The Alphabettes Mentorship program, finally!
On May 23, 2020, amidst the pandemic lockdown and working-from-home, I finally got the email I was really waiting for. Alphabettes wrote to me saying that they had found me a mentor, at last after a long match-matching process. They introduced me to Shuchita Grover, a typeface designer from India, who is currently based out of London. She has a lot of experience in designing for Indic fonts, especially for the Gurumukhi script. We kicked off our mentor-mentee journey together with an introductory zoom call and then by setting up our project on Basecamp.
Yeah, I still have to update my display picture on basecamp.
About the Alphabettes Mentorship program:
The Alphabettes mentorship program is like a personal one-on-one mentor-mentee guidance program aimed to help people, especially students and professional newcomers, to immerse themselves in the type industry. Based on the overall goals and aspirations communicated by both parties, the Alphabettes team matches a mentor and a mentee together for a fixed duration of time to start the program. The best part about this program is that there is no application or program fee which makes it super accessible to everyone with an interest in world of type and learn from the professionals.
I had applied to the program as a mentee at the beginning of 2020 with a clear intent of getting back into the world of type design & typography and reconnecting with the knowledge and learnings I had in the subject since college. I wanted to do a project where I could explore my love for letterforms, scripts & writing systems and the design process of type design from scratch and learn more. I had listed a few specific goals in the application like completing the latin typeface I had started in college, but when the mentorship actually started my goal has shifted slightly with my keen interest of working on a Gujarati typeface. It was something I wanted to do towards a personal goal of staying in touch with my cultural roots and my native language.
A virtual letter from the mentee to the mentor
As the next step after our introductions, Shuchita wanted to see my past work related to type compiled in a document with a summary of around 300-500 words about how I look at type design, my purpose of doing this program, where I see myself in the type design industry and all about my understanding of type design so far. For me, it was almost like a Manifestation + Statement Of Purpose exercise, so that I could align my aspirations and expectations of this journey right at the beginning.
For this exercise, I decided to put some perspective in the document and take a personal approach of writing. I designed the document as if it were a virtual letter from me to her, telling her about my type story and aspirations with this program as well as showing them all the past work and experience I have in the field.
It took a little longer than I thought it would to put this presentation/ letter together because I did a lot of reflecting on my relationship with type and a lot of digging down my old archives to find all the type related work I had produced. I am glad that this exercise gave me a chance to do both helped me view my journey in retrospect to see how far I have gotten already - and how far I really want to go. :)
The Alphabettes mentorship program is still accepting applications. If you’re interested, you can apply here.
