Wild Sugar
Deliverables:
- Illustrated Murals
Wild Sugar started as a small bakery in Belgaum, Karnataka and has since expanded into the cafe business in Belgaum itself as well as in Pune and Kolhapur in Maharashtra
The brand has been serving sweet treats to customers ranging from artisanal breads and hampers to desserts and custom cakes since 2013.
We were commissioned to design artwork for two of their locations in collaboration with CraftCanvas, large scale wallpapers for the cafe and framed illustrations for their Belgaum location.
For both of the locations, the Kalighat art style gave those big vivid features and expressions to convey the nostalgia and sense of community without overcrowding the composition.
In Belgaum, this translated into looking back at the third spaces of the Indian diaspora outside of contemporary cafe culture in a whimsical way. Day picnics in public parks depicting the beautiful Gulmohar trees of Belgaum and Baraamadas of houses where neighbors became friends.
The humans in these illustrations were intentionally made life size to make the cafe visitors feel like they were part of these narratives, encouraging them to make more memories the old school way.
Besides these digitally printed wallpapers, Pomoco also designed a custom table made of fallen Gulmohar leaves for the site. For the bakery in Belgaum, smaller frames were illustrated with scenes of street vendors from around the city, adding a layer of local context and recognition.
The color palette was consistently vivid, derived in connection to the colors of the city’s identity to be as reminiscent as visually engaging.
The illustration style isolated the vendor to highlight nostalgia whilst building location cues in low contrast in the background, cotton candy (budhiya ke baal) at an amusement park and sugarcane juice beside railway lines all become a part of what has made Belgaum and most of India’s sweet culture.
