Ram Ray, Param, and my downloadable Indian street fonts…

(Click to enlarge)

Very soon, I needed a tool box. So I made this abomination. Not proud of it at all, but was very fond of it nonetheless. The hinge-work was good though, as it taught me how to think out my hinges. The handle-work COULD be argued into being called good too, in that it taught me how NOT to do handles 🙄

The story here is not about the box, though. It’s about the “KIKI’S TOOL BOX” writing on its side. I could have just written it in black paint, but at the time, I was deeply into an interest of mine of making fonts the proper way.

My interest in fonts was woken and fuelled by my the two biggest supporters of my varied interests at the time, Ram Ray and Paramvir Singh. Both were themselves particularly interested in and knowledgeable about fonts. Param still is (God bless him), but Mr Ray is no more (a huge loss to the Advertising Industry as well as to the thinking-with-their-hearts intellectual crowd, not to mention being a mammoth personal loss). I learned a lot from both of them about the geometry, the art, and the rules of fonts. How each curve and each stalk length of each alphabet or symbol in a font family belonged to that family for the very reason that they conformed to the geometry and art rules of that family. In the days of no social media, my email boxes used to be flooded with font design forwards from both of them—anything they found interesting or had to share of their own. So when I started exploring making fonts properly by constructing each in vector software, painfully, laboriously, and mathematically precisely, their encouragement knew no limit. (Another little story came to mind wrt the above. Clarion [Bates by then] office, where I used to once work, had framed along the walls of the staircase an alphabet set hand-drawn and designed by Satyajit Ray [from when he used to work there]. Mr Ray had suggested I fontilise it. It was a secret project of our own, and he intended to make it official once it was done. After I made it, and it had passed his approval, and we had christened it RR (“Ray Roman”), it was too late by a day. He gave me the news that someone else had already done it. We were devastated. I decided not to share the font publicly thereafter, but to keep it under his care only.)

At the time Param had started a website called Desicreative (he still continues to run it with passion. You can check it out here), and he suggested we add a section called Font Fridays to it, where i would contribute a downloadable and installable font I had created every Friday. This was exciting but we needed an enduring theme to hold it together. So the thought came up that i make it on the fast-disappearing hand-painted fonts populating the roads and streets around us. The very-Indian ones… like the HORN OK PLEASE paintings behind trucks, the STD ISD letters painted onto the glass of phone booths, etc. It was the “etc.” part that needed work next.

Mr Ray was immensely kicked with the idea, and then both he and Param (we were all in different cities by then) started sending me photographs of whatever such “etc.” incidents they could capture around them in their daily lives. I started collecting these photographs, added my own to them, and started work on creating them, converting the designs into font files, and making them installable. The greatest challenge in each of these exercises lay in the fact that each photograph gave me only a few letters of the alphabet. The rest had to be created after studying the existing ones, finding the invisible rules, and interpolating the rest. Crazy fun. Crazy hard work. After creation, I sent it to the two guys to test, take apart, criticise, suggest, or give go-aheads on. Yes, all three of us had a lot of fun. And every Friday, it was up on Desicreative to install.

You can see and download some of these free fonts here.

To come back to the tool box, I thought – why not put one of my own creations to use? So I downloaded one of them, installed it, typed out KIKI’S TOOL BOX, increased the font size, took prints, created the stencil, and stencilled it on to the box.

Do you like it?