As the city was starting to wake up yesterday, a group of over thirty people gathered in the central courtyard of Moazzam Jahi Market around 8 am. Curious onlookers walked by, wondering what the crowd was up to, unaware that this gathering was about to read the city’s streets in an entirely new and unique way. Guided by book designer and researcher Ragini Siruguri as part of the Shehr Festival, the Lettering Landscapes walk set out to decode the signboards across Hyderabad’s one of the most commercial areas- Osmangunj.
What began as an observation of shop facades quickly unfolded into a deep dive into how typography and design define micro-territories, preserve local history, and reflect the city’s vibrant multilingual pulse.
The script of Moazzam Jahi Market
The walk began at Moazzam Jahi Market, where Ragini introduced how visual typography shapes how we inhabit public space. A prime example is how shop owners claim physical territory through letters: in the courtyard, wrought-iron garden chairs feature shop names stencilled directly onto their armrests. Customers sitting on a chair marked “Famous” implicitly step into the domain of Famous Ice Cream, turning simple seating into a tool for spatial ownership.
Looking up at the market’s facade reveals permanent architectural script: Perso-Arabic lettering (Urdu) rendered in the elegant Nasta’liq calligraphic style. Cast in metal in 1935, the inscription reading Moazzam Jahi Market stands as a historical anchor of high-craft public typography.
Osmangunj’s visual tapestry
Leaving Moazzam Jahi Market, we walked into Osmangunj, a street that serves as a living gallery for sign-lovers. Everywhere you look, storefronts are stacked with an incredible mix of materials: neon lights, digital flex banners, acrylic cutouts, stencils, engraved stone, and hand-painted metal sheets.
Here, we studied how shops frequently combine initial letters into distinct geometric logotypes, using lettermarks and monograms as shorthand branding alongside their full names.
Architectural lettering in the area also adapts 1920s Art Deco hybrid styles directly onto building facades, while sign painters employ vibrant colours, drop shadows, and fill patterns to bring depth and creative texture to individual glyphs.
These hand-painted boards carry a double memory, commemorating establishment longevity with marks like “Since 1932” while preserving artisan credit through the signatures and phone numbers of local artists.
A highlight of the walk was a signboard that was over 100 years old and had letters made of wood. Ragini shared how the owner takes pride in this sign and plans to always have it on display. The business? A simple stove repairer.
What also stood out was how signboards frequently feature illustrations and pictures of the products sold inside, offering an intuitive, non-verbal layer of communication alongside written script.
Ragini also emphasised that while most of the artisans who painted these boards never attended a formal design school, the sheer ingenuity, composition, and artistic flair of their work offer profound lessons for modern design professionals. A persistent disconnect remains between folk sign painters and trained studio designers, but Ragini hopes this gap narrows so both worlds can learn from each other.
Multilingualism on display
Beyond its physical craftsmanship, Osmangunj’s visual tapestry is defined by its deep commitment to linguistic accessibility, giving equal spatial weight to Telugu, Perso-Arabic (Urdu), Devanagari (Hindi) and English scripts on a single board. While older markets of Hyderabad preserve this hand-lettered craft, Ragini noted that the tradition remains geographically bound; legacy commercial districts sustain local painters, whereas modern tech corridors like Hitec City or Gachibowli rely exclusively on uniform, corporate plastic panelling.
Also, addressing the perception that multi-script, heavily textured signboards create visual clutter, Ragini offered a critical reinterpretation, explaining that the idea of these signs being overstimulating often comes from a Western lens accustomed to uniformity. In reality, India’s visual culture is inherently textured, layered, and multi-linguistic, forming a natural and functional backdrop to daily interactions even if passersby do not explicitly analyse every shading, pattern, or art form on display.
AI’s threat to regional typography
Speaking to Siasat.com, Ragini raised concerns about how generative AI is entering small business branding. As AI design tools become accessible, small shop owners may find it significantly cheaper to generate quick AI signs than to commission traditional acrylic or hand-painted boards.
However, for her, the core issue lies in how AI handles South Asian scripts. Trained on imbalanced datasets, AI tools frequently mangle regional letterforms, confusing Telugu script with Tamil letters or outputting illegible typographic hallucinations.
Rather than wiping out physical traditions entirely, Ragini expects AI-generated boards will simply become another layer on shopfronts. Just as hand-painted signs sit directly above or below modern digital flex banners today in Osmangunj, we may soon see AI-generated boards hung alongside authentic hand-lettered signs on the same storefronts.
For now, AI seems like a far-away problem for this part of the city, as here signboards are more than advertisements. They are a rich archive of history, community identity, and artistic craft built right onto the walls of Hyderabad.
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