Insight
Tradition, Today & Tomorrow:
More is More, Exploring the Essence of Indian Design

I think it’s fair to say that many people reading this article right now have at one point or another tried Indian cuisine. Interestingly, it’s a great metaphor for describing Indian design.

You know … that experience where you take a bite and your taste buds are hit with cumin, then coriander, then a slow-building heat, then a cooling yogurt note, then something sweet you can’t quite identify, and before you know it, you’re tasting seventeen different things at once and somehow it all makes wonderfully delicious sense? A cuisine that doesn’t believe in “less is more” when you could have more AND more, where complexity isn’t avoided, it’s the entire point. Indian design?

It’s pretty much the exact same thing. Seriously. While design movements elsewhere often picked a lane -minimalism OR maximalism, traditional OR modern, East OR West- Indian designers said, “How about all of it, simultaneously, preferably in neon colours?”

Let’s start with the obvious: India is culturally exuberant and a sensory tapestry. Visually, culturally, sonically, everything-ly … it’s an assault on the senses in the best possible way.

Walk down any street from Delhi to Mumbai, and you’re bombarded with hand-painted shop signs in multiple scripts, Bollywood posters that treat subtlety as an unworthy concept, absolutely unique truck art that turns logistics into art galleries on wheels, and somehow … despite all logic, it all works together. What initially comes across as pure Chaos, upon further inspection, is more of a visual language that’s been refined over centuries.

What some designers would call “too much.” Indian designers simply call it Tuesday.

Designs Deep Roots

The roots of this aesthetic DNA run deep, really deep. Before there were branding agencies and design studios, India had temple sculptors who displayed a profound understanding of visual hierarchy, miniature painters creating impossibly detailed manuscripts that make contemporary illustrators weep, textile artisans developing patterns so complex they’d break modern design software, and folk artists working in traditions that stretch back centuries. This wasn’t “design” in the professional sense as we tend to know it … it was life, craft, devotion, commerce, all rolled into one.

Independence in 1947 brought a fascinating tension: how do you visually represent a newly free nation with five thousand years of history? The answer, predictably, was messy and magnificent. The government needed symbols, the people needed identity, and designers (most of whom were trained as painters or architects because “graphic designer” wasn’t really a job title yet) stepped up, big-time.

Early post-independence design embraced bold typography influenced by Devanagari script, illustrations borrowed from folk traditions like Madhubani and Warli, and colour palettes that refused to apologize for their intensity. This was design as nation-building, visual communication as cultural assertion. It was a true Renaissance.

In 1961, based on Charles and Ray Eames’s India Report, the government established the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, fundamentally changing how India thought about design education. The Eameses had traveled across India in 1958, meeting craftsmen and women, architects, and industrialists, and recommended that designers could bridge tradition and modernity.

NID became the laboratory where Indian design consciousness was formalized  … not by rejecting craft traditions, but by putting them in conversation with modernist principles. It was basically saying, “Yes, we can have both the kolam and the grid system, thank you very much.”

In 1967, NID designed the visual identity for Indian Airlines, creating a modern, clean logo with a sliding crossbar suggesting motion. This was Indian design finding its professional voice, learning to speak the language of corporate identity while keeping one foot planted in cultural specificity.

But here’s where the story gets really interesting -the hand-painted traditions that formal design education was supposedly replacing refused to die. Bollywood poster artists like S.M. Pandit, BM Gupta, or S. Rehman became legends in their own right, creating works that turned movie marketing into street-level spectacle. These weren’t just advertisements; they were public art that defined urban visual culture for decades.

Heroes the size of buildings, villains dripping with menace, heroines frozen in eternal glamour, all rendered in colours that seemed to vibrate off the canvas. Digital printing has largely replaced hand-painting now, but that aesthetic DNA (the unashamed theatricality, the maximalist composition) … still pulses through Indian visual communication. You can take the poster out of the hand-painting, my friend, but you definitely can’t take the drama out of the poster.

Typography

Typography deserves its own chapter in this story because, for the longest time, it was design’s neglected sibling in India. Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, and Malayalam (Absolutely gorgeous scripts with centuries of calligraphic tradition) were shoved into clunky digital fonts that looked like afterthoughts. The hierarchy was brutal: English was for aspirational design, regional languages were for compliance.

But something shifted in the last decade. Designers started asking a dangerous question: what if we stopped treating Indic scripts as secondary? What if we designed for Devanagari first and English second? The result? Studios like Mota Italic and Ektype created typefaces so expressive, so unapologetically rooted in their script traditions, that they sparked a renaissance. Suddenly, brands realized that designing in Hindi or Tamil wasn’t a compromise … it was a strategic advantage, a way to speak directly to audiences who’d been visually underserved for decades.

