BOD x ET BrandEquity: Strategic Communication Report

Some projects land in your lap and turn out to be far more than the brief suggested. This was one of them.

BOD Consulting was commissioned by ET BrandEquity to design and produce an annual research report on the state of strategic communication in India. The report, titled Strategic Communication: The Age of Convenient Consumption, was a deep dive into how the Indian consumer was evolving and what that meant for marketers and brand communication professionals.

My role covered the entire design scope: cover design, layout system, data visualization, and all custom illustration throughout the publication. Every chart, infographic, icon set, and visual element was built from scratch to fit a unified visual language that also carried the new Brands of Desire identity into print for the first time.

A report like this lives in a tricky middle ground. It needs to hold the credibility of a research document while being engaging enough that someone actually reads past page three. Pure editorial design gets dry. Pure infographic design loses rigour. The challenge was finding the balance, something that felt like a well-designed magazine issue with the structure and data density of a proper industry report.

The cover needed to do the heavy lifting first. The solution was a custom radial illustration built around the concept of media consumption and attention, layering retail and screen environments into concentric arcs with halftone textures and contour line patterns. It gave the publication a strong visual identity without borrowing from generic report templates.

The interior followed a consistent system of three things: editorial layout for longform content, infographic spreads for data-heavy sections, and a set of custom illustrated assets that ran across both.

The data sections required building custom charts rather than adapting software defaults, including a Connected India map illustration rendered in the publication's red and dot-pattern language, demographic breakdowns for platform usage across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, media consumption time visualizations, and market share comparisons for video streaming and music apps.

The typography hierarchy stayed clean across all of it, with a clear distinction between editorial body copy, data labels, pull quotes, and section headers. The red, black, white, and muted pink palette kept everything coherent even when a spread was carrying a lot of visual information.

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Client: ET Brand Equity

Collaborated with: BOD Consulting, New Delhi, India Content by: Divya Rathore

Layout + Art Direction: Sidharth Singh