Aditi Kulkarni

Marathi is the official language spoken in Maharashtra, a state in western India. I was also born in Maharashtra and use Marathi to communicate with my family.

Growing Up Bilingual is a three-section editorial that celebrates Marathi and English. It explores my childhood in India, moving to the UK at the age of six and how I grew up in a foreign country with a new language and customs whilst also attempting to preserve my native language, culture and traditions. Through the interactive elements, the reader gets a glimpse into my personal experiences with Marathi and English as well as how both languages have shaped my identity as a bilingual person.

Book covers, like any form of marketing, go through trend cycles as one style catches on and another fades away. As much as the story itself is important, the cover also plays an important role in the selling point of a good book. But the cover design is also subjective, one plot summary can produce countless different design iterations.

This project visualises the space between five books and two of their front cover editions. Through the various layouts, the user is taken on a journey of discovery, seeing the similarities, the differences and the changes as one cover is deconstructed and morphed into another.

This project was the designed element of my dissertation, where I focused on the stereotypical representations of women within the Bollywood film industry.

Films are constantly marketed as being hero led in India because many people still believe a hero is what makes a film successful. I wanted to challenge this biased notion, so for my Element 2, I redesigned the film posters of my case studies. I chose to remove the male protagonists and instead focus on the actresses who, despite playing key roles in the films weren’t always promoted on the posters. Rather than simply photoshopping the women into the existing posters, I decided to do a complete redesign so that each poster had a new identity.