abhijithkeyaar / archived blog

Who Moved My Glycerine Bottles?

2011-08-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

The Blog Has Moved.
Looks like it is time for a goodbye and a new beginning. After months of trial and error (mostly error, owing to my expertise in webhosting related matters) this blog has found a new home at http://blog.keyaar.in. Not too far from here, but a lot more reader-friendly and pretty-looking (I hope). I have written an introductory post, listing all the technical mumbo-jumbo for the inquisitive minded-s.
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The Feed Has Changed.

All Google friend-connect subscribers (yes, the whole 34 of you) and the RSS feeders and the Googlers, you might want to subscribe to the shiny new feed, and while you are at it, check out the new neighbourhood.
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All In Good Spirit.
If you don’t want to get into Google Reader or a RSS feed reader and if you can tolerate my occassional narcissistic bouts and such trivia, head over to the Twitter feed @abhijithkeyaar, where I am most likely to post links to blog entries. The revolution might not be webcasted in a better form, so, you know, hay, sun shines…

Singning Off,
Yourstruly.

Interim Goals and CBM Measures. Stuff of Minor Legend.

2011-07-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

With no iSight in sight, I decided to put the pen to the much less proverbial paper. The animated gif puts together few pages from a sketchbook. The file might make the page load a little slower, India being renowned for its 3G (most of the Gs for that matter, the newspaper assures me from the work-side table) ‘capabilities’.
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Then, on a three year old impulse, bought these. Multiple shop-owners were positive that an Illustrator-perfect round frame is stuff Quixotic blockbusters are made of. Patience.
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On Placebos, Pop-ups And The Occassional Bursts Of Narcissismo.

2011-07-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

I am back with the cheap tricks to hold you — my imagined audience — at bay while the people at AppleCare reenact their little game of ‘It’ all over again, shifting the blame to the superiors, inferiors, courier people, telephones, the colour of the doormat, the consistency of Coco Cola, the length and breadth of a standard pixel and so on for delaying the delivery of my laptop from far-far-away Bangalore. Sticking rather brutally to the adage of not counting the appam-holes when the owen has ‘sponsored’ written all over the thing, I haven’t gone mad and called them names. The last post proclaimed that one as the last before the unibody arrives in Gurgaon. I am known for being a sucker for fulfilled promises.

Talking of cheap, I have been accused of being — occassionally, probably because my affinity to brands in clothing conforms more to the Unified Thela Consortium norms far too often than it does to the stripes, swooshes, rings and the glittery monograms variety (which, on hindsight, it never does). I am feigning being at a loss to explain this to myself, in the hope that nobody starts putting my shirts’ seam-count through the magnifier like Kathy Torrance. It has been quite a while since I started calling my checkered shirts ‘modular grids’. That also brings to mind, (how convenient a coincidence) the last time I had to think consciously about my (absence of) dress code was in a bus-shelter near Connaught Place, at something past eleven, looking at the patrol-jeeps and hoping that it rained, making it look like I had a reason for being in there. Moral of the story was reportedly seen to be scrawling/spray-painting furiously, hymns about souls and shoes in the vicinity of the said bus-stop.

This, I had kept for after the unibody to write down and upload, but the hell says ‘what’. The closest thing to a being I have been in love — head over heals variety — was my laptop. Was. Promiscuity is a word that fails to explain what goes on at work when I have to put the strokes down on a different machine. The machine had somehow come to understand me, quitting it when the shit I was so carefully drawing up on the vector program started to resemble the proverbial shit it was not supposed to look like. It was quite like having a personalised, ruthless and eventually, slow editor. You will be missed, old Mac.

The outrage felt at being unable to tread on familiar territory comes with its advantages. I was able to finish more books in days than what I could have in weeks. Though this doesn’t play so well with the bank balance, happiness is being ensued/enjoyed. I came across, late by centuries, William Gibson and Laurence Sterne while on this semi-self-imposed technology exile. They have so far been good. I started on the wrong foot with Gibson, Virtual Light having found its way through the numerous bikeporn sites of the interwebs into my not-so-hard-disc. Also, Tim Krabbé.

