Kicks and Kisses

I was strolling in Manali when I saw these signs.

It was on a lunch house, and typical of tourist places it served everything from regional specialities (punjabi, gujarati) to chinese. In particular the punjabi thali and gujarati thali, was written in punjabi and gujarati script respectively.

At first glance it seems very obvious. If your target audience is punjabi, it makes sense to write the punajbi dish name in punjabi script. But the downside is that some people who love punjabi food but can’t read punjabi script won’t be able to understand.

Let’s look at what some global websites are doing to solve this problem. We have to keep in mind that there are other constraints when it comes to web. To keep it simple lets say we want to provide a list of languages a site is available in. So that a user who wants to see the site in that language can select the required option. The following image shows how youtube does it.

Say you go to a japanese cyber cafe and you see this. And if you want to see an english site, to choose the english option, you have to know an english speaking countries flag. Easy for the person of that country, not so for someone else. Still youtube has at least tried to solve the problem to some extent.

Now lets look at BBC’s world service site. Now they could have put each language in that respective script. So that people who can only read that script could have chosen that option easily. But that would have meant that all those people who don’t have those font-packs installed on their machines would have seen some thing like this (????? question marks for non existant fonts). Hence BBC has put the language name in the respective script as an image. So that everyone sees everything, no question marks. As well as the user who knows only one language still can choose his language. Then why they have written that language again in english? So that everyone can know which languages it is available. Since this is just the landing page, and this being the world service page, I think the aim of this page is to show that it is truly global. Which the language names written in english does.

This is what I call good design.

From the ancient times humans have been trying to enliven their surroundings. The following images show one of the oldest discovered images made by man. Humans are one of the few animals, who have a sense of aesthetics. Well many nests made by birds, or mud castles made by termites, etc. are beautiful too, but more than beauty they are primarily functional. Humans are I guess the only ones who make art just for the sake of it.

“The eruption of Vesuvius preserved graffiti carved on the walls of Pompeii, including everyday Latin insults, magic, love declarations, alphabets, political consigns, and quotations from famous literature, offering us a direct insight into ancient Roman street life.” This line, a quote from wikipedia on graffiti, gives a very apt summary of ancient street art.

Fast forward to twenty years ago. The new age graffiti appeared on the urban lanscape. Intertwined with Hip-Hop and punk music, it was illegal and so very cool. They were considered vandals and chased by the police.

In 1986 Frank Shepard Fairey started a street art campaign called ‘André the Giant has a Posse‘ as an experiment in phenomenology. Propagated by skaters, they now have full firm called obeygiant, selling everything stickers, clothing and music. Their tagline is ‘Manufacturing quality dissent since 1989′.

Banksy on the Israel west bank wall, earned wordlwide media attention.From piss stinking walls it has sneaked into the exhibition gallery. Banksy who was one of the pioneers of the stencil art, now has exhibitions with a live elephant painted with gilt. He sells his prints for thousands of dollars. Street art has even been covered by the time magazine.

And this street art culture has been widespread, running through many countries. Recently I read an article on the first generation street art in Iran. I had always felt why I did’nt see any in India. I have been in Mumbai and now in Delhi, but apart from the trivail and egoistic, ‘i love u rita/sita/anita’ scratched on walls I didn’t see any. So it felt really good when I spotted a few in Delhi on my way to office. One is that of a grinning face with a sort of cross for his face. This has been stencilled along the outer ring road, on the sides of flyovers and bus stop signals. This image was taken at the Hauz-khas/IIT flyover.

With decrease in printing costs, new media like stickers and pasteups have arrived. People are experimenting even with cut metal. While it is debatable if what these artists are doing is right or not, as they sometimes do paint on private property. But it cannot be dismissed that they do make our surroundings beatiful. Here is a slideshow with some pics of prominent street arts.

So people stencil the city, but do it right.