Mint Road Milestones
Client | The Reserve Bank of India
Organisation | Lemon Design
My Role | Creative Strategy, Copywriting, Account Management
How do you take 75 years of India’s economic history
and weave it into an immersive experience imbued with storytelling?
Context.
To celebrate the 75-year old heritage of the Indian currency: from the times of Kings to the Ashoka Chakra, Mahatma Gandhi, the introduction of the security thread through to the present, the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) partnered with Lemon Design to create an immersive, modular storytelling experience.
Financial literacy.
As part of the bank’s financial literacy effort, my team was commissioned to design a visual journey through the different eras of India as a developing economy and portray the evolution of the apex institution.
The visceral beneath the visual.
A creative workshop with the RBI Communications team gave us the opportunity to interrogate the brief together whilst developing mock ideas and concepts internally. As the lead strategist and copywriter at Lemon Design, my brief to the creative team was to explore the visceral beneath the visual i.e., to look at what’s behind and beyond what meets the eye. This meant that the only way to tell this story of 75 years was to go back in history and start from the beginning: the socioeconomic context in which the RBI was formed and its role in shaping what we refer to as the Indian economy today.
There was a lot of research material out there, but none of it was designed for the layperson.
Demystifying the history.
Our goal was to create visual stories that help demystify the history of the RBI and guide the general public towards a greater understanding of the transformative and galvanising role the institution plays in our society.
A creative retelling of a world full of ones and zeroes. This is how we arrived at the concept of a travelling exhibition (‘Newsibition’), an immersive, on-premise experience that showcases previously unheard perspectives from the RBI archives and expands access to key narratives from India’s socioeconomic history, demonstrating how the impact of the RBI and the Rupee on the evolution of India continues to grow and reverberate with time.
Historytelling.
From that foundation, we developed a country-wide exhibition composed of sprawling visual explainers to commemorate the history of the Indian Rupee as seen through the prism of the RBI, focusing on culture, richness, friendliness and function.
The idea was to create an informational hierarchy, with a modular look, organic layout and enhanced spatial navigation, illustrating the timeline of events in the history of Indian banking since 1870.
Through digital panels, slideshows, posters and on-ground design activations, this visual journey of the Indian Rupee provided the viewer with a baseline understanding of the RBI and its impact on the course of Indian history.
Working alongside leading scholars and economists at RBI, we had managed to create a travelling museum of the Indian economy, designed to help anyone get their bearings with a complex history, documenting events not only as they happened but also how they were viewed by the public at large through media reportage.
End-to-end research.
Mint Road Milestones was the result of the most comprehensive research on the evolution of the RBI ever conducted. This research was presented through audio, video, photography, and historical ephemera, collected and curated specifically for the exhibition experience.
Our work spanned everything from branding, theming, and wayfinding to the production of landmark digital and artistic installations that elevated the experience with engaging storytelling, infusing the RBI’s iconic legacy into every visitor touchpoint.
Story-rich.
The biggest accomplishment of ‘Mint Road Milestones’ lay in stimulating the intellect of the audience by projecting the information as a narrative which took them back in time and at the same time had a contemporary look.
From the moment visitors arrive, immersive visuals pull them into the world of the RBI. Content is presented via posters, wall art, and display panels that seamlessly blend into the fabric of the venue's architecture. Likewise, the wayfinding throughout the venue has a functional beauty and story-rich graphic quality that makes it a rich source of inspiration.
A connected whole.
Every element is crafted to work seamlessly together, cutting through individual design assets to form a connected whole.
From the colour palette, curated to reflect the longstanding history of the RBI, to the tone of voice that amplifies and sparks every story, guiding people through the evolution of the Indian Rupee. The scalability of the design brings it all together into one ever-evolving destination.
Living monument.
Inaugurated by the then-Governor of RBI, Dr. Duvvuri Subbarao, at the 200-year old heritage site in Kolkata where the RBI had its first office, the exhibition was an attempt to put central banking in the context of the broader socio-political developments of the day, both in the world and domestically, where visitors could learn about the impact of the RBI on the past, present, and future of India and add their own reflections to this ever-growing monument in India’s history.