I rode the Indie home and to places around WF for the past few days. Took the scooter to regular-mundane daily tasks and took it on dedicated test-rides in the night after the traffic thinned. (The photo looks like a potato-quality spyshot but that is just because I am awkward at taking photos in public. Even when it is early in morning and the only three people outside the chicken stall are more interested in other more pressing everyday stuff. R couldn’t take pictures because of the hurt leg and we are left with this crappybara I’m constantly apologising for. I even had to content-aware-fill the eff out of a piece of crumpled newspaper somewhere in the bottom left corner. See the bird-droppings on the seat above the pannier mounts? That is how ‘stock’ the vehicle was running. We’ll fix all this soon. Let R get well soon.)

The scooter rides really well, planted to the ground as if it were a car with nice suspension. (Reminds me of podimol in many nice ways.) The last time I felt this amount of ride-refinement was with the Thunderbird 500 back in GurgaonOfTheFlatRoads[1]. Like all EVs, the torque is instant and it is fun to make the motor spin up on open roads. (The whine is divine.) The range anxiety is real (started most of my rides with under 50% charge and that is not a nice thing to have running in one’s mind or flashing in the instrument cluster) and reenacting the charging sequence reminded me of trying to memorise a particularly longwinded hydrocarbon in class twelth. That—despite how my marksheets turned out—is not a memory I’m particularly interested in revisiting everytime the chariot runs out of juice.

The Indie is a beautiful machine with a lot of well-intentioned details. We’re working on the second version of a small part on the vehicle and it is nice to see assumptions from version one fail faced with the three-dimensional experience of riding the Indie and having to charge it at the shared bays in the HQ parking lot. Looking forward to making some small significant (and above all, friendly) improvements soon.

I also did some impulsive helmet buying. Unlike my usual matte black-grey-white-with-stripes palette, this one is ‘colourful’ to say the least. R was surprised and went on to say she doesn’t recognise me anymore. I know she wasn’t talking about the second (tinted) visor-lette having come down over my grin-painted face. But the point remains noted.

There was a particularly busy traffic situation near Brookfield where I stopped next to an RE (a Bullet 350 with the golden 3D logo on the tank; not the retrofitted abomination that passes for decals at RE these days[2]). It was nice. Was happy and talked to R about it when the traffic situation let me get home sunburnt.

In other news, showed myself the proverbial door at the current temporary office this morning (before getting thrown out ceremonially perhaps; my ego wouldn’t have been able to take that fall after all the serendipitous traffic-light spotting of beziers). Looking for a tea-break friendly room and working from home till that materialises. After all these years wringing pixels behind oddly angled screens held together with velcro and bulldog clips (and sheer force of will to continue making a reasonable enough living), a proper workspace is something I’ve come to care the most about (after certain other things in life, ofc) and it is not okay to compromise. There was something that S wrote about that I wanted to discuss here. Will soon. Context.

There is a lot of work to finish. Some of it is exciting. Some of that exciting work is tweaking carpet designs in the middle of the day and tweaking them again much later. Some of that exciting work is mundane out of context but take a lot of patience and craft. (Like putting vehicle loan options and terms and EMIs in handout-friendly A5 cards. Or a 3-by-9 cm newspaper ad for hiring store staff. This last one I had so much fun with.) We are looking for capital G graphic design people to help do some of that boring/tedious work that needs an unsustainable level of attention to detail, fairly advanced typography/gestalt chops, and a lot of empathy and humility. If this sounds like I’m trying to glorify tedium and perfectionism and all those ideals that usually work against people having a life, apologies. I have heard what Carson had to say about graphic design saving the world. Also read this Nick Asbury essay on ‘purpose’ and fully agree. None of this work is ‘noble’ in itself but are good opportunities to manipulate form and order in service of someone’s experience. (Send in a PeeDeeYeff CV via hello-at-kl11-dot-in if still interested. Know that we expect a significant amount of fundamentals-in-place-ness and an unconditional willingness to work on many many many versions of things; we too do this. We also pay fairly well while being sufferable bosses.)

1: The difference is that I did not want to get one for myself immediately then, given how smitten I was with the Classic with the upswept silencer.

2: I wonder how the current B350 tank graphic even passed the basic-est of reviews. Can hear Mr. D grind his teeth everytime one enters my line of sight. I believe crapfest is the most family freindly technical term to describe that waste of materials and space. Like how a friend’s new boss describes stuff, I must start saying ‘shambolic’ and ‘gargantuan’ and suchlike.

Cake Day

R completed another round of running-around-the-sun. We had a slow day with her friend dropping by with cake #2 (unexpected, unexpected place, etcetra) that made it quite special, some nice food at this quiet-ish two-storey food-complex finished in exposed bricks and cement and littered with wire-backed chairs in yellow and blue, and some harmless IKEA web browsing for artificial plants. We played some Snakes&Ladders (she won). We also made some art away from the screens. Here is what I started off with.

