/full write up to follow/

So twice a day, all work in the college ceased and almost everyone would come and collect either a cup of intensely sweet chai, intensely sweet ‘coffee’ (which was actually chicory) or intensely sweet badam (almond) milk. All were served in tiny plastic cups and cost Rs5 a cup (around 6p).

He couldn’t speak English (or much Hindi) so only the local staff and a small handful of the students who spoke Kannada or Tamil could actually converse with him. Therefore he remained a bit of an enigma until, as part of a project, one of my students followed him around for a day, documenting ‘a day in the life of…’.  His family would brew the tea at home, whilst he would spend his whole day cycling around the neighbourhood, with the bag containing his flasks hanging over his handlebars. His regular, daily route would include shops, street corners and offices with the occasional trip back home to restock.

Most of his other customers would probably not even think twice about him because he was from an extremely poor background and had a job which commands little respect. However, we took him to our hearts and hopefully brightened his working day a little. We invited him to our first graduation ceremony (his appearance on stage getting the biggest cheer of the night), we even invented a birthday for him because he didn’t know when his real birthday was. A naturally shy lad, he was obviously confused with his ‘fame’ initially but he took it all in his stride and didn’t let it effect his vitally important job.

He said he was aged 18 but we all knew he was probably closer to 14 and should therefore still be in school. However, like many young people in India his family simply can’t afford to pay for even the most basic education. So, i decided that i could use my skills to secretly create a ‘brand’ for him. His first step to entrepreneurship and stardom!

I wanted to design something that he would love, looked modern and was also practically usable. Using an interpreter, i found out his favourite activity was watching Tamil movies and so i did some research on the style of posters used to promote the films of his hero, the legendary Vijay. Realising that Tamil movie posters are a garish riot of mustachioed men and Photoshop filters, i reverted to more traditional styles of hand-painted signage used on trucks and shop fonts.

I started with the English characters, hand drawing each letter using references photos i’d taken on the streets of Bangalore. However, to be able to communicate effectively with the majority of his customers, i couldn’t just design in English. The lack of decent Kannada fonts, let alone slab serif ones forced me to do my own research, so i asked all the Kannada speakers i knew to write the word ‘Ramesh’ on scraps of paper, then analysed the similarities. There were huge variations, both with the actual characters used, the shape of each letter and also how they fit together to form the word. So, after a lot experimenting and double checking i ended up with the Kannada version of his logotype.

Designing in a language you can’t read, speak or type is extremely time consuming and involved a lot of help from my students and colleagues (thanks!). As a language that is so poorly supported by digital technology, Kannada makes the task even more of a challenge. Even though it was a ‘joke’ assignment, it opened my eyes to the problems of designing in multiple languages. Yet as brands expand into new markets, this type of project is likely to become a common task for more and more designers.

Incidentally, i never got to see his reaction when he was presented with his new graphic identity. Indian-timing meant i had to fly home before his new metallic-finished, embossed business cards were ready to collect from the printer. Although he thoroughly deserves such ‘unnecessary’ attention, i hope he appreciates how much time i put into making them.

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One of my first tasks was to devise a brand for the new college. Although the Raffles parent company has it’s own branding and styleguide, each one of its 40+ colleges tends to have it’s own variation on the theme. As a college that was going to market itself on its ‘international’ reputation, i decided to use the very western international style of graphic design as the basis of the brand. It was applied to all promotional material, our website and a huge sticker covering the front of the building.

From a practical point of view, most designers in India are untrained so it was also a reasonably easy style for others to try to replicate. The styleguide also outlined the college’s correct tone of voice, guidance on stock photography and an extensive ‘dos and donts’ section.

I also designed posters for some of the high-profile events that the college hosted.

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Around a third of the 1300 delegates are students which gives the conference a youthful, vibrant atmosphere that has become it’s trademark. The venue, the brand new Grand Hyatt was a beautiful location and allowed all guests plenty of space to meet each other between talks. The students in particular loved the social side of the event, which gives them a chance to chat with professionals and students from other colleges.

We made a decision 2 weeks before the event to advertise RMI Bangalore in the ‘welcome pack’ that all delegates receive upon registration. This would achieve two things: firstly we could try and attract transfer students from other colleges and secondly, to try and raise awareness of the college to potential internship partners. A very large proportion of India’s design community attends the event each year, so it is the perfect way to target a very specialist audience.

