I have written another article for specky boy design magazine titled ‘Ignore the design, please’ The article deals with how and why people underrate design as a profession and how and why they are wrong. It is based on my experience working as a freelance designer for the last 9 years. Although any designer is generally aware of the fact that design was underrated for a very long time and there is a resurgence of design and designers in the silicon valley at present, the picture elsewhere is still grim. The article takes the reader through the common misconceptions of people about the profession of design and how they came about to be.

Read the full article here

This article was originally published in the Specky Boy design magazine

The most important thing a designer needs to have is a good taste. A good taste at identifying great work. It doesn’t matter if your work doesn’t match up with your taste yet. It will slowly but steadily catch up. Ultimately your taste ends up defining your style. In fact your taste will be few steps ahead of your talent in the initial years of your career. Your taste can tell the difference in quality between what you want to make and what you have made. You should listen to this video by Ira Glass of ‘The American Life’ fame if you have not already done so. He talks about taste by analysing his earlier works in a candid fashion Continue Reading »

Recently there was a discussion in twitter about the various titles for a design professional. One side was of the opinion that titles do not matter and at the end of the day they are all designers while the other side was of the opinion that it is important to pay attention to your titles especially when you are working in a large organization. I can understand where these two points of view come from. For a designer working in a small startup titles are the last thing they are concerned about. In a start up almost Continue Reading »

I have been working on a project which has the Follow/Unfollow functionality. The above pic shows how designers usually think about the Follow/Unfollow buttons but while implementing it in the UI I came across some unforeseen issues. Below is the best fit solution I could find.

1) The Follow button instead of Grey should be Green in color to catch the Users attention. A grey button can go unnoticed with all the white space in the background. Clearly the button needs to beckon the attention of the user as it is a ‘kind of’ Call To Action.

2) Once the user has clicked on the Follow button and started Following the user the ‘Following’ button can have the Grey color because now the button need not compete with other elements for the attention of the user. The major action of following the user has already been done and now all the button is doing is displaying that information.

3) A better management of the screen space available will make use of just one single button. ie: one button to Follow and Unfollow an User. So that means on hovering over the ‘Following’ button the button will change to ‘Unfollow’ with the red color. This means that the unfollow button need not have three states but just two (normal & active state) and for the ‘Following’ button just the normal state.

Pic courtesy: Matteodicapua. You can download the PSD for the buttons from 365PSD

I work as an in-house graphic designer and everyday my work gets judged by a lot of people, some with a bit of design sense while others without much. After being in the design industry for some time I have come to realize that perfection is a relative ‘feeling’. What might seem perfect to me might not seem perfect to another person…it might not even seem perfect to me after some time. Perfection is a feeling that changes from person to person and from time to time.

A lot of people confuse perfection with closure. Making sure that the edges of the text-boxes in your comp line up is not a sign of obsession with perfection, it is just an effort to attain closure while testing 41 shades of blue
to find the perfect shade is.

Rather than trying to attain perfection I try to attain closure in every work I do which means that if I have 5 minutes to create an artwork and send it to the printer I will spend the last one minute pre-flighting the files.

It’s a Monday morning and you are rushing to office. Just when you were about to enter a cab, you remember that your wallet is empty. You rush to the nearest ATM to withdraw money. You open the door to the ATM and a friendly voice welcomes you XYZ bank’s ATM. Once at the kiosk you see a welcome message on screen. Continue Reading »