Ramyatara Mullapudi is a designer whose practice sits at the intersection of storytelling, systems, and experimentation. Her path into design began through self-teaching while studying marketing and psychology at the Kelley School of Business, before being refined through an MFA in Design at the California College of the Arts. In this interview, Ramyatara reflects on learning design outside formal pathways, misusing tools to unlock new ways of thinking, the influence of typography and archives, and her ambition to build expressive, foundational systems that leave room for creativity, culture, and care.
Tell us about where you study/studied and some of your highlights and favourite lecturers and if you are self taught, how did you do it?!
I first stumbled into design at the Kelley School of Business, IU, where I was studying marketing and psychology. I discovered Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop during a marketing comms class and immediately went down a rabbit hole. I taught myself design tools from scratch through YouTube tutorials, online forums, and a lot of trial and error. The trick was to stick with it, and it never felt like effort. I could spend hours without feeling exhausted. That’s when I discovered design as a practice and career. The appeal was clear to me early on because design felt like the perfect intersection of storytelling, problem solving, and taste. In 2020, back in Hyderabad, I freelanced for a couple of years and worked with Manduva Project, a homegrown foods brand that gave me the creative freedom to shape their brand across digital and print.
At California College of the Arts, I earned my MFA in Design. The programme pushed me into a more experimental and conceptual mode of thinking, and the exposure to the wider design industry was invaluable. I took every chance to create visual work, from designing for CCA Exhibition Galleries to working part time at the Letterform Archive so I could surround myself with their incredible collection of graphic and typographic history.
Some of my favourite projects at CCA involved unlearning and misusing familiar tools to create unexpected compositions. I was lucky to learn from incredible instructors like Saraleah Fordyce, Ana Llorente, Helen Ip, Omar Mohammad and Jon Sueda, who encouraged the kind of critical discussions that shaped how I think about design’s role in culture and society. Outside school, mentors like Matt Asato Adams and Michelle Gong at Poieto, and Simrit Brar at Siegel+Gale, helped me shape my creative instincts into something sharp, intentional and industry-ready.
Tell us about your tools / what tech, programs, equipment and environment do you do your best work in?
I primarily work between Figma and Adobe Illustrator and switch to Procreate and Glyphs when I am doing typography. For experimentation, I have been playing with Midjourney, Flora, Gamma and Google’s AI Studio. I am also trying to wrap my head around Cavalry because the motion possibilities look too fun to resist. I also love my low tech tools: Apple Notes, Google Sheets, a pencil and graph paper notebooks. And lists. Endless lists. They help me keep my brain from behaving like a browser with 147 tabs open, which is the case on my browser windows.
I do my best work in bright, well ventilated spaces, at a dining table with an organised chaos of my laptop, lists, sketches and an iced latte. Occasionally, a good cafe with greenery also works, especially if I can pretend I have become the kind of person who journals.
When I am deep in making mode, music is very important! Sometimes I let a comfort show play in the background, something like Castle, Fresh Prince or Psych, because it keeps me company without demanding attention. The equivalent of a loyal golden retriever.
Tell us some of your favourite, creative professionals and inspiring places in your city!
- Universal Thirst (Kalapi Gajjar). For their typography and for how supportive they are amongst the type design community.
- Letterform Archive in San Francisco. Do I need to explain this one? They are a treasure trove of incredible typographic and graphic works through history.
- Khyati Trehan. For her expressive style and even more for how explorative, iterative and regular she is with her experiments.
- Our home in Tanuku and Hyderabad. Curated by my mother with a precision and sensibility Pinterest should fear.
- My mom and her two sisters. Their clothes, embroidery, art collections and more. Basically my personal creative multiverse disguised as family.
What are your biggest hopes and dreams for 2026, both for the world and your career?
In 2026, I want to keep strengthening my ability to build strong, expressive and foundational systems for brands, structures that help everything flow without restraining creativity, while also making room for more experimental, culturally rooted typographic work. I am working on a project with The Facility(by Ripe Studios) right now and I would love to collaborate with more creative teams like that. My dream is simple, to work with people who care deeply and make cool things.
For the world, I hope we become less polarised and much more capable of listening. I would love to see more conversations where curiosity wins over defensiveness and disagreements do not turn into character assassinations. Conflict is inevitable, but shutting each other down does not have to be. I hope we rebuild some capacity for nuance, critical thinking, respect and human generosity.
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