The design of the leaflet included a variety of stickers that attendees could wear at the event that would help them network with other guests. Along with more practical designs like ‘My name is:______’ there were also cheeky slogans like ‘Gimme a Job’, ‘Smile if you like my ______’, design related puns and Indian-specfic queries such as ‘Khana ho gaya?’. These were really popular, with many delegates wearing them over the weekend.

The folder that held the sticker sheet explained how “We can help you make connections” and emphasised Raffles’ international faculty, curriculum and standards. As a result of this we had a particularly high number of new visitors to our site during the following week. Hopefully it also helped to put the college ‘on the map’ of both the Indian and international design scene.

Thanks to Alison Byrnes and Aseem Gautam, who helped with the sticker designs.

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There were loads of reasons why i fancied living somewhere abroad for a while and, without a doubt, it turned out to be the right decision. After sniffing out possible options (and then turning down jobs in Shanghai, Delhi and Mumbai) i plumped for Bangalore. Not the most obvious choice given the relative fame of the other options but – having been to Shanghai – i knew i couldn’t live in such a bewilderingly huge urban sprawl. Google told me the other two would be unpleasantly hot.

Ah, the weather. I just as well gloat about it now and get it out of the way. The weather turned out to be one of the, if not the, greatest thing about living there. Bangalore has an almost perfect climate with only a month or two each year getting hot enough to feel the need for air conditioning and perhaps another month or two where you might need to wear a jacket out at night.

I’ve now realised that every British winter feels as if it’s a fight against nature, a battle to make it through to the sunshine and longer days of spring. Year round warmth removes that annual struggle and (as corny as it sounds) allows you to just get on with life. It’s only when you move somewhere that doesn’t have bad weather (in the UK sense) that you realise how much it dominates your existence at home. Never waking up in the dark, never having to consider what to wear, never shivering whilst waiting for a bus, never having to heat your home, being able to eat outside almost every evening etc etc. I still don’t consider myself as much of a sun-worshipper but i would never have guessed what a positive impact it has had on my mental well-being.

I thought i might miss the changing seasons and unpredictability of British weather. Bollocks to that. Quite frankly, the pleasure of waking up pretty much every morning and opening the doors on to a sunny balcony shits on a walk through the park on a frosty morning. I know i’m going to seriously feel the cold for the next few months and will probably moan endlessly about it. Apologies in advance.

The thing that sealed the deal when plumping for Bangalore was that my Dad spent quite a bit of time in the city when he was a child. I grew up with him recounting stories of his life in the Raj – being shot at by snipers in what is now Pakistan, riding on an elephant in his back garden, flying kites in the valleys of the Himalayas, all of which have stuck in my mind over the years (probably due to repeated retelling). Even Hindi words like ‘challo’ and ‘jaldi’ became part of the family lexicon, so it seemed natural to try and follow his footsteps.

Until the age of 16, he was a boarder at a school in Shimla however the family home was in Bangalore (a mere 5 day train journey away) and he spent 2 years attending Bishops Cotton school in the city before he joined the British army just after the war ended. Me being able to travel along a street that he used to cycle up everyday on his way to school (over 60 years before) creates a strange echo of history that was really satisfying but also made me miss him dearly.

My parents visited me in 2010 and although Dad didn’t recognise much of the city anymore, we did visit the site of my grandmother’s former house.  Located in one of the former colonial areas of the old town, almost every Raj-era house in the surrounding area has been knocked down to make way for apartment blocks – apart from this one, which although falling apart and greatly modified, is still standing. Being in the ‘legendary’ Prime Street with him and finding the very bungalow that he called home is a treasured memory.

The job turned out to be an almost entirely great experience. When I arrived, the college was still being built, there was only 5 other members of staff and a grand total of 4 students had signed up. Since then, a core group of us managed to set up a reasonably respectable design school from scratch with next to no help from head office. With the exception of the curriculum, almost everything else had to planned. What time should classes start in the morning? What should the marksheets look like? What do we put on the walls? Having that much freedom, with nobody more senior than you to say “no” (apart from for financial reasons) was a great challenge and i’m really proud of what we achieved. Although it was far from perfect process, i think we managed to create a unique personality for the college and hopefully it will go from strength to strength over the coming years.