The birthdaywoman did not approve the first one fully so I moved on to this (it says ae-bee-see-dee in Malayalam). Cleaned up, whitebalanced etcetera.

R made a portrait of me. I am going to take it to the HQ and show it off on the desk.

She had a ligament tear some weeks ago—distracted by Chelgato getting into a car—and walks in pain. Hoping things turn out okay soon.

Other (Work) News

Work is harsh and fun. Store #2 is on, signage project is on, web is off (should be on). On Friday I picked Pantone shades for some tintsandshades from the brand palette for River and topped them off with corresponding-ish AsianPaints Cosmos swatches with fun (?) names. By the end of it I couldn’t tell red from orange so just focused on what was needed ASAP.

New neighbours at the ID Studio. Good conversations and sharing references.

We need more people to steer this graphic-design ship, clearly. If you know someone who knows the only right way to align monospaced type and whose filenaming game is chefskiss awesome, please ask them to come meet us online.

Technologee

Ordered one of these in white (darth was out of stock). Binepad is an Indian startup from Haryana; the person at the other end of their phone number was nice enough to run me through basics and share a discount code. They also sent me a nice little machined aluminium tray with the order. More on all that after I have a chance to work with it at the Cintiq.

I am not reading enough. Another K-ink device died its untimely death and I find it really hard to justify throwing another 12K at something that is going to go the ghost-touch way in a year. Also need to visit Blossoms soon; it is almost illegal at this point to say I’m in Bangalore and I haven’t been to the big B yet.

KL11-10

This deserves its own post. We have been at this for ten years! Almost all of it is thanks to M managing the stuff so well and keeping the standards high up when it comes to work. The rest thanks to great clients and folks we work with. We had a small (surprise for M and I) gathering with great friends and tasty food. It was overwhelming and fun. We may do something of our own, later if everything works out well. Fingers firmly crossed.

Mirrors

Our new home in Bengaluru has four mirrors (two tall, two small, and three large glass windows that turn into translucent mirrors past sunset). The Wayanad home had one (01) A5-sized mirror we awkwardly hung too close to a wall and never managed to look at unless we were leaning on to the wall purposely trying to catch it at the right angle. So, more reflection this year. It seems.

Moving

We moved here in the first week of January with a lot of anxious preparation and general anxiety about moving to a city. We also moved with a tiny house’s worth of stuff—kitchen utensils and all the accoutrements; foldable furniture from Decathlon and everywhere else; a wooden cot (that we had to prove wasn’t made of sandalwood); bicycles—in a fruit truck that would replace all this stuff with strawberries and such on its way back. While both of us (not all three of us) have lived in cities for weeks at a time for work, we hadn’t needed putting-roots-down kind of stays since 2014–15; life in cities was always out-of-backpacks and eating-at-canteens. In the three weeks we have been here, we’ve dealt with a couple of angry people, a couple of insecure vendors (especially print; long story) and a lot of nice neighbours and neighbourhood dogs. We are warming up to the city. We miss Wayanad too much to embrace all that the city is all at once.

App-solute Everything

While I knew life here would be run on apps, I did not expect this level of dependency and ease. We got a water purifier subscription and that took a while to sink in. The society has app-driven vending machines with funny-slash-scary-looking 360-degree cameras and some sophisticated weight-triggered payment system that I don’t look forward to checking out anytime soon. I also got blank RFID entry passes for River’s HQ and live the corporate-ish life everytime doors magically open.

Stuff

Once the money situation gets back on track—Bank-of-India treats online banking like it is a luxury; KL11’s accounts are stuck at Silk Street—we need curtains for the translucent-mirror windows. It looks like we may also need something to fill the hall with. We both love sofas but are open to ideas that involve other ways of pet-friendly seating. (That should be good reason to check out the ‘Say Hi’ WoT link up in the menu, if you’re reading this on the browser.)

Chelgato

Since the weather is comparably cold, Chellam is having a great time; she eats, she plays, she sleeps—a lot. She also figured out her bathroom business on day uno and hasn’t given us trouble since. We go for long walks in the evening, staying away from that one RottweilerLab from two houses away and staying close to the really curious Beagle from the other end of the society. The neighbours across from our balcony have a golden and a lab, both older than Chellam. They do a pitch-bending jugalbandi once in a while but haven’t met snout-to-snout yet. There are also two chonker-cats—one ginger, one grey—who visit the translucent mirror at night and mock Chellam for absolutely no reason. She has grown to ignore them, somewhat.

Everything Else

No teaching this year; except when/if Jodhpur calls—I loved that place and the enthusiasm. I am also done compromising on everything—quality, detail, being nice—all at once.

