Case study · Brand strategy & visual identity
Nomad Village asked us for a deck to convince India's ministries. We went looking for the argument, and found a contradiction sitting inside the founder's own success metrics.
Nomad Village turns underused Indian villages into places where remote workers live and work alongside local families. The ask that arrived was modest and specific: build a communication deck to take to government.
The audience was serious. The Central Ministry of Tourism. State tourism departments. Entrepreneurship Development Cells, Women Empowerment departments, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs. The argument was serious too — India sits outside the global digital nomad circuit while Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bali and Thailand collect the traffic, despite having every landscape a remote worker could want.
And Nomad Village had already proved the model works. At Yakten in Sikkim, participating families were earning over ₹50,000 a month. The project had taken a SKOCH Award and been declared India's first digital nomad village.
They also had a logo: a mountain, with a wifi arc above it. Clear, legible, appropriate. Nobody had asked us to touch it.
Long conversations with Arpit Bansal about the vision, the pipeline, and the operating reality of building in villages where power, connectivity and staffing all behave differently from a city. Not a briefing call. The kind of discussion where you find out what somebody is actually planning, as opposed to what they have already written down.
Two things came out of it that changed the job.
Asked what winning looks like, Arpit didn't describe a brand or a funding round. He listed four villages.
Nomad Village — stated success metrics
The identityFour targets. Four terrains. Not one of them a mountain.
The pipeline said the same thing. A written proposal for India's first coastal nomad village in Goa. Live conversations in Idukki in Kerala, with Andhra Pradesh Tourism, and in Nagaland. A stated plan of 100 villages in ten years, across island, forest, beach, backwater and hill.
The client was already walking off the mountain. He was just doing it while carrying a mountain.
“We enter, enable, and eventually exit, leaving behind communities that can continue to thrive independently.”
Arpit Bansal, Founder, Nomad Village
That is an unusual thing for a founder to say, and it carries a design consequence most people miss.
If the model is to hand a village over and walk away, the brand has to work with nobody from head office in the room. It cannot depend on a founder to explain it. It has to be legible to a homestay owner, reproducible by a local signwriter, and defensible by a district officer who has never met the person who designed it.
A mountain and a wifi arc describe a terrain, and describe it well. But they describe one. Put that mark on a beach village in Goa and it argues with the ground it is standing on. Put it in front of the Ministry of Tourism as the identity for a national programme and it quietly undercuts the pitch — it says Sikkim project, not Indian one.
Nobody had spotted it, because the pilot happened to be in the Himalayas. For one village, the logo was perfect. For the second, it was a problem. For the hundredth, it was a rebrand nobody had budgeted for.
So the deck was never the thing that needed fixing. The thing the deck was carrying was. We went back to the client and proposed rebuilding the identity first.
Not landscape. Nothing about landscape survives that list — add a Keralan backwater and a forest settlement in Nagaland and every visual cue cancels out.
What survives is movement. Somebody arrives who isn't from there. They work, they teach, they spend, they build something with a family that lives there. Then they leave, and something stays behind.
That is the only constant across all hundred villages. So that is what the mark had to be a picture of.
We drew the nomad's route through the village as a line. We let it loop where impact happens. Then we folded the loop into a form.
One Path. Many Possibilities.
It holds an n and a v inside the curves without announcing it. It reproduces in a single colour — carved into stone, painted on a wall, embroidered, or at thirty-two pixels.
And it works on a mountain, a beach, a backwater and an island, because it is not a picture of any of them.
The path pulls out of the mark and stretches into a ribbon that runs across signage, wayfinding, web, social and print. It is the cheapest available way to make a village of independently owned homestays read as one brand.
Materials were specified for what a village can actually build and maintain, at a cost a homestay owner can meet without a grant: stone, timber, painted metal, whitewashed wall.
One hundred villages in ten years, across every landscape India has. That number was the design constraint, not an afterthought — every element is built to be handed to a village this studio will never visit.
Mark, ribbon, type and wayfinding work independently. A village can adopt two elements or twelve.
One-colour reproduction, local materials, no photography budget, no specialist printing.
Each village carries its own name inside the system without breaking it — which is what makes communities defend it.
None of the above began at a sketchpad. It began with reading what the client had already written, and noticing where it disagreed with itself.
Read everything the client has said. Find where the story contradicts itself.
Move the argument to the ground where the same work is worth more.
Build the mark out of the idea, so the design can be explained, not just liked.
Turn one idea into a kit that works at any budget, in any material.
The strategy, narrative platform and identity have been presented to the client and approved — the path in particular, and the shift in narrative underneath it. Rollout is a budget question rather than a design one, and is scheduled against incoming projects.
The applications shown here are design intent rather than photographs of built work. The income, visitor and award figures belong to Nomad Village's existing programme; they are the context we were briefed against, not outcomes claimed for this identity.