Having a great bunch of people at work really helped, particularly in the first year. They know who they are so I won’t thank them individually. As someone who finds it hard not to be sarcastic and tends to find the faults in any given plan, the overwhelmingly positive attitude of most of staff was a real breath of fresh air from the UK, where moaning is a national pastime. Shambu (a tiny little Nepali guy who’s job was to supervise the cleaning ladies), big Ramesh (our boss’s driver) and little Ramesh (our amazing tea boy, who now has his own Facebook fan page) are some of the happiest people I’ve ever met, despite earning barely anything in Western terms. This positivity is everywhere in India, perhaps understandable given the consistent high economic growth over recent years. Yet there is also something to be said for the (massive patronising cliché alert) simpler life that the majority of Indians lead.

India (and more specifically Bangalore, which is much more down to earth than Mumbai and Delhi) hasn’t adopted the rush for bling and brand-names that other rapidly developing countries like China have. For almost everyone, the focus is still on the family. Most people in the UK would probably say that their family is the most important thing in their life, yet until you live somewhere where the family unit really is sacrosanct, it becomes obvious how much people in the west are distracted by work, friends and attempting to gain status through possessions. I’m sure I’ll be sucked back in to a consumerist lifestyle over the next few months but i’m certainly going to try to keep things simple for as long as I can.

Living somewhere where the vast majority of people behave in a remarkably similar way and abide by ‘the norms’ is going to seem really dull. Foreign tourists coming back from India will always have wonderful and strange tales of the crazy things they saw or people they met. These daily wtf moments are one of the best bits of living in India. Sometimes they’re funny (our cleaner turning my Bolognese sauce into a curry because it wasn’t spicy), more often curious (watching cows undo tied-up plastic bags with their mouth), often scary (a father and his 4 kids, plus baby, on a scooter) and generally just odd (an auto-rickshaw with so many chrysanthemum garlands on the windscreen the driver has to have his head sticking out of the side in order to see where he’s going).

Despite the constant crazyness, I found life in India incredibly easy. I’m pretty sure my life will never be as easy as it was there until I’m retired. Partly, this was because all the practical, day-to-day stuff was a doddle – a easy and quick commute, lack of stress at work, not having to worry about money etc. (Sorry to mention it again but the weather really helped too.) There’s also barely any crime and more importantly there’s little fear of crime. I wasn’t particularly scared of trouble when I lived in Peckham, yet being able to go anywhere without any fear of trouble is such a blessing.

The easy life was also due to having people around you to do all the mundane crap that clogs up your days. I had: a cleaner that comes twice a week (and also cooks a decent curry), a dhobi wallah in the basement (to iron shirts for Rs3/4p each) and an office boy (runner, in UK media speak) to go to the bank, post office etc; also almost everything can be delivered to your door (including cold beer). Most foreigners, including me, initially go through a period of guilt about employing people to do the jobs you don’t want to do and paying them next to nothing. Yet after you get to know the individuals, you quickly realise that they’re simply grateful to have a job that feeds their family. Also, nobody seemed to harbour any bitterness about the brutal colonial rule that the British inflected upon the nation for three centuries.

During my time there I also found myself feeling guilty about my ‘escapist’ lifestyle. Whilst I was there, the concerns I would be dealing with at home – family issues, politics, the financial crisis etc – seemed a world away. Running away and living the ex-pat life is perfect way to ignore these problems – and also make you feel like a selfish twat. It was strange not to have a meaningful engagement with the place that you live or be able to develop long-term relationships with the people around you. Everything is temporary, which suits the inner teenager in us that wants to avoid responsibility but i’m not sure i could carry on living a nomadic life. I certainly don’t feel any great affection for the UK (it’s a pretty average country in European terms) but I know it will be my home for the foreseeable future and I think I’ll take more of an effort to try to change the things I disagree with from now on.

As a country, India is simply amazing, as those of you who have been there will know. Luckily, I managed to travel round a fair bit. From the near empty beaches of Kerala and Goa to the crumbling history in Kolkata and the epic scenery in the Himalayas to the buzzing nightlife in Mumbai, it’s difficult to appreciate how much diversity there is in one country. Although I never made it to any of the traveller hotspots like Agra and Rajasthan, being a tourist is so damn easy (as long as you’re not in a rush) i know I’ll be back to visit , hopefully into my old age.

