The Edit: five projects including Sthuthi Ramesh’s modular identity for the South Asia Gallery

Each and every day, we're lucky to discover dozens of interesting and inspiring projects from around the world. From global identities and campaigns to side projects and independently published books, The Edit is home to five of them; every two weeks. The South Asia Gallery, located in Manchester Museum, is the UK’s first permanent gallery that celebrates the experiences and contributions of the South Asian diaspora. Presenting displays from the British Museum alongside Manchester’s best South Asian collections, the landmark project gives visibility to stories and cultures; curating them through an authentic South Asian lens. As part of the visual identity, London-based designer Sthuthi Ramesh teamed up with Universal Thirst to create a bespoke typeface that not only resonates with the diasporic journey from South Asia to Manchester but also supports multilingual characters. She drew from a modular type specimen developed in the 1930s by Gujarati Type Foundry, creating a dual-coloured stencilled typeface that brings the gallery’s story and vision to life without falling back on South Asian design stereotypes. The ingenious typeface supports seven South Asian scripts: Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Latin, Tamil, and Urdu – all of which are present within the gallery’s wordmark. The vegan cheeses of today are unrecognisable compared to their early iterations as tasteless, rubbery chunks. Better yet, vegan cheese brands such as IN+U are created with groundbreaking technology, ensuring their vegetable cheeses are made with high levels of proteins whilst tasting genuinely like cheese. Their branding and packaging, designed by brand strategy and design agency FUNKY captures their progressive, health-forward and mindful focus. The colour palette features pastels to convey a feeling of ‘lightness,’ whilst a zingy bright green catches the eye – chosen to give a sense of the product’s innovation. A series of pleasant character illustrations, clad in lab coats, reinforce the scientific theme of IN+U alongside a subtle grid; serving as a visual metaphor for diets and eating habits.