About · Santhosh Kumar M
Santhosh Kumar M, visual designer for brand and marketing, Bengaluru, India.
I'm Santhosh Kumar M. My job is easy to say and hard to do: keep a brand looking like itself in every place it appears. This page is the full record of how I got here.
Right now running brand and marketing design at DriveU studying product design at IIT Madras rebuilding this site in public
Academic background
Specialisation: Industrial and Product Design. I am learning UX and product design so I can handle brand, marketing and product work without handing it off to someone else. The course covers AI-powered design, user research and product strategy.
Animation, motion graphics, visual storytelling, graphic design and photography. This is where it started. It taught me detail, timing, and how to tell when a piece of work is finished. I still use all three every week.
Career path
I do all the visual design for DriveU's marketing: hoardings, print, performance ads, social media, lifecycle campaigns and partner creatives. I also built the AI-assisted workflow the team runs on, using Firefly, Google AI Studio, Midjourney and Claude. It shortens the gap between brief and final artwork without lowering the standard.
I ran five clients at once. Wrote the briefs, built the identities, guided the freelancers and kept every client updated. I delivered more than ten brand identities across different industries, and most of them are still in use.
I started freelancing here and it turned into a full-time offer. Brand identity, campaigns, social and motion, across several clients at once. This is where I learned to price my own work and run a project from first call to final file with nobody above me.
My agency years. Campaigns for several brands across three cities: concept, art direction, print, social and on-ground creatives. This is where I learned how big brands actually work, and how to hold one look across many formats at the same time. I also helped junior designers read a brand guideline properly.
Motion design and video storytelling for education and community campaigns, mostly in Tamil. This is where I stopped designing single pieces and started thinking about how they connect, and how one message has to hold its shape across very different formats and audiences.
My first job, straight out of college. 3D visuals, title cards, simple animation and visual effects for short films, YouTube channels and OTT content. This is where I got the technical base that everything after it sits on.