I was genuinely sad to leave. There feels like so many things left to do, sights to see, people to meet and projects to complete. I never made up to Ladakh, i never finished my Kannada font, i never got around to exhibiting my illustrations and i never managed to persuade a club in Bangalore that i was worthy of a gig. However the decision to return home was been made for me. For the last couple of years, i’ve increasingly wanted to attempt a MA. The cost of studying in the UK has been rising rapidly, i simply can’t afford to wait and see how much they put up the fees for Masters courses. My degree course in Visual Communication was bafflingly vague and I really feel an urge to learn all the specialist stuff I missed out on. The idea of being a teacher and then heading back to school is great and i can’t wait to really stretch myself creatively. I also know I’ll make the most of it, which I almost certainly wouldn’t if I had tried it any earlier. Hopefully, the qualification should make getting a teaching job in the UK easier (that is if anyone can still afford to study design subjects by the time I finish).

Lonely Planet’s recent list of the Top 10 cities for 2012 placed Bangalore at number 3. Whilst this is blatantly nonsense (for a visitor, it’s not even the third best city in India). I found it a really easy city to live in. The lack of anything decent to do at the weekend and the ludicrous traveling times make it a difficult city to love, yet it was extremely good to me. I can’t recommend moving abroad enough; having made the leap, the idea of spending your whole life living in one country now seems to me as old fashioned as never leaving the place that you grew up.

Bye India, until next time.

© Nick Lovegrove 2010

I asked Peter if he could come to Bangalore after reading an interview with him in Eye Magazine. In the interview he explained about his latest venture, the Indian Type Foundry, the company he co-founded that aims to design and release quality fonts for the Indian market. He mentioned that an important aspect of setting up the company would involve educating India on why good type matters and why font piracy is harmful. So, after a remarkably brief email discussion he agreed to visit, having never previously been to Bangalore.

Most of the existing fonts for Indian languages use character sets which, over the last few hundred years, have been much-simplified from their handwritten origins. There are all sorts of reasons for this: colonial rule, imported technology that was made for much simpler latin scripts, a lack of government guidance and almost no kind of financial incentive for type designers. The Devanagari fonts made by ITF have over 800 glyphs, many of which have never been incorporated into a digital font before.

Also, Peter and his partners at the ITF plan to create fonts, not just for the most popular Indian languages but also for the smaller, less common variations that are struggling to survive in the digital realm. Unless there are fonts for these languages, they will almost certainly die out within a few decades. If published material can’t be produced these ancient languages will forever have to be handwritten, which severely limits the potential audience.

As part of the college’s marketing campaign we invited the press to the event. I was expecting one or two of the westernised arts-focused magazines like Time Out to take an interest but in the end, rather surprisingly, three newspapers asked for interviews. This meant Peter had to spend a challenging 3 hour stint with journalists trying to explain what he does for a living. Two of the interviews went fairly smoothly, one of them i suspect because the hack didn’t understand a word, the other because she’d done a decent amount of research beforehand. The third interview was a real struggle. The journalist had a real difficulty understanding the differences between language, alphabets, type design and typography. She was far from stupid, she simply had never thought about the subject before. Peter and I tried coming up with all manner of analogies to explain what the ITF does, eventually with some success.

Following this dialogue Peter decided to change the content of his talk to include explanations of these terms, to make it easier for typography newbies (and there were quite a few in the audience) to understand the importance of what the ITF is doing. He also felt the need to communicate the idea that a well designed font take a huge amount of skill, time and dedication to create.

He also spoke about the design process he went through for the postage stamps he designed for the Dutch postal service, saying that the final design was more of a last-minute attempt to try a new approach, even though the client was happy with the existing solutions. It has now been in use for 8 years, with hundreds of millions of copies having been printed.

He went on to talk about the importance of programming in modern design. As an example, he showed a project he’s currently working on, a series of book covers for a Slovakian publisher. He’s developed a programme using Python coding to merge decorative letterforms into a semi-randomised pattern. This is simply an updated version of the idea of the book jacket template pioneered by Tschichold at Penguin. However it allows a much wider range of possible outcomes, yet doesn’t take any more time to produce.

