sara parulekar

SARA PARULEKAR

Sara Parulekar is a graphic designer at Rhode Island School of Design, with a concentration in Computation, Technology, and Culture.

I. email
II. linkedin
III. instagram
IV. portfolio
V. resume

view more about me

ELECTROJAZZ FESTIVAL

Branding, Publication, Merch

Electrojazz is a festival identity emerging from a dos-à-dos spiral-bound publication that unfolds through a non-linear narrative. It weaves together fragments from The Polyvalent Discourse on Electronic Music, Three Approaches to Defining Jazz, and Popular Music and the Aesthetics of Aging. Two visual languages—electropop’s neon gradients and swing jazz’s timeless, contemporary palette—collide within a playful grid system. This hybrid identity of eras and genres translates sound into form across poster, web, and souvenir designs.

(2025)

THEINTERNETISACULT.COM

Campaign, Branding, Publication

theinternetisacult.com is a proposed cult-inspired campaign targeting internet addiction through an offline, printed matter experience. The project uses provocative color and Authentic Sans across pamphlets, posters, and stickers to capture the attention of passersby. It combines internet language with cult rhetoric to guide viewers toward the ironic action of visiting theinternetisacult.com. The campaign culminates in an installation that merges online and offline worlds, questioning the cyberfuture, the divide between digital and physical selves, and who we become once we enter the digital world.

(2025)

III

RISD STORE MERCHANDISE

Apparel, Merch, Branding

Latitude 41° and Defenders of the Arts are two merch lines developed for the RISD Store, translating place and identity into wearable design. Latitude 41° draws from Rhode Island’s nautical history and Providence’s local iconography to create three distinct designs that allow visitors to carry a piece of the state with them, each paired with custom-printed labels that echo the shirt graphics. Defenders of the Arts, originally conceived as a camo collection inspired by RISD Public Safety’s 2014 merch release, emphasizes the importance of artistic practice to be defended, valued, and collectively upheld.

(2025)

IV.

SECRETGROTTO.NET
Web Design, Typography Design

Secret Grotto Type Foundry is an interactive, hand-coded website that invites users to explore a submerged typographic world through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The site features three variable typefaces, including an original pixel font (Novice Witch) and a hand-illustrated typeface (Lost Times), each supported by custom themed dingbats developed in Glyphs.

It also includes an interactive type specimen for Novice Witch, where users engage animated icons through a wand-like interface, summoning characters across the page through direct interaction.

secretgrotto.net

(2025)

HEARING VOICES
Web Design, Artificial Intelligence, Writing

Hearing Voices is a digital poetry project that interrogates where human language ends and computational language begins. In response to John Cayley’s Grammalepsy, the work challenges the idea that writing transcends material form through six co-authored poems. The first half are originals created for the project, and the latter was generated by large language models. The web experience includes open-source videos encoded into ASCII and custom sound design, transforming the text into image, signal, and noise. These cyber-touched poems invite viewers to question authorship, agency, and how digital language reshapes perception, identity, and the self within networked culture.

hearing voices

(2025)

VI.

AAWAAZ
Publication, Writing

Aawaz (meaning noise in Marathi) is an archival publication that gathers South Asian queer and feminine histories through myth, storytelling, and historical narrative. The project merges research and design into a living archive, drawing from South Asian textiles, Sufi miniature paintings, and pre-colonial visual traditions to reclaim queer histories as inherent to South Asian identity. Informed by Gayatri Gopinath’s writing on queer diaspora, the work navigates liminality—existing between cultural belonging and displacement—shaping a diasporic framework that reflects lived experience as well as theory.

(2024)

VII.

THE COMPLETE ACT OF PURIFYING THE CONCIOUSNESS
Publication, Writing

The fundamental nature of the true self is beyond that of space, time, and causation. The Complete Act of Purifying the Consciousness is a tetralogy derived from the story of Saraswati and Lila in the Hindu text Yoga Vasistha. Through graphic typography and archival imagery, the project explores the nature of reality as non-linear and non-sequential, where worlds, lifetimes, places, and events—perceived as separate—exist in a state of superposition. What appears as past, present, and future collapses into simultaneity. Everything that seems to be happening is happening now. There is only now.

(2024)