Two For One

When Hazel Karkaria and Somesh Kumar realized they had much more in common than an ‘unparalleled love for tea’, the result was By Two Design!

What is the story behind By Two Design?

We’re batch mates from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore where we both pursued a Diploma in Visual Communication. We shared the same ethos of how we’d like to practice design and just genuinely liked working together. A year or two after graduating, we sat and chalked out a little road map to have our own studio in a couple of years.

‘By two coffee’ is a phrase we became familiar with while at Srishti. It seemed to sum up our philosophy of halving everything and working together. Often decisions of how you choose to work are born out of constraints and are more organic than you’d think. Both of us are sort of old school and believed in hard work; the idea of having our own little studio motivated and excited us!

As a young graphic design studio, we had a lot to figure out and somewhere along the line we realized that we wanted to specialize in illustration (analog and digital). Whilst engaging with everyday projects, we’ve always encouraged each other to hone our own skills and learn new ones too. Recently, we added lettering and basic animation (gifs) to our repertoire whilst continuing to specialize in illustration. We’re excited to see where we’ll go with that!

How did you come up with the Perch Project?