We are delighted to host the launch of India Street Lettering: A Journey Through Typographic Craft & Culture by typeface designer and lettering artist Pooja Saxena, in conversation with design historian and graphic designer Nia Thandapani, at Champaca Vasanthnagar.
Drawing from over a decade of documentation and research, India Street Lettering is a 200-page hardcover, full-colour book that showcases striking public lettering from across Indian cities in paint, relief, mosaic, neon, wood and more. It brings together photographs, essays and interviews that trace how shopfronts, hand-painted signs and vernacular letterforms tell stories about language, labour, design and everyday life in India’s streets.
At Champaca, Pooja and Nia will talk about building this archive of signs, the collaborations and fieldwork that shaped the book, and what it means to argue for street lettering as part of the design canon. The evening will also explore the politics of the urban visual landscape, questions of preservation in the age of vinyl and digital printing, and how designers might learn from the ingenuity of sign painters and local lettering traditions.
Event details
Date: January 17, 2026, Saturday
Time: 6:00 PM onwards
Venue: Champaca Bookstore, Vasanth Nagar
Champaca is only accessible through stairs.
About the speakers
Pooja Saxena is a typeface designer, lettering artist and typographer. She is best known for her work with Indic scripts and her writing on locally rooted typographic cultures. Pooja is a devoted collector of ephemera and chronicler of street lettering. Since 2017, she has maintained an online archive of letterforms on public signs around the country.
Nia Thandapani is an independent design historian and practising graphic designer and book maker based in Bangalore. Her work spans colonial and post-independence design history in India and the United Kingdom, with a focus on how questions of power, coloniality and public memory play out in museums, heritage spaces and design practice today.
Seats are limited, so please RSVP here to save your spot: