Abhishek Chaudhary makes software look obvious in Berlin, then goes home and makes Bollywood look strange

Bollywood poster design has a house style, and it has had it for decades. The faces are large. The faces are the point. Whatever else happens on the canvas happens around the arrangement of stars, sized by billing, lit like they are about to say something important.

Abhishek Chaudhary's version of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara has no faces at all. It has four block letters, a strip of turquoise, and a set of line-drawn bulls hanging from parachutes, which is a very economical way of describing a film about three men who go skydiving and then run with the bulls in Spain. You have to think for a second. That second is the entire product.

Two disciplines pulling opposite ways

The duality here is unusually clean, because the two halves want contradictory things. Product design, his day job in Berlin, exists to remove friction. A good interface is one nobody notices; the whole craft is the disappearance of effort, and the measure of success is that a stranger gets it instantly with no thought at all.

The posters do the reverse on purpose. They withhold. They take a film that a billion people can already picture and refuse to show you the thing you expect, so that recognition arrives a beat late and lands harder for the delay. Same person, same eye for composition, aimed at the opposite outcome.

The training explains some of it. He went to the College of Art in Delhi first, then to IDC at IIT Bombay: fine art, then design, in that order rather than the reverse. It is the sequence that produces someone who can build a clean product surface without believing that clean is the only thing worth being.

Redrawing home from three thousand miles away

There is a second thing running under the project, which is that he is doing this from Berlin. These are the films of home, reinterpreted at a distance, by someone who has enough space from them to see their shapes rather than just their stars. Diaspora art usually goes sentimental. This goes dry and funny instead, which is a harder and more affectionate register.

The style he describes on his own site is contemporary, abstracted, crisp strokes, and the poster work is where that gets its best material: the source is maximalist and famous, and reduction is the joke. The Hindu wrote it up this August, which is the sort of coverage that tends to arrive once a personal project has quietly become a body of work.

Go look at the ZNMD one first, then find a film you love and see what he did to it. The good ones make you slightly annoyed that nobody drew it this way the first time.

The Hindu wrote about how I'm adding a quirky punch to movie posters. Go give it a read.

Abhishek, announcing his own press with admirable brevity