Naksha did not begin as a collection. It began with the wooden city maps.
At the time, we were exploring how cartography could become something more tactile and personal. We took real road networks, translated them into layered wood, and built the entire product around that idea from the ground up. The design, cutting, layering, framing, customisation and production all had to work together. That first product taught us something important: people were not simply interested in maps, they were interested in places that meant something to them. A city could represent where someone grew up, studied, met someone, or spent a part of life they wanted to hold onto.
Once we understood that, the next question was accessibility. Not everyone wanted a layered wooden piece. Some people wanted something quicker, lighter and more affordable, without losing the idea of having a city that felt personal to them. That led us to framed city prints. The format was simpler, but the design problem was different. Without the physical depth of wood, colour, terrain, linework and framing had to do more of the work. The city itself had to carry the visual character of the piece.
Then we started thinking beyond cities. The state maps came next, and this is where our approach began to become more distinctly Indian. A state is not just a boundary on a map. It carries its own visual culture, history, landscape and identity. So instead of treating the state maps like enlarged versions of the city maps, we approached them through a more Indianised visual language, using motifs, colour, pattern and illustration in a way that still felt contemporary rather than decorative or souvenir-like.
By this point, our understanding of the category had changed quite a bit. We were no longer asking only how to design a map well. We were asking what kind of visual language made sense for each scale of geography.
And then came the India map.
That was probably the most complex version of the idea. India cannot be understood through one road network, one pattern or one visual reference. Each state had to feel like part of a larger composition while still retaining enough character of its own. The challenge was finding the balance between diversity and coherence. Everything we had learned from the earlier products started coming together there: the precision and construction thinking from the wooden city maps, the graphic clarity we developed through the framed prints, and the cultural and visual exploration that came from the state maps.
The India map became a culmination of those experiments, but it also made us realise that Naksha had become much bigger than any one product. What started with cities had grown into a way of exploring place at different scales and through different materials. A city can become roads and layers. A state can become pattern and visual culture. A country can become a composition of many identities.
That is what Naksha means to us now. It is not one map style repeated across different geographies. It is an evolving design language around place, memory and identity, and with every new product, our understanding of that language becomes a little sharper.
We still feel like we are only at the beginning.
