LURU Hangs w/ graphic designer Kriti Monga

Simplicity shields a ton of hard work.

“I’ve always been fascinated with typography,” gushes Kriti Monga, while pulling out scores of her notebooks bursting with delightful lettering and illustrations. We – the LURU newsletter team – are at her brightly-lit home studio that seems to be a world away from the traffic-choked bylanes of Cox Town. “Even as a child, before any ideas of typography, I was always fascinated by handwriting. I would play around with the shapes of letterforms,” she recalls. Even as a little girl, she would “question the double-storey” nature of the drop cap at the beginning of the page of a storybook she was reading and compare it to “single storey or lowercase alphabets” on the rest of the page. “And I have some of my school notebooks, and [it seems] I’ve always been playing around with handwriting even before I learned rudimentary calligraphy,” she adds.

And during her student years at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad “we didn’t have many typefaces or fonts on our computers” and “we were [the] hand drawing type.” This grounding “and interest in hand drawing,” the handmade, and the analogue has been the spine and sparkle of Kriti’s work for over two decades of working as a graphic designer and creative strategist for brands.

Having a Helvetica good time

She points us to her travel diaries with their “particular kind of hand lettering” while still allowing herself “to be influenced by where I am,” she explains. Quickly drawing us into her Italy travel diary, and she highlights the “variations in the lettering styles” but indicates, she was lettering in “Roman Serif fonts in gold” because it was all around her. Another page “drawn while eating” lists out all of the gelato flavours she ate on the trip. For Kriti, these travel journals “become an opportunity to just draw things without really thinking about a brief,” and allowing herself “to absorb influences of a place and notice those influences organically” translated into her overall practice. Next, we’re flipping through her Japan travel diary and taking note of the “very, very different visual world including the way of drawing letters.”

On occasion, these explorations within her travel diaries inform her formal practice as well. For one of the essays in her most recent design project – Taste – an experimental, limited-edition publication by Juggernaut Books (edited by journalist Lakshmi Chaudhry), Kriti played around with the word ‘amma’ in Kannada script. “For the conversation between critic-writer Parul Sehgal and Kannada writer Vivek Shanbag, I sketched the word ‘amma’ as a free, flowing saree kind of a feeling,” she says. “Shanbag talks about his feeling of reading Kannada letters, it almost becomes a game for him. So, I imagined this childlike feeling of being a little boy. Later in the essay, he speaks on the flow of language. With those ideas in mind, I started to draw these Kannada letterforms with a feeling of flow,” she explains. “So, in that way one can sort of sense the expressiveness of letters.”

Don’t brush it off

Kriti doesn’t work with type and hand lettering alone. She works with many materials. There’s stitching and textiles, a throwback to her days as “the in-house graphic designer for FabIndia,” where she found “spending time with the craftspeople to be really invaluable.” Her time with this Indian chain of stores in its early days contributed to her “deeper understanding of processes and materials” and “was hugely influential in terms of my sensibility with colours and craft,” she says. She demonstrates her tryst with ceramics by pulling out a tile engraved with the Arabic word ‘sabr’ which means patience, endurance and steadfastness which she “made in a small workshop in Barcelona with colours and materials that are very Catalan,” she tells us. She shows us a clay cylinder carved with the quote ‘it is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world’ by the poet Mary Oliver “also tattooed on [her] arm.” She picks up a faceted glass bottle that she “designed for the gin brand Terai inspired by the facets of old pillars” and its lacquer stopper, which she “created on a lathe at Channapatna” herself.

And if that wasn’t enough, next, we’re standing in front of charcoal and oil-on-canvas drawings of human figures from her time in Barcelona where she studied the technique through “the traditional atelier method.” She thinks this interest stemmed from “a curiosity for human anatomy...maybe because my mom is a zoologist,” she offers. For Kriti, this ability to move between mediums and materials is powered by her belief in “being a storyteller first.” She is also conscious of “always searching” and not knowing all of the answers but open to working it out through a layered process. But yet, she’s keen “for that searching to always show up in the work.”

Follow Kriti’s work here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly LURU Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.