Aamira Brar Hundal

The divine feminine is a concept I came across in my second year and decided to further research and learn about because I found this very interesting and I developed a passion for it. That is why I decided to create my Self Directed Project on the same topic. I decided to focus on divine femininity in India and started to design a font with just the word ‘KALI’ and an illustration to support the font.
I aimed to make individual posters with each letter and an illustration supporting the letter that shows just how fearless the goddess is and how fearless the power of divine femininity is. The vision was to make bold and fearless drawings of women in a goddess form with each letter of the word ‘KALI’ and bring it all together.

The style of art I went for and the message I am giving through my work is, ‘Fearless & Powerful’.

Over the last few years, I have realised I am very interested in typography, editorials, editorial design, photography, and poster design. That is why I decided to explore 36 days of type and create my own fonts. I saw a few examples of how people had created their type and I realised that there were no restrictions whatsoever and I could free flow with my imagination so that is one aspect that caught my eye.

I had an idea in mind since the start and I don’t think I budged on that even though I went through a series of iterations and changes – I stuck with my primary idea of how I wanted my type to be and how I wanted it to look. My basic idea or inspiration for my design was from Roman structures, Greek structures, Roman and Greek paintings, angelic structures and symbols, fairy tales and fantasies, old Roman fonts, and old British fonts. I wanted to create a very classy yet very detailed type of typeface or font, so that every letter had a certain amount of detail or a certain amount of imagery to it, so that by itself it looks like an artwork or a painting. I wanted the entire typeface to come together as a whole so I did keep a certain narrative throughout, but I wanted each alphabet on its own to be considered as a separate piece of art. I tried colour and monochrome and the monochrome suited my entire idea better.

The idea was to go unconventional with the font, making the font in a way that is never seen before and use different kinds of drawings and ideas to change or to create an unconventional type. I think that freedom is one reason why I played around with my font and came to the outcome I have now.

The idea here was to raise awareness with Gen Z to get them to start a conversation about their mental health with friends, family, colleagues or even Mind. An explosion of any sort is only because a limit that shouldn’t have been reached, was reached. Be that with us or anything else in the universe. The one way for us to not reach that limit is by talking, if we don’t have that we keep bottling and collecting it all up until we are bound to explode, as a lot of us have. The world would be such a better place if people just talked, right? This is why I designed, “Talk openly, with your mind” to help people around us start talking.
This is a pack of 10 “Just in Case – in need of a conversation” postcards and a poster series. I focused on the most prevalent issues such as anxiety and overthinking.
Most conversations never happen because we are too nervous or anxious to approach the other person, the postcards help with that. They all have a conversation starter on them along with a little message on the back for you to say whatever you want, maybe to someone you know or just yourself.
The posters are a collection of photos I took of people around me as their most
authentic self, and while speaking to them I tried to capture gestures and movements they showed when asked about the uneasy moments of their life. This was just to be able to give a visual representation of the normality of these issues because such gestures are made by millions of people every day, so not talking about the same issues is not okay. I wanted my photos to speak to people and grip them into thinking, acknowledging and talking about mental health with others and with themselves.
The aim here is to let people know they are not alone, it happens to everyone and that is okay, it is okay to feel this way.
“9 out of 10 people think it is important to talk about mental health” was the fact I was
interested in, so for the 9 people out there who think it’s okay to talk about
mental health this is their push to start talking about it, be it about their own mental health or someone they know.