Multipolis Mumbai: Illustration and the City

Mira Malhotra is a graphic designer, visual artist and founder of Studio Kohl. With ten years of experience, she studied Applied Arts first, and later completed a post-graduate in Graphic Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Mira is also a member of Kadak Collective. She works on design, strategy and visual branding for a variety of select, game-changing clients, including those for social good. In her free time she works on her own graphic art characterized often by humour, wit and the combined experience of being an Indian and the experience of looking at Indianness as an outsider. Her work primarily revolves around image-making, with a variety of themes. She is known for her specific style of hand-lettering; a bright, offbeat colour palette; a visceral use of line; and movement in her works.

As a cartoonist, author and advertising creative director - Cyrus wears many hats (paired with plenty of t-shirts). He has authored and illustrated 2 award-winning books – ‘I Take This Train Too’ & ‘Painful People’. His original comic strip, ‘Zal’, features every Sunday in the newspaper Midday. Based in Mumbai, the city and its people provide the canvas and creative fodder for much of his work. Cyrus likes to stay in touch with creative people and trends, but is firmly against staying in touch with millennial abbreviations and lingo.

Aniruddh Mehta (thebigfatminimalist) is an independent visual artist, graphic designer and art director based out of Mumbai, India. He runs and manages Studio Bigfat, under which he takes up commercial projects and also works closely with the independent music scene in Mumbai. He has worked on projects for brands such as Puma, Redbull, Adidas and recently known for being the design-lead for the title sequence of Sacred Games on Netflix.

Bindu Nair has been a journalist for close to two decades, having started her career with The Pioneer in New Delhi in 2000. Since then, she has worked at companies like Times Now and UK’s Haymarket Media. From 2009, she started writing on design and visual communications, first for Haymarket Media’s advertising and marketing title Campaign India and then as editor of Kyoorius magazine. She later moved to Conde Nast as features editor for Architectural Digest India. Her last assignment was as editor of Beautiful Homes, an online design magazine that she launched for Asian Paints. During all this time, illustration has remained an abiding love, and the evolution of the Indian illustration community is something that she has studied with keen interest over the last eight years. In 2017, she moved from Mumbai to a small town in Kerala to launch her own sustainable womenswear brand called Ela India. She currently spends her time traveling across the country, connecting with independent weaving clusters while continuing to work on documentation projects as a consulting writer. She tweets at @urbanbinsie