Listicle: 10 designers behind the visuals you love

Wani’s bright eye-popping palette, fat squiggly letters and peppy Instagrammable props have made Lollapalooza India seem like fun even to those who haven’t attended the festival. His studio also crafted the look and feel of Sunburn 2025’s Underwater Ocean Symphony stage and the overrun garden city theme of Bengaluru’s Bandland last year. He admits that nothing comes close to designing the Team India cricket jerseys for the 2024 T20 World Cup.

The Delhi-based graphic designer and artist is why Delhi’s Perch Wine & Coffee Bar and Smoke House Deli, Mumbai’s Americano, and Bengaluru’s Champaca Bookstore Library & Café have such a trendy, welcoming vibe. Monga, who runs Turmeric Design, fashions everything, from the menu, the typeface, and wallpaper. For Champaca, she crafted a forest-themed look (deer logo, olive green tones) and even picked the name, inspired by Bengaluru’s summer bloom.

Remember that bold, blocky, glossy text on the thumbnail of Spotify’s I-pop icons playlist? It’s the work of designer Mira Felicia Malhotra’s Mumbai-based studio. Malhotra’s work always has a bold, feminist edge. She goes for vibrant neons, characters with strong features, bodies that take up space. The firm has also done Snapchat and Instagram stickers for Diwali, mythology-themed book covers, and a T-shirt collab with Nike.

Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Patric Gagne’s Sociopath: A Memoir, John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars, and the entire Rachel Cusk collection — the white, minimalist, picture-heavy style dominates the NYC designer’s portfolio. Corral treats the creative process almost as an act of cinematography. “You are the reason why I buy these books,” an Instagram user commented on his Insta post. Hard relate.

The children’s book illustrator says her creations — exaggerated, larger-than-life, and comical — are the product of an “overactive imagination”. Chaves’s characters include Gopi the dog from Sudha Murty’s The Gopi Diaries series, the little pastry chef Pinkoo Shergill, and the people in Ruskin Bond books. They’re what kids growing up today associate with leisure, summer holidays and book fairs.

Every WhatsApp user has been through a respond-with-a-sticker phase. In 2020, one of the packs everyone obsessively used was Shen’s Fearless and Fabulous — women sending finger guns, flying kisses, and rolling their eyes. Shen, an LA-based author and illustrator, says she’s “always dreamt of creating magical things”. You can see it in her gouache-themed food sketches and her limited-edition Disney fashion collabs.

If you’ve seen these, you’ve probably made one too many late-night decisions. The Gurugram artist’s illustrations (over 30) are all over the brand’s brown-paper packaging. Kruty, who calls herself a “full-time intern”, posts BTS Reels about her digital doodling process. Our favs from her designs: The Christmas, Valentine’s, and travel essentials themes.

How could a lime-green square with a single word in Arial font spawn a meme fest and even influence a US presidential campaign? Freaney worked on Charlie XCX’s 2024 album Brat. That lazy-looking design took more effort than a glam, airbrushed stock image. Freaney and his team sifted through 500 shades of green for it. “I wanted to go with an offensive off-trend shade of green to trigger the idea of something being wrong,” the singer has said in interviews.

Khatri has created poster art for Animal, Jewel Thief, Sikandar, Housefull 5, and Tiger Shroff’s upcoming Baaghi 4. Do you sense a pattern here? Dimly lit surroundings, fine dust signifying an explosion, smoke and blood. The artist, who has been designing movie and TV-show posters for over 20 years, loves textured lighting to deliver a sense of drama.

The Bengaluru illustrator’s art has shown up in Google Doodles, street art, and murals as far apart as Tamil Nadu, Belgium, Sri Lanka and Milan. Much of her work is about interior scenes — domestic life, a terrace at night, quotidian clutter. “I’m drawn to the elements that often sit in the background of our lives,” she says in a social media post. In 2023, she took over a facade in the Lodhi Art District, turning it into a colourful mural that represented six global goals for sustainable development. So iconic.