Matra Type is the independent design and research practice of award-winning typeface designer, lettering artist and typographer, Pooja Saxena. Pooja divides her time between Matra Type and TypeTogether.


At Matra Type, her work focuses on design in and for Indic scripts, notably Devanagari, and studying typographic visual languages that emerge in India. She is a devoted collector of ephemera and chronicler of street lettering, and writes a newsletter about type and design curiosities called I Spy with my Typographic Eye. She is the author of India Street Lettering: A Journey through Typographic Craft & Culture (2026), published by Blaft Publications.

As a senior designer and project manager at TypeTogether, Pooja designs and engineers fonts, as well as researches and writes. Most recently, she was lead designer for Playpen Sans Devanagari (2025) and Bree Devanagari (2026). She is overseeing the Indic expansion of Futura®100, leading the design of Devanagari, Gujarati and Gurmukhi script families. Pooja was co-editor and one of the lead researchers for Primarium (2024), TypeTogether’s groundbreaking research effort to document different models of handwriting that are taught to primary school students around the world. This work was expanded to take the shape of the book, Primarium: Handwriting education across cultures and continents (2025), which she edited with José Scaglione.

Pooja studied communication design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi (India), followed by typeface design at the University of Reading (United Kingdom), where she was supported through the Monotype Imaging Studentship. Afterwards, she interned with the fonts team at Apple.

Pooja is an Alphabette, and works between New Delhi and Brussels.

 
 

SELECTED CLIENTS

Apple Inc.

Asia Art Archive

Bira91

The Centre for Internet and Society

Champaca Bookstore & Library

Chawla Art Gallery

Consulate General of Italy in Bengaluru

Dark ‘n’ Light Zine

Dhoomimal Gallery

FontLab

Google Fonts

Glyphic

ThePrint

Storyweaver

Samsung Design

Zubaan Books

TALKS & PANELS

WiT Talks
Panelist at the inaugural Women in Type (WiT) Talks, facilitated by Flavia Zimbardi (Amsterdam, Upcoming).

The Past is Always Present: 100 Tens Speaker at Letterform Archive’s salon for their 10th anniversary celebration to showcase her lettering contribution to the 100 Tens’ campaign (Online, October 2025).

Care for Characters
Panelist at the Brand Identity and Typography Symposium, BITS11 highlighting the research conducted for Primarium (Bangkok, February 2025).

Women Shaping Typography: Insights from South Asia
Panelist at Sri Lanka Design Festival to discuss her efforts at archive-making and community-building for designers specialising in type in India (Colombo, November 2024).

Crafting Multiscript Logotypes
A presentation at DesignUp centered on the lessons learned in a decade of designing multiscript brand identities (Bangalore, October 2024).

I Spy with my Typographic Eye
Reflective talk at TypeLab looking back at a year of design research and writing for Pooja’s eponymous newsletter (Online, June 2023).

See full list of lectures and workshops and India Street Lettering events.

RECOGNITION

Gold in Digital Design for Social Change at the Indigo Design Awards for Primarium, where Pooja was co-editor and lead researcher (2024)

Bangalore International Centre’s B·LORE Grant to develop a short film about street lettering in Bangalore’s M.G. Road (2023)

Third position in the Granshan Type Design Competition – Non-Latin Category for Adelle Sans Devanagari, for which Pooja contributed as a lead designer (2019)

Publishing Next Award for Book Cover of the Year - English for Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India (2018)

Monotype Imaging Studentship to pursue MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading (2011)

First place in FontStruct Competition “Illustration” for the design Rise of the Cellphone (2011)

 
 

JUDGING & JURIES

Type Design judge for the D&AD Awards (2022)

Type Design judge for the D&AD Awards (2021)

Typography judge for Art Director Club’s 99th Annual Awards (2020)

Book cover design judge for Publishing Next Awards (2019)

Member of the final review jury for the first semester studio of the Masters in Social Design programme at Ambedkar University, New Delhi (2018)

 

SELECTED PRESS

Better Letters / India Street Lettering zines
The first batch of India Street Lettering zines featured in the Book Club section of the world’s only magazine about sign painting

Deccan Herald / Online Archive of Street Lettering
Feature on India Street Lettering, a decade-long effort to document street lettering in India

Femme Type
Featured in the publication that celebrates the typographic achievements of women designers from around the world

Scroll.in / Indian streets are ruled by charming homegrown fonts
A feature on my 36 Days of Type project about Indian street lettering.

Adobe Create Magazine / 10 Women Type Designers
Was featured in this article showcasing ten women type designers from across the world and selected work from them.

AIGA Eye on Design / Type Tuesday
Angela Reichers interviewed me about Guru Gomke, a Santali typeface I designed for Centre for Internet and Society.

Make in India
I was interviewed for Condé Nast Traveller’s publication Make in India about type design, side projects and what it means to make in India.