---
title: "KARTHIKA RAMANUJAM - Director of Creative in Greater Bengaluru Area | Tal"
description: "Meet KARTHIKA RAMANUJAM, Creative Director & Design Leader | I build and scale human-led, AI-powered in-house studios | Art Direction · Creative Operations · Brand & Marketing Design | Director of Creative @ Masai School based in Greater Bengaluru Area. AI stack includes aistudio, claude code, and..."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/karthika-ramanujam/share-image"
---

# KARTHIKA RAMANUJAM on Tal

## Headline

Creative Director & Design Leader \| I build and scale human\-led, AI\-powered in\-house studios \| Art Direction · Creative Operations · Brand & Marketing Design \| Director of Creative @ Masai School

## About

Hello there\! I'm Karthika\. I build and scale in\-house creative studios that move the needle at agency pace on in\-house economics\. 12 years in, I still think it's one of the most interesting problems in a company: how do you make a team ship a huge amount of work, on time, on brand, and still make things they're proud of? Right now I lead a 10\-person studio at Masai School, reporting to the CEO\. Before that, 3M, Swiggy, ZestMoney, GrabHouse and Housing\.com\. Startups to Fortune 500, B2B to B2C to D2C, across edtech, e\-commerce, food delivery, fintech, real estate and global manufacturing\. Different worlds, same puzzle\. The craft first\. Creative direction and art direction across integrated, cross\-channel campaigns — brand, performance marketing, video, print and product\. Concept development from brief through approved execution, and the creative rationale presented to CXOs and senior stakeholders\. My craft spans brand, marketing, product and video, which means I can execute, review and direct across all four\. Next comes scale\. Scalable design systems that grow with the brand\. Intake processes that hold across six departments \- Marketing, Tech, Product, Sales, Ops, Partnerships & Curriculum\. AI\-integrated creative workflows where volume gets automated and final creative judgment stays with people\. Then comes the team, which is the soul\. I've built creative teams from nothing; hiring, mentoring and coaching designers, copywriters, animators and video editors\. I watched people grow into roles they didn't think they were ready for, and made the case for them when it mattered\. A good year, to me, looks like what we shipped, who levelled up and how far we have come, together\. My Leadership Playbook \- Lead with empathy, build with clarity, innovate with agility\. I'm a curious person by default\. As a polyglot and a polymath, I've picked up at least one new skill every year for the last twenty\. When I'm not working I'm usually cooking, learning a new language, or falling down a mythology or anime rabbit hole\. I care about who I build for, the work is better when the problem is one I actually relate to\. Building an in\-house studio, or reinventing one around AI\-native production? Let's talk\. \-\-\-\-\- Creative Direction \| Art Direction \| Creative Development \| Design Leadership \| Design Management \| Creative Operations \| Brand Strategy \| Brand Design \| Marketing Design \| Integrated Campaigns \| Visual Storytelling \| Performance Creative \| Design Systems \| Studio Management \| GenAI Production \| Adobe Creative Suite \| Figma

## Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

## AI stack

aistudio

claude code

codex

Adobe Firefly

Figma Make

Framer AI

## Work experience

Director of Creative at Masai, Jul 2024 \- Present · 2 y 2 mo, Bangalore, Leading a 10\-person in\-house creative studio across brand, marketing, product design and video, reporting to the CEO\. • Provide creative and art direction across 3 pods, from creative brief and concept through approved execution; set and hold the creative quality bar\. • Lead cross\-channel production of landing pages, social, digital ads, style guides, brochures, playbooks, pitch decks and GenAI films for campaigns, events and webinars\. • Mentor and coach designers, copywriters & video editors\. Hire, run structured reviews, and secured promotions across every pod\. • Present creative rationale and concept narratives to the CEO, CXOs and cross\-functional stakeholders\. • Own budget, resource allocation and tooling strategy, evaluating AI tools on quality, speed and unit economics\. Manage contractors and freelancers\. • Grew creative output 82% YoY, from 4,527 to 8,253 assets, at flat headcount\. Video rose 201% \(877 to 2,637 films\) with two people; marketing design 54% \(3,650 to 5,616\) with three\. • Rebuilt production around a GenAI pipeline spanning image, video and voice, with human review gates on brand and quality\. 74% improvement in overall TAT\. • Built the DCR platform, a Slack\-native creative intake system, and a course intake system spanning six departments, cutting launch cycles from two weeks to two days\. • Built a modular Figma design system, AI workflow and custom agents for copy, wireframes and landing page design that cut production time by 65%, taking landing pages from 30 to 120\+\. • Directed 100\+ partnership course pages and 15\+ launches for MIT USA, IIT and IIM programmes and institutes including BITSoM, MICA, IMT Ghaziabad, SPJIMR, IIM Trichy and SP Jain\. LP conversion up 12%\. • Rebuilt the user onboarding journey \(730\+ device screens\) with product, manual to self\-serve\. • Led a full revamp of Masai brand assets and website, and built the visual identity for sub\-brands including Placed, MST, Misogi, Masaiverse, MasaiLive, MasaiLearn and Loop\.

