Kwazi originally wanted to create an identity inspired by Kolkata.
So the studio began by looking at the letters the city had already made: hand-painted signs, shopfronts, street signs, graffiti, logos, buses, restaurants, and institutions.1
Then the research became larger than the branding job.
Type Around Town grew into a visual archive, a publication, and a set of objects built from that collection.1
It is a useful design method precisely because it begins by not designing anything.
A city already produces its own graphic system
Type Around Town treats Kolkata’s streets as a living archive of forms that were never coordinated into one identity.1
A shop sign answers to a budget, painter, wall, and era. A bus needs to make a route legible. An old restaurant keeps lettering because it has become recognizable. Graffiti adds another layer. None of this is a brand guideline, yet together it creates local visual character.
Kwazi says the research began during a design project that needed a typographic representation of Calcutta. Looking became a “sweet obsession,” accumulating through multiple versions of the document.1
The project describes more than a century of design observed in the city without pretending all of it belongs to one style.1
The diversity is the data.
Photograph before you normalize
The common temptation with vernacular design is to extract three motifs quickly and clean them up.
Type Around Town takes a longer route. The studio says it tries to preserve the integrity of spaces, signs, and establishments in context. The publication moves through hand-painted signage, transport typography, colonial remnants, retro artifacts, and portraits of particular places.1
It’s Nice That resurfaced the project this week, focusing on the everyday letterforms that surround people without necessarily being treated as “design.”2
The result is more than a folder of pretty street type. The forms stay connected to use and place.
The merchandise comes after the archive
Some collected forms were later redrawn into objects people can carry and wear.1
That step could easily turn a local archive into a commercial moodboard. The order of operations changes the reading.
Kwazi did not begin with products and search afterward for local folklore to justify them. It began with sustained observation, then chose fragments to reinterpret.
That distinction matters whenever a designer works with an existing visual culture.
A studio archive is not a museum
Kwazi explicitly frames the project through the values and aesthetics of a design organization. Type Around Town is not an academic census of Bengali typography or Kolkata’s complete visual history.1
That limitation is healthy.
A situated archive can be useful without claiming final authority. It tells you who is looking, from which profession, and with which obsessions.
That makes the method portable: choose a street, object, practice, or neighborhood; photograph before interpreting; record use and context; let exceptions accumulate; only then search for patterns.
Design can begin with attention
Many briefs pay designers to make something new quickly.
Type Around Town is a reminder that one creative step can be delaying production.
Before choosing a typeface that “feels like Kolkata,” the studio looked at how Kolkata was already writing itself across walls, buses, and businesses.1
That avoids a familiar shortcut: compressing a complicated visual culture into three tidy references that agree with each other.
Streets are less disciplined than design systems.
That may be why they are often a better source.