There is something about the kitchen that invites intimacy. I suppose kitchens are a space for intimacy because I will touch with my hands the things that will go in your mouth; I will taste what you taste; I will work for you, or you will work for me. I will make this for you because I love you, because you need it, because you want it.

— Ella Risbridger, Cupboard Love

R makes soul-filling food even when she’s not trying. This passage made me so happy I had to interrupt her cooking (which is a big NO otherwise; she has a zone she gets into, cooking) and make her read.

It is incredible, almost absurdly so (and a cliched thing to bring up), how the simplest of dishes take on levels of delicacy that should be illegal, when gifted people cook. The other month I was having some curdy salad she’d packed for lunch and was certain there was something extralong about the ingredient list till I was told—later—that there wasn’t.

The passage is from an anthology-type book I found at Champaca some weeks ago, called In the Kitchen. The book has some slow-cooking writing. R and I are making our own cookbook. (It is mostly her; I’m picking stock and working layouts.) By next year. Fingers firmly crossed.

This is R outside Jaswant Thada, Jodhpur. That (teaching) trip was a lifesaver. More on that later.

The L-grip that came with my camera has a 1/4"-20 tripod-thread on the side, for convenient vertical videography. A large percentage of the stuff (images and videos) the media team at River creates, are 1080×1920 versions of whatever they would have made otherwise. Looks like the world has moved on from appreciating landscapes to indulging portraits on screens full time.

I also realise—with not a small amount of concern—that it is only a matter of access (neither choice, nor philosophical or otherwise stance) before the floodgates of narcissism-slash-comparison bursts in to drown out our lives. (We recently got a KL11-phone to look at messages sent via WhatsApp groups. The phone has KL11’s Instagram account signed in.)

The lack of room for peripheral vision feels worse than blinding.

PS: I was reading NickAsbury’s latest ThoughtsOnWriting column discussing billboards (public advertisement). We make a lot of billboards (sometimes lovingly called ‘hoardings’ in emails that forget to turn on the doublespeak) to sell the Indie to unsuspecting victims of traffic and shopping. The ones that S and H work on are beautiful, well-made, fun even. The ones that I used to make were pages from books disguised in cloth-flex. I am used to pointing out how in most cities, the bill-board-ed folks are the only people smiling at you. The point is that we contribute to the clutter and the incessant nudging and the noise that one cannot turn off. Wondering what my penance could be.

I asked R to photograph some print samples for a thing I’m doing. Then it was a low-ish moment of recognising how the world has moved on from one-frame compositions to everything-moving compositions as a way to showcase work. I was looking at type contract, expand, and move in splines around 3D rendered figurines over fields of Fuchsia and IK Blue. I asked R if I have gotten too old, too dated for what is considered nice work today in the field. It was a moment of self-doubt that I’m not too used to sharing. As she recalls (correctly) I’m (was) fairly arrogant when it came to work in general, and detail in particular. So, this was new and uncomfortable. I was looking at all the recent stuff I’ve made and the tools I’ve made those with, and realising that the scope has shrunk from when the foundation studio wasn’t a distant memory coated in LGBs and pencildust. The scope has shrunk, and the fun has too, perhaps. I don’t know whom to blame. I don’t think I hate the daily stuff I work on, even when it is largely insignificant and ad-hoc and automated and plain. I find joy in figuring out small things for small ends. I obsess over details perhaps as a way to establish a misguided sense of control and purpose. I don’t read as much as I used to. I don’t actively listen to music the way I used to. I can’t remember the last time I rode the bicycle not to work or to run an errand.

We had a lovely dinner today, with H and a bunch of experimentally coloured cats for company. We ordered a lot of stuff because all of it was lovely. The place was not quiet but well furniture-d and open. We spoke about many things and books and people and places. I went down my go-to rabbit holes about significant teachers etcetera. (On that note, the faculty page at IIT-J’s Design School has a link to a Google Form. It has these two sentences. “Some teachers can have a lasting impression on us. They can inspire us with their thoughts, their stories, their respect and care for us, or some such action…” and “What did you like about them? How did they inspire you? What was special about them? How were they different from other teachers? Did they only teach or did they become friends?” I think that is an awesome way to find people. I was looking at the website after sharing this year’s material- and reading lists for the TDM course. The folks there—Ga and Pr in particular—have managed to do an excellent job of planning stuff, again. In contrast, I received a call on Friday from one of the NIDs for a BGD course early next month. Facepalm indeed.)

