Celebrating South Asian literature and art

Daak Vaak is a literary and cultural initiative focused on South Asian literature, art, culture, and history. Founded in 2017 by friends Onaiza and Prachi, it started as a small newsletter and has since grown into a wide range of literary projects including research, poetry readings, a gift shop, and more, serving a thriving community of readers.

Daak Vaak’s existing WordPress-powered blog was struggling on two fronts: it could neither effectively showcase the breadth of content being published nor the diversity of projects being undertaken, and it was failing to mitigate actively exploited security vulnerabilities in the underlying infrastructure.

Miranj came on board to help chart a new path for their web presence. We kicked off with a strategy workshop with the founders to deeply understand their brand, their audience, and their goals, and to arrive at a clear direction before any design or development began. This helped us chart the way forward in a manner that would address the immediate security breaches, poor user experience, and authoring concerns with the ageing-WordPress site, as well as lay the groundwork for publishing a growing portfolio of written content around South Asia. It surfaced the need for a content model that could accommodate traditional long-form essays alongside poetry, letters, guides, and podcasts, each with its own structural requirements.

We built the new site on Craft CMS, which gave us the flexibility to model these varied content types cleanly while keeping the publishing experience straightforward for the Daak Vaak team. Special attention went into tooling for poetry, supporting nuances like translation credits and sourcing details. The site also features a detailed taxonomy system — tagging posts by creator, location, language, and topic — making it easier to dig deeper into a poet, a language, an interest area, or a corner of the subcontinent.

The new Daak Vaak website launched in September 2024 with a clean, minimal interface that keeps the art — essays, letters, poetry, photographs — at the centre of attention. Each article is treated as a postcard, and the site’s structure reflects the full range of what Daak Vaak publishes, from ​“Curiosity” posts to poems, presented with the care they deserve.

We are glad to have worked on a project that celebrates South Asian heritage. Browsing the Daak Vaak archives has always rewarded us with interesting historical anecdotes, glimpses into the lives of famous literary figures, and of course, poetry — and we hope the new site takes this work to many more people.