Ratna Ramanathan in her land of typography

Ishita Mehra
May 1, 2013
5 min read

Rathna Ramanathan is a practising designer and tutor from Chennai, India now based in London. Rathna is the Head of Design & Interaction on the BA (Hons) Graphic Design course at Central St Martins, London and has her own design studio minus9 Design.

The work done for BBC World in rural India and her most esoteric typographic books for Tara Press, India. Inspired by India: its intensity and love for life, colour and food, she creates visual aspects based on those. She is the Association Typographique Internationale [ATypI] Country Delegate for India. A practising designer, Rathna splits her time between India and the U.K. and her work for Tara Publishing has received a number of international design awards.

Rathna addresses, cheerfully, “How many know the meaning of typography?” We see a scattering of hands. “Okay, so how many here are graphic designers?” A few hesitant hands go up. “How many have bought a children’s book at Tara?” Hands shoot out in a volley. “And how many have kept their books and not given them away?” All hands stay up amidst much cheering. A researcher, a teacher and a graphic designer, Rathna is always challenged to define her occupation when she fills the visa form at the airport in London. “It’s whatever I feel at that moment”, she candidly admits. Presenting to a general audience is a new experience for her. “As a graphic designer, I am usually backstage. It is rare for a publishing house to put their graphic designer in front.” And Tara Books has done just that. They have formally acknowledged the designer’s unique contribution to the book in the special circle of author, illustrator, publisher and production manager. At Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, where Rathna teaches, there are 64 different nationalities and she finds many different perspectives. “In the West, they make more distinctions than we do. In India, word and image are intrinsically bound. Here, design and art are just one word – kala.” These combined concerns have channelized her work at Tara Books, where a distinct style that is both rooted in place and welcoming to diverse cultures has evolved.

“Visualizing language is typography. You find it in print, on walls, in signage, on your phone. It is everywhere, so we tend to take it for granted.” Words become images Maps, dictionaries and directories use Structural Typography. It is like the rigor of a marching band where it is important everyone stays in line and rhythm. Rathna notes, “A map would not be great if it was experimental. We forget this, but typography has to disappear for reading purposes. And I’m interested in spaces where we don’t have to ignore the spaces.”

Typography in an Indian context feels unnatural if it is not expressive. Design, Culture & Human Need Singanapalli Balaram a well-known Indian educator observed that human need is the origin of design, and that is not just physical but physiological, socio-cultural, ecological and spiritual. In the West, design emerged as a response to industry and mass production and has been removed from art. In India, there has always been a direct link between design and art and craft traditions and is evident in the Indian approach to typography which sees the ‘character’ as an ‘image’. In Sanskrit (as in most Indian languages) the word for ‘design’ is the same as the word for ‘art’ – kala. As India grows as a nation, there is need to distinguish our emotions from our tasks. There is great need in India for basic, functional typographic design – signage that is comprehensible, communications that are readable, identities that translate. So while India must continue to embrace its unique view of the world, our first task as Indian designers is to find clarity in the purpose of our expression.

At the inaugaration of Murty Classics books, for which the covers she illustrated.

BBC World in rural India.

"But I don’t have a style. I would hope that any work I do represents my approach which I would say is to be relevant to the target audience. "

In the Land of Punctuation.

For aspiring writers the land of punctuation is often a metaphorical minefield. Published by Indian publishing house Tara Books, this book is an amazing visual translation of Christian Morgenstern‘s poem In the Land of Punctuation, turned into a visually compelling tale that restitutes more than the literal meaning. The images through which the verses develop are all ‘assembled’ typographically, using only punctuation marks as both independent characters and visual signs forming the elements of the landscape.

Written in 1905 by German poet Christian Morgenstern, apparently In the Land of Punctuation is a cute non-sensical nursery rhyme that plays with punctuation marks. They become the living characters engaging in a violent fight against each other and for supremacy.

Defined by its author as a linguistic caprice, the poem is actually a dark satire on the absurdity of intolerance and the pointless but unavoidable violence that comes out of it. Since its beginnings committed with a strong socio-political vision, Tara Books could not miss the occasion for rediscovering this literary gem, translating it into a book to be read both textually and visually. The making of In the Land of Punctuation has involved a double translation. First Sirish Rao came up with a brand new translation from German to English. Then, designer and illustrator Rathna Ramanathan provided the translation from written language to visual typography. Each page is masterfully animated by the aggressively dynamic actions of the characters. The spiral of violence, which is the central thread running through the poem, starts when stops and commas form a belligerent alliance against the semi-colons, seen as parasite owning their existence to them. All the semi-colons are left dead on a bloody battlefield. But violence only results in more violence and the aggressor easily become the aggressed. So, when the blade-like dashes join this civil war in the land of punctuation they direct their hatred against the commas, beheading them. The once commas are reduced to semi-colons corpses adding up to the death field. The design of the book perfectly restitutes the war atmosphere. With its red and black rendition and the dynamism of lines and marks, it is clearly reminiscent of the visual language used by Russian avant-garde in the 1920’s that had in Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge by El Lissitzky its most famous propaganda work of art. But the original reinterpretation of art does not stop here. There is also a homage to Alexander Calder‘s mobiles in the image presenting the main characters of the story, with the lightly suspended semi-colons still unaware of the lurking tragedy embodied by stops and commas.