British-Canadian graphic designer and illustrator Aysha Lilani merges East African heritage with snowboarding culture in Kichizi, a bold board graphic selected by Gilson Snow for their 2026 lineup that takes its name from a Kenyan word for mindset over struggle.
The word came from a tour guide in Kenya, on a trek where Aysha Lilani and her nieces were clearly struggling and trying not to show it. “Kichizi,” he kept saying. It means something like “it’s easy,” or “piece of cake.” Repeating it somehow worked: it lightened the effort, turned a physical challenge into a mental one, made the hard part feel like a choice rather than a fact. Years later, learning to snowboard and falling constantly, Lilani found herself reaching for the same word. “Kichizi. I can do it. It’s fine. It’s easy.” Even when it wasn’t. She kept going until it clicked, which is exactly how snowboarding is supposed to work and exactly how very little of it actually feels in practice.
That word, and everything it carries, became the title and the animating idea behind her snowboard graphic for Gilson Snow’s 2026 lineup.
“I wanted to try something a little different and bring East African culture into snowboarding,” she says, “merging my heritage with my passion for the sport, two worlds you don’t often see together.”
The project began as a personal one: an attempt to place two parts of her life, her Indian-Kenyan heritage and her love for snowsports, in conversation with each other on a surface where neither would typically appear. Gilson Snow’s decision to select it for production turned that personal project into something considerably more public.
The design is built from masks, flowing lines and a warm palette of reds, oranges and earth tones. The masks are not direct reproductions but expressive interpretations, representing the emotional range of learning something new: determination, doubt, confidence, frustration. The flowing lines emulate the sensation of finding rhythm on freshly groomed snow. The warm palette is a deliberate counterpoint to the cold environment the board inhabits, bringing heat and cultural resonance into a visual context more accustomed to ice and alpine restraint. Lilani created the piece digitally in Procreate and Adobe, working with layers and bold colour choices informed by African patterns and textiles.
Snowboard graphics have always had their own aesthetic tradition, and in recent years that tradition has opened outward into a broader celebration of creative diversity. Kichizi pushes further still, introducing a specific cultural narrative and a personal story of perseverance into a space where both are rare. To Lilani, the word itself is the work’s real subject: “Kichizi is about mindset. It’s about determination and progress, reframing difficulty even when you’re falling over and it feels like you’re failing.”
Aysha Lilani is a British-Canadian graphic designer and illustrator with Indian-Kenyan heritage, working across expressive design, pattern and illustration inspired by nature and East African culture.
ARTIST LINKS
ayshalilani.com
@ayshalilani.designs
Available at Gilson Snow
Kichizi, 2026. Digital illustration, Procreate and Adobe. Snowboard graphic produced by Gilson Snow.
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