I’ve put an alarmingly short list of tools together. There is little variety. The list used to be much more eclectic and fun, especially in the software department. Now it is an apple orchard with few interesting species in between. I’m not sure if it is a sign of things stabilising over time or a sign of too much overtime.

Made this ‘illustration’ [1] for Aruma’s second-floor grooming station windows+doors. The white bits (that spray-bottle, the standing dog’s legs, all white parts of gradients, speech bubbles, general bubbles, etcetera) are transparent and the other bits are translucent (frosty) for eager pet-parents to take peeks at their (our) kids getting their spa on. There is a photo of yourstruly bent over and eyeing a young Chellam somewhere on R’s phone.

My opinion is greatly biased and they’re the first (and sometimes only) place I trust with Chellam (and before her, with Kalyani). Chelgato had an uncharacteristic seizure (tests couldn’t say anything beyond ‘normal’) a couple of weeks ago and we are a bit worried. She’s been her usual complicated happy self since—is the report from home.

Said illustration. The grey bits are grey ACP walls.

And this below is on the ground floor windows. The left side houses a pet-supply store section so sunlight wasn’t welcome. Then, everyone got bigger heads. The right side is a waiting lounge and there is a decent amount of exposed glass there. I shamelessly repurposed stuff. This was ‘work-for-a-friend’ so no green pieces of paper changed hands. There was a huge bucket of fancy shampoo involved though. (We’re sorted for another two years I guess.)

These are all—obviously—based on simple geometric shapes and an unhealthy amount of gradientry. If one clicked on that link in the first paragraph, one would also see that the symbol—unoriginal, but drawn ‘well’ by yourstruly—drove most of those decisions and not laziness. One can argue laziness drove some of the decisions when it came to the symbol, but that is somebody else’s beef. What I really loved doing was giving some of these playful poses, and—R says—obviously, drawing those wavy lines for the showerhead and hair dryer. There is a lot of copypasta that is too late to apologise for.

1: I say ‘illustration’ and ‘well’ in quotes not because I am not good at them. Make whatever of that statement, etcetera. That ‘well’ is also what I tell myself; to sleep fairly well without all the waking up worrying that I most certainly did eff something up somewhere. Just saw these files looking for door-stickers to River Stores (that now get updated, longer working hours like the rest of the country; hello, union budget!), and now my filing system needs some spring cleaning. See? I have bigger problems of ‘being good at’ to deal with. Recently, Ma at the HQ gave much wisdom in simple terms: no fire, nobody is hurt, Ar is not in jail, we’re good. That was such good life advise that I’m going to ignore and panic instead.

The List is a Paragraph That Stood in Front of a Mirror

Lists are one of my favourite things to typeset. I love how they are a near-perfect stage set for all the fundamental form- and type-related gymnastics in service of clarity and brevity. They are also so easy to mess up with the tiniest amount of extra paragraph indents or the wrong choice of bullets. The ‘risk’ thus involved is quite rewarding. I’ve also come to judge people (design people, not general people so much) by the lists they design. I find it easier to tell if someone is an excellent graphic designer looking at the way ‘bullets’ in their lists are indented, than by looking at tastefully rendered simulations of loremipsummed app screens.[1] Yes, I am fun at parties I don’t attend. Moving on.

What Lists Do

At the text level, the list strips away fluff even from otherwise well-sculpted paragraphs to surface all the crispy little chunks of stackable information. The list breaks walls of text into more ‘porous’ walls of text. Typeset well, the list pauses and takes stock of whatever has been, and whatever will be. Typeset carelessly, the list breaks the text’s flow into random islands where meaning keeps facepainted volleyballs for company. [2]

I Detest Bullets

Broken down to fundamental shapes that form them, ‘bulleted’ lists are an exercise in Gestalt theory. The directionlessness of bullets and our years of connecting dots to make meaning out of them are a match made in typographic hell. All the ‘dots’ form a line and the listed stuff floats away (sometimes together) looking like badly spaced (and punctuated) paragraphs.