For the sake of placebos and associated pop-ups. The accopanying pictures are a depth-of-field experiment on the Nokia 5233, with ample help from a glass dome and some histrionics with image editing. Histrionics being this month’s theme.

Dreams of aluminium and mush-rooms,
Yours truly.

(That about covers this month’s quota of keywords. Too.)

Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

2011-07-15T07:23:00.000-07:00

This comes after a two-week-too-long wait for a Macbook Pro. I am on a wow not to write unless the track-pad is made of glass. This image also waited for two-weeks-too-long as a basic compostion wanting to be edited on a Quad-core machine. Tomorrow.

Sine Wave Through Space.

2011-06-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

When you do not have an inkling of what it means to be a sine wave, watch this on loop.

Camera mounted on bike wheel. 5 minutes long. Manifestation of a sine (or cosine, depending upon your political leanings) wave in Gurgaon at 6 in the morning.

There Is No Chammach.

2011-06-27T07:09:00.000-07:00

While f*ing with real heads is not allowed, doing the same to printer-heads is legal, and is written somewhere in the (civil society approved) constitution. Use of protection (polyethene cover) recommended for economic reasons beyond your understanding. Originally, I wanted to title this “To Err is Human” (based on the bottom-most image as well as a direct dialogue to soothe the scanner’s soul). I decided against “The Scanner Darkly” thinking that will end up being too corny. This one seemed better than “Good Bye, Mr. Anderson”, so there.
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The human condition is one with which I have no direct connections. After three years of highs, lows and in-betweens, the laptop quit its final application on a tuesday this month. While I had somehow managed to develop a metaphysical (yes) connection to the almost new (except for the motherboard and the hard disk, it was brand new-ish) laptop. Thanks to Dahiya, the Big Apple deemed it worth a replacement. As I wait for my shine-y (have ‘casually’ browsed through pictures on the website) new computer, the iMac presents a problem of excessive screenspace — which was never anticipated to become an issue for me — coupled with a kernel panic and eventual shut-down every twenty minutes or so.

The images were created by moving post-its, colour pencils and a Heinz Beanz can over the scanner head. The hard-rock keyboard from the G3 era helped.

Peas and Monsoons.
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Inkdrinker. Punk.

2011-06-22T03:55:00.000-07:00

Look what the ~~cat~~ dog brought in!

The Tale of Three Cities.

2011-06-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

It isn’t so much the colour as the texture that changes from small towns to cities. Based on a few places I have been fortunate (or not) to call home from time to time. Tomorrow is the Malayalam ‘Reading Day’ (Vayana dinam), commemorating P.N. Panicker, regarded as the Father of Library Movement in the state of Kerala. (My subscription to Matrubhumi needs to arrive sooner.) Since the day is a sunday, expect a little script-love here.
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In Disguise: a Book Review of Sorts.

2011-06-17T02:10:00.000-07:00

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Peter Mendelsund, like his colleague at Knopf – Chip Kidd – is one of the few designer+human beings I happen to look up to, and aspire of becoming, someday. It would be nothing short of disastrous to even attempt redesign of one of their covers, let alone publish it for the world at large to look at. I do have my reservations when it comes to picking up books from a store, the price-tag being one of them (sadly).

Many sleepless nights were spent looking at unforgivable crimes to jacket design in my bookshelf — which often gets the irritating shove to the corner and never back to where it was — hoping I will be able to buy the copy with a cover I swooned over online or at a shop-window.

Yesterday bore the unmistakable hues of one of them nights. Spending a good eight hours after work reading the last book from the Millenium Series, I was reminded of how much I hated myself for not being able to buy the box-set with Mendelsund’s gorgeous covers, choosing the ten-times-cheaper paperbacks instead. Now, there are points at which the translation peeps out from the text, laying bare the ugly repetition of words that ought to be a punishable crime in editorial/design. Yet it would be preposterous, pseudo-intellectual double-talk to say the novel — while playing the ethos and pathos cards too often — wasn’t gripping or worth my time. That is, if Zaratushtra were to ask if I regret reading it.

