"Good design starts with having the right brand message," says Rajesh Kejriwal

The theme for this year's Designyatra is 'What if?', thus keeping the door widely open for various moot points, any particular reason for doing so?
Designyatra’s greatest strength is the open door policy, which brings people from different fields with divergent viewpoints together in one place. We want to encourage cross-pollination on many levels, across industries, between students, young professionals and senior creative, and even within departments of an organisation, so that agencies, marketers, designers and managers don’t continue to work in their traditional silos.

According to you what will be the highlights of this year's event? Any particular sessions or speakers that should entice the representatives of the Indian print fraternity.
I can’t be partial to a few speakers, because the truth is, the speakers' list is curated and not randomly chosen or chosen basis connections or relations – every one of them has been carefully selected and has a completely unique perspective. Each will appeal to a completely different audience. There are of course names like Ajaz Ahmed of AKQA, and Ivan Chermayeff, a graphic design legend, who have dedicated fan followings. But then there are speakers from Silent Studios, Naked and MIT Media Lab who will amaze people as well.

How important is it to have a good design for a popular brand's printed product?
Good design starts with having the right brand message and finding the best way to communicate it. After that, it’s building a strong visual language around the brand and adapting and applying it for different mediums, so it is not limited to print. The future will be about having a strategic design approach that aligns the overarching efforts of branding, enterprise architecture, and experience design, and sets them on a common course to shape tomorrow's enterprises. 

A recent example that comes to your mind wherein a popular brand Image has been created for the print media and how the brand benefitted from it?
The Whitney Museum identity designed by Experimental Jetset is definitely one such example. It is simple, bold and reminds us that print can be exciting and dynamic. For the brand, it gave it a fresh, modern personality and opened the museum to new audiences. The second, in some ways and closer to your publication, could be the dynamic identity for Mohawk Papers designed by Michael Beirut of Pentagram

Which technological trends are you keeping an eye on?
There are a lot of designers playing around with displays, using them as a surface. Some of the speakers at Designyatra are doing some really interesting, mind-blowing things with technology. For instance, Dhairya Dand from MIT Media Lab has designed a flexible screen that can be pinched and pulled. On the other hand, Tim Malbon of Made by Many tries to find ways to integrate technology seamlessly into our lives, and make it invisible. So I would say that the Intersection of technology and design is something that we are keeping an eye on

Brand differentiation is of essence. What is the best example of differentiation you've seen in the print media?
FMCG is an extremely cluttered area, and brands really have to differentiate themselves in their packaging. Jonathan Ford of Pearlfisher, one of our speakers this year, has worked with brands such as Cadbury and Waitrose, and his packaging design for Lurpak especially serves exactly that purpose.

How frequently do you interact with the technical print production team? What do you discuss - ink, paper, colour?
Practically, every day. I’m in the paper business, which means I am constantly following up with my team, printers and our clients to discuss technical aspects of print production. In fact we call ourselves paper consultants and regularly act as paper plus print consultants to designers – talking on ways paper or print can enhance the visual impact.

For long it has been believed that the end user is blissfully unaware of the aesthetics of design and does not value it. Is that changing and what's the future?
I would rephrase that, to say that people make decisions based on design every single day, but they just aren’t aware of it. In India, we have a tradition of repair and “making-do” with what we have, which is jugaad. This is an example of design that works, which is as important, if not more important than looking good.

At the professional level, there is certainly a change. What is encouraging to note is that designers are playing an instrumental role in companies large and small, whether it’s in-house teams or companies hiring chief creative officers, or a startup working out of someone’s spare room, there are more and more examples of companies acknowledging the pivotal role that designers can play in the success of a business – there are businesses who now have designers as part of their strategy team. We may need to be a little more patient to see these changes come to fruition. After all, we are a nation of a billion, and changing that many minds is bound to take time!