Featured Workshops
Type Walks
For close to a decade, I’ve been conducting guided typographic tours that reacquaint participants with their neighbourhoods from the vantage point of signage and letterforms. Type walks are a way to recognise how typography in public spaces shapes our experience of cities, and how everyday letterforms are a product of social, cultural, and even legal developments. Through this experience, participants learn about languages and scripts used by the community, and build a scaffolding to meaningfully appreciate sign-makers and their role in nurturing local economies and creating civic identity.
I’ve facilitated type walks in New Delhi, Bengaluru, Udaipur and Panjim (see details of all previous type walks here), and for cultural organisations including Bangalore International Centre, Instituto Cervantes of New Delhi, Ajaibghar and Champaca Bookstore.
Bringing the ABCs Home
Bringing the ABCs Home is a speculative design workshop I debuted at Indian Institute for Human Settlements’ City Scripts festival in 2024. The workshop was based on the conjecture that instead of the imposition of Western printing techniques on Indic scripts and of English on the country’s people, the Latin alphabet came to India and itself underwent a visual metamorphosis as a result of its interaction with local writing systems, their manuscript and calligraphic traditions, and signpainting practices.
Pixel/Play
Conducted under various names since 2019, Pixel/Play explores the connections between digital bitmap letters and their counterparts in textiles and needlework. It highlights the mutability of material, and asks which analog design histories are overlooked when studying digital design. Participants get the opportunity to see a range of contextual material, including specimen images of early digital type, examples of arcade game fonts, knitting and embroidery patterns of alphabets, Indian scripts rendered in textiles, and photographs of mosaic lettering. They then create pixel letters through several techniques: sketching, using stickers, by paper weaving, and LEGO letterpress. The latest iteration of the workshop was co-hosted with Noopur Varma at the Underline Center in Bengaluru.
Draw with Devanagari TypeCooker
This practical workshop is a relaxed and easygoing way for a student or designer interested in Devanagari lettering and type design to move past their hang-ups and get down to drawing. At TypeLab Asia 2024, I conducted this workshop with fellow typeface designer, Namrata Goyal. After introducing the participants to Devanagari TypeCooker and how I devised its prompts, Namrata and I joined everyone in a live drawing session driven by TypeCooker recipes, ending with a friendly critique of everyone’s sketches.
In Pursuit of Typographic Cityscapes
Facilitated for students of publication design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, this workshop encouraged the participants to embrace unconventional and non-canonical ways of approaching letterforms and their arrangement by documenting and analysing street lettering, and making zines to share their learnings. Through two days of activity, students learned to discard prescriptive rules of Western typography, appreciate local visual histories and artists, and collectively build knowledge about Indic script letterforms. In making zines, we talked about the importance of trial and error in the design process, and different ways of organising photographic materials and making meaning from them.
