Ahmedabad Trip #2

For my second trip to Ahmedabad, I had the pleasure of visiting with Kimya and Georg Seifert. The agenda was to meet with the guys at ITF (Indian Type Foundry) to catch up with Satya and meet all the new hires, give a couple small presentations to students at NID, and maybe visit the other ITF (India Type Foundry) again if time permitted.

The new ITF office is pretty sweet. So many new faces there, it’s great to see so many up and coming type designers in India. Satya is doing a lot for the Indian font industry. And such nice hosts they were — they even helped celebrate my birthday and shared a wonderful dinner at Ahmedabad’s greatest thali joint Agashiye.

I find Ahmedabad remarkable for its abundance of beautiful hand-painted signs. It seems like many cities here have very distinct things that they like to paint very well (e.g. Mumbai delivery trucks or Kolkata busses), and here it seems to be general shop signs. There are so many everywhere. In Mumbai you will find some great signs especially in older and or poorer areas (see Dadar’s textile district), but overall there are less and less nice shop signs here.

Then Georg, Kimya, and I all gave presentations at NID. There was a surprising amount of students that came and overfilled the room to hear us (unfortunately we all forgot to take photos, save this one here). Georg spoke about Glyphs 2 and it’s ease of use for creating Devanagari fonts, Kimya talked about some of her fonts, and I showed my typefaces and some of what I did in Berlin with the gallery and shop.

Related posts still to come:

India Type Foundry
Ahmedabad Signs #1