Nagaland has been a state that many people have not heard
about, and the reason why is mostly because of the political
situation in the state that makes it unreachable for tourist
and outsiders to even connect with its local people and
culture.
The Hornbill Festival is a festival that is held every first week
of December in Nagaland. The Hornbill Festival is like the
Window to Naga- land. Nagaland has about 16 main tribes and
all these tribes are spread around Nagaland making it
impossible for anyone to cover it all in one time.

Nagaland being my home and close to my heart, I always
wanted to experiment with all the different tribe prints to
come up with my own version for personal Design
Experiment, and this interest led me to the Horbill Festival
Project. I felt the need to do a solid Branding project and still
connect this with my interest for Tribal Prints of Nagaland.
Since the Hornbill unites all of the 16 tribes of Nagaland, I felt
this would give me an opportunity to study the prints more in
depth and also study about the Naga culture.

Cultural probes is also known as a diary study which is a way
of gathering information about people and their activities.
Unlike other observations like Questionnaires and traditional
field studies, Cultural Probe allows users to self-report.
Information gathered from cultural probes is particularly
useful early in the design process.
I wanted to use this approach to research my audience and to
take a different route to researching. The Cultural Probe was
distributed to people around Bangalore from students to
working people. Packages were handed over with Paper, pen,
mood stickers and photograph cards to look and reflect their
opinions on it. It was an open project and they were allowed
to write, draw and some even wrote a poem or two about
what they felt looking at these pictures.

The feedbacks I got varied from peoples opinion about
cultures and identity, most wrote about the colors that
caught their eye, some talked about power and strength and
unity and some about the freedom of Nagaland.
Some feedback Poems:
“Is this just something you’d like to share with us? Is this a
culture that makes you want to fly?
Can we walk along with this feel of trust?
Is this the place where you want to live and die?”
“This is the strangest place I’ve ever heard of.
I never thought I’d find a place like this.
This is a place full of colors.
A place you want to watch, smell, hear and touch…”

Concept Development-
The initial stages were of inpirations I picked up from the
tribal shawls, the carved wooded panels and doors, to the
hornbill feathers and the various Naga Tribal Headgears. I
randomly chose patterns from the tribal shawls, not being
specific which tribe I was choosing from as I did not want to
stick to one tribe print, my aim here was to even mix tribal
prints to represent unity for the Hornbill Festival and to see
what I can come up with.

The Logo Design –
The great Indian hornbill, a large and colourful bird is
considered a symbol of bravery in the folk culture of most
Naga tribes. Its cry, which sounds like a roar, suggests
strength and courage. Wearing a hornbill feather on the
headgears implied honour for a Naga warrior during the
headhunting days.
I focused my logo design on the Horbill Feathers and used
bright colors to add elements of fun and character. I played
around with many feather styles and brushes for the feather
effects.

After the prints were re-created in Illustrator, I started
creating the poster designs and played around with many
different effects in Photoshop. During my experiment I
realised the prints were not standing out as it looked like any

rectangle shapes pasted on the poster. I wanted the prints to
have more depth in it. So I started using a graph paper to
break apart the designs and layed it in each sections of the
graph.

During my research I have come to learn more about the
tribal attires of Nagaland and the folklores that comes with it.
I have gained more information about Nagaland and the
Hornbill Festival then I did before this project.
My fascination to recreate the tribal prints have led me to
study different existing tribal prints in Nagaland and gave me
more insight on Tirbal Cultures and prints around the world.

This was my Final Uni Project but I’m still intrigued in this
topic and looking forward to deep diving more in the future.