The View From Mumbai: Indian packaging design fusing heritage and contemporary culture

The View From... is a new column on It’s Nice That written by a team of international correspondents in major creative cities around the world. Every two weeks we’ll report on the design scene in these cities, exploring the topics that are making an impact on the local creative community there. This week, Payal Khandelwal is reporting from Mumbai.

Drawing from India’s rich history, architecture, art and craft, rituals, and languages (among many other things) in contemporary graphic design can do wonders if implemented and executed in a thoughtful, discerning way. And most importantly, if the references and inspirations are internalised and used as a springboard to create a new, refreshing language.

If you look at one category in particular - food and drinks - there are some packaging design examples that have managed to accomplish this herculean task. In my search, I found some scrumptious sweets, coffee, gin, feni (an exclusive Indian liquor), and local snacks. Each of their brands, created largely by Mumbai-based design studios, merge Indian cultural elements with contemporary design in the best possible ways. I’ve also included two projects that were designed out of Delhi, as the design scene in India often overlaps between major metros. These two designs are for homegrown gin brands – a category that’s experiencing a colossal surge in India and is a huge part of F&B’s creative story right now.

Bombay Sweet Shop is a young, hip brand that looks at Indians’ eternal love for traditional sweets through a new lens of ‘play’. Its goal is to create sweets and snacks that may seem familiar but actually flip the convention through presentation and flavours, which is reflected well in its delicious branding and packaging design work by Please See// – a studio that does a lot of exciting work in the F&B space.

The packaging is filled with maximalism, dazzling colours, unique Indian motifs, and fun illustrations, and often takes cues from established institutions and landmarks in the city. For example, the designs for Indian Cookies box and Barks are inspired from the flora and fauna in Rani Bagh, a pocket of greenery in the heart of Bombay. Some of the design inspiration, including the logo, also came from the Art Deco buildings in South Mumbai.

Another brand, Subko, has a clean, contemporary brand language rooted in its Indian origin. The brand’s identity is a simple tri-script lock up in Devanagari, English, and Urdu languages, which is a configuration adopted from local design systems. Says Aniruddh Mehta, founder of Studio Bigfat which has done the brand identity and packaging design for quite a few Subko coffees and chocolates, “If you google any vintage Bollywood posters, you’ll notice they have a tri-script lock-up. In my view, some things are better re-imagined or repurposed, rather than created new.” The typography-focused visual identity is meant to reflect the diversity of the Indian subcontinent and the three broadly representative cultural components of the region through languages, as per the brand.

Then Subko’s in-house design team has also created some brilliant packaging designs for some of its coffee products like Project Pearl, Subko VLGE, The Spirit Series, etc. which have meaningful indigenous inspirations behind them. Here is a good example: Subko VLGE’s packaging draws inspiration from the visual and ornamental style of the people of Paderu region in Andhra Pradesh, South India where the Subko Co-op initiative (an initiative to empower coffee farmers and their community) has its roots.

Also designed by Studio Bigfat, Feni is synonymous with Goa, the quintessential beach town of India, where it’s exclusively made. The label design for Goenchi (Konkani for ‘of/from Goa’) Feni, founded by first-generation entrepreneurs, evokes the spirit of the city and dives in further into the history and local culture.

Through remarkable, detailed hand-drawn illustrations, the packaging showcases various stages of feni’s production process and celebrates the individuals involved in the process. It also brings in the glass carboys called ‘Garrafãos’ which are integral to Feni’s identity, and are found in a lot of Goan homes.

For Indians, train journeys are often associated with memories of travel, sense of adventure, and aromas of different local foods wafting at each station. Thought Over Design has applied this insight to Pattri, a regional brand that sources and offers famous local snacks from all across the country. The brand name comes from the hindi translation of ‘railway tracks’. The colour palette and typography are inspired by the dual coloured Indian trains and stencilled type associated with the Indian Railways.

