CAFÉ DECOR POSTERS
Illustration • Graphic Design • Handlettering • South Indian Cuisine • Cafe Decor • Poster Design • Tamil
For the inauguration of a new South Indian café, the client commissioned a set of four illustrated and hand-lettered posters to display inside the space. The brief was to create visual tributes to four signature offerings of the Sivasakti Café: Boiler Tea, Mallipoo Idli (idli soft as jasmine blossoms), Medhu Vadai, and Filter Coffee.
The posters were to set the tone for the space: warm, rooted in tradition, but open to playful, contemporary expression. In response to this brief, I developed a series of four illustrated posters that blend cultural texture, whimsy and minimalism, evoking the sensory richness of these dishes, along with a hand-lettered title or phrase in Tamil.
TIMELINE
July 2022
ROLE
ROLE
Director, Scenographer, Writer, Singer, Experience Designer
CLIENT
Sivasakti Cafe, Dindigul, Tamil Nadu
SKILLS
Illustrations, Handlettering
TOOLS AND SOFTWARE
Adobe Photoshop
OUTCOMES
Set of four posters for interior display at the cafe, titled, Boiler Tea, Mallipoo Idli (jasmine blossom-like idli), Medhu Vadai and Filter Coffee
PROCESS AND ITERATIONS
I wanted this series of four posters to capture the essence of beloved South Indian staples through a blend of an evocative colour palette, playful character design and a dynamic composition. Beginning with a small dive into photographs of the cuisine to create a moodboard, I familiarised myself with the textures and colours of the subjects. I then created a broad colour palette and a lofi thumbnail of the whole set as it would be displayed.
Next, I experimented with some brushes and treatments of the characters, settling finally upon a semi-realistic, mildly 3D foreground with a flat, minimally textured background. Once the artwork was finalised, I set to work on the words. The client provided some poems for the hand-lettering, but eventually requested the title alone beside the subject. I enjoyed the lettering process and creating lively compositions in my mother tongue, Tamil. The very final additions were the yummy sides of chutneys, sambar and yelakka, which took several iterations to pin down the exact placement of, but made our main characters pop out even better.
REFLECTIONS
This project was thoroughly enjoyable and made me want to explore creating characters more. With typography and hand-lettering being a long-enduring love of mine, I would eventually come back to Tamil letters again in different contexts, but I’d love to do similar free-flowing lettering any day for the blend of intuitive artist/ deliberate designer it brings out.