Project Overview
Design Etc. is a podcast by Payal Chugh Vaidya, a CX leader and design thinker with two decades of experience across India and the US. The show explores design through unexpected lenses: how it connects to behaviour, culture, strategy, policy, climate, and everything in between. The audience is designers and design-adjacent professionals.
Payal approached me to build the brand from scratch. The podcast had a name and a vision. It needed an identity.
Project Type
Branding
Year
2025
My Role
Brand Designer
Client
Payal Vaidya
The brief had two things working in tension. The podcast needed to feel credible and authoritative enough to hold its own in a space where Payal's professional reputation was on the line. But it also needed to feel personal, reflecting her specifically, so that it could stand out in a Spotify feed.
The logo sets up the central tension of the podcast in a single mark. DESIGN is set in a heavy, condensed sans-serif, bold and declarative. Directly beneath it, etc is handwritten in a loose cursive script. The contrast is deliberate: the authority of the discipline sitting alongside the openness of conversation. The "etc" is the whole point of the show, the idea that design connects to everything else, and the script treatment makes that feel personal rather than just clever.
The social templates were designed to work across Instagram posts, stories, reel covers and LinkedIn carousels with intentional colour pairings that keep the grid coherent without making every post look identical. The grid layout below shows the range: episode announcements, pull quotes, topic cards, guest features, all carrying the same visual language at different volumes.
Platform banners were built for consistency across YouTube, LinkedIn, and Spotify.
A complete brand system for Design etc., including the primary logo and variants, a documented colour and typography system, social templates for posts, stories, and reel covers, platform banners, and a podcast cover.
Delivered in three weeks with brand guidelines as a handoff document so Payal and her team could apply the system independently.