Indian culture illustration | importance,

Indian culture illustration

Instead, we were learning about Paul Rand's logos or about Massimo Vignelli's New York Subway maps which had no relevance to us culturally or technically."

Nallaperumal, a partner in a Mumbai-based practice November, described the emphasis on Swiss modernist ideals of good design as "design-school propaganda" in a lecture at Hyderabad Design Week.

"We deeply appreciated this work, but it was just purely visual," he told Dezeen. "There was always this disconnect because we never studied the things that we grew up around and were influenced by like Tamil cinema, Hindi cinema, magazines. But why? This is our language."

Documenting visual culture is key

In his talk at Hyderabad Design Week, Nallaperumal showed a typeface that can work in Indian scripts as well as Western alphabets.

In addition Nallaperumal's studio, November, is curating an online archive of graphic design from South Asia. The initiative is one of several efforts to document and share Indian visual culture.

© Provided by Dezeen Limited Avinash Kumar's game-design project is called Antariksha Sanchar

Others include urban research organisation Hyderabad Urban Lab, which last month exhibited a study of Hyderabad's industrial design history at Hyderabad Design Week.

Meanwhile Art Deco Mumbai has been cataloguing the financial capital's beautiful art deco buildings in a bid to encourage their conservation.Recently the Pratt School of Architecture in New York launched its Decolonizing Architectural Pasts and Futures event. These initiatives mark an attempt to shift the discourse away from an anglo-centric or euro-centric viewpoint, and explore more localised solutions.

"Decolonising is a tool to reflect"

"I find decolonising to be a useful tool to reflect on my practice," says Delhi-based designer Avinash Kumar. "I see it as a desire to express oneself as an individual or a group or a region, it's about finding some sort of parity globally."

For seven years, Kumar's own practice Quicksand has been producing Antariksha Sanchar, an ambitious game-design project that also lives as a dance production and a graphic novel. Set in pre-Independence Madurai, it tells the story of a family trying to conquer the challenges of space travel.

Kumar views the project as an effort to decolonise design by practice.

"For me, decolonising is about how to celebrate what we have, to amplify that and translate it globally and confidently across a medium like gaming," he said. "It's about taking it upon yourself to go on a seven-or-eight-year journey to create something that checks all these boxes."

Indian societies "self-organised"