After attending a Malayalam calligraphy exhibition at IFFK in Thiruvananthapuram, Orion made one poster. A word, set in old script, minimal. The idea was to keep going together.
Thirty posters in five days. Film dialogues, Padmarajan lines, young poets. The treatment was minimal, closer to Scandinavian sensibility than anything happening in Malayalam design at the time. Same fonts throughout, the expression coming from scale, weight and placement rather than variety. All published under Creative Commons.
The Facebook page crossed 7,000 likes in five days. Media covered it. Other studios started making their own versions within 48 hours. Narayanan Bhattathiri, the calligrapher whose exhibition started the whole thing, saw the work and said it was good. That response mattered more than the numbers.
It grew to 40,000 followers over the months that followed. Four months after it began, it stopped. One or two pieces after that, then nothing for twelve years.
The word Malayaligraphy stayed. Designers in Kerala use it to describe expressive Malayalam typography as a whole. Most people assume the project ran for years. It ran for four months.
[poster images]