Indian Street Lettering

I have a terrible admission to make and you may never forgive me. It’s taken far too long, so please don’t be mean about this. Look, I’m already on my knees apologizing and you don’t have to make this weird, okay? But this weekend I finally got my copy of Indian Street Lettering by Pooja Saxena. I know! I’m sorry! I should have known sooner! I apologized already! Jeez!

Pooja’s fantastic book and equally fantastic website are fancy typographic objects, sure, but they most certainly won’t sit quietly unread on your coffee table or in your browser tabs collecting dust. Instead, Indian Street Lettering demands as much attention as Pooja has lovingly poured into this project:

Take a short walk in any Indian neighbourhood and you’ll find signboards in a profusion of languages, styles, materials, and colours. So far, this living typographic archive has existed on the fringes of mainstream design discourse. India Street Lettering brings it to the fore, celebrating the artistic expression, linguistic diversity, and historical intrigue found in the vibrant letterforms around the country.

In her talk about the project called A Typographic Archive in the Making, Pooja describes how much she loves making playlists of photographs depending on the region, language, and style of lettering that she finds out in the wild. But she also talks about how temporary these signs are and how recording them is important because the visual identity of a place is always churning in a big, temporary soup. It’s all just great stuff.

Oh and I’d highly recommend subscribing to the feed, too. It’s a fount of interesting and unfamiliar typographic styles, like Pooja’s latest post all about astrology related signs.