Minus 9 Design » Posters

6,000,000 impressions

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:27:53 +0000

6,000,000 impressions: handcrafting the book experience is an exhibition showcasing the process and output of Tara Books, at St Bride Library London. One of the things that make Tara Books unique is their genre of books made entirely by hand.
The enterprise is a fascinating study of craft and mass production. Tens of thousands of titles created in a small workshop in Chennai, India by hand using silkscreen and letterpress and book binding craft techniques are shipped to various parts of the world – LA, Berlin, Moscow, London, Tokyo…. the list keeps growing.

A6 invitation

These are books that, as Gita Wolf, Tara’s publisher puts it, ‘refashion traditional artisanal skills into fine contemporary bookmaking’.

Designing the poster and flyer for the exhibition was fun. Keeping in mind the spirit of Tara’s initiative, the publicity material was entirely (and painstakingly) printed by hand in India on handmade paper. The peacock on the poster is an image by the Gond artist Ram Singh Urveti from the book The Night Life of Trees.

A3 poster

Critical Context Program

admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:50:58 +0000

For one academic year (from 2007 to 2008), I ran the Professional Practice lecture series on the MA Communication Design program at Central Saint Martins, London. In practice, this meant inviting speakers of interest to come and talk to the students for an hour on a Tuesday night, on subjects ranging from independent publishing to play. Some nights we hosted a series of small-scale informal film screenings. Part of the delight of running this series meant I got to design a poster to advertise each of the events to the student community. The posters were meant for internal use only, and my constraint was that I had to spend no more than 60 minutes on each.

Often, due to shortage of time & budget, I had to be creative with low-res options available via online image searches or find images in my personal photo library that would suit. These are some favourites.

14 Non-Latin typefaces

admin — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:04:31 +0000

14 Non-Latin Typefaces was a series of posters created to celebrate a bipartite exhibition and two-day conference on ‘Non-Latin Typeface Design’, jointly hosted by St Bride Library, London and the Department of Typography, University of Reading.

I worked on the project with the wonderful, hugely experienced typeface designer Fiona Ross. These typefaces were produced for Linotype in the UK, by teams headed by Walter Tracy in the 1970s and Fiona Ross in the 1980s. It is incredible to imagine that the beautiful graphic forms and non-latin characters you see below were each created and drawn by hand.

Script: Arabic; typeface: Linotype Yakout Bold

Script: Arabic; typeface: Linotype Qadi

Script: Arabic/Farsi; typeface: Linotype Nazanin Bold

On the posters, we featured the same character ‘ka’ (often the first consonant in non-Latin languages) in a white box on the top left corner. This, along with the script and typeface titles on the top right corner provided an index that grouped the 14 posters together. The main character showcased on the poster was chosen both for its characteristic as well as its representative shape. I chose bright, bold colours to suggest the flavour and vibrancy of these scripts.

The posters were printed by silkscreen on black handmade paper by Arumugam and his team at AMM Screens in Chennai, India.

Script: Arabic; typeface: Linotype Maged

Script: Bengali; typeface: Linotype Bengali Bold

Script: Devanagari; typeface: Linotype Rohini Bold

Script: Gujarati; typeface: Linotype Gujarati Bold

Script: Gurmukhi; typeface: Linotype Gurmukhi Bold

Script: Kannada; typeface: Linotype Kesari Bold

Script: Malayalam; typeface: Linotype Manorama Bold

Script: Sinhala; typeface: Linotype Araliya Bold

Script: Tamil; typeface: Linotype Samanti Bold

Script: Telugu; typeface: Linotype Tamara Bold

Script: Thai; typeface: Linotype Sukothai Bold

You can read Fiona’s paper on Non-Latin Typedesign at Linotype and a review of the exhibition by Eye magazine. You can also buy a copy of the exhibition catalogue from St Bride Library.