It is 6 a.m., and the Old City of Hyderabad is slowly stirring to life. The workers are sweeping the streets, scooters carrying cans of milk are whirring around, and the first orders of chai and sheermal are making their way to the waiters at Hotel Shadab.
Just outside the popular restaurant near Charminar, a knot of 20-odd people is waiting for the city’s first typography walk Talk Type, Walk Type to start. A brainchild of Vydika Rao, founder and creative director of Studio Oon, who attended a typography walk in Mumbai in 2012, where people walked around exploring and understanding fonts, this is her attempt to understand the city better.
Vydika says “This is an attempt to build a community of people who share similar interests.” The walk that lasted for over an hour had discussions around font sizes and types, logos, and a demonstration by artist Syed Fasi Hussain, who had been painting signboards for almost three decades.
Walking in the Old City
A typewalk is a guided exploration of a specific area, focusing on the typography found in the urban environment. It involves observing, analyzing, and discussing the typefaces, lettering styles, and typographic layouts seen in signage, storefronts, advertisements, and architectural details.
The walk traversed the crowded landscape of one of the city’s oldest markets to unravel the anatomy of typography. The sheer number of styles of fonts from different eras and the usage of contemporary and modern methods of lettering made for great real-life examples to understand the dynamics of typography. Varshini KVSS, a graphic designer who led the walk, says that signages give out more information than we credit them for. “The style and fonts are primarily a tool to communicate and aids for visual impact. Different fonts evoke different emotions. Some, like Cooper Black, are bold and in your face, while others, like Helvetica, give off a contemporary vibe, while the font style, Obviously, evokes a sense of friendliness.”
There was much to notice and savor. One clear aspect was how the traditional hand-painted styles gave way to flexi printing and banners. Other small but pertinent changes slowly came to the fore too. For example, the Telugu font style of the 70s and 80s was bottom-heavy and rounded, but over time, it became more similar to the Devanagari style, which is very lean.
