Working with INDICA
A rebrand delivered substantially through animated film — because the core of INDICA is an idea, and ideas are hard to photograph.
The Collaborator
INDICA is one of India's leading Indic institutions — a not-for-profit working across education, scholarship and cultural entrepreneurship, and a central force in what its founder calls the Indic Renaissance. Its work runs through courses, events, publishing, and a network of allied initiatives spanning yoga, bhasha studies and the arts.
Founder Hari Kiran Vadlamani approached us to rebuild the brand and to articulate the idea of INDICA itself on screen. The work is a rebrand delivered substantially through a series of animated films.
How We Made It
INDICA's work is broad — courses, events, research, publishing, a dozen sub-initiatives, each legible on its own and collectively hard to state in a sentence. The rebrand had to find the through-line rather than put a tagline over a list of activities: something that holds whether you arrive through a yoga programme or a language-studies centre.
Animation as the primary medium. The core of INDICA is an idea, not a product or a place, and ideas are hard to photograph. Animation lets the films work at the level of concept — continuity, transmission, revival — without falling back on stock footage of monuments.
Identity derived from the films, not applied to them. Rather than fixing a static identity and animating it afterwards, the visual system is being developed through the films, so the motion language and the brand language are the same thing.
Present-tense rather than reverent. Civilisational subject matter tends toward heavy ornament and sepia. INDICA is a renaissance project, so the identity carries depth without becoming a museum.