Graphic Design
Aakriti Khurana
Aakriti Khurana is a graphic designer, with strengths in typography and visual research. She makes the most of her over-thinking into a design practice that oscillates between symbolic representation and chaotic expression. With an affinity for analogue methods of reation, she devotes serious time to thinking through making and making without thinking. She has an academic background in Communication Design and Nursery Teachers’ Training.
"No vulnerability, no creativity.No failure, no innovation." - Brene Brown
Aakriti’s constant search for value in the socio-cultural-physical world and understanding perspective shifts has been fuelled by her time at the RCA. When she’s not at work, she’s distracted by anything and everything. Exploring, escaping.
The lockdown has pushed her into grounding herself, and finding her purpose, professionally and perhaps personally.
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A structure is invisible to a person for a few reasons:
Maybe this structure was ideated as a response to the absence of such a structure, made and applied into the mechanics of the world long before the existence of said person. So, this structure has been background noise; in the world of their own purpose, there wasn’t any need or any interest in understanding the core existence of said structure. ‘Who cares about how type is set, I just want to read what’s written!’
"The mental eye focuses through type and not upon it"-Beatrice Warde, Crystal Goblet
That is the premise of invisibility that a book type designer would create in; knowing full well that the hundred of hours spent in meticulously tweaking every glyph into a harmonious typeface will be beautifully rewarded as being a well-oiled cog in the machine, of chance reading.
Typography and typesetting was primarily a technical practice that emerged with the expansion of the printing press. It was a profession of numbers, minute distances on paper, of working with ink that would fill up the shape of each letter, a humane effort in what became a mechanical and automated job through the years. Now your computers, laptops, phones and smart watches all display text typeset in a default manner. Digital default is the cheap heir of the letterpress; cheap because it’s quick and easy. This is in no way a disregard to the technological advancement that brought us to this stage; but is an example of a typographic version of Moore’s Law.
Medium:
PrintSize:
A5ee animation gif
edible plastic devanagari BUT defined z
variety 04
The commencement of an online type design challenge, and coming across a bag of plastic fusible beads at the local art & craft store. I wanted to explore the idea of setting an algorithm, and allowing automatic/logical visual results to develop; but in an analogue sense of creation. So the restraints for this experiment
were pretty simple:
(a) The medium would define the glyph’s structure; and so the typeface would be pixelized,
(b) The glyphs that would be transferred onto this medium would be handwritten; so it would
preserve double strokes and half strokes made while writing the letter,
(c) And lastly, I wanted to create this with the Devanagari script: which is the base script
for languages like Hindi, Marathi, Kashmiri; and is mainly used in India, Nepal and Tibet.
The analogue stage brought out immense possibilities for variations, which could be colour-based or form-based. This pointed toward an integral question: what is the ratio of visual abstraction to legibility in this typeface? Keeping in mind that Devanagari is fairly new to pure conceptual experimentation as opposed to say Latin, given that its use is limited to more traditional print and web applications, because of a largely conventional audience.
Still in an exploratory phase, the digitised version shows a translation from circular units to
squares, and falls into the category of exaggerated aliased type which is highly experimental and
display-based. The following experiments are form-based exercises in understanding how negative
space in glyphs could affect the perceived weight of the same.