This is the final brief of their second year and it ends in a very different sort of ‘Work in Progress’ show. The show (which is actually a non-show) will be a sale of items produced for the brief and sold in a pop-up shop space on Clerkenwell Road – the proceeds of which will go towards their final degree show next year. We have been intentional in not having a usual kind of London work-in-progress show where work is sanitised and glorified, and taken out of its actual context. Instead, the intention is to engage with the audience that London as a city provides – the passers-by and specifically non-designers.

I enjoyed very aspect of the making process of this brief.  The research (happily conducted off the books in my library), the writing, the editing (thanks to David Preston and Rebecca Ross who provided useful and clear critique), the design and final production.

The final 24-page booklet contained the brief, timetable but also important and essential readings. It was produced using 80gsm copier paper, laser printed masters, an ancient protesting photocopier, and rubber bands. As this is a brief about designers as producers, I chose typefaces designed by people rather than corporations. I used Archer designed by Jesse Ragan, Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler for the body text and Leyton, a chunky yet astonishingly readable typeface designed by Ian Moore for the titles.

I was keen to make the booklet as sustainable as possible – working with the recycled copier paper that was available in college and simple rubber bands from Rymans (easier to recycle than staples). Rebecca had the idea to use coloured paper to separate the content – so the yellow part is the brief, and the readings are printed on white paper. On the day of production, I must confess that I struggle not to over design the booklet but to produce it with the materials available – even if they were a strange yellow and an almost-lilac paper and the photocopier toner was exhausted and weary.

Over the weekend I collated each of the 120 copies (1 for each of the tutors and students taking part in the brief), trimmed and cut them by hand. A mad labour of love (resulting in severe tendonitis!) that was intended to convey to students that this was a physical brief rather than an impersonal pdf document, and that tutors do practice what they preach! On the day of the briefing, each of the 7 tutors personalised copies for the students using a simple label space on the cover.

The postman brought a delivery from Tara Books, India yesterday. This is a book that Sirish Rao and I have worked on. The project was introduced to me by Tara’s editor V Geetha and has been incubating in our collective minds for a long time. The available English translation felt too big and complex to illustrate and design, and I felt a bit overwhelmed by it. The project finally fell into place when Sirish came up with a highly visual translation of the original author Morgernstern’s text. My job was to typographically ‘illustrate’ the text and design the book.

I enjoy the challenges of approaching typography as sign, mark and image. For me, this is process takes me back to the origins of language – where letters are marks and images that can be read both ‘textually’ and ‘visually’.  The word is a mark on a page. At very first glance, the word is first and foremost an image.

As the blurb on the book reads: First published in 1905, German poet Christian Morgernstern’s Im Reich der Interpunktionen (In the Land of Punctuation) is a brilliant comic poem on language. Morgernstern called it a linguistic caprice; and it is a fun romp, populated by punctuation marks as characters with their own agendas … and yet the political undertones are unmistakable, suggesting systems of control that go beyond language.

A detail from a spread

An excerpt from an email to publisher Gita Wolf explains part of my process: I’ve taken a modernist (some may say militaristic approach) to the design. What I liked most about Sirish’s text was the visual but also staccato nature of the text. I’ve tried to maintain this by giving a very left-right, turn page, left-right, turn page rhythm to the book.
Other thoughts: Besides the obvious political nature of the text, I’ve envisioned this as a modern, contemporary conflict with visual allusions technology, machinery, war…Influences have been, amongst other things, the structures and rigour of letterpress and metal type, Russian posters of the 1920s and 1930s, the work of Werkman and modernists such as Weingart.
The look right now is flat and graphic – but this is the artwork. I envision the printed version as having uneven texture. Also, as with letterpress, if the black is printed first and the red after, then both layers should be visible… we can experiment.

The book is available here

Anything But a Grabooberry is a book of nonsense verse for children aged 4-8 years that employs typography as word and image. Written by Anushka Ravishankar, and typographically illustrated by me, the book was bravely published by Tara Books in 1998. Working on the book was my first true foray into both typography and collaboration. In the process, I fell in love with both the ability of typography to convey ideas, and with collaboration as a method of engaging with creative practice.

Anushka is one of the most inspiring and easy people to work with. The poem she wrote for her daughter Akshara became the fodder for a book enjoyed by many children.

For an outsider, it is easy to presume that all books develop in the same way – text comes first, illustration next, design and production at the end. This rarely happens with independent publishers such as Tara. In this case, Anushka gave me the text simply typed out on an A4 paper. I began to experiment with different typefaces and tried to ‘visualise’ the ideas contained in the words. Some descriptions worked better than others. Anushka and I reviewed them together and she suggested other more visual words.

During this, I tested the pages out on several friend’s kids – their reading aloud of the typographic text on the page was an invaluable input. It gave the bee many more ‘e’s, and the grabooberry more ‘ooo’s… It was important that the design rather than being intended for adults was understood by the audience of children. There was a pleasurable to-and-fro designing and editing process. As Gita Wolf, publisher at Tara Books explains, ‘We found that children enjoy figuring out words like puzzles, since they have no pre-conceptions about this. Adults are not necessarily faster at comprehending it.’

The typography in the book sets off associations in different ways: sometimes the word is a direct visual representation. For example, the word ‘cup’ looks like a cup. Other connections are indirect and lateral. A smelly sock is suggested through texture, a rocking chair is its movement, a bee creates sound, and the colour blue bubbles through water.

A simple, punchy verse that was so distinctly visual in itself seemed to ask for a simple, graphic treatment. I chose to go for a typeface with multiple weights. The only multiple weight typeface I had on my computer at the time was Arial and we certainly couldn’t afford to buy a new one so the decision was quickly made. The book needed to be low-cost – we couldn’t afford for this to be an expensive production. The book was printed on a single-offset machine in red and green. We simply worked with the restrictions we had and searched for inspiration within them.

Anything but a Grabooberry by Anuskha Ravishankar and Rathna Ramanathan was published in 1998, and reprinted in 2002 and in 2004. It won a White Ravens Special Mention in 2000 in the category of ‘World’s Best Children’s Books. The last time I checked there was only 1 copy available for sale on Amazon.