An Uncertain Arc: Impressions of India’s Design Century

Design has come into focus in present day India. It is seen as a source of competitive advantage, as a business resource, as a development resource and even an expression of soft power. In popular culture, the concept is more available than at any other time. On 20 February 2014, a conference for the design community held at India International Centre was addressed by the well-known typographer and designer Itu Chaudhuri.

Entitled, ‘An Uncertain Arc: Impressions of India’s Design Century’ – Chaudhuri illustrated the history of design from the 1900s onwards to the present with his own eclectic collection of examples. Chaudhuri said, “In advertising, or in street signs, an entirely imported style can be seen even if the subjects are Indian. As western manufacturers attempted to compete for Indian customers, often with Japanese exports, their advertising, packaging and graphic design mixed religious depictions, maharajas, or westernized gentlemen and lettering traditions — all of these sold products or sat cheerfully on matchbox labels.”

Chaudhuri reflected that in 1905, the first advertising agency, Dattaram’s Advertising in Bombay (which still exists) was formed and by 1924, National Advertising in Calcutta came up. In the formative years after independence from 1947 to 1960, the action moved to Delhi, not because business or industry shifted but because of the role of the government under Nehru. In the 1961 to 1991 period, no institute of design was as admired, debated or denounced as the National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad. These extreme reactions were a reliable indicator of NID’s impact.

By the 1980s, the IIT Powai in Mumbai set up a postgraduate design department headed by Sudhakar Nadkarni. By the 1990s, several IITs added graphic design departments. A central thesis of Chaudhuri is that from the 1990s to the present day, design’s trajectory responds to the economic environment, in ways good and bad. The opening up of the economy after 1991 seems to have had the effect of proliferating everything to do with design – schools, graduates, firms, designers, beauty, sophistication, crassness and created squalor.

“Up to 1990s, the most significant institute to have opened after the NID and the IITs was the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in 1989, behind which we can see the hand of Pupal Jayakar. Its graduates have made an instant mark, and some have started to make waves internationally,” says Chaudhuri. “In the 1990s at least ten new design institutes opened, expanding the design workforce, mainly in graphic design. ‘NID graduate’ appears as a desirable tag in the matrimonial classifieds. Today’s multinational companies like HP, LG, Samsung and some other big brands, Indian firms like Godrej, and every automobile company have all started design departments in India. The Tata group states design as a key policy thrust and has a development centre in Europe. Some designers have done well outside India.”

Chaudhuri also discussed type design for Indian languages and scripts describing a Gujarati font as a good example of a quality type design based on Indian calligraphic systems. He mentioned the work of calligrapher and type designer RK Joshi who designed the first Devanagari fonts for Microsoft. Despite earlier NID efforts, this is the modern Hindi font that has become ubiquitous, as an everyday, jobbing font. Joshi’s work inscribed an arc from Ulka Advertising, to IIT Powai’s design school to the NCST – a government institution for software development techniques.

Alok Kumar, March 2014 issue Indian Printer and Publisher

Buoyancy in print publishing despite strong head winds

Despite headwinds faced by the Indian economy, the print and publishing Industry continues to grow at a healthy pace. Be it the newspaper industry, commercial printing activity or the publishing of books, there appears to be some movement and growth at a time when many other industries are holding back on investment decisions. This month we profile two leading Indian language newspapers who are modernizing and expanding at a frantic pace. The 125 year old Malayala Manorama is investing over Rs 150 crore to buy five Mitsubishi’s ‘made for Asia’ New Diamond Spirit SA 4 x 1 press lines. “This is the third of a four phase expansion plan designed to replace the old single width presses with double width single circumference machines,” says George Jacob of Manorama, “and we plan to complete the modernization at all our dozen printing locations in Kerala within a couple of years.”

We also visited Dainik Bhaskar, the diversified Indian language newspaper that straddles seven states across Central, North and West India with several dailies with a combined circulation of over five million copies. Dainik Bhaskar in Hindi is moving eastward with its Patna launch shortly. Known as DB corp after its highly successful IPO, the diversified conglomerate continues to expand its newspaper business at a rapid pace by setting up a new press location in each quarter for the last five years. The big story here is the trend towards colour pages and that more than four fifth of all new newspaper printing capacities in India are of 4-Hi color towers.

If Indian newspapers are doing well so are the commercial printers investing in digital color production presses. Though this year seems flat for entry level presses, both the mid-level segment and the high end presses continue to do well. Like in the newspaper industry, there is a strong preference for higher color quality, one of the reason for the distinct shift towards high priced digital presses. Investment in building new capacities have more than doubled during the last year with HP, Xerox and Kodak reviving up the top end while Konica Minolta has set the pace both at the entry-level and now in the the mid-range segment as well.

Sandip Sen from the edit-blog page of November 2013 issue Indian Printer and Publisher

The chaos of Indian book publishing

As Indian literacy and education grow rapidly, the country’s book publishing remains a chaotic mix of large international and medium and small local publishers. The book distribution system seems bottle-necked with difficulties of geographic reach and payment recoveries. University and college librarians are bribed by distributors of scholarly and technical books to build up their libraries. School principals and teachers receive bribes from textbook publishers to prescribe the right books for their students.

This is a situation that invites college students to share PDFs of widely pirated textbooks easily available on the internet. And also invites the large online platforms such as Flipkart and Amazon that offer discounts and free delivery of millions of titles catalogued online to practically every nook and cranny of a large and disorganized country. Of course publishers, distributors and booksellers lament the deep discounts and the unfair competition from the large marketplace portals citing the recent French competition laws on discounts and free delivery. At the same time many of them willingly collaborate – they are traders after all. Another outcome is the malaise and restructuring that was bound to strike the large bookstore chains in the country. Many of these issues are discussed in the current issue and we plan to write on this theme in the future.

The GlobaLocal events in Chennai and New Delhi organized by the German Book Office complemented the two major book industry events in the country this year – the World Book Fair in Delhi from 15 to 23 February and the Literature Festival in Jaipur from 17 to 21 January 2014.

Krishanu Dutta from the edit-blog page of December 2013 issue Indian Printer and Publisher