Looping gifs, moshed-up candy and such needs to be posted often, shuffling carefully and not-taking-to-heart-anything in the pages of the nation’s only newspaper worth reading.

Here is an article on the Millenium Series cover design.
Link / Millenium Series covers at the WSJ.

Here is a link to a few of Mendelsund’s covers.
Link / Peter Mendelsund at the BCA.

If you happen to be into graphic design and have not a clue about Chip Kidd, to quote a teacher at NID, go jump into the Sabarmati.

Tomatoes or Helvetica?

2011-06-13T10:04:00.000-07:00

~ Is egg or chicken for philistines.

It.

2011-06-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

Countless years were sandwiched between my reading On the Road and the first edition off the press in 1957. Strangely, and rather fitting while being so, more than half the text was read in metro compartments to and from Gurgaon. The book, camouflaged in a page off The Hindu’s MetroPlus, rode along in the shoulder-bag quite a few kilometers, air-conditioned and otherwise. Post Lynne Truss, my Obedient Cumbersome Deviations are focussed better on sentence-lengths, commas, dashes, colons and semicolons, in the inverse order of hierarchy. Kerouac’s sentences put me on reading loops more often than what would be considered legal in book-porn.

Cycling at ten in the morning, you learn, over time, inquiring — often bordering on yuppie-contempt and a general sense of disapproval — eyes, screeching tyres all over in the scorching Gurgao-ni heat and a sweat-drenched shirt is a rather sweet way to start a fresh day at work. Since the later half of April 2011, this BSA Mach single speed has become my mark of attendance at the office-door, sniffed and occasionally given a friendly pat-of-honour by the office-dogs. It came with a straight handlebar and plastic mud-guard accouterments, which a trip to Jhandewalan Cycle Market prompted me to replace with a repainted rusty drop bar. The amount of bikeporn on my RSS feed makes my head swim in endless circles, accentuated by the fact that a decent custom bike can cost more than a Maruti Alto.

There isn’t much work done on pixels since the laptop went for its fifth screen replacement, fourth optical drive replacement, second fan replacement, first logic board replacement — all at once and for a long week, a curious departure from its one-at-a-time approach all these years. The sketchbook is half-full/half-empty, ink spilt, teas drunk, etc.

Also, shout out to Marching Ants, who keep blowing minds with Bollywood film posters, this time with a heavily Rorschached Shaitan. The way they manage to catch eyes, while maintaining a signature aesthetics, which is a fine balance between over-selling and understated artistry commands respect.

Peace and Monsoons (mutually inclusive).

Haan Ji. Shot First.

2011-05-31T09:22:00.000-07:00

A few things to do when in a 6 feet by 6 feet room, looking at a computer screen (with extra on-screen guides) all day.

1. Think up religious connotations in software drop-down menus.
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2. Take the Shannon and Weaver model of communication. Apply it to the anti-piracy infomercials that come attached to bootlegged DVDs/video downloads. This one is much fun every time you are on a form-follows-function thing, second-guessing everything you have been doing for the past few days and command-clearing the trash after deleting the open-files.

3. Note down possible questions to 42.

4. Think of all the four/five letter domain names you can buy.

5. Listen to Hard Kaur in loop. Then shift to Philtre.

Love.

2011-05-29T01:19:00.000-07:00

Ours is, of course, at a completely different level.
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The ‘Other’ Other Thing About History.

2011-05-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in Mehrauli.

The Rain Washes Away Everything.

2011-05-21T04:58:00.000-07:00

In the pit.
Perhaps, a parallel to what Weingart did with hot metal type is to destroy typefaces in TextEdit. I used to — and still do — have a thing for washing clothes, and the machines. Here is a sentence. Lynne Truss might want to shoot me and leave.

