36 Days of Type · Chennai

The brief

36 Days of Type is an annual challenge where designers and animators make one character a day, the 26 letters of the alphabet plus the digits 0 through 9. For the 2021 edition I gave myself one rule: every letter had to be a place, a person, or a feeling from Chennai, the city I grew up in.

That single constraint did most of the work. Instead of designing letterforms in the abstract, I was just remembering my city , a street, a temple, a sound, a snack, a particular kind of afternoon heat, and letting the letter take that shape.

The approach

A letter a day is a brutal, useful pace. There’s no time to overthink it, you sketch the idea in the morning, animate it across the day, and post it before midnight. The constraint keeps the work loose and honest; some letters are jokes, some are quiet, and a few surprised me.

Each was animated as a short loop with sound. The higher-resolution versions with audio live on Instagram, the grid below is the silent, at-a-glance version of the whole set.

The letters

All thirty-six, in order. Hover any letter; swap each cell for its looping GIF when you have them exported.