Three: Body Type// Henna

Delhi in the monsoon is a muse for poetry and metaphor for romance: nestling green parrots, dancing peacocks, swinging jhoolas and much light-hearted dalliance in rain-washed gardens. The sensuality of the season comes to a head at Hariyali Teej, when girls dress up, adorn themselves with henna and sing songs.

As an ode to the long-awaited first monsoon rain, we used henna to write traditional Malhar, Kajri and Sawan song lyrics in fluid devanagari calligraphy.

Photographed at Bara Gumbad, Lodi Gardens. Graciously modeled by designer, Shubhangini Singh.

Two: Petrichor

So the weatherman’s predictions were a tad off and the monsoon’s delayed its visit to Delhi by a week. In the typervention spirit of dogged optimism, we sent out our petition to the rain-gods for respite.

Petrichor is a word for the scent of rain on parched ground after a hot dry spell. For our second typervention in this series, we stencilled it in water on Delhi’s heated roads, watching as it evaporated.

Set in the gorgeous Reina, a typeface we’ve been smitten with since last year, we cut a 2x12 feet stencil and sprayed water through it, to transfer the lettering to the ground. The roads and pathways are so hot in Delhi’s blazing 45 degrees, that the water made it smell lovely immediately and the lettering evaporated within seconds.

We carried our stencil and water spray bottles to different locations, to watch the type evaporate off different surfaces and tell curious passersby what the word meant.

Before Delhi bursts into its monsoon laments of waterlogged roads and traffic snarls, let’s revel in the petrichor awhile.

When the first rain finally comes, that is.

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Hauz Khas Village

Initial type and evaporation tests

Our hand-cut stencil. 2x12 feet

The shoot at Hauz Khas Village

Join the Delhi Typerventions group for updates and upcoming workshops.

Photographs by Manit Balmiki for Time Out Magazine and Kriti Monga at Turmeric Design.

One: Tank Up on Watermelons!

Our first Type Out piece is a lighthearted jab at the recent fuss over rising petrol prices and more significantly, a celebration of watermelons. The quintessential saving grace of Delhi’s brutal summer, a cold watermelon is arguably the most luscious way to rehydrate.

1. Play

We started with a watermelon party + playshop at the Turmeric Design studio and experimented with several ways to create letterforms out of watermelon slices and seeds.

Playing off of a few initial ideas of biting or cutting into cross-section slices of the fruit, we then drew further iterations of modular typefaces that could be created solely from the watermelon sections.

We photographed the letterforms on white plates (and ate them afterwards!)

2. Taking it outdoors

We then trooped out to the lovely Deer Park adjoining the studio, to try mashing up our letterforms with words, environment and meaning.

(More pictures of the playshop in the previous two posts)

3. Final piece

It was difficult choosing a final concept from amongst all our iterations, so we put together a few quick prototypes of the page to get an idea.

We liked ‘Tank up on juice’ as a message and also the freshness of the white background on the first option. But the outdoor photograph on grass had more context and connect.

Secondly, the plates on the white option had to be overlapped digitally for better kerning, but that made the page look too ‘constructed.’

Also, though the simplicity of the construction pieces on the first option (circles, three-quarters, semi-circles and quarters) was nice, the finished letters were more challenging to read than we would’ve preferred for a first edition.

The white background would have allowed us to create seed lettering and flourishes, but that’s an idea we’ll just have to save for another time!

The adjusted lettering was drawn on Adobe Illustrator, and finalised. Then, fresh watermelons carried out to the Sakri Gumti lawn (on a particularly hot day) and set in place to be photographed. The ‘on the’ was then added digitally to finish the piece.

And in case you were wondering, several workshop-attendees, studio-mates, bystanders, park-snoozers, street children and a holy cow were fed during the making of this piece.

Join the Delhi Typerventions group for updates and upcoming workshops.

Photographs by Pulak Bhatnagar & Kriti Monga for Turmeric Design and Manit Balmiki for Time Out Magazine.