Aditi Jain - Textile Designer in Chennai, India

We are happy to present you our with with Shanthi Chandrasekar about folkloric graph theory of kolams. This collaboration started during…

Mathematics of kolam: folkloric graph theory

https://liubauer.medium.com/mathematics-of-kolam-folkloric-graph-theory-4b3acc79d5cb

I'm imagining something like the retro prince of persia or lion king home screen /landing page(?).
All those pixelated elements feel like both noise and design haha

I can spin something up for others here to collaborate on as well

reposting cause I want more people in on this and also it's a spinny icon

“Unapologetically maximalists” love that phrase 🤍🤍🤍 and it describes so well all of my Indian (&Pakistani & Bangladeshi) friends

Yesss. My comfy zone is biased towards minimalism, but the expectations are real. I will on occasion meet them lol.
This is a signal. I see potential more than a clear cut answer and I love this.

What I was thinking is probably closer to dense grandmacore and in many ways, anti-IKEA

Khadi as a fabric tends to be minimalist too. You can check the work of Aditi Jain https://www.behance.net/aditijain

We are unapologetically maximalists but you can see glimpses of Indian minimalism in the arts & crafts. For example, Kolam https://liubauer.medium.com/mathematics-of-kolam-folkloric-graph-theory-4b3acc79d5cb

Funnily enough, I was gonna say, it feel's like it's be a maximal kinda minimalism. Maybe a mix of patterns but with a restricted color pallet... 🤔 - I'm not Indian, so take with a pitch of salt, this is just what comes to mind for me. 🤷

A couple of design features I personally think should be part of the overall aesthetic - flat dense elements squeezing in a lot of finer design patterns that have some depth (think temples, tiles), elements that have more than one or a contextual purpose (think jugaad), noise etc

I had a realisation, minimalism comes in flavours. Every culture has their own, Bauhaus feels different from Japanese minimalism.
What would "Indian Minimalism" look like?

Love it! I'll admit I don't have a complete picture of what you're suggesting but in a weird way I kinda get it!?

A non-Indian's perspective is interesting, I thought of a fun exercise where non-native designers imagine what a modern aesthetic would be for different cultures.

This feels like a major contradiction for a culture like ours,
that's exuberant and loud. But I still think it's worth exploring different visual identities across the spectrum.

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