Your Type by Tanya George: Decoding mixed signals
I hope you’ve enjoyed journeying across India through its signs. Over the past few columns, it’s been a thrill to be your typographic curious companion. I hope I was able to turn an ordinary walk through your city into a journey of hidden stories. We discovered how fonts and colours speak of identity, language, and place—and how moving canvases such as rickshaws, and unlikely spaces such as bus facades echo our rhythms.
There are three types of signs that don’t really fall into a particular category. I want to talk about them a bit before we call it a day.
Graffiti has transitioned from an underground movement to a respected form of public art in India. Much of it – simple tags, elaborate murals and everything in between, now enriches our street corners, boundary walls and little neighbourhoods. It started out as something that’s typically done without permission. I still seek out echoes of those transgressive origins. It balances the line of vandalism and art.
Look carefully at a spray-painted stencilled design when you next see one. Think about what the stencil covers up and the empty spaces it leaves, allowing the eye to fill in the gaps. Think about the kind of energy it brings to a design. In our cities, several brands have been commissioning wall art as a way of revamping a building’s exterior and getting their advertising to stand out. I find it strange that none of the gated societies ever offer up their walls for these projects. On the other hand, in Odisha, another kind of graffiti is part of a robust tradition: When there’s a wedding in the family, the names of the bride and groom are painted on the entrance of the house in order to welcome them after the celebrations.
The second kind of sign to look out for is pixelated letterforms. You know, like those old-timey computer styles. Look out for it as LED signage on buses, on train-station indicators, on elevator screens, on those scrolling shop signs that say “WE BUY GOLD” or “TODAY’S GOLD RATE”. Not all of them are on screen. Some places also use contrasting tiles to spell out words across scripts – fitting shapes into the grid creatively. A few of them require some guesswork to read, but the designs are a treat to look at.
And finally, look for signs that just use unusual materials and try to figure out what was going on when it was being made. Think of why someone would think of typing out Jai Mata Di in English on top of a temple but also making it look like a neon sign (and why someone else would approve this as a good message to devotees and onlookers).
India, as always, is in the middle of a billion things at once – even as English tries to hold its own against local languages. Consider the sign for Garman Fashion in Mumbai. I would never have guessed to pronounce the name as German if it wasn’t written in Hindi as well.
As we part on this typographic note, I hope you’ll carry forward a sharpened eye – and a bit more wonder – for every letterform you encounter.
From HT Brunch, September 6, 2025
Follow us on www.instagram.com/htbrunch
