Awarded Gold in Graphis Poster 2026, Olliday, A Pollinate Event by Pollinate Labs turns conversation into visual form. Led by founder and creative director Siddharth Khandelwal with design by Giles Augustine, the project translates an intimate creative gathering into posters shaped by dialogue, tension, and restraint. Hand-drawn typography, metaphor, and carefully guided AI come together to capture fleeting moments as lasting design artifacts.

Case Study

Olliday: Designing Conversations, Not Just Posters

Olliday is less an event and more an ongoing experiment. It’s a bi-monthly creative speakeasy hosted at Pollinate Labs, an intimate room where two people from entirely different worlds come together to discuss, disagree, reveal industry truths, unpack ideas that didn’t make it to the table, and occasionally surprise each other.

Designers, musicians, chefs, filmmakers, architects, and writers participate, the only real filter being that they are shaping culture in their own way.

The evening usually moves into a game of Jenga, where each pull comes with a truth or a dare, gently nudging speakers into revealing personal and professional quirks they wouldn’t otherwise volunteer. After that, the room opens, conversations spill over food and drinks, hierarchies dissolve, and the format fulfills its purpose.

Olliday’s aim is simple: facilitate conversations that don’t usually happen, in a format that feels honest, unscripted, and human. The poster becomes a creative artifact capturing the energy, tension, and temperament of each episode.

The Process

The process begins away from screens. Before AI enters the room, ideas are grounded in sketching, note-making, and visual exploration. Themes are translated into form and emotion into metaphor.

Typography is always hand-drawn first, treated as an expressive tool carrying mood, humour, tension, or discomfort; it becomes the voice, not decoration.

Only once the idea is grounded do tools like Midjourney and Adobe Firefly enter. Here, experimentation brings both excitement and frustration. AI hallucinates when intent isn’t precise; the challenge is guiding it to understand restraint, context, and tone.

Iterations are endless, with broken visuals, detours, near-misses, and repeated restarts. Craft becomes critical: intuition is translated into prompts, hollow outputs are rejected, promising results refined, and course-corrected multiple times.

As imagery aligns, hand-drawn typography blends into AI-generated visuals, sometimes reworked, sometimes rematerialized using AI, and stitched together in Photoshop. The goal is a seamless, tactile, believable final poster, a coherent visual language rather than a collage of tools.

The output is never the result of a single tool; it’s a combination of hand drawing, AI, Photoshop, instinct, patience, and persistence. It’s messy, imperfect, and exciting.

Olliday S01–E03: “Ek Chammach Aur”

With Yash Bhanage, co-founder of The Bombay Canteen and O Pedro, and Anurag Arora, a design-focused chef, food became the shared language. “Ek Chammach Aur” (“one spoon more”) embodies generosity, always making room for one more at the table.

Jenga emerged as a metaphor: careful removal and continual addition, reshaping structure while building higher. Replacing wooden blocks with edible forms transformed the game into a visual metaphor for sharing, play, balance, and collective participation.

Typography was hand-drawn to bend, wrap, and respond to the structure. AI-generated food forms and hand-crafted type were stitched together in Photoshop into a single frame that feels generous, playful, and instinctively human.

Olliday on Holiday

Between Episodes 3 and 4, the format paused for rest, openness, and community. A swimming pool became the central metaphor, fluid, playful, and inviting.

Early sketches explored multiple directions, but restraint and simplification became the focus. Typography was inspired by water, reflecting, refracting, stretching, and compressing, and hand-drawn digitally to preserve legibility while maintaining realism. Elements were composed in Photoshop to create a final poster that feels effortless, a quiet reminder that creativity often emerges from pause.

Olliday S01–E04: “Explicit Advisory”

With Kshitij Kankaria, founder of Dirty Magazine, and Sid Vashi, an experimental musician, conversations ventured into discomfort, provocation, and honesty.

The shaved black sheep became a central symbol, an outlier, exposed and vulnerable. Every detail mattered: posture, expression, gaze, environment. AI initially struggled to generate the desired form, requiring careful workaround and guidance back to the intended vision.

Typography was crafted strand by strand in Photoshop, integrated into the sheep’s wool to carry emotional weight. AI generated the form, but the emotive impact came from typographic detail, provoking curiosity and resisting easy interpretation.

The Impact

These posters have taken on a life of their own. Speakers feel seen through them, and the community participates in shaping them. They are no longer just visuals; they’re part of the Olliday ritual.

Creatively, the project reshapes thinking about authorship, control, and failure. AI amplifies intuition when guided carefully. Experimentation is chaotic and full of false starts but deeply rewarding.

The posters feel alive, carrying conversations forward. They reflect a creative voice that values wit over polish, risk over safety, and dialogue over perfection.

About Pollinate Labs

Giles Augustine

Siddharth Khandelwal

Siddharth Khandelwal & Giles Augustine
Siddharth works at the intersection of instinct and intention, shaping how design, culture, and business converge in contemporary India. As Founder and Design Director of Pollinate Labs and Olliday, he leads a multidisciplinary practice building culturally intelligent, future-ready design systems. An alumnus of the University of Sydney, he has trained under brand visionary Martin Lindstrom and held leadership roles at Fitch, Lintas, and VGC, crafting work for the likes of Apple, Netflix, Nestlé, and Unilever.

Giles is a graphic designer at Pollinate Labs, working across motion, 3D, web, product design, and illustration. A graduate of École Intuit Lab, Mumbai, his journey began as a metal band bassist before evolving into visual storytelling. Known for restraint and curiosity, he integrates generative AI thoughtfully into everyday design practice.

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