Visiting cards are usually read once and forgotten. Candy Shop's is a candy that opens into a highlighter, with the card printed on its wrapper — useful enough to keep on a desk. I co-designed the wrapper graphics and helped shoot the award film. It made The First List at the Kyoorius Design Awards 2025.
PROJECT INFO
The brief
Candy Shop wanted a visiting card that behaved like the agency: playful, surprising and hard to forget. Nobody commissioned it. The one fixed point was the deadline — the entry date for the Kyoorius Design Awards 2025.
What we found
We looked at visiting cards of every kind, from everyday ones to design-led ones. Even the clever ones ended up the same way: read once, then filed or thrown out. A card does its job in the few seconds of an exchange and has no reason to exist after that.
So the problem wasn't how the card looked. It was that nobody had a reason to keep it
The idea
Umeshwar Adhikari asked the question that started it: why can't an agency called Candy Shop hand out a candy? We made the candy useful: open it and it's a highlighter, and its wrapper is the card. Something people use keeps your name on their desk.
How it came together
The object. A custom highlighter made no sense for a small run, so we used an off-the-shelf candy that opens into a highlighter, and designed its wrapper as the card.
The wrapper. A 1.409 × 3.16 in label (about 36 × 80 mm) on matte sticker paper. Name, email and number sit in a solid band at the top, the Candy Shop badge at the base, candy stripes in between.
Four flavours. Blue, orange, pink and yellow, with every person's details printed in all four. On yellow, the type switches to black so it stays readable.
Prototyping. Most rounds were about size: how small the type could go and still read once the label was on the highlighter, how large the logo needed to be, and how big the label itself could be.
What shipped
The finished card, photographed by Somya Arya, and a 1:52 award film that the team shot and cut together.
Outcome
The First List, Kyoorius Design Awards 2025 — the stage after Round 1 of judging, in Communication Design › Branding & Identity › Brand Expression: Stationery.
More than 100 cards handed out, one person at a time: at pitches, events and office visits.
The usual first reaction: "Wow, is that your visiting card?"
What I'd do differently
We built this from an insight about behaviour. Next time I'd also start from the hand: how a card is held, pocketed and used. The off-the-shelf highlighter was the right call for the deadline, but its ergonomics are the weakest part of the object. A form designed for writing would make it better to use, not just to receive.
Details & credits
Timeline March–April 2025
Tools Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Blender
Concept Umeshwar Adhikari
Wrapper graphics Shaurya Singh, Umeshwar Adhikari, Shalini Singh, Shivanshu Gupta
Copy Kirti Saini
Photography Somya Arya
Shoot and award film Shaurya Singh, Umeshwar Adhikari, Shalini Singh, Shivanshu Gupta, Kirti Saini, Piyush Kumar, Tuhina Sharma, Somya Arya
Agency Candy Shop Communications