Worried that I have started having an early (mid?) designer-life crisis on the work that I automatically do. We did some nice layouts and made some nice typography choices for the River Store over the last month but it starts to feel ‘default.’ The guidelines are solid, perhaps. (Pats back vigorously.) Will need to start looking at side-projects to break from the (self-inflicted) mould.

So that is that and 2024 looks nice so far. Read the ‘How About Now’ magazine earlier—nicely done for most parts; I would’ve added a little more leading to the bodytext and dwelled less on some stuff. I’ll make a ‘Needs More Leading’ sticker like the old DesignPolice stickers maybe. (I had this one on the laptop-lid in 2013–14.) Here is wishing everyone a happy new year!

PS: I’m also testing the Paper app (just got a subscription to evaluate before submitting to iA again). There is a lot to love but I wish there was no AI integration.

The photographs are up along with the roses and rosaries and pages off the Book and the mouldy old bread and the candles burning and the light filtering through hastily pasted acrylic panes over window panes at the Old PWD Complex in Panjim. R’s Mother Beloved is on display till the 23rd. We are here till the 17th and would love to have any of my three regular readers to check in if around. More on all the prep later (we did some lovely die-cut exhibition pamphlets in black and red). Here is the day before the day before.

In the evenings there is mellow music and loud lights. Yesterday was lovely except for people trying to one up Lucky Ali (one simply can’t) at O-Sanam (especially). The streets are full of art and -ists and people and dogs. Gradients are out in full bloom. Viva Panjim is quite and lovely and feels like home.

R took the nice photograph above, obviously. We are here, R is hopeful and tensed. Wish her luck.

Driving up the hills on a Wednesday morning. Away from the rain, into the mist. A few minutes later, this turned to an even grey. A few tens of seconds before this photo, one could see a couple more layers into the mountains, too. Opacity changes the geography inside and out. Much to write about Jodhpur and the XR-Design typography course and the folks there. Also about feedback, answers, and taking care of machines.

Wayanad, rain, Bhaskaran Mash (MHR, Gowri Lekshmi too), Chellam under the table, R vibing to some other stuff while telling me the Manuka Condensed on screen is typically condensed, heavy dinner shenanigans, etcetera. Makeshift working from home.

My Bludit installation is misbehaving; I’ve had to manually FTP the image via CyberDuck and link to it the longwinded way to get it to show up in this post. That is not a route I want to go down again. It will take a while to set something else up and migrate content. We’ll see.

I just spent the major part of my Sunday getting Zettlr to work well as a distraction-free[1] writing interface, complete with a monospaced face and appropriate fore-ground-back-ground colours. (#000 and #8a8a8f for now. AND now I am noticing the octothorpes turning into jellyfish-blue tags.) I digress. Suffices to say working around blaming one’s tools takes way more time than coughing up 5K for that sweet single-device iA Writer license. I must say it is time well spent, except that it meant time away from my girls[2]. Conflict. I digress.

At some point in the five years (5!) spent on teaching pilgrimages[3], I realised almost all of the conceptual, nuanced typographic choices can be made with a deliberate extension of gestalt’s principles. Seen in that (to me) new light, the needless—but fun!—debate over ‘rules’ disappeared, and a demonstrable set of checks-and-balances replaced them. I felt an appropriate amount of self-pity at having taken so long to ‘see’ it. I’m trying to convince self the most appropriate penance for something of this magnitude, is to write a book about it. Considering how productive I have been with side-quests recently, it is only wise to use thisbloghere as a way to publicly commit to finishing the thing (including ink, paper, thread, staples, blades, and all) this year.

I have a rough outline in progress, as well as a few to-do checklist items. (Just making them up as I type, really. This is blog-post as performance. It is a potent mess.)

• Must be shorter than Jost Hochuli’s excellent ‘Details in Typography’. Around 50 pages. [4]
• Pages must work like slides. (Not wordy, have illustrated examples.)
• Discuss the principles in detail, referring original texts as much as possible. I have been using the Khan Academy video as a refresher for students all this while.
• Use a typographic problem to discuss a principle. This can be tricky; so not set in stone.
• Talk about lists. Talk about alignment. Talk about letterforms.
• Use Indic examples. Use bilingual examples.
• Use examples from KL11’s work. Some vulnerability there.
• Limit discussion to practise. Not a philosophy book.

Now that we have got that out of the way, here are some ‘asks’ to the 35 (R says; I say 3–5) readers of mine.

• If you have come across specifically gestalt-driven discussions of layout/typesetting problems, please let me know.
• Also tell me what you think of putting another rainforest to pulp for such a thing. Sensible?
• How are you?
• My email ID is abhijith@keyaar.in and I would love to reply to all the emails you can throw at it.

