Aksharaala Aata
A Game of Letters2025–ONGOING
Aksharaala Aata is an exploration of type through my mother tongue, Telugu, a script alive with rhythm, complexity, and cultural memory. The project began with a personal frustration: navigating Latin-centric design tools that left little space for the nuances of Indic scripts. In response, I created a series of open-ended, analog tools—stencils, weaving frames, and modular systems, that invite participants to co-create, play, and rethink what a Telugu letter can be.
Rooted in modularity, defamiliarization, and shared authorship, Aksharaala Aata positions letter-making as a living, participatory process. More than a design intervention, it is a celebration of building generous tools—tools that hold space for spontaneity and intentionality to coexist, and for scripts like Telugu to evolve beyond inherited forms.
By reframing authorship and accessibility, the project opens questions about how type design can become an act of cultural preservation and renewal. What might it mean to design tools that invite exploration rather than dictate outcomes? And how might we make room—culturally, visually, and structurally—for scripts to be reimagined with joy and agency?
Experimental Typography
Book Design
Ramyatara Mullapudi DESIGNER
Sara Dean ADVISOR
Mathew Kneebone ADVISOR
Kalapi Gajjar Interviewee
Purushoth Kumar Guthala Interviewee
Peter Bil’ak Interviewee
Ramon Tejada Interviewee
I began with research into Telugu letterforms, interviewing Indic type designers, educators, and practitioners about the complexities of script design, decolonizing approaches to typography, and the role of modularity. I also spoke with family members, drawing on lived knowledge of the language and its cultural artifacts.
Building on this foundation, I explored Telugu through hands-on material investigations—sketching, cutting, weaving, and testing how form could emerge through process. These explorations culminated in a series of open-ended analog tools, including stencils and weaving frames. My role spanned research, interviews, conceptual development, and material prototyping, bringing together cultural inquiry and typographic experimentation.
A growing collection of analog tools that invite people to play and build Telugu letterforms, especially those who, like me, may be familiar but have lost touch with the script.
I distilled Telugu letterforms into their simplest geometric components, reducing vowels and consonants into 20 basic shapes. By separating form from meaning, the stencils invite playful reconstruction—blurring the line between legibility and expression, and encouraging participants to build letters guided as much by imagination as by recognition.
The system includes two stencil sets. The green set, which is numbered, provides the base shapes for vowels and consonants, with accompanying cards that suggest possible combinations while leaving construction open to interpretation.
The pink set introduces vathulu and guninthalu (conjunct attachments), expanding the system to more complex forms. Used together or on their own, the stencils create space to mix, match, and reimagine what a Telugu letter can be.
An exploration of constructing Telugu letterforms through weaving, inspired by the reed mats (chaapa or chatai) that were always present at home growing up. I was drawn to these mats as a kind of graphic language, and wanted to bring that tactile way of making into letter design.
Here, weaving becomes less about technique and more about tinkering—a way of learning through iteration. I’m drawn to this kind of work because it reveals how much we think with our hands, through touch, friction, and pressure. I think it’s downplayed how useful that kind of thought can be in discovering how things work and how things can be made.
The project embraced slowness, texture, and continuous refinement, creating a tactile system for play, construction, and thought.
A term I borrows from Ramon Tejada
Open-ended play tools that create spaces for personal interpretation and meaning-making, to encourage play, active participation, and creative exploration
The heart of Aksharaala Aata lies in finding the sweet spot between spontaneity and deliberation. Creating space at that intersection is important. These tools were designed to hold that space.
Ultimately, Aksharaala Aata is about planting seeds for future Telugu typefaces and lettering practices, and about reframing how scripts can grow when given space for joy and agency. The project was showcased during SF Design Week 2025 at GANTRI Studio, and at TypeLabs Asia 2025 as part of the Typographics Conference.