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 and was featured in Wallpaper magazine’s Reborn in India issue

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.

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.

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Most marriages in South India are arranged and while ‘love’ marriages do happen, it is not the encouraged norm.  It is an accepted fact for the most part that a boy or girl’s parents will play an important role in the picking of their marriage partner. A marriage in South India is not just the sealing of a bond between two people but a merging of two families. The merger is based on the compatibility of the couple to some extent but important criteria include religion, caste, class, social status and wealth.

Marriage in India is viewed as the culmination of one’s life and great preparations go into making this a grand and memorable social event. It is also a matter of social standing – the grander the wedding, the greater the stature. It is no surprise then that every aspect of an Indian marriage is carefully thought out and planned for months, sometimes years in advance by the families involved. This includes the design of the wedding invitation.

The tradition of wedding invitations
In pre-modern India there was no need for wedding invitations. Marriages often took place within families with cousins marrying each other or within small villages and towns where everyone knew each other. There was no need to inform anyone because everyone already knew of the event.  The parents of the bride and groom would simply visit their extended family and friends and family in their homes as a courtesy to tell them the happy news. This served as the invitation.

With economic progress, people began to move away from their ancestral homes into larger cities and things changed. The family unit was no longer contained within the village but was spread out across the country making oral invitations no longer feasible. This coupled with the spread of printing in India in the early 20^th century gave rise to these oral announcements being realised in print.

The traditional South Indian wedding invitation is not a card but a printed leaflet that borrows its form from the earlier tradition of oral announcement and from the form of a hand written letter.

The template of a traditional South Indian invitation

The invitation follows a traditional template and is always enclosed within a large decorative border. It always begins with an incantation to the family’s ancestral god at the top of the invite and is followed by clip art images of five different Hindu gods. The main content of the invitation is worded like a letter and informs the recipient of a marriage between two families.

This is followed by the bride’s and groom’s educational and professional qualifications as well as their family lineage and town. All these details are considered important as it establishes family status and lineage. It also links the past (who the bride and groom are, and where they are from) with the future of the couple. The information about the groom always appears on the left, centred and enclosed within a box while the bride’s details appear similarly in a box on the right. Following this sense of alignment, based on who the invite is from (usually the bride’s or groom’s father), the name of the addressee is placed either to the right or the left.

In general, great prominence is given to the family and often the names of various family members (uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters and cousins) are mentioned beneath the main text as well-wishers of the occasion. While this is portrayed as a visible indication of the family’s support and blessing of the union, it also works like a family tree, outlining lineage for the recipient of the invitation. The details of the actual event such as time, place and date are delegated to the base of the invite and are often in smaller type size. This hierarchy of information is telling because it clearly gives the family prominence over the details of the wedding event.

Traditional invitations are always printed on double-sided glossy art paper, yellow on one side, and pink on the reverse. The main text and images are always printed in dark green and red on the yellow side. Yellow and red in particular are considered to be auspicious colours in the Hindu tradition.  Traditionally, the announcements are in the vernacular (in Tamil) and carry very little English text.  However, nowadays it is increasingly common practice to have the English version of the invitation printed on the reverse (pink) side of the paper.

Traditionally, these announcements were letter-pressed though they are now also printed by mini-offset or screen-printed. The letterpress process could be partly the reason why the invites often have many different combinations of type. Letterpress jobbing printers very rarely had one complete set of text typefaces, and if they did it was usually Helvetica or Arial. Therefore, to set an invitation with different levels of hierarchy, they often resorted to using display type. A wedding stationery printer in Chennai gave me another reason for this multi-various type palette. Vernacular typefaces, he said (and I paraphrase here) are by the nature of their shape, decorative and script-like. In comparison, Latin typefaces appear ‘austere’ to the Indian eye and therefore require ‘creative mixing’ to match the ornamental feel of vernacular typefaces. Sometimes this creative mixing is done with such enthusiasm that it can involve as many as seven different typefaces in a single invitation.

A Tamil wedding invite which uses seven different typefaces

Contemporary Wedding Invitations
While traditional invitations are still common practice in Tamil Nadu, Hindu families in larger towns and cities go for a more contemporary format. The modern Indian wedding invitation is a riot of colour, typography and image. The invitation, seen as the first intimation of the wedding ceremony carries the responsibility of reflecting the family’s status in society as well as the grandness of the occasion. Invitations (based on the grandness of the wedding and the resources of the bride’s father) take three main forms. The simple card (very rarely used), the folded card (most popular) and ‘the book invitation’.  I also looked at envelopes. I was curious to find out a few things.

