“Without words, design is mute” — 5 questions for Naresh Ramchandani
@Interactive Storytelling Meetup #4 –14 April 2016
Interview by Klasien van de Zandschulp and Cecilia Martin.
Naresh Ramchandani is Pentagram’s very first communications and advertising partner. Naresh is a wordsmith. In his previous roles as copywriter and creative director, he has picked up numerous awards for his quick-witted one-liners and wickedly candid campaigns.
We met Naresh Ramchandani in Cape Town at Design Indaba conference. We invited him to Interactive Storytelling Meetup #4 to give a presentation about his favourite Eight Words to show how language can mean so much and do so much.
“What is a word? A word is a single distinct element of writing or speech that, in the English language, is configured by an almost unique set of shapes taken from 26 letters of the alphabet and articulated by a unique set of sounds taken from approximately 44 spoken phonemes.“
5 questions for Naresh Ramchandani:
1) You are a writer at a design agency. Can you explain us how we can design words? And what is the importance of words in design?
Designing words is not about typeface or line space or ranging left, centre or right. It’s about finding the right tone, rhythm, inflexion and sounds to make the writing strong when it needs to be and simple when it needs to be. Words are incredibly important in design. Without words, design is mute — and with words, design is articulate.
“Remove from the world the self and the selfie; think of others, take an everyone-elsie”
2) You gave us your favourite words in the presentation during the meetup. What was your inspiration to create this list?
I studied English at University and have worked with language and loved it all of my life. But I have never really paid a fitting tribute to language, so that’s what I set out to do. I’ve always thought that certain words were very powerful or meaningful or beautiful but never sat down to figure out why or how they worked the way they worked. So it was a love letter to language and a lesson for me, and I hope it connects to other people too.
3) Do you have a word in the English language that you completely dislike?
I dislike the word ‘Tinker’. It’s a very negative word that accuses someone of messing around the edges of something rather than doing something fundamental. It’s a word that presents perfectionism in a bad way, when some people (me) could argue that perfectionism is fundamental to doing something well. So I would like to ban ‘Tinker’ from the English language.
4) During the Q&A with the audience, you answered that you find inspiration in music and lyrics. Why is Sufjan Stevens your favourite songwriter?
He’s not my absolute favourite songwriter (I couldn’t really say who that was), but I adore his poetry and his intensity and the fact that he dares to sing about painful or private subjects but always with taste and respect. 2015’s ‘Carrie and Lowell,’ a collection of songs about his recently-deceased mother, is as intimate, articulate and beautiful as a record gets.
5) You also mentioned your project ‘Do The Green Thing’. Can you shortly describe what this project is about?
Do The Green Thing is an environmental charity that I co-founded and co-run. It’s mantra is creativity vs climate change, and its idea is to work with world-class creatives (writers, illustrators, strategists, directors, designers, illustrators, coders, musicians) to create arguments and artworks to inspire as many people as possible to take green action in their everyday lives. We’ve reached around 40m people in our first 8 years, but we need to do more, so if anyone wants to be help we won’t say no.
“The Oxford English Dictionary defines Home as “the place where one lives permanently, esp. as a member of a family or household; a fixed place of residence”, which is perhaps a little British, a little reluctant to emote.
The trouble with this defnition is that the word emotes so quickly, its four letters constructing four physical and psychological walls around a safe space where nakedness, argument, love, warmth, mess, comfort, privacy, and sociability all spread their icky sticky mess all over The Oxford English Dictionary’s sanitised starting point.”
