Crafty work

Hey Audrey!

I wanted to show you some of the work I did whilst working at Ishan Khosla Design in New Delhi. We were briefed to design a logo for Sangam, a three year program focusing on design collaboration between India and Australia. The intriguing part of the brief was that the logo had to be traditionally handcrafted by one of the artisans participating in the Kala Raksha project. We started off by doing in-depth research into all the types of traditional handicraft and embroidery used in the Kutch district. The logos ended up being very detailed, and it was a challenge to imagine that every shape I drew in Illustrator would end up being stitched. Unfortunately I wasn't in India long enough to travel to the Kutch district to see my logo design being hand crafted, but Ishan documented the whole process on his blog. I love the end result on the Sangam website!

Initial designs using patchwork

These logos were presented as alternative options to the Sangam client. I included a reference to a specific artisans work that I had based that design on.

A screen shot of my Illustrator file showing the detail of the design.

Stages of crafting the final logo. The shapes had to emulate the Rabari embroidery stitching, but the letters still had to stand out.

This was the design that we worked with. Getting the first three letters right took me about a week!

The final logo implemented on the website. The colours I used initially were tweaked to be more "Australian."

The street where I lived

Hey Audrey!

A whole three months later, I am showing you the last photo I took in New Delhi, just before getting into a taxi to go to the airport. Those are our street cows, showing me their bums because they don't care that I am going home. And there is the gentleman that spends his days sweeping rubbish onto heaps just for the wind to blow it all over again. He lived in a little hut in an alley, I honestly don't know how he slept in there. One night he nearly spat on me. He didn't hear me coming down the alley, but fortunately he cleared his throat before spitting, so I waited for the fluid projectile to fly past before walking on.