Aha! Katha (Tiny Frames, Big Stories)

Publication Design, Illustration

The Media Lab at the Agastya International Foundation

The Client

The Agastya International Foundation is an educational trust and not-for-profit organisation based out of Bangalore. The MediaArts Lab at Agastya’s Creativity Campus teaches young students how to use new media like photography, animation and filmmaking to tell their own stories.

The Brief

The Foundation wanted to showcase the fabulous work done by the young alumni of the programme in a coffee table book that could be shared with a wider audience, including potential investors.

The Thinking

While the final artwork created by each child was unique, thoughtful and lovingly put together, we felt that it was important to also showcase the journey that they took to reach the end outcome. To that end, we decided that the design of the book would be centred around the childrens’ ‘behind the scenes’ process - the experimentation, collaboration and play integral to the creation of their art.

The Visual Approach

The client had assiduously documented the children at work as they developed and executed their ideas. Hand drawn illustrations were woven through these raw, candid and sometimes low-res images to create a colourful, engaging design language.

These illustrations were limited to only a few pages, to support the text that spoke of Agastya’s approach and the history of the lab. The rest of the book was treated as

as a gallery of the student’s artwork, clean and clutter-free.

Collage-style illustrations peppered throughout the book

Illustrated Icons

Pages with the students' artworks were kept simple to allow their work to shine