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After working in the industry for 12 years both in India and abroad, Roshnee Desai, founder of LOCAL and Local Labs, wanted to come back to her roots and create something that would bridge the gap between international design standards and the indigenous design crafts of India.
“When I was working, I felt that we were only looking at the internet for inspiration and trying to replicate what was happening outside India. So, every café in Mumbai looked like a café in New York, and globalisation is making every brand look bland and generic. However, we, in India, have a deeply visual culture of our own. If you take a walk down any street, you will find 20 different things to be inspired by,” says Roshnee, who has worked in the past as a designer and brand consultant with leading brand studios both in India and abroad.
So, when she started LOCAL, her aim was to navigate graphic design in a way that was embedded in the social reality of India. She wanted to uncover how her own countrymen communicated through word, imagery and semiotics and use this knowledge to design better brands and communication in India.
“Each country proudly owns and evolves its graphic design aesthetic. But when I started LOCAL, 3 years ago, I found that Indian graphic design had kind of stopped at ‘HORN OK Please’ and the kitsch; this bothered me a lot. I knew I had to find a way to evolve Indian graphic design to a more global standard.”
“There is so much to study here. If you look at the colours of building in Kerala versus those in Maharashtra, they are completely different. And there’s a reason that is there. There’s a taste that is developed in those places. What red means to us and what red means to a westerner, or what red means to a Bengali versus what red means to a Maharashtrian are completely different.”
Often we condescendingly look upon our design sensibilities as ‘kitsch’, and forget about the thousands of years of culture and civilisation which have actually enriched us, and from which we have consistently drawn our sense of aesthetics.
“We are unafraid to use 30 different colours and make it look great in one piece of communication, while textbook graphic design tells us ‘less is more’.” says Roshnee.
She feels that these are the kinds of nuances that the western brands who come to India do not understand. More often than not, they almost patronizingly put something according to their own idea of what India is. That’s because no one here has created a compendium to help people understand what ‘our’ idea of India is. And hence she started another vertical for the company called LOCAL Labs in January 2020.
While they had been doing ‘culturally researched’ work for brands since 2017 via LOCAL, it was difficult for them to deep dive into researching the design topics they loved due to the usual client deadlines and pressures.
So, they started the design and research wing of LOCAL called LOCAL Labs, which is more of a deep dive into graphic design in India.
Collaboration with British Designer, Patrick Thomas
LOCAL Labs’ first project was a collaboration with British designer Patrick Thomas’s Open Collab project. Two 8-hour online sessions were held - the first theme was ‘Locality’ and the second was ‘Local Businesses’.
The auto-generative design project was a web-based session that allowed someone from Gujarat and someone from Tripura to co-create a poster via this platform. Home-quarantined designers were addicted to these all day sessions. With 300 participants per session, participants came up with a whopping five lakh posters for each topic!
The Indian Graphic Design Story
“Since there is a lack of books and resources on Graphic Design in India”, says Roshnee, “Indian graphic design students and the industry has had a hard time evolving and understanding our long history of visual culture.” Therefore, LOCAL began the Indian Graphic Design Story to bring to light the rich history of design embedded in India’s heritage and culture, most of which we are oblivious to, despite it surrounding us everyday. “Essentially, what we want to do is create an open-sourced and crowdsourced online archive of graphic design research. It’s a lofty goal, but someone’s gotta do it.”
Roshnee roped in Kevin Angelus, the creator of the project Indian Ephemera to collaborate on this project. Together, they research and document, Indian graphic design, one topic at a time. So far, they have covered ‘Indian Candy Graphics’, ‘Indian Vehnicle Stickers’ and ‘ Indian Political Murals.’
However they are determined to not keep this a sole effort. They have opened up the research to get contribution from the larger design community in India. Every month they announce a topic. Their Instagram followers (mostly designers) and LOCAL Lab members are notified of it and given a link to a folder. Designers from all over India can upload any data, research or artefact they may have about that topic on this link.
“This makes this entire process more democratic and collaborative. It also moves the onus from just one design studio’s opinion to a project, the entire graphic design community in India can feel a part of.”
As part of the research, they also interview ‘non-designer’ folks asking them about the impact of the graphic design subject topic of the week. They call this section LOCAL Awaaz.
Once, they interviewed an ex-Kerala MLA, who had used hand-painted wall graphics to campaign throughout his career, for insights into their ‘Indian Political Murals story’.
For the candy graphics, they interviewed four generations of Indians who grew up eating various local candies.
“We even had a 94-year-old reminiscing about pre-partition candies as part of this conversation,” says Roshnee.
Through such local initiatives, LOCAL continues to make an attempt to appropriate indigenous designs into mainstream designing in India, so that these are brought into light for further study and research. Freeing Indian graphic design from the clutches of foreign influences, this project is an attempt at decolonising graphic design, whilst educating people about the same.
You can follow LOCAL labs here.
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