One: Tank Up on Watermelons!
Our first Type Out piece is a lighthearted jab at the recent fuss over rising petrol prices and more significantly, a celebration of watermelons. The quintessential saving grace of Delhi's brutal summer, a cold watermelon is arguably the most luscious way to rehydrate.
We started with a watermelon party + playshop at the Turmeric Design studio and experimented with several ways to create letterforms out of watermelon slices and seeds.
Playing off of a few initial ideas of biting or cutting into cross-section slices of the fruit, we then drew further iterations of modular typefaces that could be created solely from the watermelon sections.
We photographed the letterforms on white plates (and ate them afterwards!)
We then trooped out to the lovely Deer Park adjoining the studio, to try mashing up our letterforms with words, environment and meaning.
(More pictures of the playshop in the previous two posts)
It was difficult choosing a final concept from amongst all our iterations, so we put together a few quick prototypes of the page to get an idea.
We liked 'Tank up on juice' as a message and also the freshness of the white background on the first option. But the outdoor photograph on grass had more context and connect.
Secondly, the plates on the white option had to be overlapped digitally for better kerning, but that made the page look too 'constructed.'
Also, though the simplicity of the construction pieces on the first option (circles, three-quarters, semi-circles and quarters) was nice, the finished letters were more challenging to read than we would've preferred for a first edition.
The white background would have allowed us to create seed lettering and flourishes, but that's an idea we'll just have to save for another time!
The adjusted lettering was drawn on Adobe Illustrator, and finalised. Then, fresh watermelons carried out to the Sakri Gumti lawn (on a particularly hot day) and set in place to be photographed. The 'on the' was then added digitally to finish the piece.
And in case you were wondering, several workshop-attendees, studio-mates, bystanders, park-snoozers, street children and a holy cow were fed during the making of this piece.
Join the Delhi Typerventions group for updates and upcoming workshops.
Photographs by Pulak Bhatnagar & Kriti Monga for Turmeric Design and Manit Balmiki for Time Out Magazine.
