Axis Bank — Prineeth Ramachandra

Visual overview to be added

Overview — breadth across verticals

Visual system audit to be added

Visual system audit — inconsistency as found

Research artefacts to be added

Research artefacts — perception mapping across 12 institutions

Framework diagrams to be added

Strategic framework — core vs. contextual elements

Sound design research to be added

Sound design — emotional response to transactions

Sound architecture visuals to be added

Sound architecture — hierarchy across seven touchpoints

Game design visuals to be added

Project Olympus — financial literacy game

Workshop documentation to be added

Design advocacy — workshops across functions

Subzero site visuals to be added

Subzero — design system narrative

Premium packaging to be added

Premium segment packaging and collateral

L&D curriculum visuals to be added

L&D curriculum and organisation-wide training

Reflections visual to be added

Reflections — working across scales

Project

Three years at India's third-largest private bank — first as an intern, then consulting, now full-time. The team sits somewhere between a design studio and a corporate function, which means you spend as much time explaining what design is as you do practising it. The work has moved through — and more recently into strategic design, L&D, and packaging for the premium segments.

The starting problem was a brand perceived as premium that needed to become approachable — without losing the premium, which is the kind of brief that sounds simple and is not. An audit across product verticals found illustration, photography and 3D being used for wildly different things, and vendor video that seemed to belong to a different bank entirely. Colour was the most recognisable brand element; props and characters were the most dangerous — easily read as cartoonish, and therefore not serious.

The framework separates : what must stay fixed for recognition, and what can flex per product. On top of that: implementation guidelines for illustration, motion and 3D, a component-based illustration system, motion principles that survive low-end Android devices, and colour systems meeting WCAG AA. The test was not whether it was good — it was whether teams outside design could use it without someone holding their hand.

The absence of sound was a gap nobody asked me to fill. Sixteen interviews on emotional response to financial interactions found that a surprising number of people carry genuine anxiety about whether a transaction went through. That gave the work its first target: the . The architecture is hierarchical — primary, secondary, tertiary — with signature motifs for recognition and functional sounds for feedback, built with sound designers and audio engineers, rolled out in three phases across seven touchpoints.

Olympus was a financial literacy game designed over three years and then shelved. I took it out of the drawer — which, it turns out, makes you responsible for it. It needed a mechanical, aesthetic and dynamic overhaul: a rebuilt acquisition flow, a learning path balancing entertainment against educational outcome, and progressive difficulty that adapts to how a player is actually doing.

The harder, slower work — and the work I keep returning to — is advocacy. Teams outside design did not know a motion and illustration system existed, or that anyone was maintaining it. I designed a workshop programme and role-specific material connecting design principles to what each function actually does, with a measurement framework tracking whether anyone was using the system at all. The was rewritten not as documentation — which was already fine and still unpersuasive — but as a narrative about how design systems actually work between the people who build them and the people who use them.

The role has since grown into packaging design for the bank's premium credit cards and L&D curriculum reaching over a hundred thousand employees. Those are different design challenges — the materials are processes and incentive structures rather than pixels — but the core of it is the same: making something complex feel clear without making it simple.

What three years teach you: advocating for design across functions is harder than you expect, and evidence moves people where enthusiasm does not. Zooming between strategy and pixels is exhausting in a way I have come to enjoy. And working end-to-end is where I do my best work — for better or worse, because it means I never really stop.

Grey plates stand in for visuals to be added. Exact metrics omitted for confidentiality.