Preeti Vyas Giannetti & Sonal Dabral – An unabridged lesson in Design

The Women Disruptors Lifetime Achievement Award for 2021 was conferred upon Preeti Vyas Giannetti, Chairwoman & Chief Creative Officer, Vyas Giannetti Creative. Giannetti was recognised for her tireless efforts and significant contribution towards the Indian Advertising and Design industry in various ways for the past 3 decades.

To make this session more interesting and engaging, we had Sonal Dabral, Writer, Director and Creative Consultant having a candid conservation with Preeti Vyas Giannetti, where she narrated her career in advertising and design. Both Giannetti and Dabral are from a design background and had graduated from NID, one of India’s premier design institutes. Giannetti also took us through her career journey starting from the NID days and some of the challenges that she faced before setting up her Design studio and becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Sharing her experiences, Giannetti said that what she had learnt and what was taught at NID was fantastic and a lot of her cultural heritage and the cultural DNA was formed at NID, for which she is immensely grateful. When she was starting out, there were no design agencies, but just advertising agencies and she felt that these advertising agencies could use the skillset which NID was teaching.

Adding further, she said that she was immensely fortunate to land up in Contract Advertising, where Mohammed Khan was the Creative Director. It was also important for her that she did her diploma project with Khan, which she did and she was offered a job at Contract with a small salary and continued working there for some more time.

The exposure of NID and the experience that Khan brought in helped her in ideating and knowing more about creativity, which was essential because for a designer one just changes a cocoon and designs beautiful things. “But when you mix up the idea with the strategy, it means a lot and that was fantastic and was alchemy for me,” Giannetti said.

The discussion continued as Dabral and Giannetti brought in more spark and liveliness in the conversation. The conversation between the two design enthusiasts provided some very insightful, especially for students and professionals from the design sector.

Click here to watch the complete conversation.