Reena Mistry
Reena Mistry is a Toronto-based artist, multidisciplinary designer, and co-founder of Humble Raja, an illustration studio that uses illustration and design to explore history, folklore, and culture. Her South Asian heritage informs her design practice, infusing a research-based process to create artwork with cultural depth.
With a career spanning from architecture to advertising, she has worked on 4 continents, designing for clients big and small, from Canada Post to Agora on Queen Street West. Her work has been published in the Globe & Mail, Designboom, and Designlines Magazine, and awarded by Applied Arts and DesignTO.
Her obsession with typography has led her to create custom type in environmental design, illustration, commercial branding and packaging design, but also to stop in the middle of the street to document type specimens in the wild.
Imagine cities still brimming with sign painters. A place that has 22 official languages and uses 13 different scripts. Layered organically over decades, the streets are filled with hand-painted lettering, peeling posters, cheap vinyl decals and neon signs. These are the streets of India, a living museum of typography.
This talk centers on a series of urban lettering and type specimens collected over the course of 8 months spent in India. It features samples that indulge in the human touch of hand-painted lettering, octolingual newspaper stands that navigate a multi-script landscape, and experimental type on retro album and book covers.
As generic modern signage threatens this rich history and culture of lettering, I’d like to take you on a diverse visual journey full of the vibrant, chaotic and often handmade character of letterforms in India, an inspiring and immersive look into another world of type.
