Beautiful examples of handpainted typography at UK / South Asia festival

Inspired by the street typography of India, Hanif Kureshi and Shabbu created these handpainted signs inside the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.

Hanif Kureshi is an artist and designer based in Delhi. He always wanted to be a street painter and his current project HandPaintedType converts street painters’ signs into digital fonts.

Shabbu is doing a degree in painting at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi and makes juice stand signs. He has worked with Bollywood sign painters and in Delhi’s cinema hoarding studios.

Another wall showed off Kriti Monga’s calligraphy; poems about places, borders and a sense of belonging written in different languages and scripts. Kriti heads up Turmeric Design in New Delhi and creates ‘typerventions’ in the city’s public spaces.

Sri Lankan letterforms appear on a series of silk-screened posters by AOD in Sri Lanka. This forms part of a project – No Straight Lines – which acknowledges that with increasing computer literacy in Sri Lanka, people want to see their own language on screen.

The Southbank centre hosts Alchemy (15 May 2014 – Monday 26 May 2014) – a festival showcasing the best of music, dance, literature, comedy, fashion, art and design from the UK and South Asia.