Art Metropole

#15564

jugaad is...

Designer

Arshdeep Kang

Date

2023

Publisher

Arshdeep Kang

Format

Zines

Size

10 × 14 cm

Length

16 pp

Genre

Graphic Design, Design, Typography, Culture, Risograph, Asian Art & Artists

Jugaad is a way of making do with what you have and came from necessity, a notion widely used in India. It is a way to use low-cost materials to function in place of high-cost materials. The purpose of this zine is to define jugaad through several phrases and pictures.

To truly emulate the notion of jugaad, Arshdeep designed the zine using Microsoft Word as an alternative to the Adobe Creative Cloud applications, on a single 11” x 17” sheet of paper double-sided, along with the default font Times New Roman. Printed on the risograph, layering magenta and yellow inks resulted in bright orange with a slight misregistration, adding to the charm of the jugaad. The spreads of the zine were sewn on a Kenmore with pink and yellow threads to maintain the consistency of the chosen colour palette. Images printed as is without further treatment.

Colophon copy:
“Design education in India is a Western import: it’s Swiss and Bauhaus schools of thinking. They talk about less is more, but that’s not always part of Indian visual thinking—maybe it’s more is more, or more with less, what we call jugaad, a way of improvisational making that comes from lack of material and infrastructure”.
—Ishan Khosla, AIGA Eye on Design, Collaboration, Cultural Nuance + Localism— A Conversation on Reshaping the Design Monolith