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.

Dear Rathna,
Could you please remind me of why exactly I need to have a personal web page?
Thank you.
Best,
Rebecca

This wasn’t just a random email. It comes from conversations that Rebecca and I have often – about the tension and nature of our practice, of being both designers and tutors. We also strongly encourage our students to have their work websites up and online by the end of their second year. Rebecca’s email was a reminder to myself about the nature of what I do, and the purpose of this site. Here’s what I said, in response:

Dear Rebecca,
I think its important to maintain an archive of our practice, our work. You and I have a similar approach to our practice. We have intense journeys where we dig deep, and travel far. And then move on to something else. It is important to maintain a log of this journey, and outcomes, if any. This provides reflection. Helps memory. Threads the many journeys together. For me, ‘making’ is an important aspect of my work and practice. The site helps retain a sense of that – that it is not all about thinking and contemplation, but also about doing.
A personal web page is not a broadcast. Its a place of work. For designers who are tutors, like we are, the site helps us commit to our selves and our practice.
Best,
Rathna

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.

Chennai is a city where politics is visible on the street in a variety of different marks ranging from particular semiology to giant cutouts that are nearly 100 feet tall. The cutouts are usually of film actors, many of whom use the medium of the masses (cinema) to launch their political careers.

The ad, uses very localised ‘insider’ language including graphic handpainted cutouts, Tamil folk music and dappankoothu dance to tell its story. As the creative director Senthil Kumar explains, the ad presents a short satire on the life of a giant cardboard cutout character through the course of one day in the life of the city of Chennai. It acts as a visual metaphor for the rise and fall of actor-turned-politicians.

Naaka Mukka (‘naaka’ meaning tongue, and ‘mukka’ meaning nose) is the title of the ancient Tamil folk track that was rewritten for the video, with the new lyrics sung by a folk singer Madurai Chinna Ponnu.

The video is well edited. There are several ‘gaps’ in the narrative that only someone who is familiar with Chennai and the social/cultural/political context could fill. The Times of India is a national rather than local newspaper, and by this film content and narrative shows very specific local knowledge and culture, that is both historic and contemporary. It gives the newspaper a credibility, but also signifies empathy, as if to say: Chennai, I know you, heart and soul.

The creative agency handling advertising for Fevicol (Ogilvy and Mather, my first 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 humorous; 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.

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

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.

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.

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’.

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.