Section Chief / Lead Designer at 3M, Nov 2019 \- Sep 2023 · 3 y 10 mo, Bangalore, B2B brand strategy, creative direction and design across Asia, Europe, the US and South America for a Fortune 500 manufacturer\. Global, matrixed delivery environment\. • Built Design meets Design, a design\-led B2B programme for 3M Rail, 0 to 1 in India where it generated $1\.5M within months\. Worked with senior leadership and multiple functions on brand direction, brand strategy and the framework\. The framework was adopted across China, Korea, Japan, Europe, the US and South America, contributing $13M in revenue over two years\. • Led, designed and delivered the 3M Experience Center for India: space design, creative direction and an immersive brand environment with augmented and virtual reality experiences, working across 100\+ internal stakeholders and two external agencies\. • Co\-founded Design for Sustainability as one of seven founding members, an ESG\-aligned initiative\. Global Team Lead for the 'Inspire' segment, 2021–23\. • Country Lead for the global Design Culture team\. Ran Design Thinking, Sustainability and Creative Trends workshops, culture programmes and student internships\. • Partnered with global stakeholders across marketing, design, product, strategy and operations, including US and APAC time zones\. Awards: EHS \| PS Sustainability Achievement Award 2023 · Sustainability Gold Award 2022 and 2021

Creative Head \(Brand & Marketing\) at ZestMoney, Apr 2019 \- Oct 2019 · 6 mo, Bangalore, Built the creative function 0 to 1 at an Indian BNPL fintech\. • Established the studio's three verticals \- marketing design, video and editing, and product design \- and the operating systems that keep them synchronised\. • Set the brand and visual identity foundations, and the briefing, creative review and delivery processes the team worked from\.

Creative Head \(Brand & Marketing\) at Swiggy, Feb 2017 \- Jan 2019 · 2 yrs, Bangalore, Scaled an established creative function 1 to n through hypergrowth at India's largest food\-delivery platform\. Swiggy entered the unicorn club in June 2018 and closed a $1B Series H that December, both within my tenure\. • Built the creative engine behind Swiggy's 7x city expansion, from 7 cities to 70\+ during my tenure\. • Led brand and integrated campaign creative production across ATL and BTL: billboards and OOH, TVCs, digital and performance ads, social, in\-app, emailers, events and partner branding\. • Art\-directed campaigns and photoshoots from concept and creative brief through execution\. • Built and led the creative team from 3 to 18\+ \(in house & contract\) across design, copy, content, animation, video and photography; mentored and directly managed the core team\. • Delivered 5,000\+ assets in 24 months\. • Cut workflow redundancies by 70% through creative operations frameworks\. • Supported 165% customer\-base growth in 10 months through targeted creative and content strategy\.

Senior Marketing Designer at Grabhouse\.Com, Nov 2014 \- Aug 2016 · 1 y 9 mo, Bangalore

Marketing Designer at Housing\.com, Aug 2013 \- Apr 2014 · 8 mo, Mumbai

## Education

M\.Des \(Industrial Design\), Industrial/product design, Game design & Graphic design, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

B\.Arch, Architecture, Thiagarajar College of Engineering

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/karthika-ramanujam)

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