So this, is what I ‘eventually’ want to do: make books. Ink and pixels. It’s also been too long since Dekho and WID and MT.

[1]: Distraction-free implementation takes a while to get right. The right balance between focus and isolation is tricky at best. I see why iA is expensive. Safe to assume Ananthu has been a power user of Zettlr for a while, so I’m going to talk to him about this.
[2]: Chellam turned 2. R bow-tied and scarfed her. Our friendly neighbourhood-ish chicken-stall guy gave us so much extra parts the fridge is having a hard time. We believe she is famous in the town for coming along on all trips.
[3]: There is a link to some of the material at exif/teaching Justincase. ‘Infinite-Gestalt’ is what we had (unanimously in the way dictatorships are run) christened a Typography2 course in 2022.
[4]: Girish introduced us to the book. Short, to-the-point, fresh.

Links

While binge-skipping through Lincoln Lawyer behind an unmanageable large Figma file, came across this beautiful Mattiel Song. Forest has been good company. Such beauty everywhere on the internet. Here is ‘Introducing the Concept of Radical User Friendliness in Web Design.’

So… we were in Goa for a two-week workshop (R was documenting; I went along) and made some supertalented-neighbour-slash-faculty-slash-friends. Sampled all the curries at VP (practically next door) and found them all excellent etcetera. Robbed Siridao beach clean (the flat shells are otherworldly nice; we don’t know what to do with them, yet). Looked at some veryold verynice Portugese houses from the inside. And went to a total of three beaches. The sand was in the process of turning into glass (or so it felt at mid-noon). And there were lotuses sprouting from cashew nuts.

There were long walks in Fontainhas (pronounced Rajarajapuram or some such; most spellings had moved on from the spoken word counterparts) with bathes of friendly dogs on tow. We met some folks from Paldi and GN too and campus-jokes flowed. The place (Goa) was sand-into-glass hot, all the folks at R’s workshop were such sweethearts, and offered such warmth (and stuff; jackfruit, mangoes, kokum, pastries, crochet, the works). On the day the workshop got over, J gave me something to remember Kalyani by. It was a nice two weeks.

That is Siridao post our collecting ALL the fun/flat shells.

Serendipity!

Reshma is going back to Panjim (North) again in December for the Serendipity Arts Fest. She’s won the photography grant and is one of the five people exhibiting work. (It is a deeply personal project. Visit her/us!) Here is hoping for a good show! Maybe we’ll make small books to give away.

Kalyani passed away on the 10th. She was almost 11.

She had stopped eating (and drinking) three days prior, even refusing treats that Achchan had to usually feed her first thing in the morning. (She would keep writing infinity-signs around and between his legs until.) We took her to Aruma twice to get her blood tested and insulin injected and saline IV-ed. Reshma found her passed out on 9th night and we got her admitted to the pet hospital. Her glucose levels had dropped dangerously.

Kalyani was magic and grace. She gently (and sometimes peppered with a stern, loving whack) nudged me to being a better person. She loved winters, looking at the rain, and rolling around in the grass. She judged mercilessly and loved unconditionally.

The gif is from my backyard in Gurgaon, 2012. She loved the place and was too small to jump the tall walls. That did not stop her from trying once in a while, though.

The paddyfield in all its misty, blurry, newness. This is around 8–8:30 in the morning—people are already on their way to office-jobs, cows are already in their designated field-slots, etcetera. A beautiful (odd) thing about Wayanad is how cool (cold, even) the shades are while the rest of it gets superhot by 9:30–10. The lines on the road (in the first photo) are from tractors/tillers exiting the fields. The ride was uneventful; met a few regular dogs. Not Tiger. Tiger lives at the house next to the three-roads-intersection, down the hill. He’s mastered the art of sitting still outside his gate. We mistook him for a gunny bag once. He’s actively angry. The ones I met today were more shy than suspicious. The three puppies are gone. One of them had whined when Chellam gave him/her a nosing-exam last time. They’d looked well-fed so that is a relief.

The mist veils more cows—grazing between paddy-plots in the distance. You can—kind-of—see a black-and-white one to the right, facing away from the camera. Beyond that coconut-tree-line is where we live, atop a small-ish hill. A new paddy crop has come up in most of the fields, with plantain and spinach and weeds peppered in between.

The mounds of hay look like alien-movie monsters against the haze and the general people-less-ness of the field. Chellam keeps trying to find evidence of something around this particular one whenever she’s around. R thinks it must be rats. Or, less endearingly, snakes. Or both. Things are wild around these parts. (Last month we saw a bear along the road to Muthanga; it was a mostly casual encounter—for the bear. We freaked.)

Today, walking out to the butcher’s after the ride, we met so many (overwhelmingly large enough number; five) neighbours and folks we only sort-of know but everyone spoke to us as if we have been here for longer than a year.