For the packaging, various artists have created bespoke, handmade watercolour illustrations that bank on nostalgia and an instant association with the place where the snack comes from – represented in terms of the landscapes, spirit of the place, moments of consumption, or hyperlocal anecdotes. All this infused a sweet, vintage vibe into the design.

Another packaging design that stood out for me is Kalkandu, by studio Local, for its reimagination of classical South Indian paintings, typography, and colours. Kalkandu is a luxury South Indian snack brand in Singapore, targeted at the Indian Diaspora. The Local team found inspiration for the project in the personal histories of families of South India, including Tanjore paintings, a classical South Indian painting style, but with their own spin on it. They took traditional art forms of gold foiled paintings and created their own non-religious characters from it to build the world of Kalkandu.

The surrounding world of South India was used to bring in the local context into the design. The inspirations included colour combinations used in Athangudi tiles (handmade tiles from the region with traditional patterns and designs), bilingual signages that are common in South India, and the hand-painted sweet shops’ signs in Chennai city.

Meanwhile, the Indian market is packed with some really good homegrown gins right now, such as Tāmras. Being from a storytelling background (screenwriter and producer) and inspired by their various Europe trips, the clients themselves came up with the idea of making the Greek mythology lore of ‘Lotus-Eaters’ a part of the Goa-based Tāmras gin’s narrative, shares Anant Ahuja – co-founder and managing partner of Irregulars Alliance, which designed the brand.

The ‘lotus-eater’ theme of course meant to inspire the idea of a good, relaxed time. The theme became a part of the packaging through dreamy, intricate illustrations that built a story based on the theme. The city of Goa found its way into the design through colours and styles uniquely extracted from the ubiquitous Azulejos tiles in the city, Anant tells us. The entire design was then directly screen printed on the bottle.

Another brand surfing the gin wave in India is Terai by Quick Brown Fox. Hanumant Khanna, founder and creative lead at the studio, shares though, “When we were approached by the client, the gin surge hadn’t really started in India but there was a sense that it was going to be the next big thing. We wanted to create a new, authentic language for Terai where the Indian elements have depth and meaning and are not used just for the sake of it.”

A set of vintage coins, found in the client’s family collection, became a part of the design through sculptural emboss to represent the botanicals in the gin. The faceted design of the bottle is inspired by hand carved pillars found in ancient Indian architecture and artifacts. And then comes the most interesting part of the packaging – ‘craft’ in this case was interpreted as ‘Indian Craft’ which involves knowledge and skill being passed down from generation to generation to create things of beauty and utility, as Hanumant says. After much research, the traditional craft of Channapatna toys (manufactured in the town of Channapatna in South India) was chosen to create handcrafted stoppers for the bottles, made of ivory wood and colored with natural vegetable dyes. The result of all this is an appealing, authentic look that seamlessly incorporates culture.

Whether you’re in Mumbai or want to find out more about its design scene, Payal’s got you covered, with some creative recommendations in the city and online.

• Enthucultlet is a digital magazine of unusual food stories from India published by Hunger Inc. Hospitality, the company behind some highly popular Mumbai restaurants like Bombay Sweet Shop, Bombay Canteen, O Pedro, and Veronica’s.

• The TypeWalks conducted in different parts of Mumbai by typographer and type designer, Tanya George, are a fantastic way to spot and know more about the signages and letterforms of the city’s various institutions, restaurants, local shops etc.

• Conceptualised and designed by Bombay Duck Designs, the Everyday India book is a unique, well-researched illustrated documentation of Indian visual culture. As the makers say, “it is a collection of iconic, nostalgic, familiar, unfamiliar, accidental and intentional graphic design”.

• While it’s easy to find recommendations about the most popular or trendiest places to eat in Mumbai, this recent list by Architectural Digest India spotlights some iconic restaurants that capture the essence of what ‘Bombay’ (as the locals still like to call it) is and reflect its different moods.