udaipur’s food carts, Mumbai’s Art Deco apartment complexes and Haridwar’s ashrams, among others. Her focus was also on the many enquiries and dialogues that this project helps initiate, and she debuted her first set of zines at this public lecture.

Watch the talk on Youtube.

In the summer of 2021, Pooja was invited to speak at Adobe Design Mix’s series of remote talks, Design Shots, about her explorations with augmented reality as a way to appreciate street lettering. She shared experiments that used well-known public signage as a trigger to learn type anatomy, recreated unique cityscapes of street lettering that can be used for teaching without bearing the cost and burden of travel; and restored shop signs that can have been damaged, removed or replaced by new ones by superimposing photographs on live video.

With Tanya George, Pooja hosted a session to talk about their processes and perspectives on facilitating type walks. Their walks refocus typographic history, which is usually Western-centric, to stories and uses that can be experienced in local public spaces. They talked about how they frame signs and letterforms to initiate a dialogue with walk participants about viewing this history as more than just an abstract construct only to be read in books, but as something that can be seen in our own neighbourhoods, and interpreted in the context of architecture; social, political and economic developments; and, popular culture.

Through their session, Pooja and Tanya examined how value and prestige is assigned to different typographic objects, and argue that archives and resources, so necessary for type appreciation, need not be in libraries and museums alone. In the absence of readily-available traditional facilities and material, they have seized cities as living, breathing typographic archives, and encourage others to do the same! With the help of virtual tours of their favourite local typographic spots, they shared their love and interest for making all things type more accessible — how and why did they began running type walks, what goes into preparing for one, and what they have learned from successes and failures.

Listen to the talk here.