BSES Rajdhani and BSES Yamuna are Delhi's two principal electricity distribution companies, serving millions of households across the capital. Their communication problem wasn't visibility — it was warmth. A utility company, by definition, communicates in the language of bills and outages. We were brought in to change that register entirely.
Our work spans the full range of brand communication — seasonal campaigns advising consumers on power conservation in winter and summer, monsoon safety advisories, and the ongoing editorial work of newsletters and corporate and CSR booklets. Each of these serves a different audience and a different moment, but all of them carry the same underlying argument: that an electricity company has a relationship with the city it powers, and that relationship deserves to be communicated with care.
The design language that runs through all of this moves away from the expected corporate blues into something warmer, more neighbourhood. Typography that feels like a local magazine rather than a government circular. The result is communication that people actually read — and that BSES's own employees feel pride in sharing.
After Vivek Vihar, the brief was prevention — not condolence.
On 3 May, a faulty air conditioner triggered a fire in Vivek Vihar that killed nine people. BSES came to us for a campaign, quickly, ahead of the worst of the Delhi summer.
The temptation in a brief like this is to communicate concern. Concern does not prevent a fire. We built the campaign around a single rule: every post had to end with something a person could actually do that week — fit a stabiliser, clean the filter, get the wiring checked, set the thermostat to 24°C, find out whether the flat has an RCCB.
One post carries the incident. It states the date, the place, and the number of people who died, over a map of Delhi, without adjectives. Everything after it is instruction. The visual system is deliberately flat and unmistakable: BSES red and blue, one idea per frame, the action line always in the same position at the foot of the post, so the campaign reads as advisory rather than advertising.
This is not work we are pleased about. It is work we were careful with.
Twenty-four years of a utility, told as a record rather than a celebration.
BSES turned twenty-four this year. Anniversary communication for a utility usually collapses into self-congratulation, which is the one register a power company can least afford — most people's relationship with their discom is transactional and frequently irritable.
So we built it as a public record. Every post is anchored to a number that can be checked: peak demand from 2,879 MW in 2002 to 8,748 MW today, AT&C losses from around 55% to below 6%, over 16,000 rooftop solar connections, 3.5 lakh trees and shrubs, more than 3,400 EV charging locations, bills issued in Braille. The argument is not that BSES is remarkable. It is that this is what twenty-four years of infrastructure work looks like when somebody bothers to write it down.
The films hold the same discipline — data animates rather than decorates. One is simply the numeral 24 catching light. Another is about Ojaswini, India's first all-women led O&M sub-division, and needed no statistics at all.
#LifeLineOfDelhi ran across the campaign. It is a large claim, and a utility is only entitled to it if the rest of the work earns it.