Tactile Typography
THE ART OF CREATING MEANINGFUL LETTERFORMS
To celebrate indigenous typography of Sri Lanka, calligraphy artist Pradnya and I were invited for a workshop for Typography Day 2017 hosted by the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Pradnya’s skills of designing letterforms paired with my hands-on knowledge of local materials led to typographic experiments rooted in exploring the principles of proportions, type weight and kerning for the Sinhalese script.
Using Sand and Kolum Powder as the primary elements we focused on juxtaposing the meaning of a word with the quality of the materials creating a new and suggestive pictorial language. For example the word ‘Samsara’ was sketched on sand as the word means ‘to exist and then get destroyed’.
