The intention of this website is that it functions as a living repository of my practice. I say living, because maintaining it causes a necessary act of reflection of my process, method and output as a creative practitioner.

At the moment, my nose is pushed to the glass and my breath is fogging the pane – I am too close to reflect. I can only do. But over the next few weeks and months, the intention is to ‘upload’ all my previous work, and let the strands and nodes connect themselves, leading to a re-engagement, again and again of thought and process.

Welcome to my world!

For an informal summation of Rathna’s practice, make yourself a cup of coffee and listen to her Typeradio interviews.

The creative agency handling advertising for Fevicol (Ogilvy and Mather, my first and only real employer) has done a brilliant (and very successful) job of introducing Fevicol as a metaphor for strength and bonding.

Fevicol Rajasthan bus advert

The ads are memorable and humourous; Fevicol provides bonding solutions to various everyday issues and people in overflowing buses feel at ease, politicians glued to chairs,  large families are held together and wandering husbands are kept firmly in place.

Fevicol Joint Family advert

Fevicol Newlyed advert

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.

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 very modernist (some may say militaristic approach) to the design. What I liked most about Sirish’s text was the very 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 for pre-order here

View from the CCTV camera

The final artwork was a series of 4 A0 posters that ‘visualised’ Ken’s text (an essay he had written for the Embedded Art catalogue) as a network of connections. It also worked as a reflection of Ken’s process and essence as a writer, connecting what may seem like random “historical events, cultural allusions and epistemological shifts” in an impressive complete story with fascinating insight. The artwork is the result of a true and highly enjoyable collaboration, moving back and forth between Ken and myself. Ken covers the one, two, three, four, five stage process in detail.

Ken watching the artwork while being watched

Making the connections

Its all about the network

Photography by Ken Hollings.

Slides from Short run, an illustrated talk

The talk focused on important aspects of little press publishing such as the publisher’s direct involvement in the design and production of their books. The design approach of a little press was largely dependent on the publisher’s available resources and connections that contributed to the unique identity of the imprints.

Each of the five little presses featured in this exhibition had a unique approach to publishing and was run in a distinct, individual manner based on the publisher’s personality and agenda. The exhibition showcased how this was reflected in the design and production of the books they published.

The exhibition featured a variety of rarely seen artefacts from private archives and collections. First editions, photographs, artwork, correspondence, layout sketches and illustrations allowed the viewer to gain a true understanding of the nature of book design and production of little presses in this post-WW2 period.

I ran this as an introduction brief for my third year students on the BA @ CSM. It was a short one-week brief and a simple, effective way to get students comfortable with bringing their own perspectives to their practice.

Here are three very different results:

Ben Lee

Louise Naunton Morgan

Guglielmo Rossi

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

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.

It’s not often that one gets a chance to discuss exciting and unusual projects created for rural communities in India in a top British design magazine. Many thanks to editor John Walter and writer Steve Hare for putting together a fine piece. Read an excerpt of the article ‘Roadshows and rickshaws’ and buy a copy of eye no 64.

Despite a police report, and a most helpful train manager, I had no luck in finding the culprit (or the battered portfolio). I spent several sleepless nights after, and would wake up in the middle of the night and open the front door imagining that some kind soul had returned it to me. I was shattered – I had no way of recovering many of the artifacts in there, lost to too many misbehaving hard drives.

As trite as it sounds, it is true – in case of my house burning down, my portfolio would have definitely have been one of my top 10 things to take with me. It’s a mystery. The case was of little value to anyone but me, but there you go. Someday I’ll do a project that imagines all the places my portfolio turned up. In the meanwhile, if you happen to find it, email me! I promise a fine reward!

Using their own words (excerpted from emails), the concept of the exhibition was to reconstruct the personalities and individuals which had been erased or ‘flattened’ by electronic mail. Virtual Faces gave the words of the emails, a new graphic dimension. Friends were envisioned as PCO (Public Call Office) posters, postage stamps, business cards, books, and other graphic objects.

Unfortunately, due to a stolen portfolio situation, I have very little visual record left and will have to try and ferret more out when I head to the archive in India. For now, here’s one friend ‘Hitch’.