You're Kind

SOAS

Kagbeni Monastery
Shrine Display Guide

An accessible interpretation tool using illustration to make spatial and cultural knowledge easier to navigate across languages.

Information Design | Illustration | Publication Design

Mountain landscape with a temple in the foreground, decorated with prayer flags, mountains in the background, and a clear blue sky.

Designed in direct collaboration with an academic client at SOAS, the guide interprets the shrine displays inside Kagbeni Monastery in Nepal. The brief called for an accessibility-led approach: a tool that could communicate complex spatial and cultural information to any visitor, regardless of language or prior knowledge.

Interior of a Tibetan Buddhist temple with a golden Buddha statue at the center, colorful prayer flags, and traditional drums and masks decorating the space.

A shrine inside a monastery with a Buddha statue, surrounded by various Buddhist artifacts. To the left, a Nepalese Buddhist flag with vertical red, yellow, white, orange, and blue stripes. To the right, color swatches labeled with font types: Tenez, Akkurat Pro, and Tibetan. The background is beige.

The illustrative system uses a clear visual hierarchy, translating dense, layered shrine displays into flat, numbered illustrations that mirror the arrangement of each shrine. Typography, colour, and pattern were drawn directly from the monastery's own visual language: the Nepalese Buddhist flag, the shrine's palette, and the sculptures' Tibetan names, set alongside their English translations

Photo of a golden seated Buddha statue with a halo, flanked by smaller statues, inside a decorated temple. Illustration of a Buddha figure with labeled parts and decorative elements.

Photo of various Buddha statues in different sizes and colors, displayed on shelves and a table in a room. The right side shows a labeled silhouette diagram of Buddha statues in different postures and sizes, numbered for identification.

Open book with text about Buddha Maitreya and accompanying illustration showing the silhouettes of a Buddha figure and smaller figures above, all in yellow and red, against a white background on a dark wooden surface.

The result is a guide where illustration carries the primary weight of communication. Viewers can navigate and identify each figure through the visual system, with text providing further information about each shrine.