Priya Mistry
Priya Mistry is a multidisciplinary designer, creative leader, and founder of Blended Creative House, a culture-driven creative agency and platform exploring what it means to create, live, and belong between worlds.
Currently a Design Director at Publicis Brand Design, Priya has spent over a decade building thoughtful, story-driven identities and experiences for brands including Canada Women’s Basketball, Tentree, Cheekbone Beauty, and DoorDash. Her work has been recognized by Applied Arts, RGD, Marketing Mag, and UnderConsideration.
At the heart of her practice is what she calls the Blended ethos: designing from the in-between. Shaped by her experience as a second-generation South Asian Canadian, Priya is interested in the spaces where cultures, identities, generations, and visual languages overlap, and in how design can create new ways of expressing identities that do not fit neatly into one world or another.
Through Blended Creative House, she uses design, storytelling, and conversation to centre culturally nuanced perspectives and challenge preconceived ideas of what cultural design should look like. Her practice sees design not simply as a tool for representation, but as a way to bridge worlds, create connection, and give form to new ways of belonging.
Making in the Middle explores visual identity design as a form of cultural translation, and how the nuances of type, colour, graphic systems, art direction, and storytelling can help bridge identities and create new spaces where people feel seen, heard, and understood.
As a second-generation South Asian Canadian, I grew up between where my parents were born and where I was born, between inherited traditions and the culture I was surrounded by. That experience has shaped not only who I am, but how I design. It has led me to think deeply about what it means to build brands in-between, brands that don’t sit neatly within one cultural world, but find their identity through the intersection of many.
For bicultural and diasporic designers, there can be pressure to either assimilate into dominant Western design languages or lean on familiar cultural signifiers to communicate who something is for. But culture is rarely that simple. So how do we design for identities that exist somewhere in the middle?
Through my own practice and Blended Creative House, I’ll explore how we can build 360-degree brand ecosystems that hold that complexity. From the personality of a typeface and the emotion of colour, to custom letterforms, graphic systems, imagery, art direction, and language, every design decision can become an opportunity to connect the old with the new, where our families come from with where we are now.
Making in the Middle is about using design to create a third space: one that doesn’t ask people to choose between identities, but allows something new to emerge from their intersection.
At a time when culture can easily be reduced to aesthetic shorthand, I want to explore how we can move beyond what culture is “supposed” to look like and build visual worlds where more people can recognize themselves, feel represented, and belong.