Which typefaces were most popular?

Did religion made a difference in typographic choice and final form? For example, were the Christians more for scripted faces than the Hindus? Did the Muslims prefer sans serif to serifs? Were the Hindus more ostentatious than the Parsis?

And finally, did the rich have less taste than the poor?

I proceeded to do a little research on this using my collection as a sample. 

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Which typefaces were most popular?
The typefaces that find most favour for Indian wedding invites are a mixture of serifs, san serifs and script typefaces. They are, in alphabetical order:  Amazone,  Arial (Regular and Italic),  Century School Book,  Dauphin, Edwardian Script ITC,  Georgia (Regular and Italic),  Helvetica (Regular and Italic), Kaufmann,  Murray Hill, Nuptial BT, Park Avenue, Poetica Chancery, Pristina, Shelley Allegro, Verdana, Vivaldi, and Zapf Chancery.

Did religion made a difference in typographic choice and final form?
Across all religions and class, envelopes seem to work as brief announcements of the event.

The envelope carrying the wedding invitation holds key information

The recipient at single glance is informed of the event (wedding, reception etc.). This is almost usually in Zapf Chancery. They are also informed of who is marrying whom, of the date of the wedding and whom the invitation is from. Hindu cards often carry the address of the invitee as well so the recipient can send a telegram wishing the couple, which is still common practice in many parts of India. In the case of Hindu invitations, the envelope most often carries a clipart image of the Hindu God Ganesha, who is seen to be the remover of all obstacles.

The envelope for a Tamil wedding

Simple wedding cards
Simple wedding cards were rare to find. In a selection of over 300 samples, there were only four simple card invitations.  One was a Christian invite, one a Parsi invite and the other two were Hindu invitations. In general, with both simple and folded cards, Christians and Parsis tend to be more minimalist in their type selection. They rarely go for more than one typeface and the type is almost always in gold on a cream background. If two typefaces are used, one is a script face such as Shelley Allegro. This is used to highlight the names of the parents and the bride and groom. The second typeface is a serif such as Garamond or Georgia for the main body text. There is an European influence evident in these invites.

An invitation to a Christian wedding

A Parsi wedding invitation

It is difficult to draw similar parallels with Hindu invites other than the prominence given to the names of the parents and the bride and groom, and the preferred colour for type being red or maroon. This colour preference probably derives from the fact that red or maroon are the colours of the ‘sindhoor’ or the mark that is placed on a bride’s forehead indicating that she is married. Hindu invites also seem to go for serifs or san serifs based on personal preference more than anything else.

A Hindu wedding invite using the classic palette and printed on handmade paper

The most popular format for Hindu wedding invitations is the folded card. In Chennai, capital city of Tamil Nadu, there are numerous speciality-wedding invitations shops that have pre-designed folded cards for parents to choose from. Only on rare occasions (and with more affluent families) are the invitations custom-made. Numerous samples of invites (with their corresponding envelopes) are pasted within large photo albums and displayed on counters or exhibited individually on the walls. There are helpful assistants to guide parents in their selection. The samples are helpfully categorised by religion: Sikh cards, Muslim cards, Christian cards, Hindu cards, and Interfaith cards.

They are also categorised by levels of grandeur (plain wedding cards, designer wedding cards, scroll invites, and cards with jewels). None of the invitations contain any typography and the first choice of design is based on paper, image and colour. The front of a folded card also never carries any text (though I did find a marvellous exception to the rule).

A Hindu wedding envelope

Grand designs using plenty of gold or silver are usually popular. With Hindu invitations a clipart image of Lord Ganesha is common. Only after the choice of the card is made does type come into the picture and even then it is of secondary importance. Parents are more concerned with the content than the typography and the choice is often one recommended by the salesman behind the counter. With Hindu invitations in South India, three typefaces win hands down – Zapf Chancery and Arial Italic or Helvetica Italic.  Zapf Chancery is used for the main body of the invite. Arial Italic or Helvetica Italic is used for more factual information such as lineage, address, profession, educational qualifications. The type again usually appears in maroon or red.

On the insides of the cards, the text is always centred, never in capitals and never in black, which is considered an inauspicious colour; this applies to all cards whether grand or simple, from any religion. As with single card invites, the invitee’s names and the names of the couple as with the single card invites are given most prominence in the card. The main difference between the single card invites and the folded invites is that the folded invites often carry the programme of the wedding on the left side of the card. Keeping in mind that weddings are events which affirm one’s social standing in the community, as many details about the wedding are mentioned even down to the orchestra that has been hired to play at the event.

