Bengaluru is a food lover’s paradise. But a casual, all-day dining restaurant that elevates Indian street food with rooted design, warm hospitality, and a thoughtfully curated experience? That’s rare. Thelagram set out to change that—celebrating street culture, bringing the thrill of street eats and the warmth of a vibrant desi neighborhood into one unforgettable space. A place where chai meets chatter, chaats meet camaraderie, and flavors meet nostalgia.
Drawing inspiration from iconic Indian street elements, we designed a brand identity that celebrates the vocabulary, flavours, and eccentricities of Indian street culture. We created a brand that wasn’t just about food but instead an immersive cultural experience – A melting pot of India’s iconic street sights, sounds, and flavors—reimagined for today’s crowd.
We created a fusion emblem with a custom desi type, that borrows from rubber stamps and is also reminiscent of the 'National Permit' symbol commonly seen on trucks.
At the heart of the emblem is a hybrid wordmark: Roman letter T fused with a Devanagari 'Maatra' (glyph). This hybrid 'T' visually imbibes street style — creating its own entity through eccentric juxtaposition.
We curated an exhaustive bank of iconic street motifs. This included posters, stamps, matchboxes, road signs, shop signs, tickets, slogans, packaging, and collectibles. We then remixed or reimagined some elements to produce new-age hybrids, to resonate with the current generation. Some slogans and symbols were preserved in their original form, celebrating them as nostalgic street gems.
For our menu, the dish names were curated and retained in their local avatar - Chilli Bhajji, Puchka, Shikanji, etc. Each of the hero dishes on the cover had its own motif to champion its flavour metaphorically. While the visual grid was inspired by bus tickets, the content was designed to feel like a local flyer listing out must-try popular dishes.As a final touch, we created 'Thank You' notes styled as vintage bus tickets, that were handed out to customers, post billing, as a nostalgic keepsake.
To give the interiors an authentic street-aesthetic, we went old school. Convincing the client to switch from framed digital posters to earthy, hand-painted motifs on the wall. We collaborated with the architects to source a local street painter, who hand painted our slogans and motifs directly onto the walls, using street-style printing techniques. We also proposed a cement finish for the walls, and metal as the primary material for signage, to introduce grunge accents, integral to the street palette.
Drawing inspiration from iconic street elements like art, signs, spelling, slogans, slang — we created Thelagram’s unique remixed desi identity, and a brand voice derived from the banter of desi neighbourhoods, connecting everyone through humour, gossip, nostalgia, love of street food and shared vernacular history.
The result? A distinctive brand that deeply resonates with audiences, transporting them to a melting pot of Indian street culture.
