Mumbai-based award-winning graphic designer and AGI member Shweta Malhotra collects a decade of fashion illustrations from her visual diary Something Cool Everyday into a limited edition Riso-printed zine, produced with Miso.inc in Surat.
In 2014, Shweta Malhotra started a visual diary called Something Cool Everyday, a daily illustration practice where fashion and graphic design could meet without a brief or a client. That practice has continued for over a decade. The zine is the archive it produced.
The fashion illustration zine is a curated selection of Malhotra’s favourite works from that diary: pieces made as self-initiated expressions of style, attitude and silhouette rather than as commissions. The visual language is consistent across the decade, minimal, bold and feminine, a deliberate counterpoint to the maximalist visual culture she works within and against in India. “Each illustration started as an instinct,” she says, “and over ten years those instincts built into something I could see as a whole.” The works stand individually but read collectively as a portrait of an evolving practice shaped by intuition and cultural shifts.
The zine is printed in Riso in collaboration with Miso.inc in Surat, a choice made for the texture, the colour layering and the lo-fi vibrance the process brings. “Riso has an imperfection to it that felt right for work that was never meant to be perfect in the first place,” Malhotra says. “It makes each copy feel intimate and alive.” The limited edition format positions the zine as both archive and art object, a collectible that extends the daily illustration practice into a physical form worthy of its ten-year span.
Shweta Malhotra is an award-winning graphic designer and artist based in Mumbai, Gold Medalist in Applied Arts from Sophia Polytechnic, and a Member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale since 2019. Her career has spanned McCann Erickson, Ogilvy, Fabrica at Benetton, and twenty years of independent practice.
Website: shwetamalhotra.in Instagram: @shwetamalhotra
Fashion Illustration Zine, 2025. Limited edition Riso print. Produced in collaboration with Miso.inc, Surat, India.
