The founder of the Hello Colour, a social impact design lab, is giving the city's minority talent a place to create for positive causes
Sravya Attaluri was born in India, but moved to Hong Kong at age eight and, naturally, considers herself a Hongkonger. Yet, throughout her career as a graphic designer for some of the city’s top agencies, Attaluri witnessed firsthand how non-Chinese Hongkongers, particularly those of colour, are treated differently in professional contexts. She also found this issue was exacerbated by being female and that progressive ideals were consistently throttled.
These experiences partly laid the groundwork for her to found Hello Colour, a design lab that focuses on working with clients and brands that specialise in driving social impact; the company also places importance on hiring ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. In addition, Attaluri has been spurred to undertake a master's degree in neuroscience and psychology of mental health.
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Here, Attaluri explains life at the intersection of design, media and wellbeing, and how Hello Colour’s mission to champion clients who make the world a better place is also providing opportunities for the next generation of Hongkongers like her.
I worked in design agencies as a graphic designer. I learned how to use design to change people's opinions and make people want to buy things. I understood that design had the power to drive action, drive change and impact psychology. So, I wanted to be very careful of how I used that superpower.
In the agency world, there were a lot of race issues. And it wasn’t just one agency. In Hong Kong, I do feel like a lot of things are not addressed.
It was really difficult to be young and hopeful and feel like nobody had my back or some things just couldn’t be said. So I would share illustrations on Instagram. That was my outlet.
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I quit my agency. I just wanted to freelance and take on monthly projects and it kind of blew up from there. I had the freedom to focus on the kind of projects that I wanted to take on—[I was] very focused on women’s rights, women’s health and mental health. To be able to do that was just really exciting.
I started getting six-month, one-year and two-year contracts. I basically had my own little mini-agency and started needing help. Once I got the opportunity to hire more people on paid contracts, I started to give opportunities to girls like me, because I couldn't see representation like that in the agency world in Hong Kong: women of colour and younger women.
I also wanted to carve out a niche for myself at the forefront of scientific research for mental health. It’s really dangerous when people speak up about advocacy and use their own experiences as advice, the line can be very blurry. I do a lot of advocacy work and I talk in panels but I don't want to only speak from lived experience. This is life and death that we're talking about. This is health.