The AAIBA Designs Portfolio: How Saurabh Chandekar’s Studio Drew Vespa With 85 Client Changes, Fused Apple’s Ringtone With Chennai Music, Designed 65 Acres of Saguna Bagh, and Created an 80-Foot Horlicks Illustration With a Mouse

Vespa had relaunched in India and needed to show how the Italian brand connects with Indian culture, fashion, and urban mobility. Saurabh created a series of illustrations showing the scooter integrated into Indian daily life: Vespa in a garden, at a crossword, in the cinema, in music, under street lights. Each illustration placed the scooter as a presence that had always belonged rather than a product being advertised.

The process: a final sketch was approved, then tracing began on Illustrator. Two months of work. During that time the client requested changes on 85 to 90 occasions. The scooter’s angle was adjusted. Details removed. The 35th illustration revised. Saurabh said he felt no anxiety through any of it because he understood what he was doing and why. Passion and consistency together create the conditions where that composure is possible. The illustration he discussed most was the Vespa in the garden: built image by image, element by element, creating a visual ecosystem where an Italian scooter sits completely at home in an Indian setting.

AAIBA managed the launch campaign for Apple‘s second Imagine Store in Chennai in 2023. The challenge: create authentic local content for a global brand with strict creative guidelines, in India’s most culturally diverse city. The brief was to win the hearts of Chennaites by making them feel the store was theirs. Not a global brand arriving. A brand that understood their city.

AAIBA fused two elements: Apple’s iconic ringtone and traditional Chennai musical elements. They composed an entirely new sonic identity that was identifiable as both Apple and Chennai simultaneously. The campaign included print, digital, outdoor advertising, and a contest inviting participants to present artistic interpretations of Chennai. The ringtone achieved viral distribution through organic sharing. People downloaded it, recreated it, shared it. Music and cultural identity were not decoration. They were the campaign’s core. Bring ideas to life through impactful visual storytelling with Communication Design at Parul University.

Saguna Bagh is a resort and farm with over sixty years of legacy, built around its region’s biodiversity, settled beside a river. The rare species on the land, the folk practices, the agricultural traditions, the rituals, all existed but none had been given a visual language. The idea AAIBA built around came from something ancient: the act of stamping. Proof of existence. Human beings have marked surfaces since before recorded history.

Saguna means with all that is positive and good. Bagh is a living, breathing space. The design system used carved stamps, shapes and elements dipped in a colour palette drawn from the farm’s surroundings, applied physically across the property. The rawness of the stamping process was intentional: something made by hand that could not have been generated. The scale: a design language applied across 65 acres, illustrations of 56 plant and tree species, 70 animal, insect, bird, and butterfly species, and 50 different souvenirs and merchandise items. All cohesive. All rooted in what the land actually is. Saguna Bagh always held the story. AAIBA made it impossible to overlook.

The spice installation for Risoil (an edible oil brand) used actual spices as the medium for a physical installation displayed at a mall in Pune. Spices as raw material, not decoration. The medium and the message sitting so close together that separating them would feel wrong. The Pune Heritage Festival work gave the city’s history and visual identity form through design rooted in what Pune actually is.

The Isuzu X Food Festival created an identity around the unexpected: ants, chutney from the North East, ingredients from Kerala to Kashmir, foods that exist in their regions and nowhere else. The name used X as in ex: things you have not encountered yet. It won the Grand Jury Award, which sits above Gold. A large-format Horlicks illustration ran at 80 feet. All drawn with a mouse. That production detail bears repeating: no pen tablet, no stylus, just a standard computer mouse producing work at billboard scale. Step into the world of motion, design, and cinematic visuals with Animation and VFX courses at Parul University.