Indian Sign Painting: A Typeface Designer’s Take on the Craft
Since 2013, Pooja Saxena has been documenting Indian street lettering in all its forms. As this culimates in a new book from Blaft Publications, which can be pre-ordered on the dedicated Kickstarter, I invited her to share her insights into the sign painting themes within her work.
India Street Lettering is a 200-page book presenting the documentary photography and detailed research that Pooja has carried out across the country. The Kickstarter campaign is already fully funded, but you can pre-order the book, along with a host of extra add-ons, until Friday, 25 July.
Indian Sign Painting: A Typeface Designer’s Take on the Craft
By Pooja Saxena
It was not long after I began documenting street lettering in India that I became jaded by its singular perception — one that focused solely on sign painting and was outrightly colourful and flamboyant — that had taken hold of public imagination. More so because I could see that there were several non-digital methods and techniques of sign-making popular in the country at different times, and many design idioms flourished.
Of course, ignoring local design traditions for dominant global narratives is bad, but flattening them to a common denominator felt no better. And I couldn’t help but ask, why this identity — was it a vision for Indian street culture that seemed most palatable? My attention shifted, therefore: to ribbon lettering in metal, to experiments in mosaic, to possibilities in wood.
While I had never doubted the immense skill of sign painters, it took coming back to their work with new perspectives and a curiosity to see beyond the surface. I focused on recording signs and stories with the intention of zooming in, concerning myself first with the scale of the neighbourhood, rather than sweeping generalisations. If the exuberant adjectives used to describe sign painting felt vacuous, it was time to learn the language of the trade in local tongues. [Pooja explored some of this language in her recent BLAG Meet talk.] And most of all, I looked at painted letterforms with similar inquisitiveness and criticality that I do typefaces.
Searching for Local Typographic Flavour
It is not uncommon for sign painters to be employed by agents of large corporations, Indian and international, painting their logos on walls over and over again, but it is usually when they produce work for their communities and local businesses that they have the opportunity to flex their creative muscles.
I asked Mohanlal Sihani, a sign painter and proprietor of Shiv Arts in Chawri Bazaar, New Delhi, how he designs a shop sign: Does he show the customer samples of previous work? Are there discussions about preferred styles and colours? Is there an agreement on the design before he paints it?
The answer to all these questions was ‘no’. As it turns out, the process is based simply on trust. Sihani said that folks come to him because they know him and his work, and have faith that he will create a sign in his signature style that will suit their business. He chooses the layout, picks the lettering styles, and even adds illustrations where he feels they’re necessary.
Hardware store signs by Mohanlal Sihani (Shiv Arts) in New Delhi.
Perhaps, it is this kind of creative independence that allows and encourages sign painters to cast their cities and neighbourhoods in recognisable typographic flavours, which sometimes end up taking on lives of their own. I am thinking of the painted buses of Kolkata, for example.
Buses in Kolkata with painted numbers, routes, and destinations, painter unknown.
And speaking of painted vehicles, how about the boats from Kochi’s Mattancherry? Or the lettering on trucks, also from Kochi, that strikes a unique chord even in a region known for its truck art.
Painted boats in Kochi, painter unknown.
Painted trucks in Kochi, painter unknown.
The thing to remember, though, is that these local typographic identities aren’t entirely prescriptive, and, in fact, foster experimentation. Last year, I spoke to Ram Kumar Azad, proprietor of Azad Band in Lucknow. In a city known for its brass bands and their trolleys, Azad Band’s automobiles are conspicuous for their restraint. This is not an accident. Azad explained that his father worked closely with a sign painter to develop their visual identity using only red, black, and white, so they would stand out in a sea of brightly-coloured trolleys.
Maximalist trollies in Lucknow for Amrit D.J. Band (painted by Anwar Art) and Jai Bharat D.J. Band.
A Typeface Designer’s Perspective
For me, seeing painted signs from a typeface designer’s perspective is both a professional hazard and a super power. And by this, I don’t mean mining them for ideas for new typefaces, but being on the lookout for dialogue between sign painting and printing, and learning from them what my typographic education might have missed.
One of my pet peeves is seeing painted letterforms parrot shapes brought on by the constraints of moveable type, even when those restrictions don’t apply to them. For example, in hand-written Devanagari script there are almost endless pairs of consonants that use conjuncts. These are composite glyphs representing combinations of half and full consonants, e.g. the half form of the ब (b) before the full form of the ल (l) to form the sound ‘bl’ in ‘blag’. To retrofit the script into a small, finite character set for producing moveable type, many of these unique pairings were done away with. The solution was to recreate the conjuncts using discrete half and full forms of consonants, and the trade-off was visible gaps where the written script has continuous lines.
The visual motif created by this ‘hack’ is still repeated in signs, despite being completely unnecessary in this context. Whether it is because the typed samples that painters refer to look this way or because the configuration, however dubious its origins, has seeped into the script’s visual appearance, is a question with no universal answer.
This, of course, is not to say that painters don’t exploit their medium’s abundant flexibility — playful baselines and headlines are excellent examples; delicate swashes are another. But there’s more. In Lucknow’s Nadan Mahal, for instance, I came across the work of Mani Arts, which was characterised by a distinctive approach in dealing with limited vertical space. Like many other painters, they had shrunk down the vowel and other marks that appear above and below base letters, but what stood out was the space-saving indented shape of the ि and ी marks (pictured below). Cheeky and effective, it added levity to their designs.
Multiscript signs can be equally delightful. Painters are able to weave together words in many scripts, and design layouts that easily combine writing systems with different writing directions and vertical proportions. Where digital tools stutter in this regard, sign painting flourishes. When it comes to visually matching scripts, painters tend to take an approach that is effective but not exacting. Sometimes they apply harmonised typographic features, at others they’ll co-ordinate colours, shades and banners. In many cases they’ll combine both.
Looking past the clichéd lens that dominates popular narratives about street lettering in India has helped me twicefold: it forced me to search for other mediums, visual languages and crafts that dot India’s urban landscape, and build an archive that represents lettering beyond the hand-painted; and it has led me back to a deeper appreciation for hand-painted lettering from the viewpoint of individual styles, functional requirements, and local tastes.
Text and photography by Pooja Saxena / India Street Lettering.