This video was created by Liqvid Ink studio.

2024-26

Offline to Online — Building a Desi Brand for Bharat

At Rapido, we were designing for Bharat. Not just India — Bharat. People who were unlocking smartphones for the first time. People who didn't have the popular apps installed. People for whom every new app is a question — is this for me?

That question stayed with me. And it became the seed of everything we built.

I wanted to start somewhere more honest: what does our user already trust?

And when I sat with that question, the answer was obvious. They trust their world. The physical, offline world they navigate every single day. The colours of the auto outside their building. The familiar shape of the cab they've taken a hundred times. The visual language of the streets.

India has a rich culture and nuances that we, as designers, often overlook. We spend so much time looking outward — at global products, global aesthetics — that we forget how much visual intelligence already exists right here.

"What if we stopped borrowing aesthetics from elsewhere and started celebrating what India already has?"

That became the vision. The principle we built everything on was simple:

Offline to Online. Take the physical world Bharat already knows — own it, embrace it, bring it into the app. With a Rapido accent.

The belief was this — if we start owning these offline elements inside our product, we start building a subconscious association. Users don't need to consciously think "this feels Indian." They just feel at home. And that feeling is more powerful than any brand campaign.

The first thing we did - Improve the service Icons

Theory is easy. Execution is where vision gets tested.

Our first move was to ask —

what are the most familiar visual artifacts in a Bharat user's daily life?
What do they see every single day without thinking about it?

The answer was right outside. Vehicles. Streets. The physical markers of how this country moves. So we started there. We localised our service icons to reflect exactly what users see in their own city. The auto in Chennai is yellow and black. In Bengaluru it's yellow and green. Same with cabs — not generic silhouettes, but the actual vehicles most common in our ecosystem.

The logic was simple: if it exists in their world, it belongs in ours.

This was just the beginning. Every decision that followed came from the same question — what offline element can we own and bring online? The icons were the proof of concept. What it told us was that the principle worked. Users didn't need to be told the app was built for them. They could feel it.

The bigger picture: a brand that looks like India

The larger ambition was to build a full visual philosophy — one that was unapologetically desi. Rapido is a homegrown Indian brand. We should look like it. Feel like it.

The style we arrived at was a blend of neumorphism and flat vector design — but seen through an Indian lens. Tactile and physical from neumorphism. Clear and scalable from flat vector. The cultural soul came from working closely with artists — people who carry this aesthetic knowledge as lived experience, not reference material.

We built character illustrations that looked like real people — riders, captains, the faces of the India that actually uses Rapido every day. Warm. Expressive. Specific. Not the polished, globalised illustration style that could belong to any app anywhere.