Discussion with the Guide

October 14th

In this meeting, me and Tarun discussed the status of the project so far. He told me that if I take a different perspective towards the project, I might be able to explore more in type design. Instead of taking a ready style of a hand painter, he advised me to take multiple styles and then come up with my own set. The previous approach will only be digitizing ie; converting it into a font, a hand painted type, which would only help me in developing my software skills and not my understanding of letter forms.

In the second case, I would be creating the characters from scratch. I would be now deciding the X-height, the grid, the negative and positive balance of the letter forms.

By heading this way, I would be creating a display type which will have multiple features, inspired from the types created by hand painters.

Why this approach :
This will make me understand how characters are formed and constructed. I will be working on the entire visual representation. Also, I will have to take conscious decisions on the characters which I won't leave it on the hand painters. I can now merge two or more different styles together, creating a possibly new output towards hand painted type.


I am also thinking of studying the existing display types used as newspaper hoardings, so that my type can have a wider application and appeal.

I now have to make multiple exploration sketches of the root character set in order to finalize a style.

Discussion with the Guide

While discussing about the project, Tarun gave me a very important insight that "How the surface area plays an important part when the Hand painters are painting". Hand painters take conscious decisions when they are painting a board most of the time. They tweak and twitch letterforms to fit the surface area in the best possible way. When asked, painter Dashrath simply replied that it looks good.

We discussed further on the topic and realized that the painters have developed association of certain styles to certain professions. Gujarati being a Modulated script, only 2 out of 10 hand painted boards reflect this style. Monolinear type is the most common type of form followed by hand painters wile treating a display type.

In my research I concluded that hand painters do associate certain styles with certain professions. A jewelers sign board will have a certain 3D feel to it with a clear geometric construction and stark light and shade. Now, if you look at restaurant sign board, it will be very humanistic. Professions with an industry background like mechanics, oil traders, hardware shops have very bold and heavy (to the eye) letterforms.

I am now planning to conduct a word association experiment with some of the handpainters to understand their psych and approach my project accordingly.

I am now collaborating with Manoj Naorem (an UG graphic design student) working on indian hand painters subculture. Manoj shared his references with me and Tarun. We are now compiling and categorizing  with all the references.


You can visit Manoj's blog Here

Discussion with the guide

I had a meeting with Tarun after a long time, to discuss the process and progress of my project. He advised me to update my blog, to make it more interactive to the user. He also asked me to find about Mr. Amit Kharsani, a visiting faculty and a Gujarati calligrapher, who often visits NID. Questions such as the difference between Devanagari and Gujarati and the basics proportions of standard Gujarati script were to be asked to Mr. Amit Kharsani.

Tarun asked me to meet up with Manoj Naorem, a Graphic design UG, who was doing a project on Hand Painters, so that we could collaborate and do extensive research. For an extensive studio 3 project, the work which is already done has to be thoroughly taken into consideration, so Tarun asked me to roam around Ahmedabad to click pictures of existing hand painted sign boards.

Finally, for making this project more challenging and also for me to learn type design more extinsively, Tarun told me to come up with a sentence like " The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" in gujarati, which would have all the vowels and the consonants of the script. This sentence would be given to the hand painter to further render it in his own style. Also if a few alphabets were missing, they would be derived from the rest of the alphabets.