Default Lists and Disconnect

Here is an untouched (Default-Systems[3]) list straight out of Illustrator 28.5 typeset in 12pt Fira Sans (on a 1920×1080 artboard). I believe here is a basic Gestalt-principle solvable grouping-and-direction problem like almost everything else typographic.

When we look at the basic-shapes version of that default-list, the grouping issues are obvious-er. I’m cheating and made the text-blocks black [4] instead of grey. (Otherwise this would be obvious-er-er.) The textblock here is a group and the bullets are one kid with a pencil away from being a separate line.

Making Lists Work: Paragraph Spacing

Starting with the most basic of measurements (extrinsic), we must add an adequete amount of paragraph spacing to separate listed items into their own units. The list is no longer a paragraph-with-a-string-of-dots-for-company.

Paragraph spacing, like everything else vertical-spacing related, is a function of how much we lead lines of type.

Making Lists Work: Indents, Intents

After spacing list items better, we tweak the indents-to-bullets to make them more intentional. This indentation takes care of most of the grouping issues around lists but doesn’t solve the aimless dots-waiting-to-form-a-line problem, especially if the listed items are equally tall.

Making Lists Work: Directional Signs

For fixing this similarity-related problem, we need signs with a sense of direction to point to the listed items rather than to the other signs below. Countering similarity with suggestion works (lines suggest a horizontal movement stronger than the vertical similarity).

Triangles work too, as long as one downplays the similarity by making them small or grey.

A mix of both lines and triangles (arrows!) works even better given how obvious the ‘direction’ suggestion gets. It also helps that the font file has arrows too, and those glyphs are an even grey like the letters and punctuation.

Optional: Alternating Rows

A fancier (not essential) way to establish even better grouping would be to iTunes-ify the list items. Either by using colour (values are a better way to go to keep the general group intact), or by using rules to break the last remnants of proximity-and-similarity-groups. Both are overkill.

B&A

No self-respecting guide is complete without a B&A comparison. Here.

This is an early draft (of Chapter 6) of the Gestalt-Typography book I’m not-writing writing over weekends. I haven’t managed to zero in on a tone for this yet. I also don’t really know what I expect out of it either. Is it going to be required-reading for T101 courses I mentor? Am I trying to be the ‘teacher who wrote the textbook’ and revel in the ego-boost? Etcetera, etc. There’s an unhealthy amount of self-doubt attached. Feel free to write in and tell me everything is fine. Or not.

There is way too much work at the River HQ that it’s started messing with life at home and going home. I take work home and work late nights (early mornings) after coming home late. I work early mornings after sleep evades me at a rest-break at 2 AM. Not proud of any of this. Too old to be able to be proud of anything after an allnighter. I haven’t withdrawn a salary in three months thanks to how oldschool our bank back at KL11 pretends to be. There is so much ad-hoc stuff to pdf-print now that there are more stores and more people and—finally—a space to work from in the HQ building. M tells me he has dreams about presentations typeset in Söhne. We need to balance all this better.

H joined the brand team two weeks ago but hasn’t gotten the necessary silicon for work yet. We’re also stuck in a hardware/software acquisition limbo that has reached Catch-22 levels of absurdity and pain. Piano-piano. We’re happy to have someone we can trust and have normal conversations with. Ru (UX expert) has been here for two months now. Same boat. Good people good at their work. Much peace when you think about them being around. Etcetera.

1: The best portfolio is a well-indented Resume with proper punctuation, clear hierarchy, and decipherable connections. Date this quote so I can somersault my way out of the responsibility later if necessary.

2: Cast Away reference. Appropriate because lead type.

3: Lined and Unlined: Default Systems in Graphic Design

4: Unrelated and fun read from Norma. Also read the rest of the logs.

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 twelfth. 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.