Illustration
Indie Indians
Overview
While illustrating a book featuring Indian cities and characters, I noticed that most of the popular image banks lacked authentic and diverse representations of Indians, often offering Westernised visuals. To address this, I created an
open-source illustration library on Figma that allows users to interactively design and customise their own Indian characters.
Approach
I started observing the prints, patterns of clothing attentively on the streets and in movies, researched indigenous clothing from various states of India and sketched many body forms, trying to encapsulate the body very geometrically, such that it can be recreated and stretched to vary in height and weight. The clothes and accessories too were made using the simplest
shapes to invite people to draw graphics as per their needs. There is also a feature to add pictures of one’s own fabric. I often add more contextual characters- movie protagonists, sports figures or new saree drapes and native accessories.
Many of my friends created their own characters, a clothing brand used the project as a teaser for an upcoming collection, and my niece printed her 'My Family' school project using it.
Although this was a small project, it could serve as a delightful feature and valuable addition to UI screens—such as onboarding flows for government applications focused on community duties like account verification, vaccinations, or voter registration.