How Asian Designers Are Reshaping Brand Identity in the United Kingdom
A quiet revolution is happening in British design. It is being driven by a generation of designers who refuse to leave their roots at the door.
Growing up between two visual cultures teaches you something that no design school fully replicates. You learn that colour carries different weight depending on who is looking, that typography can hold cultural memory as well as formal meaning, and that the visual identity of a brand is never just about how something looks — it is about who it speaks to, and what it makes them feel. That understanding is exactly what a growing number of Asian designers based in the United Kingdom are bringing to their work. And the results are beginning to reshape what British brand identity design is capable of.
Sthuthi Ramesh — London
If you have visited Manchester Museum recently, you may have noticed something quietly remarkable about the typography in the South Asia Gallery — the UK’s first permanent gallery dedicated to the South Asian diaspora. The typeface feels simultaneously ancient and fresh, rooted in tradition but entirely contemporary. It did not happen by accident.
The identity was the work of London-based designer Sthuthi Ramesh, who teamed up with Universal Thirst to devise a typeface inspired by the South Asian diaspora journey, drawing on a 1930s Gujarati type foundry modular type specimen to produce something genuinely original. Ramesh has worked at Pentagram and Wieden+Kennedy before establishing her own independent practice, whose clients now include the Design Museum, Cambridge University Press and the NHS.
“Being born and raised in India and then later moving to the UK has given me a super creative lens, making my design solutions fresh and relevant,” she says.
sthuthiramesh.com
Manjit Thapp — UK
Some designers work primarily in the world of corporate identity. Manjit Thapp works in a world of her own making — and major brands keep coming to find her there. The UK-based illustrator uses traditional and digital media to create layered, richly textured work that has drawn commissions from Adobe, Apple, Cartoon Network and Harper’s Bazaar. Her solo exhibition ‘My Head is a Jungle’ at NOW Gallery in London in 2021 was a significant step in bringing her online following into institutional recognition.
Her collaboration with Dishoom — the celebrated UK restaurant group — produced a collection of T-shirts memorialising inspirational Indian women. It is a project that demonstrates something increasingly central to brand identity at its best: that cultural specificity, handled with genuine knowledge and care, produces work that resonates in ways that generic solutions never can.
manjitthapp.co.uk
Umer Shehbaz — Karachi, Pakistan
Not all significant contributions to British design culture come through institutional commissions or editorial features. Some of the most formative work is built quietly — across years of independent practice, corporate commissions and civic design leadership.
Umer Shehbaz is a graphic designer and brand identity specialist based in Karachi, with over eight years of professional practice. Since 2013 he has run an independent design practice through AD Revolution, serving clients including the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry and General Tyre. From 2015 to 2021 he served as the commissioned event brand designer for Emkay Line Pvt Ltd, delivering complete identity systems for the Emkay Line Shipping Premier League — a major corporate cricket tournament at Moin Khan Academy, Karachi, attended by teams from across the shipping industry. Alongside this, from 2016 to 2021, he held a part-time appointment as event brand designer to the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, a federal regulatory authority, with commissions including a programme delivered in collaboration with The World Bank and UKaid. From 2018 to 2021 he also worked on contract at Rabid Studios, a leading Karachi animation and design agency, producing advertising and brand asset work for McDonald’s, Omega, TELUS, Ufone and SadaPay.
Running through all of this was a sustained design leadership role: from 2017 to 2021 he served as a formal member of Rotaract District 3271, editing the district’s monthly publication, chairing its publications committee, and leading the annual visual identity programme — including the official District Directory, a 350-page formal Rotary International publication. In 2019 he was awarded Best Rotaract Designer, the district’s only design-specific honour.
umershehbaz.com
The Larger Pattern
What connects these designers is not a shared aesthetic or a unified cultural agenda. They work in different disciplines, for different clients, in different registers entirely. What they share is the experience of building a creative practice across more than one visual culture — and the professional discipline to translate that into work that functions wherever it appears.
For British brands seeking design partners who can navigate genuine complexity — cultural, commercial, institutional, international — that breadth of formation is increasingly not a bonus. It is becoming a competitive necessity. The UK design industry has long been one of the most respected creative sectors in the world. The designers profiled here are not simply participating in that tradition. They are expanding it.