It was a pleasure and an honour to spend the day with such a high-profile figure. Having spent so much time and effort organising the event, even down to designing the promotional poster, invites and backdrop, it was really satisfying to see a room full of people there to hear him speak.

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Further coverage of the event:
Times of India
Bangalore Mirror
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www.typotheque.com
www.indiantypefoundry.com

Also, i got used to being there… what would seem strange and worthy of a photo to most foreigners quickly turned into everyday scenes. I realise great photographers can find subject matter anywhere but my neighbourhood (as crazy as it was) felt like home. These are some of my favourites, mostly taken on trips away from Bangalore.

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“If you ask most people what they enjoyed doing when they were kids, most would give similar answers: perhaps playing with toys, hanging out with friends or avoiding getting into trouble. I was quite content in front of a drawing board, armed with set squares and a box of colouring pencils. I could spend hours, lost in my own world whilst drawing maps, graphs and bits of lettering. This wasn’t a hobby, it was homework set my my school teachers. They encouraged me to do what I enjoyed, suggesting ways to improve and were rarely negative. I stuck with the idea of studying what i enjoyed and ended up, unsurprisingly, becoming a graphic designer.

However, I wasn’t unique. I grew up in the UK in the 1980s, when taking creative subjects were compulsory. In my secondary school, all pupils had to study Design & Communication (a mixture of technical drawing and graphic design), Design & Technology (three-dimensional design) as well as Art until the age of 13.

My school has nurtured successful artists, animators, textile designers, as well as more than a few talented graphic designers. It wasn’t a particularly unusual school either, just an ordinary government run institution following the national curriculum. Having been involved with the Indian education system over the last eighteen months, I realise how lucky my schoolmates and I were.

It is no coincidence that the UK is one of the world’s creative hubs. The country’s creative businesses are a key component in the so-called ‘knowledge economy’. Government figures show that the UK’s creative industries accounted for nearly two million jobs and added an estimated £112.5 billion per year to the country’s economy.

Sir Ken Robinson, the leading academic has been campaigning for many years that teaching creativity in schools is as important as teaching literacy. His brilliant talks at high profile conferences are well worth watching (bit.ly/4JnO). Although his ideas have yet to be implemented on a large scale, he remains an influential voice. Of course, he is referring to Western education policies, his realm of professional experience has been in the UK and US. What then, would he make of India’s education policy which, from an outsiders perspective, is a curious throwback to almost Victorian-era teaching practices?

I now teach Graphic Design at degree level in Bangalore and even though a reasonable number of my students have attended International schools, very few of them have had the opportunity to study any sort of creative subject as part of their official education. A few have pursued drawing and photography in their own time but the focus in schools, almost always, appears to be about grinding out exam results in the traditional core subjects. Although they show plenty of promise, my students have a tendency to look for the correct answer, where quite often there isn’t one. There is a reluctance to be experimental or to stand out from the crowd, both of which are vital traits of a successful designer.

Teresa Cremin, a professor of education in the UK and an expert on creativity in primary schools agrees with Robinson. “If you have a school system which rewards conformity and avoids risk-taking, then youngsters will be unable to cope with the world unfolding before them.”

Today’s world sees Indian businesses coming to the west in search of creative solutions. In 2006 one of London’s largest post-production facilities was bought by Prime Focus, India’s largest film and TV effects firm. It now produces large numbers of TV adverts for the Indian market.

Why can’t these adverts be made in India? It’s not because there is a lack of technical knowledge here, it’s because there is a perceived lack of creative, imaginative individuals who can work at the highest level. Again, why does a company like Tata feel that they have to use a UK based consultancy, Wolff Olins, to launch the DoCoMo brand in India?

It’s ludicrous to think that India has less naturally-creative people than the West. However, there is an unarguable shortage of people who have been educated to think creatively; to maximise the potential that so many people possess. This potential is either hounded out of them by an out-of-date education system, parental pressure or is simply left undeveloped because of a lack of access or opportunity to good design education.

Lots has been written in recent years about the particular skills that Indians naturally possess. The boom in the IT industry has, for many people, confirmed the idea that Indians have a natural bias towards mathematics; to logical, organisational ways of thinking. Supposedly, this results in huge numbers of highly skilled programmers, engineers and managers.

