In 2006, India’s creative community had no shared platform for recognition or exchange. Kyoorius was built to fill that gap.

Kyoorius is India’s most significant platform for the creative community: a design conference and an awards programme. Over 21 years, it has shaped how India’s designers, advertisers and visual communicators find each other, celebrate each other, and hold each other to a standard.

Origins

Kyoorius didn’t begin as a ‘brief’. In 2006, Kay co-conceived Designyatra with Rajesh Kejriwal of Transasia Fine Papers, a conference as a way to bring designers together, and to market fine papers. From that first edition grew an entire IP: a magazine, a digital platform, a major awards programme, and a series of offshoots.

Fish Do It, founded in 2015, took it over end-to-end in 2017 and 2018.

The conference

With 21 editions and 390 speakers under its belt, Designyatra is India’s longest-running annual design conference. Over 1000 designers, architects, typographers, animators and creative professionals show up every year for a creative pilgrimage over three days in Goa.

Every edition from 2006 to 2018 has had one curator & creative director (Kay Khoo, our cofounder). The 12th and 13th were owned end-to-end by Fish Do It: programming, curation, creative direction, event branding, sponsor activations, registration UX and backend.

The magazine

Running from 2007-2018, Kyoorius Magazine was the only publication at the time in India taking visual culture seriously. Not a trade journal or a trends roundup, it had a point of view: curious but not judgmental, critical without being cynical.

29 bimonthly issues with one editor-in-chief helming curation, content, design direction and production.

The wind-down

In 2017, we wound the magazine down. Brand content, SEO and social media had crowded the editorial space, and rebuilding for a short-form, social-first world meant different machinery for uncertain returns. By then, the magazine had done its job.

By 2018, the IP was self-funded and could run itself, which is its own kind of achievement. We had built something that no longer needed us. Our involvement ended by mutual agreement.

2026, the return.

Marketing had never had a seat at Kyoorius’s table. So in 2026, we came back to launch the Kyoorius Marketing Awards and redesign the 2026 Kyoorius Awards ceremony. [Awards story.]

We also curated, creative directed and designed the 2026 Designyatra themed It’s Nice, And…

Designyatra 2026 was a question as much as a conference, of what more can design do and achieve, beyond being ‘nice’? Over three days, 20+ speakers from India, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, US and Singapore explored craft, effectiveness, perseverance and commerce.

The campaign, event packaging and experience, all deliberately under-designed, were rooted in the visual language of everyday India. More on Designyatra 2026, soon. [Read Kay’s blog on the backstory].

Role: Creative Direction, Event Curation, Programming, Promotion & Design, Editorial Content & Design

2006-2018, 2026