India's vanishing hand-painted street signage offers typographic lessons for designers, says Pooja Saxena
By
Tom May
Sesame, salt, and substance. A flagship bake.
Summary
Typeface designer Pooja Saxena has spent 15 years documenting India's disappearing hand-painted street signage, which she argues offers typographic lessons that formal design education overlooks. Her new book showcases how these vibrant, multi-script, handcrafted signs — from shop fronts to public notices — present fresh typographic possibilities beyond canonical print traditions. The article explores how this vast visual archive of urban lettering, blending multiple languages and styles, is rapidly vanishing due to modernization and digital signage, making Saxena's documentation work both urgent and inspirational for designers.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledFor designers used to working with digital typefaces and brand guidelines, India's urban streets present an alternative typographic universe.
It's a frenzied, colourful kaleidoscope where painted signs compete with neon, mosaic sits alongside metal, and multiple scripts layer on top of one another in compositions that would never pass a corporate design review.
This vast visual archive holds lessons that formal typography education often misses… yet it's vanishing fast
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