Now, let’s talk about the vast iconography, because this is where Indian design gets really interesting. Every culture has its visual shorthand, right? Us Canadians? Well, that’s Maple Leafs & Beavers, of course! Americans have their stars and stripes, Japan has its cherry blossoms and Mount Fuji. India has… everything. Lotus flowers mean different things depending on context. Peacocks. Elephants.

Paisley patterns that originated in Kashmir and somehow permeated the world’s fabric stores. Diyas. Kolam patterns. Truck art motifs. Bollywood melodrama. The challenge for Indian designers isn’t finding cultural symbols to work with … it’s choosing which ones to use without your design looking like a cultural souvenir shop exploded all over your design.

It also goes without saying that one of the most mesmerizing aspects of Indian Design is the truck art phenomenon. Those elaborately decorated lorries crisscrossing the country aren’t just transportation -they’re mobile museums of regional aesthetic preferences. North Indian trucks with their detailed typography, tigers, and eagles. South Indian lorries decked in stylized florals. Every region has its visual vernacular, and truck artists have been documenting and evolving these traditions long before anyone thought to call it “graphic design.”

Contemporary designers are finally paying attention, pulling that energy into commercial work, recognizing that this street-level creativity has always been design, just not the kind that wins international awards.

And we absolutely need to address the script-mixing phenomenon that’s happening right now. Indian designers have become absolute masters at combining multiple writing systems in single compositions without making it look like a ransom note. A poster might have an English headline, a Hindi tagline, a Tamil descriptor, and some decorative Urdu calligraphy, all playing together harmoniously.

This isn’t just technical skill; it’s cultural fluency. It requires understanding how different scripts have different visual weights, different reading patterns, and different emotional resonances. Get it right, and you’ve created something that speaks to India’s multilingual reality. Get it wrong, and … well … you’ve totally made a mess. The best Indian designers make it look effortless.

Sustainable by Design

The sustainability angle is particularly interesting because India’s approach isn’t born from trendy eco-consciousness … it’s rooted in jugaad, that beautiful practice of resourceful innovation born from necessity. Reuse, repair, repurpose -these have always been part of the culture.

Now brands are intentionally designing with these principles at the core. Handmade paper isn’t a luxury choice; it supports artisan communities. Natural dyes aren’t a gimmick; they’re reviving dying crafts (pun absolutely intended by the way). This is sustainability that doesn’t need to announce itself loudly because it’s woven into the very fabric of the design process.

Unlike some global or national brands that slap “eco-friendly” on everything and hope you don’t look too closely, Indian brands doing this work are actually putting their money where their mouth is.

What makes contemporary Indian design so compelling … and occasionally so confusing to outsiders- is its flat-out refusal to choose a single identity. It’s high-context and densely layered with meaning that insiders immediately recognize. A particular shade of saffron isn’t just orange; it’s loaded with religious, political, and cultural significance. The placement of bindis, the style of ornamentation, the choice of motifs … these are all speaking a visual language that’s been developing for millennia. And as India’s global influence grows, as the diaspora expands, more people are learning to read these codes, to appreciate the sophistication embedded in what might look like to the eye of the average Joe or Jane as decorative excess.

The evolution happening right now in tier-two and tier-three cities is going to be fascinating to watch. For too long, Indian design discourse has been dominated by Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. But there are designers in Jaipur creating work rooted in block-printing traditions, in Ahmedabad pulling from textile heritage, in Kerala exploring temple architecture motifs, in Kolkata remixing colonial-era typography. Each region has its own visual vernacular, and as these voices get louder, Indian design is going to become even more deliciously complex and impossible to categorize.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though: Indian design works best when it celebrates its contradictions and the aspects that make it authentic above anything else … rather than fitting other frameworks. A tech startup incorporates truck art typography. A luxury brand channels vintage Bollywood. A government poster uses kolam-inspired geometry. This is synthesis, the same cultural muscle that’s been adapting and transforming for thousands of years. The future is already here, fragmented across design studios, street artists, and digital creators, proving that maximalism can be strategic, that tradition can be radical, that culturally-rooted design can have universal resonance.

I could keep rambling about the genius of Indian Railway’s signage system, or how regional street food brands are creating identities that rival global chains, or the way wedding invitation designers have basically created their own genre of graphic excess … but I’ll spare you.

The work is out there, waiting to be discovered. In the meantime, we did a lot of digging to bring you some of the best examples of what constitutes Indian Design today …  Let them overwhelm you.

Trust me, it’s worth it.

Ibraheem is the Co-founder of station design bureau in Montréal & Seoul.