If I hadn't tweeted a few days back about some random typographic goodness floating on the web, I'd have never caught Meena kadri & the typographic brilliance she has been upto on her blog Random specific. At the recent UNBOX festival, what was designed to be a 3 day workshop got crunched into a 3 hour exercise in fun & exploration with starting results. Bindi's, mirrors, gota's, matchboxes and other very local decorative elements fused to form local words in an interestingly contemporary-fun methodology. And after having used all those fat words in one sentance- all I'll say is how I would have given and arm or a leg to have been a part of the fun the participants clearly had. I have not seen so much colour and honesty and simplicity in work for a long time- all the while managing to be interesting.
"I got a particular kick out of working alongside my gifted former student and pixel-pro, Abishek Ghate, who experimented with constructing typographic forms out of various elements to devise the intense workshop format. ....Ghate and I were joined in energising participants by Codesign founder and UnBox spearhead, Rajesh Dahiya – who was a former colleague of mine at India’s National Institute of Design, where he continues to teach typography as adjunct faculty."" Meena Kadri
"We started out by having small groups create Hindi words in Devanagari script out of bindis. For those of you who are in the dark, bindis are the red or coloured forehead markings worn by many South Asian women – often but not always signifying marriage." Meena Kadri
Lau (लौ) or flame, built with candles with tiny mirrors as highlights.Isn't this image powerful in its beauty and strangely moving in some way?
To see the entire set on Flickr, click here & here to read Kadri's engaging design blog random specific.
All images taken by Meena Kadri using Hipstamatic 175. Nice na? :)
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