Satyajit Ray: the ad agency designer who became a great filmmaker

A family of print and pictures

Ray was born in Calcutta, now Kolkata, in 1921, into a family of writers, poets and illustrators. His grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, ran a printing press and started a children's magazine called Sandesh, and as a boy Ray was drawn to the machines and the process of printing.

He first completed a degree in economics. Then, in 1940, he went to Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan to study painting at Kala Bhavana. There he learned from the painters Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee, teachers who encouraged students to be original and to look to Indian art traditions rather than copy Western academic styles. He later said that it was at art school that he learned to look at nature and respond to it.

Junior visualiser at D.J. Keymer

In April 1943, at the age of 22, Ray joined D.J. Keymer, a British-run advertising agency in Calcutta, as a junior visualiser. The agency later became part of Ogilvy. He stayed for about thirteen years, until the success of his first film let him work full time as a director.

At the agency he worked on campaigns for everyday products such as biscuits, hair oil and cigarettes. While many agencies of the time looked to the West for ideas, Ray brought Indian folk art motifs and calligraphic lettering into his advertising. Writers on his work describe this as a fresh, Indian look in a field that still followed colonial models.

He was fascinated by typography in both Bengali and English. Over the years he designed several typefaces for the Roman alphabet, and two of them, Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre, won an international competition in 1971.

Book covers and the road to Pather Panchali

A senior colleague at the agency, D. K. Gupta, started a publishing house called Signet Press and asked Ray to design its book jackets. In 1944 Gupta planned an abridged edition of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novel Pather Panchali and asked Ray to illustrate it. Ray had not read much Bengali literature before this work, and designing covers gave him the chance to read widely. Gupta remarked that the book would make a good film.

In 1950 the agency sent Ray to its London office. There he watched 99 films in a few months and, on the voyage home, worked on the script for Pather Panchali. The film was released in 1955, and its poster, which he designed himself, framed a photograph of the children in a folk-style circular pattern inspired by alpana floor designs.

He never stopped designing. He took charge of the posters and publicity for his own films, drew storyboards for his scenes, and in 1961 revived Sandesh, illustrating it and creating Bengali lettering for it. Late in life he wrote that he had never taken his graphic work seriously, yet designers still study and admire it today.

His film posters broke with the usual style of the time. Instead of hand-painted pictures of film stars, he tried to capture the feeling of each story, using woodcuts, linocuts, scraperboard, pen and ink, cut-out heads, expressive lettering and photography. He had studied the work of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson closely, and his son Sandip has described him shut in his study, drawing, colouring and joining images until each artwork was ready for the printer. For Pather Panchali he even designed a neon sign of the two children running, placed in a busy part of the city.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was craft through daily work. Thirteen years of briefs, deadlines and printed pages gave Ray a working knowledge of layout, lettering and image that he carried into cinema.

The second was drawing from his own culture. He used alpana patterns, folk motifs and Bengali calligraphy instead of copying foreign styles, and that is what made his work stand out.

The third was planning visually. He sketched scenes before shooting them and designed every poster by hand. Thinking on paper first is a habit any designer can build.