In my experience, it’s a flawed theory. Indian’s predisposition to these sorts of jobs is purely down to the nature of the education that the vast majority of the population receive. India’s rich cultural history, stretching back thousands of years, helps to disprove this view. This history is also an encouraging sign of what’s possible in the future if there is a move away from such rigid, conventional teaching methods.

Indeed, there is a growing school of thought that people from a design background, rather than those trained in traditional business schools, are often more suitable for management roles. A designer’s ability to think laterally, free from conventions, as well as a tendency to work well in collaborative situations are extremely desirable traits for a forward thinking business. In his 2008 article for the Harvard Business Review Tim Brown, CEO of international design firm IDEO, wrote:

“I believe that design thinking has much to offer a business world in which most management ideas and best practices are freely available to be copied and exploited. Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process.”

He goes on to explain the importance of this to countries like India: “As economies in the developed world shift from industrial manufacturing to knowledge work and service delivery, innovation’s terrain is expanding. It’s objectives are no longer just physical products; they are new sorts of processes, services, IT powered interactions, entertainments and ways of collaborating – exactly the kinds of human-centered activities in which design thinking can make a difference.”

As India’s economy diversifies, away from it’s current core industries, there will be a ever-growing need for those who can innovate; to stop being what Pavan K Varma, in his book Being Indian calls “the hard-working cogs in someone else’s creative wheel.” All these points ignore the wider value that creative education adds to society. Attempting to justify why art and design in schools is important in purely economic terms arguably propagates the myth that schools are simply there to churn out fresh workers.

Why shouldn’t developing someone’s ability to express themselves be enough of a goal in it’s own right? Creating something new, using an idea that is entirely your own, is arguably just as satisfying as receiving good exam results or gaining a promotion at work.

Who knows what wider benefits universal creative education would bring to society? Rabindranath Tagore suggested in 1920 that “engaging in processes of creation … is critical to the meaningful development of both personality and human relationships.” Surely giving more people the opportunity to explore their potential could only ever have positive consequences?

So what do I propose? A simple solution would be to make Art a compulsory subject up to 8th standard. However these would have to be based on a new curriculum, devised to stretch pupils imagination as well as their aesthetic sense. Too often art classes, both here and abroad, are based on producing work in the style of whatever art movement they have just studied.

This isn’t creative, it’s the visual equivalent of the rote-learning methods traditionally used to teach mathematics. It just encourages the lazy, imitation culture that results in Bollywood’s uncredited remakes of Hollywood titles or industrial firms meekly copying Western designs, rather than developing their own.

Of course, thinking creatively can be taught at a later stage. However, it’s much harder getting people to ‘unlearn’ all those years of conformism than it is to simply build on what thought processes are already there. Teaching adults ‘how to think’ is a multi-million dollar industry. ‘Self-help’ books seem to be even more popular in India than they are in the rest of the world, judging by the amount of space they take up in bookstores here. Thinking experts like Edward De Bono and have earned fortunes by serving the public’s desire to be more creative. If the right side of young people’s minds were stretched more, perhaps we wouldn’t need all this guidance in later life.

For those that can think creatively, India is a great place to be at the moment. In Bangalore, I can count the number of design studios doing genuinely decent, creative graphic design with the fingers on one hand. For a city of six million people and with as many businesses based here as it does, this represents a huge opportunity for young, talented designers who are brave enough to set up their own studio.”

© Nick Lovegrove 2010

During a recent trip to one of Bangalore’s dusty second-hand bookstores, i found an almost mint-condition copy of a pictorial guide to Moscow from 1954.

Every page features a scene dominated by towering examples of classic communist architecture. The pristine state of the landscape and the printing technique used in the book gives the landscapes a surreal, utopian quality that contradicts the West’s idea of life under a communist regime.

Whilst the whole images are fascinating, what i found really interesting were the human figures sprinkled around the bottom of each picture. Removed from their wider surroundings these members of the public could be mistaken for being American. Fleeting moments captured forever that, once cropped, begin to resemble the work of realist painters from the era such as Edward Hopper. Some of the images have a real sense of mystery and tension to them that artists would find hard to recreate.

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However, It’s easy to see why many people see it as almost the perfect place to live. But that’s the problem, it feels like an experiment in perfection. In a ‘perfect’ world, even the slightest hint of rebellion stands out (before it is promptly erased).

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