Pooja Saxena is an award-winning typeface designer, lettering artist and typographer who focuses on Indic scripts. At the recent ScriptTalk event held at IMSc, she spoke about her work chronicling street lettering across India. Bharti Dharapuram caught up with her to chat about her interests, everyday work, public signs as art and research, and her upcoming book India Street Lettering by Blaft Publications.
What got you interested in design and typography?
Growing up, my parents were equally encouraging of both the arts and the sciences. My Dad is an engineer and does sculpture and my Mom is a teacher who studied music, and both of them paint. It was an ideal setup to grow up in, because they were supportive of whatever I wanted to do. Even when it came to choosing a career, I was interested in disparate things. I was like, I could do design, or I could do law, or I could become a chef. And I ended up choosing design. In the very first year of college, there was an interesting assignment which asked us to imagine the future of something. For whatever reason, I chose to work on the future of printing technology and fonts. That became my ‘in’ into type design. At the time, I had no idea that it was even a profession, but I felt like this might be something that I can pay more attention to. I really enjoy that type design is about visuals and drawing, but it also involves a fair amount of research and my work requires very simple programming. So in some ways, it lets me do a few different things that I've always enjoyed doing.
What does your day look like as a typeface designer?
I've had many different kinds of jobs within the field of type design over the last decade and a half. There was a time when I was spending a day or a day and a half of my week writing documentation for a typeface design tool. In the past, I have also done more dedicated research work. Quite recently, in my work with TypeTogether, on a research project called Primarium about how Latin script handwriting is taught in primary schools in different countries and communities around the world. That project involved a lot of research, writing, editing, and interviewing people. In the weeks and months that I'm actually drawing type, like now, it is a painfully and wonderfully iterative process. You draw some letters, and then you see if they work well with each other, and then you draw them again, repeating the process till you're happy with how the letter forms work with each other. Typefaces are not about a few nice-looking letters— those letters have to work well in longer text. It can't just be a nice-looking T, which looks really awkward with everything else. And that holds true for every single letter that you are drawing.
Pooja working on a custom Gurmukhi logotype for a multilingual sign. Read more
I focus on drawing in Indic scripts, specifically Devanagari, but also a bit of Gurmukhi and Gujarati, which tend to have a much larger number of letters, marks, vowel marks and conjuncts. It often involves research into how certain letter forms may have been drawn in the past, looking at the kinds of decisions taken by people, or solving technical problems in the present. People expect fonts to look a certain way, so as a type designer, while you can be adventurous, you have to be adventurous in a very sensitive way. Research ends up being a really, really important part of the process.
Pooja spent a year drawing the letter ‘ka’ in Devanagari in a different style each week, drawing inspiration from various places.In your talk, you mentioned that when you started documenting public signs, you came to it from a feeling of scarcity. Can you say a bit more?
I went to study type design at the typography department in the University of Reading, which at the time was among the two or three places in the world where you could study it. They have an archive that contains a lot of material about how typefaces for Indic scripts were produced in the last century or so. The British Library also has archives from their colonies, at a scale that the colonies themselves don't have, and one got very used to being able to see this material. But when I moved back to India, it suddenly felt like resources to study letter forms had shrunk. Libraries and archives are notoriously challenging to access in this country, especially if you're not affiliated with an educational institution in the capacity of a researcher. So I started looking at what kind of materials I could manufacture access to, and street lettering became one of those things. I had access to it and, I realized, it was just a matter of looking at it from the right perspective to start using it as research material.
In sign painting, the constraints of letterpress printing and typeface design don’t exist because you can draw whatever you want. Technological limitations like how many characters a font can have, or how base characters and marks can attach are non-existent. Not to mention, instead of a system, you’re designing a single artefact. For example, in Hindi, Bengali or Gurmukhi the text hangs from the headline almost like a clothesline from which letters are hanging. But if you look at street lettering, the headline can be curved. When you look at material produced through non-mainstream reproduction technologies, you start to see the possibilities of how letterforms in our scripts can look. That became something that was really interesting to me.
