India's design industry is experiencing rapid expansion, rising demand, and an increase in the number of educational institutions despite ongoing issues with perception, value recognition, educational quality, and sustainable business practices.

We’ve seen talented designers underpaid, agencies trapped in a race to the bottom, clients confusing aesthetics with strategy and refusing to pay, and an education system that rarely prepares anyone for real-world work.

Key Issues in India’s Design Ecosystem

1. Design Misconceptions and Strategic Neglect

Many Indian businesses still see design as superficial decoration rather than a business function. There’s a strong bias toward aesthetics over usability, and systems thinking gets tossed in the trash. In pitches, strategy takes a backseat, and what gets bought is visual polish. Founders don't see design as a tool for growth, differentiation, or customer retention. Design is often brought in too late. Brand architecture, user research, and product-market positioning are skipped. Strategy decks are ignored. And then designers are asked to “make it pop.” This is a structural misunderstanding of design’s role in business.

2. Designers and the Talent Trap

A major chunk of Indian designers are not equipped for the complexity of modern business challenges. They’re trained in tools, not thinking. There’s an obsession with trends, mock-dribbble aesthetics, and hero images, while accessibility, information hierarchy, and systems coherence are nowhere in the conversation. Even senior designers often don’t know how to ask the right questions, facilitate discovery, or think in terms of ROI. And because clients don’t demand this, designers don’t develop it. This results into a talent pool that’s shallow at the strategic end and bloated at the surface level.

3. Education and Systemic Flaws

Design education in India is woefully out of sync with market realities. Most  institutes teach 2005-era design processes using irrelevant tools. There’s little focus on UX research, service design, or AI-assisted workflows. Students graduate with portfolios full of theoretical exercises, zero client handling experience, and no clue how to invoice. Because of this, studios and agencies that actually do good work have to retrain even “qualified” designers from scratch. Worse, many freelancers enter the market with little grounding in ethics, IP rights, or business communication. The gap between academia and industry is so wide, it’s almost irrelevant whether someone has a design degree or not.

4. Clients, Pricing, and the Commodification Spiral

Indian clients expect cheap work. They see logos for ₹500, websites for ₹10k, and brand kits on Canva. So when you say ₹3L for a brand identity, they laugh, or worse, ghost you. This pricing pressure leads agencies to compromise, scope gets trimmed, timelines shrink, and real strategy gets removed. Eventually, the only thing left is decoration. This feeds into the perception that design isn’t valuable, because the design they’re paying for actually isn’t. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

5. Agencies Under Pressure

New design graduates, who have no real-world experience or knowledge of how things work at the ground level, start agencies with nothing but their design skills. This means that these agencies only care about staying in business, and they don't know how to do business, so they slowly lower their rates. In survival mode, they undercharge to win clients, overwork to compensate, and burn out without building capital. Few can afford to invest in research, IP, or culture. Even the good ones end up working on 5 things at once, with no time to think deeply or push boundaries. Clients don’t give them room to breathe. They want Amazon-level polish at Fiverr rates, and because someone out there will say yes to their insane demands, everyone suffers. Agencies just become a part of a broken economy.

6. Market Realities

There is no real design journalism, critique, or discourse in India. No culture of reflection. Startups raise millions but spend peanuts on design unless it’s packaging. Middle management at large companies often kills good design with insecure edits. Visual sameness is everywhere: typefaces, color palettes, even layouts are indistinguishable. Indian designers do not challenge themselves and do not get out of their comfort International clients still don’t trust Indian designers with strategy; only mass production.

7. The Vicious Cycle