The humble yet exquisite Indian matchbox

The flame of India’s typographic vernacular preserved in a mosiac of product design

Neel Dozome
UX Collective
Published in
9 min readNov 12, 2023

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A set of three matchboxes. Two are the Bull brand (in green and purple) and one is Bison brand which is red and yellow. These matchboxes are thematically linked and iterations of the same concept but of different manufacturers.

An object of graphic design that I have begun to venerate above all is the humble Indian matchbox. These tiny patches of paper that vary and recombine colour, text, and image in mind-bogglingly random iterations are wound into the visual landscape of the…

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I am a London (UK) based blogger interested in culture and technology with a particular focus on type design and UX/GameDev.