Ashwini Deshpande
Co-founder, Director
A 1989 graduate of National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India Ashwini is the co-founder of Elephant, India's largest independent integrated design consultancy with offices in India & Singapore.
Ashwini is part of the core group that steers the Design Alliance Asia consortium. She is an active founding member of Association of Designers of India and The Collective, an initiative by women creative leaders to create safe work-places. She is advisor to Indian Creative Women that promotes diversity.
She along with her team have done award-winning work for global brands in automobile, engineering, FMCG, food service, healthcare & personal care segments. Some of the awards include Global ReBrand 100 (USA), Worldstar for Packaging Excellence (Germany), Asiastar for Packaging Excellence (Singapore), A’Design Awards (Italy), Lexus Design Awards and India Design Excellence Awards among many others.
Ashwini was invited by Rockefeller Foundation to participate in a global Social Impact summit and by Danish Design Foundation to partner with Copenhagen Co-creation Agenda. She has lectured across more than 20 countries including AIGA conference in Boston, icograda Design week in Vancouver & Istanbul, Business of Design week in Hong Kong and International Design Congress at Mexico as well as South Korea more recently.
She has been a jury chair at D&AD (UK), MADstars (S Korea) & London International Awards. She was a jury member at Cannes Lions (France), Global ReBrand 100 (USA), New York Festival Advertising Awards, The One Show Awards (USA), Pentawards (UK), Spikes Asia (Singapore), Design for Asia (HK), International A’Design Awards (Italy) among other prestigious awards in India such as Kyoorius & Abbys. Most recently, Ashwini chaired the awards jury at the Golden Drum Festival of Creativity. She is also a guest speaker at their Conference in Portoroz, Slovenia.
As a key member of The Design Alliance Asia consortium, she has edited Colours of Asia book that was published in Hong Kong. This project was awarded Design for Asia Special Culture Award by the Hong Kong government.
To create local awareness on design, Ashwini wrote “Design Purpose”, a bimonthly column in the most widely circulated Marathi newspaper, Sakal. She has authored over a 100 published articles across local, national & international media.
Impact Magazine has featured Ashwini among 50 Most Influential Women in Media for seven consecutive years. She is on Campaign India’s A-List.
Ashwini is a part of the MCCIA committee on Sports, Media & Entertainment. She mentors start-ups through the TiE - The Indus Entrepreneurs platform. She is part of several educational advisory boards of Design Masters Programmes including Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Pune University, World University of Design, Pearl Academy, Nirma University, Symbiosis University and FLAME University.
Ashwini was invited to be Independent Director on the Board of Directors of Indigo Paints Ltd in 2023.