Text is omnipresent in our environment, on signboards and in logos, that we all too often don’t see or pay particular attention to. But they inform the way we interact with the environment and give us a sense of the place. Most Type that we see today is a product of contemporary production methods that rely on duplication and automation. This is in contrast to the street lettering, which is a one-off production and created using analogue methods. Observing street lettering from the online archives and books, I became interested in how these informal and expressive vernacular forms reflect the histories and identities of a place.
If we look at vernacular typography across various cultures, the common thread we see is a condition rather than a visual style. They are shaped by local materials, constraints, and context rather than following any typographic standards. However, with the rise of globalised design systems and digital tools, many of which are structured around Latin typographic conventions, there is an increasing tendency towards uniformity and simplification. This has resulted in visual homogeneity of the scripts across different cultures.
When global chains and other visual languages repeat the same standardised signs across the cities, the visual landscape becomes interchangeable, making it harder to sense where you are. The question then arises – what is lost when typography becomes standardised across cultures? It tends to oversimplify forms and erase cultural specificity, especially when dealing with multiscript contexts, where questions of integrity and cultural plurality aren’t really addressed.
Through my exploration, I enquire how gesture, material, and variation can challenge these standardised typography systems.
Bibliograhy
Latour, B (1986)Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together, Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture at Present, Jai Press Vol. 6,pp. 1-40
Latour talks about how ‘inscriptions’ like diagrams, charts, and other visual systems help organise the world, making things easier to compare, manage, and control. Standardised typography (fonts, grids) works like Latour’s inscriptions. It makes language stable, repeatable, and mobile. Allows scripts to circulate globally and creates authority. This text connects to my work in a broader sense by showing how the visual communication around us, including ideas like perspective, is often standardised and made to feel natural through systems like optical consistency. These systems are reinforced through printing, circulation, and repetition, which is what gives them authority and stability. What stands out is that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether they reflect an absolute truth; what matters is how widely they are reproduced and accepted, which makes them feel solid and unquestioned. We tend to believe it because it is presented in standardised type systems, which often work through a similar logic of optical consistency: balanced proportions, uniform stroke weights, alignment, spacing, and repeatability. These choices can appear natural or neutral but they are designed systems that shape how language is expected to look and read.
McLuhan, M and Fiore, Q (1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Berkeley, Gingko press
‘Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible.’
Visual systems around us are never neutral, they are active forces that shape how we see and understand the world. These environments can become invisible when we are within the system and become very familiar with them. As standardised type systems are present everyday in our life on screens, signage, books and interfaces, they often go unnoticed. Yet they actively shape how language appears, how it is read, and what is considered clear, modern, or correct. In my project, this helps me think about standardisation as a design ideal that conditions perception and not a passive environment. By contrasting this with vernacular typography, I want to make visible the structures that usually remain hidden.
Pater, R. (2016) The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication, BIS Publishers
‘The fact that Hevetica is regarded as the universal typeface has to do more with the influence of the west european modernism design, the branding of multinationals, and the success of these multinationals in dominating work markets.’
This reading expanded my understanding of typography systems as something deeply tied to power and structure, and not just as a product of industralization. When I compare the vernacular versus the standard forms of typography, it makes me realise that what we call “universal” often comes from systems that have historically dominated the way we see. Helvetica’s global popularity stems from the reach of western modernism and the success of Global corporations. This connects to my argument about how certain scripts lose their cultural context and get reshaped when they’re made to fit into these same standardised structures. It makes me question what gets preserved and what gets lost or flattened during this transition. In my work, this pushes me to pay more attention to local, informal, pre-digital forms of type, not as imperfect, but as something more resistant and alive.
Saxena, P. (2025) India Street Lettering, Blaft Publications.
Images from the book
This book has an extensive collection of street lettering from India, which has informed my understanding of the vernacular forms across different cultures in India. I used this as the primary archive to study the style, forms, and explore my iterations. The rich imagery from this book shows how street lettering often carries improvisation, regional character, and visual freedom that standard fonts flatten. It helped me see vernacular forms not as unrefined versions of typography, but as spaces of experimentation and resistance. It shows how hand-painted signage can work beyond the technical limits of mainstream printing and typesetting, creating letterforms that formal typography often leaves out.
Blauvelt, A. (1994) ‘An Opening: Graphic Design’s Discursive Spaces’, in Graphic Design, visible language
‘To challenge the centrality of the graphic design canon and the response has been a call for the expansion of the canon to accommodate work from outside these boundaries. But little attention has been paid to what the canon actually allows as examples of graphic design’
When trying to understand or map the complex history of graphic design, it often becomes unclear which examples are considered “good,” who sets those standards, and which practices have been included in the writing of graphic design history. Blauvelt points out that even when the canon expands, it still operates within a narrow framework shaped by industrialised and western contexts. This helps me see that the historical perspectives in graphic design lack social context and is more complex than we think it is. In my work, it is about questioning the criteria of the centrality itself. Most of the vernacular practices like hand-painted signs, informal lettering, pre-digital methods don’t fit neatly into these systems, which is why they often get overlooked. This pushes me to position my work to challenge what counts as design and where its boundaries are drawn, and who draws these boundaries.