About

I’m Hiran Venugopalan, a maker and product designer with fifteen years of experience designing products, building teams, and helping ideas grow into systems people can use.

I currently lead design at Kaleyra/Tata Communications, continuing the journey that began with Kaleyra becoming part of the group. Before that, I worked with Quintype and Bang the Table. Earlier in my journey, I co-founded saltmangotree, an early digital marketing studio in India, where I led design and technology until its acquisition in.

My path into design began with an interest in free and open-source software, and by volunteering with Swathanthra Malayalam Computing. I was part of the effort to help revive the community, and that opened the door to language computing, type design, and digital publishing. During that journey, I created Dyuthi, an ornamental Malayalam Unicode font, worked on language computing projects, and designed Rufscript, a handwriting-inspired display typeface.

Over the years, that same curiosity has grown into community and open-source work through projects like Malayaleegraphy, a type-art project that brought Malayalam lettering into digital pop-culture. I’ve been building UXFOSS, an initiative to bring product design into FOSS projects, and Ksha Collectives, an space for educational tools, language, and learning. You’ll find more of that in /projects

I also write a newsletter, This&That, about how creative people think and work, part interviews, part observations, and part things worth sharing. Outside work, a lot of that same curiosity finds its way into coffee, books, films, and food, including brewing and the occasional workshop around it.

I enjoy meeting people who are building, exploring, or figuring things out. If something here connects, feel free to write to me, or find me over coffee in Bengaluru.