Building an Identity for a Place That Doesn't Exist.

The competition asked designers to capture the zeitgeist of street culture in India and build a brand around it. The category was left deliberately open. It could have been a clothing label, a footwear brand, a food concept or anything else that felt relevant to the culture.

That openness was probably the most interesting part of the brief.

Rather than trying to define Indian street culture through a particular product, I started thinking about where culture actually comes from in the first place. Brands, styles, music, architecture and art rarely appear from nowhere. They usually grow out of things people are already doing — the way they dress, where they spend time, what they listen to, who they meet and the small choices they make every day.

So instead of asking “What brand represents street culture?”, I asked:

“What kind of place would street culture create for itself?”

That question became the starting point for Pillo.

I imagined Pillo as a neighbourhood bar where a new generation of India's street community could meet. But the bar itself wasn't meant to be the whole idea.

It became the centre of a much larger world — a place where people could gather, exchange ideas, discover music, dress differently, make things and simply spend time together. The identity therefore needed to feel like it belonged to an existing community rather than like a brand that had been carefully manufactured for one.

I wanted it to feel found rather than invented.

Red became the dominant colour because of the energy I associated with the street culture I was trying to capture. It feels immediate, social and expressive.

Rather than building a large colour palette, I kept the system relatively restrained, using red alongside darker and neutral tones. This gave the colour more importance. Red could take over a poster, appear as a small graphic detail on clothing or become part of the physical environment. It also gave the identity a simple visual rule that could hold together a fairly experimental system.

The character became the heart of the identity. I wanted it to represent the way street culture itself comes together — fluidly, organically and sometimes almost haphazardly.

Street culture isn't usually created by a committee. It's a combination of influences, references, personalities and ideas that shouldn't necessarily work together — but somehow do.

That became the thinking behind the character. Its irregular form, loose construction and constantly changing expressions make it feel like something that could have been drawn, altered and passed around within the community.

Rather than creating a polished mascot with one fixed personality, I treated the character as a flexible visual element. It could change shape, appear as an outline, become a solid graphic or interact directly with photography.

The imperfection was the point.

The character ended up being the most distinctive part of the identity — and probably the most divisive too. But that was also what made it valuable.

I didn't want to create something everyone immediately understood. I wanted to create something recognisable enough to belong to Pillo, but open enough for people to interpret in their own way.