Designing for an ever-connected world is no mean feat. What one audience deems chic, another may see as dull, making it impossible to impress everyone. The result? A homogenised, minimalistic design world built to be as universally palatable as possible, at the expense of culture, style and meaning. But not all is lost; some creatives are fighting back.
Mumbai-based creative agency Mother Tongue Design defies categorisation, employing a strategy-first approach shaped by one core principle – culture. To understand more about Mother Tongue's approach to design, I caught up with founder Shruti Singhi to discuss the danger of globalised neutrality, the value of authenticity, and what the Western world can learn from India's rich creative tradition.
Why is culture so important to Mother Tongue Design?
Because culture is the root system beneath a brand, and a brand without cultural grounding is like a tree with no roots. It looks fine for a while, but it has nothing to hold it when things get difficult, and nothing feeding it to help it grow.
We build brands from life as it's actually lived, and we’re deeply influenced by food, travel, music, play, sound, memories and rituals, and this reflects in some of our work done for brands like Vahdam, Forest Essentials, P•TAL, among others. The brands we find most interesting are the ones that carry all of those dimensions in them, so they can be felt and experienced. And that's what makes a brand grow over time.
Why is globalised neutrality so bad for branding?
Because in trying to speak to everyone, it ends up saying nothing to anyone. The drift towards muted palettes and minimal everything is great, but it's safe, and for us, safety isn't the same as strength. What you're actually doing is removing from a brand the very things that make it memorable and meaningful. And when you strip out culture in pursuit of international appeal, you get a hollow brand.
A brand that doesn't know where it comes from can't convincingly communicate where it's going. We believe that the brands that will matter over the next decade will be the ones that embrace meaning, and meaning is always, at its core, cultural.
How do you capture authentic culture in a brand identity without it feeling forced?
You have to go beneath the surface. The real work is asking different questions altogether, like what does this community actually value? How do they celebrate, how do they aspire, what makes them feel seen?
With P•TAL, for example, we didn't start with what the branding should look like; instead, we started by asking what truth lives at the heart of this craft, how people feel when they hold the metalware and how it responds to both ritual and everyday life. The visual output flows downstream from that. That's why the work ends up feeling lived-in rather than applied.
How does India's creative industry differ from Western design?
We've always worked in layered meaning. Colour in India carries emotion, pattern holds history and language shapes feeling before it shapes thought. We arrive at a visual language through memory (through accumulated, embodied experience), and that gives our work a particular kind of density.
I think what's distinct about the Indian creative tradition is that we've never had the luxury of simplicity for simplicity's sake. We've always had to hold complexity, be it linguistic, regional, historical, sensory and find a way to make it feel cohesive. That muscle, built over centuries, is something you feel in the work. It's specific and rooted and tends to carry more than one meaning at once. That's not better or worse than other traditions; it's just a different starting point. And right now, I think it's a particularly valuable one.
What can the Western design world learn from India's creative industry?
That specificity is not a limitation, and the instinct to generalise/neutralise/make something palatable to the broadest possible audience actually weakens a brand. The most resonant brands in the world are extremely specific and feel like they come from somewhere.
India's creative tradition has always understood this. We've had to hold complexity and translate it into something that communicates clearly. That capacity for layered, multidimensional thinking is transferable, and I think it's only becoming more relevant as audiences get better at sensing when a brand is real and when it isn't.
And it goes both ways. The clarity and economy with which Western brands present an identity (that directness) is something we've been learning from too. I think we in India have started understanding that and looking at how we represent our culture in a way wherein we pick up the simplistic codes so that it is easily digestible by a larger audience. The most interesting work coming out of India right now holds both cultural depth and communicative precision. That's the combination worth paying attention to.
Anything to add?
Just this, that I think we're at an inflexion point. For a long time, the measure of a sophisticated brand was how much you could strip away. Now people are hungry for something real, something that knows what it is, where it comes from, and why it exists.
Authenticity has become the actual competitive advantage. And it's one that studios like ours have been built for. Our work at Mother Tongue is deeply embedded in the Indian context while engaging with contemporary global culture. For us, it's always been about shaping authentic brands that are distinct, resilient and built to evolve.
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