[HN Gopher] Indian Sign Painting: A typeface designer's take on ...
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       Indian Sign Painting: A typeface designer's take on the craft
        
       Author : detaro
       Score  : 96 points
       Date   : 2025-08-02 14:03 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (bl.ag)
 (TXT) w3m dump (bl.ag)
        
       | lelandfe wrote:
       | As a type nerd, wowza; this is why I come to HN. I'd never even
       | think to look for this. Thanks for the share.
       | 
       | Love the over the top Amrit D.J. Band ones; they remind me of old
       | school Barnum & Bailey signs.
        
       | davchana wrote:
       | Related, there are many painters, who work as employees at truck
       | repair or denting painting shops, and write generic words like
       | TANK on Diesel Tank, or like OK BYE TATA on rear bumper, or
       | simply names, with dome petals around them. They start with a
       | yellow rectangle, and then paint black lines as negative space,
       | eventually bringing out yellow letters out.
        
       | ping00 wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing! I always love looking at the hand-painted
       | advertisements when I'm back in India. I almost never see it in
       | the cities these days (billboards have taken over), but back in
       | my parents' villages, a lot of older painted advertisements (like
       | Maha Cement) are still there on the walls that run past the main
       | street.
       | 
       | On a side note, I have an HTTP200 license plate and I want to get
       | some nice Indian truck style lettering saying HORN <HTTP200>
       | PLEASE around it :)
        
         | atonse wrote:
         | HAHA. This joke made my day.
         | 
         | What the heck does "HORN OK PLEASE" mean anyway? I had seen it
         | my whole childhood.
        
           | muststopmyths wrote:
           | "horn please", to tell people to honk while passing.
           | 
           | OK was originally a separate thing that used to occur in
           | locations other than between the two words. I distinctly
           | recall this from my childhood. Don't know the origins of it
           | but there is some suggestion on the internet that it was
           | copied from Tata trucks which had the logo of the OK soap (a
           | lotus).
           | 
           | They could occur in the current order, but it was not
           | necessary. It should still be read as separate from the "horn
           | please" phrase.
           | 
           | As the country became functionally more illiterate over the
           | years (yes, probably a controversial opinion :) ), the three
           | words were just rote copied inline and painted on trucks,
           | with the meaning lost to time.
        
           | gopalv wrote:
           | > What the heck does "HORN OK PLEASE" mean anyway? I had seen
           | it my whole childhood.
           | 
           | I was told that this was the polite honk triplet - the two
           | honk call and one honk response.
           | 
           | "honk honk" / "honk"
           | 
           | "horn ok" / "please"
        
         | zem wrote:
         | a project that has been on my todo list for years is to crowd
         | source the dividing line between "horn ok please" and "sound ok
         | horn" (I saw the latter for the first time when I lived in
         | Bangalore, but I gathered it was the common version in the
         | south, which implies the existence of a border marking the
         | transition)
        
       | artur_makly wrote:
       | Can someone now Vibe-code a web font-generation tool that
       | converts these typographic gems into full embeddable web-fonts?
        
         | ethan_smith wrote:
         | Fontself Maker for Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop or Glyphr Studio
         | can convert vector drawings of these sign paintings into usable
         | web fonts, though capturing their hand-painted nuances remains
         | challenging.
        
       | shayonj wrote:
       | This is v cool! thanks for sharing
        
       | asadm wrote:
       | I am a noob, but is the Zohran Mamdani (new NYC mayor
       | candidate)'s campaign also using this style of typeface for the
       | logos etc. It looks similar.
        
         | lelandfe wrote:
         | From a search it seems it was largely born from NYC bodega
         | signage (which is ~every culture on the planet; my bodegas over
         | the years have been Pakistani, Senegalese, Ghanian, Haitian,
         | Mexican...) but some Bollywood posters' influence (one article
         | says he asked for it specifically, others that that's just an
         | inspiration). So, yes.
        
       | manas96 wrote:
       | I've always observed a curious thing within India regarding the
       | Devnagari (Hindi) and Latin (English) scripts. Essentially all
       | English words are always written in Devnagari, but it's rarely
       | the other way around. For example it is much more likely to see
       | iNglish ttuu hiNdii than "angrezi se hindi".
       | 
       | My personal theory is that this is because you can make every
       | sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the
       | other way around.
        
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       (page generated 2025-08-04 23:00 UTC)