Handpainted sign on a food cart in Udaipur with a curved headline.Architectural lettering with a curved headline on a building in Haridwar.You spoke about local histories and personal stories behind public signs in your talk. How do you explore these deeper layers in your work?
I think one of the things that I am very curious about when I'm looking at a sign is, why is this language here. Following that curiosity leads to interesting answers in most cases. For example, in Delhi's Paharganj, why do I see Hebrew? If I'm in Bangalore, why does Kannada start to appear in public signs? Why do I see broken looking Hindi everywhere I go? It is questions like these, which often tell you a lot about a place itself, the people who are using it but also the people who are being prioritized in that space. I think the question, more often than not, has an uncomfortable answer, but I think it is a question worth asking.
Bilingual sign with wooden English lettering and handpainted Kannada lettering in Bangalore.
Another really interesting thing I note within a neighbourhood or a city is the signature of the painter or the painting company on the bottom right of painted signs. Within a neighbourhood or a city, I try to find as many signs by the same painter. One, that may lead to a conversation with them, and two, it gives me the opportunity to basically look at a neighbourhood or a city as basically a gallery of someone's work. It's a little bit like, if you live in Chandigarh and you go and identify all the buildings that Le Corbusier designed, then you can think of Chandigarh as a living gallery of Corbusier's work. Sign makers and painters actually have an important role to play in what our cities look like and they're usually anonymous. Even if their name is signed, nobody's paying any attention to it. I like to be able to acknowledge who is deciding what the city looks like. I think this has really changed the experience of how I see a city.
Handpainted sign by Deena Arts on a hardware shop in George Town, Chennai.Another one of many signs in the area made by the same sign maker.Public signs are pretty much everywhere around us. But why do you think we don’t notice or appreciate them enough?
I think it's a couple of things about where we believe our appreciation is deserved and where it's not. One is that we think of signs as functional objects. And very often, when we think of something as functional, we don't really appreciate it for its aesthetic value. And two, it's not just that we don’t expect art to be in public places, but it's also about what we expect art to look like. It's our misguided relationship with taste that we think certain things deserve to be kind of elevated to art or appreciation. And that is exactly why I like to say that I could think of a neighbourhood as a gallery of the sign painter’s work. It is to kind of remind people that this is equally valid as artistic expression that deserves appreciation.
How did the idea for your upcoming book India Street Lettering come about?
I had been trying to think of different ways in which I can share my archive of street lettering photographs with people, and in 2022-2023, I started making small zines about the subject. As it turned out, people actually wanted them, which was a lovely surprise. During this time, Rakesh Khanna from Blaft Publications asked if I would be open to selling these on their website. And if I’d considered making it into a book? We got talking and decided that it would be great to do a book together.
The book is organised by the different kinds of establishments that have signs, and will feature photographs from my archive, some of which are over a decade old. I am particularly excited about the chapter about signs on homes, because they're different in not responding to commercial demands that businesses must. The book is going to carry interviews from sign makers and maps of select neighbourhoods from a few cities, highlighting interesting signs from my research. I hope these maps encourage folks to go on their own type explorations. The book is being published by Blaft Publications, and will be out this December. And for those interested, it is up for pre-order.
Tiled sign on an apartment building in Bangalore.What are some of your favourite signs from Chennai?
Gem & Co, the pen shop near the High Court, is definitely one of my favourites. In and around Triplicane, there is a sign for a store called Advanced Screen Supplies, which sells screen printing supplies. It is a painted sign which is really quite beautiful. The third one is a sign in Parrys Corner, which just says ‘fire engine’. It's a really beautiful tiled sign, where the tiles are almost like pixels. There isn't a fire station there now but there’s bound to be one there at some point and I've been digging into it. Those are my top three.
Wooden signboard of Gem & Co near the High Court, Chennai.Handpainted sign on a screen supplies shop in Triplicane, Chennai.Tiled sign for a fire engine in Parrys Corner, Chennai.All the photographs used in the article are by Pooja Saxena. You can find past issues of her newsletter I spy with my typographic eye and subscribe to it here.
