Aman Bhargava Bangalore India Data Visualization Designer & Developer aman@diagramchasing.fun

#design

3 posts tagged with "design"

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Nov 6, 2025 • Bookmark

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Fonts for a progressive future.

https://wehtt.am/fonts/

Back in 2013, I was making graphics for a project run mostly by volunteers. Being a designer, I wanted to use all the nice professional fonts I was accustomed to, but I immediately hit a roadblock — there was no budget to pay for other volunteers to use those fonts.

So I decided that if the good-looking, freely-distributable fonts I wanted didn’t exist (the free font scene was especially bleak in 2013), I was gonna have to make them myself.

If you’re an activist, an academic, or anyone just trying to make this world a better place for humans to live out our lives, please take these fonts and use them for whatever you need. They’re for you.

I like creative people taking the time not just to contribute to public commons, but articulate their thoughts in such a way. The footer and FAQ too.

#design#typography
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Nov 6, 2025 • Bookmark

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Zohran Mamdani's visual campaign

https://xcancel.com/adityafinal_psd/status/1986326607481741401

Zohran’s visual campaign is so cool. It feels like it could fit in one of the Seinfeld episodes, and at the same time be in a Bollywood movie for it’s use of a modified version of the Boheld Four font.

via Twitter (proxy link).

Apart from leading an incredibly energetic campaign on the ground, I loved watching Zohran Mamdani’s videos, websites and other visuals. Clearly a lot of work was put into their visual identity. Not since the Obama campaign, which spawned endless tutorials on how to do the same thing in Photoshop and that was how I learnt how to use it many years ago, have the visuals become so memorable to me. This was done by forge.coop. The comparison to Seinfeld is fitting; I have always loved how the sets in Seinfeld looked (bodegas, shopping marts, bakeries, The Soup Nazi) and a large part of that is typography and colors. In comparison, Friends completely fails to capture such emotion despite being set in the same city.

This campaign will also spawn such a fanbase, both because of how he conducted himself throughout it but from the design point-of-view as well.

There is a great reflection on the successes of this campaign in this post by Anil. One hopes that younger leaders in India watch and learn.

#design#nyc
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Jan 17, 2025 • Bookmark

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Designing a bus map for Pune

https://mrane.com/portfolio/pune-bus-map/

They have a habit to ask conductor about bus timings, and my map did not mention the timings- Instead of asking "does this bus goes to XYZ stand?" people ask "What bus is this?" followed by various questions. Most of the time the driver and conductor answered but when they are busy or tensed they tell people to ask their queries at the enquiry window.


We've been discussing making schematized, London-style spider-maps for BMTC bus routes over on the Bengwalk discord (which I definitely recommend joining if you live in Bangalore and are interested in public transportation) and that has sent me into a rabbit-hole of learning about octilinear, hexilinear and all those other kinds of transit maps. Professor Mundar Rane's (IDC) blog is quite a nice find for me, and this particular post discusses their process and observations on making such a bus map for Pune. It's easy to get caught up in the tech and design of things while missing things like the questions above because we take that for granted. Good read.

#design research#transit#process#design#maps
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