Lectures, Talks & Panels
Type Directors Club — Online, July 2026
A public lecture titled India Street Lettering: Building Missing Archives that focused on methodologies for annotating and analysing the photographs that make up the repository
Type&Faces — London, June 2026
Book presentation about India Street Lettering: A Journey through Typographic Craft & Culture
Women in Type (WiT) Talks — Amsterdam, June 2026
Panelist at Whose Voices get Seen (and Heard) held at letterspace.amsterdam
The Past is Always Present: 100 Tens — Online, October 2025
Invited speaker at Letterform Archive’s virtual salon to showcase my contribution to their tenth anniversary celebration
Institute of Mathematical Sciences — Chennai, July 2025
Invited speaker at the institute’s conference Script Talk to discuss how public signage is crucial material culture
TypeLab Asia — Online, June 2025
Showcased a snapshot of the tools and equipment that I use during my documentation efforts for India Street Lettering
BLAG Meet: Inside Issue 06 — Online, April 2025
Showcased ongoing work towards finding and devising appropriate terminology to describe street lettering, especially efforts to learn local sign-painting terms
BITS11: Brand Identity and Typography Symposium — Bangkok, February 2025
Panelist at Care for Characters to discuss the nuanced responsibilities, cultural impact, and craft behind designing typefaces at TypeTogether
Mahindra Sanatkada Lucknow Festival — Lucknow, February 2025
Public lecture about India Street Lettering, with a focus on Lucknow
Sri Lanka Design Festival — Colombo, November 2024
Invited panelist at Women Shaping Typography: Insights from South Asia and Typography as Brand & National Identity during Script & Structure: Conference on Typography and its Cultural Relevance; also presented a talk about the role of a designer as documentarian
DesignUp — Bengaluru, October 2024
Talk about insights from a decade of designing multiscript logotypes in the Indian milieu (pictured at the top of the page § Image credit: DesignUp)
BLAG Meet: Inside Issue 04 — Online, March 2024
Introduced India Street Lettering, and the intent behind self-publishing zines
Bangalore International Centre — Bengaluru, June 2023
Public lecture about India Street Lettering complemented with a showcase of design publications from around the world on public signage and typography
TypeLab Asia — Online, June 2023
Talk reflecting on a year of publishing my design newsletter, I Spy with my Typographic Eye
Typography Day — Online, 2022
Presented ongoing research from Primarium
Mumbai Typostammtisch — Online, 2022
Talk about technical considerations to keep in mind while choosing Devanagari typefaces for a project
TypeWknd — Online, October 2021
Presented research from my master’s dissertation about the typographic design of lithographed books from 19th century north India
TypeTech Meetup — Online, June 2021
Invited panelist for a session on tools and collaborative type design
TypeWknd — Online, September 2020
Talk about type walks, co-presented with Tanya George
Glug Birmingham Collector’s Edition — Online, October 2020
Talk about collecting Indian ephemera
Time to Talk Type: ATypI Working Seminar — Colombo, March 2019
Invited panelist for a session about type design in South Asia
Ambedkar University Delhi — New Delhi, September 2018
Invited panelist for a session titled Design and Open Knowledge Movement
Typography Day — Bengaluru, February 2016
Talk about the development of Ol Chiki typeface, Guru Gomke, and associated digital infrastructure, co-presented with Subhashish Panigrahi.
Teaching & Workshops
TypeLab Asia — Online, June 2024
Group drawing using Devanagari TypeCooker prompts (see details)
Indian Institute for Human Settlements — Bengaluru, May 2024
Speculative lettering workshop reimagining the Latin alphabet (see details)
Underline Center — Bengaluru, May 2024
Workshop exploring the connections between digital bitmap letters and their counterparts in textiles and needlework (see details)
National Institute of Fashion Technology — Bangalore, May 2024
Guest workshop: Introduction to unconventional approaches to letterforms through street lettering and zine-making (see details)
Practica Program (Latin Two) — Online, March 2024
Guest lecture: Disrupting the design canon through local histories
UXNow — New Delhi, January 2024
Workshop exploring the connections between digital bitmap letters and their counterparts in textiles and needlework (see details)
3 Sided Coin — Online, January–February 2023
Weekly workshop sessions with the studio’s designers to strengthen their foundations of Devanagari typography
Maryland Institute College of Art — Online, 2021
Guest lecture: Design for a multicultural and multilingual world
University of Applied Arts, Vienna — Online, May 2020
Guest workshop: Introduction to Devanagari through pixel type
OwnPath — Online, 2019
Multi-session workshop about typeface pairing and selection for design professionals
Pearl Academy — Noida, 2019
Guest workshop: Workshop exploring the connections between digital bitmap letters and their counterparts in textiles and needlework (see details)
Indian Institute of Art and Design — New Delhi, 2017
Guest course: Introduction to typeface design
Pearl Academy — Noida, 2017
Guest course: Introduction to typeface and publication design
Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology — Bengaluru, March 2016 & 2017
Elective course in typeface design
L’École de Design Nantes Atlantique — Noida, 2015
Guest lecture: Introduction to Indic scripts