Sign-wallahs

Image from Sign Wallahs, an article by Meena Kadri about the profession of graphics-painting. Pdf can be downloaded from LAB magazine.

Meena also has some AMAZING images of Indian graphics and daily life at her Flickr account, Meanest Indian. You'll see that she has collaborated with Indian sign painters in the works "Bollywood Soul" and "English of India". You can hear more about her from her interview at TypeRadio.

Hinglish!

Above image from WRITECLICK, blog of Deven Sensare of Umbrella Design, Mumbai.

After reading Erik's post about Indian SMS books, I was lucky enough to get in contact with Deven himself, and we were able to further discuss the digitization of Hindi and role of "Hinglish" in India. On his blog, he shows examples of billboards and graphics using Hindi written phonetically in Latin characters, an ongoing trend in India.

Hinglish makes no sense to the guy who can read Hindi, but not English. Neither to the guy who can read English but doesn't understand Hindi. Who is Hinglish talking to?

Hopefully, if we keep using the Google and Blogger Indic scripts buttons, keeping the online presence of these scripts strong, and designers keep pumping out new Indic typefaces and design solutions, hopefully the Indic scripts will be able to survive!! Cross your fingers, folks!

Deven, and his colleagues Bhupal Ramnathkar, Farhad F. Elavia, and Mangesh Zemse, have created the Facebook group, DESIgn, which will hopefully turn into a forum for people interested in Indian design. Join up, if you're on Facebook! Oooh, does an Orkut equivalent already exist? Is that still the predominant social networking site in India?

मैं थोड़ी हिंदी लिखने की कोशिश करती हूँ

Thanks again, Deven!

Back from Japan!

Holy cow, I've returned! Sorry, blog readers! I've been in the middle of a big life transition that has taken all of my concentration and energy aaand also away on a 2-week trip to Japan to visit a dear friend who is studying Japanese!

WOW, Japan was very visually overwhelming! Especially for someone who wants to look at every bit of signage and printed matter in the country. I took about a year of Japanese way back when, so I was already familiar with Hiragana and Katakana, but had no knowledge of Kanji. I think it was the first time I really thought about what an enormously difficult task Chinese type designers must have. I thought that nothing could be tougher than trying to fit in all of the dips and curves of Sinhala - but I must say, imagine dealing with this. And then try to use this popular Chinese search engine, Shohu. (here's an image, for those without Chinese language support) Wow. Welcome to the web for the rest of the world! It also reminded me of this post at the Ministry of Type on the difficulties of creating electronics interfaces due to the complexity of such characters.

Phew! Anyway, I could go on and on. But what I have been meaning to get to was that I found a few bits of Indic type while I was over there! So here they are! Some beautiful Bengali at an Indian restaurant, some Siddham script (Bonji in Japan) at a Buddhist temple, and what I believe to be Urdu, found at a park! So there you are! It's fun for me to see two different Asian scripts on one sign. It makes me giddy!

So once again, sorry for my extremely long absence. I hope to keep adding to this blog though, so don't give up on coming back! :)

Sirensongs' images from Nepal

Above are images from Sirensongs' flickr collection, which includes loads of colorful images from her travels throughout South Asia. At the moment, she is located in Nepal, where elections have just been held in which the Maoist party won a majority of votes, ensuring the end of the Nepalese monarchy. She has also witnessed firsthand the clash between the local authorities and pro-Tibetan protesters. Her blog, Feringhee: The India Diaries is a really great resource and one of my favorite blogs. Check it out!

P.S. Star Trek fans - yes, the Ferengi got their name from the Arabic/Persian/Urdu term meaning European traders/foreigners/Westerners.

Bengali protesters and political posters

So this is slightly random - I just celebrated my birthday, which also happens to be "International Women's Day", according to my calendar. This year, I was finally curious enough to try to learn what that meant. Off to Wikipedia I went! It turns out that it was originally a day associated with the Socialist party, in which women workers in the newly industrialized world, were protesting for better working conditions. - Which might seem distant to we readers of design blogs, but of course is an issue of enormous importance in the developing world.

The image on the left, above, shows women of a trade union from Dhaka, Bangladesh protesting on International Women's Day, holding amazingly beautiful, powerful signs. Equally powerful are the red and black Communist Party signs on the right, found in Kolkata. See many more amazing images posted by Wikimedia contributor, Soman.

P.S. Thanks again to Prof. Erik Brandt at Geotypografika for spreadin' the Hindi Rinny word! Shukriya!

Gurmukhi typography

Clicking through the script categories on the right, I realized that I have been neglecting Gurmukhi! It seems like it's one of the harder scripts to find online, though. So, here it is! My small Gurmukhi collection! There are some interesting hand-drawn display-type script samples from this Sikh heritage site, attributed to the late Dr. Channan Singh Chan. Two other examples are from here.

Stenciled type

some amazing script examples from flickr.

fluid, effortless painting

Pretty sure this is from the Indic Scripts photo pool - but I'm not sure. d'oh.

Nice sharp type from Tibet

fast food
veg chowmein
veg maumo ??
veg thukpa ??
mango shake
banana shake
lassi
chai coffee
dahi parantha ??

lol

Bengali signs

raised metal type

wow, what a coincidence! The man who took this photo is a cool designer, and I bought one of his personal annual reports!

Ganesh billboard

one of many amazing flickr photos

sign painter

one of many great flickr images.