Blur: Do you have a definitive process while creating? Are there any habits or rituals that help you get into a creative mindset?

Khyati: I write a lot. It helps to sit down with a cup of coffee, and play out the brief and rewrite it in my own words. Language is a really good tool for me to brainstorm wide ‘what ifs.’ I also like to flesh out all the obvious directions first so that I can get to the meatier ones sooner. Huddling with people and thinking out loud in a group is another way that gets me going.

Blur: What comes first for you as a multidisciplinary artist, the art or the medium?

Khyati: If I had to answer this question a few years ago, I’d say, the art of course. Jump cut to now, where tools are evolving before we know what to use them for, a lot of projects are scoped around exploring the medium; how a tool can add value in the creative process or take you somewhere new.

Blur: How has your artistic style evolved over the years, and how do you view this evolution?

Khyati: I’ve been in this business for a while, and if I were to place my corpus of work on a timeline, in addition to refinement that’s bound to come with all that practice, my recent work is maybe more comfortable with abstraction and entering conceptual territories. I also use the very vague squint-test-y metric of ‘does this feel right’ more now than I did when design was new to me. 

Blur: Has there been a pivotal project in your career that has impacted you personally or professionally?

Khyati: I’m going to sound like a broken record because, despite being a decade old, this project always surfaces in interviews like these! The Beauty of scientific diagrams taught me how powerful making connections between seemingly unrelated things can be, especially when the audience to the work sees it too and is awed by it. It also showed me that design and non-design interests can intersect in personal projects.

Blur: When working with major brands like Google, Apple, and Adobe, how do you adapt your style to align with their identities while preserving your unique artistic voice?

Khyati: Sometimes, I’m explicitly asked to maintain my artistic voice. For example, the project for Adobe was to explore Adobe dimension and make a tutorial to help others make 3D art with the tool, however I’d like. The Oscars project was similar. The academy asked me to re-imagine the statuette around my point of view on the immersive power of movies, in my own style. And sometimes, like at Google that has a strong visual brand, my voice shows up as the ideas I bring to the table and the visual decisions I make within the gamut of the brand’s visual world.

Blur: Your work often explores the translation of physical objects into the digital realm. What do you foresee as the future of design in this context, especially with the growth of the metaverse?

Khyati: When the term ‘metaverse’ was making the rounds as something that’s coming and is going to change our lives forever, a lot of projects were really just VR wrapped in new casing. Instead, I like to think of it as a philosophy for the way we attach value to things and experiences, rather than a ‘virtual place’. Do we spend money on digital objects in the same way we do physical ones? Do we care about the way we look on screen just as much as care about our appearance in a room full of people? The answer to these questions is yes, we already do, in gaming, social media, AI portraits, and the works. Beyond changing the way the world functions and therefore, how I design for it, as a designer, this also gives me more to design for. For example, I was brought on to help model a 3D stage for a virtual music concert. More recently, I partnered with Its Nice That and Conran shop to reimagine a classic furniture piece from Conran’s collection for an immersive installation exhibited at the London Design Festival. These are just a few projects that wouldn’t have made the rounds a few years ago.

Blur: Having worked in both Delhi, Germany and New York, what are some key differences and similarities you’ve observed in the design industries of these cities?

Khyati: The first notable difference is that New York is very contemporary art forward, with art schools, government funding and safe public spaces to host events. Getting a coffee and walking over to a gallery is a common way to spend a Sunday afternoon, regardless of whether you’re explicitly art-inclined or not. The Indian art landscape with public art projects like St.art, India art fair, Kochi Biennale, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai Urban art festival and Serendipity art festival in Goa amongst others, democratise the discipline to a large extent. There’s still a gallery culture gated by PR guest lists, which makes access a case of who knows who. Indian craft and heritage of course knows no match.

Work hours in India and the US are similar, with different motivations though. There's guilt induced around leaving at the contractually obligated time and not working extra hours (an old Indian boss once said, “It’s not dark out yet, how can you leave?”). Getting work pings during vacations is super common. Key difference here though: in the US, you often get paid for overtime. As companies grow larger in the US, work hours tend to align more with Europe’s healthier work culture.

Hierarchical systems in India tend to have many more tiers in the ‘management’ culture and farther degrees of separation, especially in bigger companies. The studios I’ve worked at in both Germany and the US have been relatively flat, if not in roles and structure, definitely in the way work days feel. In a flat system where there aren’t so many meetings to go through or people in multiple tiers to convince, good ideas are more likely to make their way to the top sooner. Organizations understand the value of design here much more than they do in India. While that’s clearly changing in India, you still need to save a few slides at the beginning of the deck to explain how design can help the client’s business, way before getting to the ideas themselves.

The last palpable difference is that American culture is quite individualist; everyone wants their individual contributions to be seen and appreciated, and people are just way more comfortable with talking about their achievements and placing themselves on a pedestal. Indian work culture is more collectivist and values humility, and a lot of ‘doing business’ in the industry is about building relationships.

Blur: What aspect of your artistic career brings you the most satisfaction, and why?

Khyati: I love beginnings, and I get to have so many of them every time I do a new project. My job at the start is literally to dream up possibilities and think wide. It feels like there’s a surprise waiting in what we end up making. I particularly enjoy how arriving at the right vessel or metaphor to communicate in editorial illustrations feels like you're trying to solve a puzzle.

Blur: What role does the environment play in your work or in fueling your creativity?

Khyati: When I’m working on my own, the environment doesn’t matter much. I just need peace and quiet. I’m inspired by the people around me more than places or things. My best work happens when I’m in ‘yes and’ kind of teams, where everyone’s comfortable sharing ideas and building on each other's directions without being too precious about their own.

Blur: If you were to collaborate with other artists outside of your discipline, what is one collaboration you would love to do?

Khyati: I don’t know how filmmakers do what they do. I admire the scale of production and the conviction in your own vision to direct a big team and tell a good story, especially in contrast to the discipline of graphic design where a lot can happen in small teams and spaces. I’d love to learn from and collaborate with a filmmaker on a feature length film. A project like that would flex motion and world building muscles in a totally new capacity.