Malayaleegraphy

Orion and I were working at the same company. I had been making digital typography posters for myself, taking popular Malayalam cinema dialogues and treating them as design objects. Orion was doing something different, hand lettering, more drawn than designed. We started sharing work with each other, giving feedback, pushing back, collaborating without any particular plan and we started posting on our personal Facebook pages and the response was immediate. We turned it into a dedicated page and kept going.

The content started from our own tastes, books, cinema, things we liked, and drifted toward what the audience was connecting with, popular dialogues, comedy, things that travelled. For us it became its own kind of puzzle, figuring out how to treat a particular piece of text, what medium, what approach. People started asking how we were doing it, what tools, how Malayalam type worked in design. That question came often enough that people started doing it themselves and calling it Malayaleegraphy.

In about three and a half months the page reached 40,000 followers. Media started covering it. We were getting a constant stream of appreciation and attention. The word stayed. Malayaleegraphy is now used broadly to describe expressive Malayalam typography as a practice, which was never something we planned for.