Through a thoughtful visual language rooted in everyday experiences, Baltimore-based designer Anushka Jajodia turns complex stories into illustrations that invite people to see themselves in the picture.
Spend time with Anushka Jajodia’s designs, it feels as if someone is offering you a hand and taking you on a guided tour. Color creates a sense of direction, while familiar scenes offer glimpses into people’s lives.
You don’t need to understand every symbol right away. You only have to follow them. An illustration can lead you from everyday life to a shared conversation, from a person’s story to the healthcare system around them, and from a difficult problem to a hopeful outcome.f
Still from PBS News Hour, “Neighborhood Nursing brings healthcare to people’s doorsteps in vulnerable communities,” August 6, 2024. A Neighborhood Nursing team member wears the stoop illustration in PBS News Hour’s segment on the program.
Born in Mumbai and trained in Social Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she received the Fred Lazarus Leadership for Social Change Award, Jajodia has built a vocabulary that holds steady across more than a decade and 25+ projects. Birds, suns, flowers, windows, and handwritten words appear across work as diverse as Indian mentoring initiatives and US health programs, giving her illustrations a recognizable character while helping make complex subjects feel more approachable.
“Every colour has a place,” Jajodia says. Her palette behaves like a language with fixed meanings, and once you notice the pattern, you can read her work by color alone. Purple and lilac mark moments when people speak in their own words, while marigold yellow often signals hope or the end of a journey. Green grounds the figures and their stories. Coral, magenta, and orange bring energy to scenes of action, participation, and change. In a project on medical misdiagnosis, she drew the same patient stories twice, first inside a grey, shadowed shape, then inside a bright yellow circle. The change in color is the whole argument.
Illustration by Anushka Jajodia for Neighborhood Nursing, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, 2023. Neighbors, a nurse, and a community health worker gather on an East Baltimore stoop in the launch illustration for Neighborhood Nursing.
Jajodia’s illustrations have a friendly and handmade quality. Simple, expressive figures appear in familiar scenes among gardens, houses, and open skies. Clean shapes and generous breathing room make the images feel warm and inviting. Beneath their playful appearance, they have a clear purpose, bringing us closer to the people and stories they portray.
At the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, Jajodia is often the one designer working within interdisciplinary teams of nurses, researchers and professionals, translating studies, experiences, and complex systems into materials people can follow. Her color coding can help trace a patient’s journey through different stages of care, so people who are overwhelmed, unwell, or reading in a second language can find their way before reading a word. On one diabetes brochure, the glucose meter sits on a family’s dinner table between the salad and the stew. The medical information is all there, inside a moment people already know.
More technically, her work sits at the intersection of visual design and research, where design becomes the way trust is built and participation happens. “When people see their own lives on the page, they start to trust the process,” she says. “That’s when co-design really begins.”
Before she draws, she observes. To develop characters for a mentoring program for girls in rural India, she traveled to the villages and photographed the young women who would appear in the illustrations for the mentoring toolkits and app. The finished characters retain details of their clothing and braids, as well as the way they hold a phone. In Baltimore, to introduce a community nursing initiative, she drew neighbors gathered on the steps of a brick house, with a nurse sitting among them. Residents now wear it on t-shirts and ask to see it on more materials, and in PBS News Hour’s 2024 segment on the program, the care team appears wearing it on camera.
Taken together, her designs invite people to participate. On outreach materials for a dementia education study, community advisors appear as hand-drawn portraits beside their own words, credited as the voices of the work. Nearly every piece ends with a blank space for the person holding it, where children write their dreams and caregivers write their own purpose statements. Color gives direction, the image offers company, and the last page belongs to the participant.
Explore more of Anushka Jajodia’s work on her website, and follow her on Instagram.
