The Typoday 2012 was hosted in the IDC, IIT Powai campus, Bombay. Bombay as a city has it's charm for a visitor in it's auto driver's willingness of going by the meter. But when you just walk out of the airport, you are a new species that has yet to disappear in the crowd. My very first auto ride left a bad taste in the mouth but then as I said once you are without the numbered luggage tags, you are ready for the regular Bombay ride. Thanks to my friend Aditi's company, I got to know the basic mapping of places in Bombay. I took the local and moved around in the old black and yellow premiere padmini taxi too. But the trip was planned tightly with little time to sit and draw the city. My fellow passengers were my subject again.
There was one thing that I had planned to do in this trip that was to visit Mondegar for Mario Miranda's drawing. Although I had gone to Mondies in my first visit to Bombay but this time it was meant to pay a homage to Mario after he passed away last year.
The Typoday this year was centred around publication design but it also had a lot to offer on type design for various scripts, expressive typogrphy, book making, Unicode and Open Type etc. There were many elders from the design background present over there and talking of elders it was difficult to miss on Mahendra Bhai's presence. Especially when he was walking around in his black and gold sneakers. It was good to see him still making conversation in the squirrel like gestures and keeping occasional rift alive with other elder design thinkers. Out of the many presentations, the two which really stayed with me were -
1. Ken Botnick's talk on how our mind works with the information when reading.
2. Bishwadeep Moitra's talk on the design history of Outlook Magazine.
Both the talks made me realise that a lot of design research and practice is only thoughtfully worked for the grown up consumers. While the younger lot's mind patterns are still an unexplored area which makes it difficult to look and work with any guidelines when designing for a young audience. Mr. Bishwadeep Moitra shared an important insight on how children generally take the print media in Indian culture quite seriously. Therefore succumbing to the use of loud colours and cute looking pictures for kids is not the most ideal solution as what the grown up mind imagines it to be.
I think the April issue of Brainwave is going to be a balance of Robert-Crumb-inspired drawings and Typoday-learnings on design and typography.
Now, I shall end this post by sharing a photograph of two matchboxes I got as a gift during this trip and a stop motion series of photographs that Hazel stitched of me sketching. You can see the stop motion on her blog - halfchai
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| Some of the work featured at the Typoday 2012. |
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| A wall of all the Indian Newspaper publications. |
The Typoday this year was centred around publication design but it also had a lot to offer on type design for various scripts, expressive typogrphy, book making, Unicode and Open Type etc. There were many elders from the design background present over there and talking of elders it was difficult to miss on Mahendra Bhai's presence. Especially when he was walking around in his black and gold sneakers. It was good to see him still making conversation in the squirrel like gestures and keeping occasional rift alive with other elder design thinkers. Out of the many presentations, the two which really stayed with me were -
1. Ken Botnick's talk on how our mind works with the information when reading.
2. Bishwadeep Moitra's talk on the design history of Outlook Magazine.
Both the talks made me realise that a lot of design research and practice is only thoughtfully worked for the grown up consumers. While the younger lot's mind patterns are still an unexplored area which makes it difficult to look and work with any guidelines when designing for a young audience. Mr. Bishwadeep Moitra shared an important insight on how children generally take the print media in Indian culture quite seriously. Therefore succumbing to the use of loud colours and cute looking pictures for kids is not the most ideal solution as what the grown up mind imagines it to be.
I think the April issue of Brainwave is going to be a balance of Robert-Crumb-inspired drawings and Typoday-learnings on design and typography.
Now, I shall end this post by sharing a photograph of two matchboxes I got as a gift during this trip and a stop motion series of photographs that Hazel stitched of me sketching. You can see the stop motion on her blog - halfchai
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| Matchboxes from Prague, gifted by Aditi. |
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