After the choice of type has being made, the cards then go through a swift proofing session (usually on the very next day) and are screen printed with the approved text. The turnaround time for these invites is usually 48 hours. So if you’re having a shotgun wedding in India, you’d still probably be able to get the invites out in time!

Do the rich have less taste than the poor?
With affluent families, ceremonies for Indian weddings can often stretch over 4-5 days and invitations can often be confused with books as each ceremony demands its own invite.

One example of a ‘book invitation’

The invitations are grouped, sized to work as a set and encased in a grand folder. This style of invitation probably provides great relief to parents as all family members can be appeased by the placement of their names on at least one of the many invitation cards. The design and typography of these invitations seems to have no limits as each invite tries to outdo the last.

It is in these custom-made invites that the Indian love of technology comes through. Invites are die-cut, handmade, gold foiled to make them appear as grand as possible.

Sometimes even semi-precious stones and miniature Hindu gods are stuck onto the invites.

The biggest difference between South Indian wedding invitations and Western wedding cards is the focus. While western invites go for the more minimalist, simple and elegant look, Indian invites focus on imbuing the card with the splendour and grandeur of the occasion. We all know what ‘happily ever after’ means in the Western context. But what does ‘happily ever after’ mean in the context of a South Indian arranged marriage? I suspect it is Zapf Chancery in bright, shiny gold!

I thoroughly enjoyed my time working with Pushkin on their Classic series, and on their first titles in the Modern series. Melissa played a key editorial and creative role and was a hands-on publisher. In our first design conversation, she spoke of Pushkin’s visual identity and interest in continuing to use the typeface employed in previous titles.

The typeface used in previous Pushkin titles is a transitional serif and a masterpiece. Transitional typefaces are so-called because they bridge the gap between old-style typefaces (low contrast) and modern typefaces (high contrast). This transitional serif, Baskerville, was developed in the 18th century by John Baskerville. The typeface is said to be the culmination of a series of experiments (including paper making and ink manufacturing) by John Baskerville to improve legibility.

A print sample by Baskerville, image courtesy ILT.

One of the most beautiful alphabets in the typeface: the calligraphic capital Q.

My first step was to invest in a good quality typeface. As most graphic designers know, there are several revival versions of original metal typefaces. I narrowed my choices down to ITC New Baskerville designed by Matthew Carter and John Quaranta and a Baskerville revival by Linotype. I chose the version as digitised by Linotype which has six different weights and a reasonable but not overly emphasised contrast which made it perfect for both titling as well as long text typesetting.

I had two design responsibilities with Pushkin. The first, was to standardise the logotype and series titles. We kept the design stark and simple, focusing on the beauty of the typeface.

A detail of a book cover which shows the Pushkin and series logo

Detail of the Pushkin paper logo on the book spine

My second responsibility was for the design and production of the books which included everything from picture research for the cover to doing a final print check on site. Included below is an example of a typical Pushkin title page, and a few of the book covers from the Pushkin Modern and Paper series.

A typical Pushkin title page has a classical design

Detail, title page

Cover design for Anthology of Apparitions by Simon Liberati. The photograph of the moth is by Thomas Nützl.

Cover design for Lovers or something like it by Florian Zeller. This image shows the spine, front cover and front French flap.

Cover design for Fantastic Night and other stories by Stefan Zweig. Image of Donati’s Comet over Balliol College
by William Turner of Oxford (1789-1862) from the Bridgeman Art Library.

The spirit of the old site is much like the present one. It offered a choice. I call my design studio Minus 9 in reference to my eyesight. Central to the concept of the site was the idea of ‘vision’ (referring both to the name of the studio as well as the vision or mission of the studio). Visitors to the site could choose ‘normal vision’ which (like the name indicates) is a more direct way of accessing the work. Or you could choose ‘m9 vision’ which was my way of looking at my work.

Front page of the site

A key aspect of the design concept and narrative of the site was the typography. Words were all blurred (as they would seem to someone with short-sight) until your mouse hovered over them, at which point, the word would come into focus.

Pop up screen for normal vision showing the various categories.
Clients interested in only a particular type of work (for example, publishing) could directly and quickly access previous projects.

A selection of work under the Corporate/Screen category.

Explanation of a branding project for the British Council.

m9 vision which organises work using ‘active’ descriptions of the design process.

Work done under the category ‘educate’

Work in the ‘illustrate’ category

Explanation of a book design project for Tara Books.

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.