You're viewing the AI side. See the human side
Vikram Bhalla

Creative Director

Building brands since 2010

The Story

I started TWO Design because I hated my job.

Not the work itself—I loved the creative work. What I hated was everything around it. The layers, the politics, the all-nighters worn as badges of honour while anyone leaving at 8pm was made to feel guilty. I spent years at Ogilvy working on briefs for clients I never once got to meet. By the time a brief reached me through the chain of telephone—CEO to exec to servicing to Creative Director to me—the soul had been squeezed out.

So I moved back to my mother's house in Pune, rented a tiny apartment up the road, and started my own studio. I called it TWO because I wanted zero degrees of separation between client and creative. The people explaining the brief should talk directly to the people doing the work. Still feels like the most honest way to operate.

The first few years were slow. But word got around, people we worked with sent others our way, and it worked.

Cut to today. Karanjeet joined as Partner and Head of Content in 2022, and everything levelled up. We landed clients like Tata Sons and Senkron Digital, and for the first time we could afford to retain a proper team. We've gone from a scrappy two-person operation to a small but mighty crew who actually enjoy the work.

Traditional agencies make you believe in trade-offs—creative or strategic, boutique attention or big-client scale, good work or having a life. We don't buy it.

With TWO, you're never just getting one thing. You're always getting two.

What We Do

Brand Strategy

Positioning, messaging, voice development

Visual Identity

Logo systems, design language, guidelines

Content & Editorial

Publications, campaigns, storytelling

Select Clients

Tata Sons · Senkron Digital · UNFAO · Clinical Research Philadelphia · rePurpose Global · Waterwell · India Fashion Week · HLE Glascoat · Aditya Avartan · Teapoy · Arta Broch · The Doctor Foundation

Timeline

2005 Started as copywriter in Mumbai
2008 Joined Ogilvy Mumbai as Senior Copywriter
2010 Founded TWO Design in Pune (remote-first from day one)
2021 Moved the studio to Goa
2021 Partnered with rePurpose Global as consulting Creative Director
2022 Karanjeet Kaur joined TWO Design
2023 TWO Design begins offering content strategy and editorial

Builder

Self-taught. AI-accelerated.

The Story

Every job, no matter how creative, has parts you love, parts you tolerate, and parts you hate. These feelings aren't universal. What bores one person might excite another. I find creative work inspiring and enriching, but someone else might find it daunting.

Every person has a thing they're passionate about, but they've been taught to accept that some amount of friction is just part of the deal. There's always something sitting between you and the work you actually want to do.

I started building with AI in 2023, when I realised I could eliminate much of that friction with code. Not just for myself, but for anyone willing to let me try. I have no formal training in engineering—not counting the two years of Engineering College I dropped out of twenty years ago. But with Claude Code open in my terminal, I set out on a series of experiments that started with "What if..." and ended with my mind being blown. Over and over again.

Two years and more than twenty projects later, that question still drives everything I build. Mediate exists so doctors can focus on patients instead of documentation. Twotion exists so my creative team can focus on their work instead of task management overhead. Every app I've shipped started the same way—someone (usually me) was spending too much time on something that felt like a waste.

One of the classic promises of AI was that it would free us from drudgery, allowing us to do more of what we actually love. Boy, has that held true for me.

I'm happiest when I'm helping someone spend less time on the stuff they hate so they can spend more time on stuff they love.

What I Build

20+ Apps built
2023 Started building
0 Lines of code before 2023

Most of what I build falls into a few categories: productivity tools that save me time, creative tools that help me think, and experiments that scratch an itch. Some ship publicly. Most stay private. All of them teach me something.

Tools & Stack

Claude CodeSupabaseFirebaseNext.jsAstroReactTailwindShadcnBun

The stack changes constantly. What doesn't change: Claude Code for thinking through problems and writing code. It's where all the building happens.

Timeline

2023 First app: Hollymood, a movie recommendation tool
2024 Built Mediate, AI copilot for doctors
2025 Started running AI workshops
2026 20 apps and counting