Sri Lanka

What home looks like from far away

Ask a Sri Lankan living abroad what they miss and you rarely hear about the famous things first. You hear about the sound of a tuk-tuk changing gear outside the gate. Plain tea in a glass, far too sweet. An aunt asking whether you have eaten, as a greeting, a question and an instruction all at once.

Sri Lanka is where Ceylon Trends begins, and these designs are built from those details. They are for people who carry the island with them in London, Toronto, Melbourne, New York or anywhere else, and who want to wear that quietly or loudly, on their own terms.

What goes into the designs

The designs draw on a small set of themes we know well: tea, tuk-tuks, Colombo, Galle, Kandy and Jaffna, food, family humour, everyday sayings and the particular homesickness of the diaspora. The style is bold lettering and simple line illustration in warm colours.

A few rules shape every piece:

• Original work only. Every design is drawn for Ceylon Trends, or commissioned under a written licence. Nothing is copied from a search result.
• Lettering is checked by fluent readers. Sinhala and Tamil designs are reviewed before printing.
• Pride without cliché. We avoid tourist-shop stereotypes, and we do not use the flag, national emblems or religious symbols as decoration.

Every corner of the island

Colombo, Kandy, Galle, Jaffna, Nuwara Eliya, Ella, Sigiriya, Trincomalee, Anuradhapura and Negombo are all listed below. Each gets its own page as soon as there is real content for it: an original visual direction, researched local detail and designs to match. We would rather release four designs we are proud of than forty we are not.

If you are choosing a present for someone far from home, start with our guide to Sri Lankan gifts for diaspora friends and family.

New to Sri Lanka? Start with what makes Sri Lanka special.