Office of Career
Services identity

A borrowed seal,
a silent identity

The Office of Career Services is where every IIT Delhi student's move from campus to career actually runs — internships, placements, the relationships with recruiting companies. It is one of the most public-facing offices in the institute, and for a long time it carried a logo that could not do public-facing work.

The old mark was the IIT Delhi seal set between two ornaments. It did one thing well: it established, at a glance, that this office belonged to the institute. Past that it went quiet. It said nothing about what the office is for, and as a near-copy of a seal already in heavy use across the campus, it gave people almost nothing to recognise or remember it by.

The Rising Starling

I started from what the office would want said about itself, out loud, if it could. That gave me a short list of operative words to design toward — the tone the mark had to hold before it held any shape.

Those words resolved into a single image: a bird lifting out of a rising sun. The mark takes pride in the office's record and, in the same gesture, states its purpose — to give students wings and launch them into a future of success. Enough of a story to carry a logo, concrete enough to draw.

One emblem,
three readings

The emblem is a single 'C' — for Career — engineered to be read three ways at once. Look longer and it keeps giving back meaning, which is exactly what a mark this office uses every day needs to do.

01

The rising sun

The rays fanning out of the 'C' read as a sun coming up — vibrance, energy, and a bright future opening in front of the student.

02

The flying starling

Inside the sun, a starling takes off — a bird chosen for intellect, dexterity and a fighting, collective spirit. It carries the flight and the pride.

03

Infinity within

The concentric strokes of the 'C' overlap and fade into one another — a quiet infinity that stands for the open-ended range of paths a career can take.

Gradients that carry the legacy

The task in colour was to give the office energy without cutting it loose from the institute. I built the palette on gradients rather than flat fills, so the mark reads as lit from within, and anchored it in a deep maroon that echoes the IIT Delhi seal — a link you feel before you'd name it.

Before settling here, I worked two other directions to be sure — a brighter multi-hue gradient standing for the diversity of the disciplines the office serves, and a cool teal-to-blue reading of the OCS as the bridge between industry and academia. The sun-warm maroon won because it held both things at once: forward energy, and lineage.

Two parts,
one system

The lockup is drawn as two separable parts — the emblem on the left, the typographic body on the right — so it can flex from a full corridor sign down to a compact avatar without losing itself. Everything downstream is specified so someone can apply the mark correctly without me in the room.

All of it — history, concept, symbolism, colour, type, exclusion zones, variations and application rules — lives in a brand guidelines deck the office can hand to any designer or vendor.

One mark,
many surfaces

The system was drawn to survive contact with the real world: reversed to a single colour on a wooden entrance sign, gilded on a wall, embossed across stationery, or dropped onto a card in the office's darker register. Same mark, different registers — and it holds.

Unveiled by the Director

On 18 August 2022, Prof. Rangan Banerjee, Director of IIT Delhi, unveiled the mark as the official identity of the Office of Career Services — timed to open the 2022–23 internship and placement season. The institute described the logo as one that gives its students wings and launches them into a future of success and prosperity.

Dr. Anishya Obhrai Madan, who heads the OCS, framed the mark as capturing what the office works for — guiding students toward informed career choices, and giving shape to their aspirations for a bright future. Seeing my design read back to me in the institution's own words, as its own meaning rather than a designer's intent, was the moment the project stopped being a file and became the office's.

Source — IIT Delhi News: “Office of Career Services, IIT Delhi Unveils its Official Logo”

Identity as a strategic act

A logo looks like a craft problem. This one was a positioning problem in disguise: an office that needed to be understood quickly by two very different audiences, and to belong to a storied institution without disappearing into it. Getting there meant diagnosing why the old mark failed, choosing an idea that said something true about the work, and building a system disciplined enough for other people to run without me.

That sequence — diagnose, decide, systematise, hand off — is the same move I now make on far larger canvases, most recently across the insurance vertical of SBI's YONO 2.0. Different scale, same discipline.