“He walked into the washing machine (noticing that the water didn’t part as his feet — soiled and in want of better footwear — touched its surface) thinking about the idea of washing machines, not the community-installed, industrial ones with their semi-naked bodies eyeing you down like a termite, but the fragile, white (often shades of grey after a distasteful few try to figure out what happens to exploding firecrackers in adjacent ones when everybody is looking) ones with a lid on top with a smaller lid on top of that, that opens quite amusingly like an eyelid — that is if you were to open the rather useless grey-blue transparent fixture while you impatiently wait for the spinning to come to an end, you would notice that after a minute or so from being switched on, they start, accelerate and then as if reaching a state of symbiosis, as if the body of the washing machine is now one with the dirt and lice and detergents and lightheaded, ball-pen-scribbled banter in the crumpled, soiled, sweat-drenched, Sellotape-d umpteen times over five rupee notes that look like distant memories of the paper notes they used to be…”

There is Definitely, Positively a Hole in My Pocket.

2011-05-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

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At loggerheads with the Editorial Policies, here is a long quote.

“When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four, what you want from people is that they tell you about you. When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, you watch the world for the way it watches you. Do people laugh when you make a joke, do they kiss you when you lean into them at a party? Yes? Aha — so that’s who you are. But these people themselves, laughing and not-laughing, kissing and not-kissing, they themselves are young and so then you begin to think, if you’re twenty or twenty-one, when you are young, that these people are not to be trusted, your contemporaries, your screwed up friends and girlfriends- that it’s not because of you that they kissed you, but because of them, something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea. This is why it’s so important to meet your heroes when you’re young, so they can tell you.”

Keith Gessen / All the Sad Young Literary Men
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Image glitch-ed in TextEdit. So be it.

The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bone.

2011-05-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Here, is some pathos-candy.
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The illustration is an X-Ray image composite, of my right hand. On the other (non-X-Rayed) hand, ‘My Way to Typography’, a massive collection of Weingart’s work and autobiographical text has proved to be detrimental to process. He is the definitive post-Swiss genius.

Probably the Reason People Ask Me for Directions.

2011-05-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

Or dope; depending on your world-view.
Grid Systems ≠ Food Chain.
Josef Müller BrokeMan.
Doesn’t even compare.
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Deus Ex Machina.

2011-04-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Update: The applet is hang-ing browsers it seems. So I have shifted
the program after the ‘Click for the rest of the post…’ section.

Please click on that to see the program in action. The image below, is
what it should look like, if you have javascript enabled in your browser.
_

OK…

Here is the application I used to make Drawing: Book.
First, click on the white space below, so that your subsequent
keystroes are input to the applet, not the browser in general.
Once the Java applet is loaded, use any of a, q, 5 and c keys to
take it to work. The c key gives the best variation, I think.
use the z key to turn the whole thing to black. (In the installation,
this seed starts as the book is closed) If it hangs your browser
(it shouldn’t), quit. Sorry about that.

I am not sure the post title helps. Please click through for the applet.
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Where You See Burnt Potato Slices, I See Pantone Shades…

2011-04-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

Apart from being another ellipsis on the headline, this happened IRL.
It has been six days since I started my diploma project (graduation project)
at Codesign in Gurgaon. We cook dinner at the guest house, figuring out
combinations of tomatoes, potatoes, and the toeless onions and raw mushrooms
of the less hallucinating kind (I guess, never tried one) as we proceed.

That aside, the pre-diploma display is over, the photographs travelled the
required miles and reached me yesterday.

Click on the panorama below for the huge-ass size.
_

To many a wellwisher’s dismay, I used Sellotapes to put the work up on the
Aquarium’s glasses. This was a stunt I have been wishing to pull after EJ’s
recent Provo exhibition. So, I guess some part of the universe changed, in synch.
This below, is Bodoni in all its glory.
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This one below is the final elective I did at the Institute, titled ‘Drawing: Book’.
An interactive installation where a book, when its leaves are turned, generates
Rorschach-like patterns onto a screen/wall.
The book was quite dysfunk by the end of two days.
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That is what four years of design school have done to me, below.
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With Mr. Tarun, Coordinator, Graphic Design Department at NID.
_

Thank you, Prabuddha and Fazal, for the photographs, and everybody who
walked in and looked at the Sellotapes. I am indebted to the space and time there.
And I do think about how the Indian Government has been instrumental in
shaping up my life since class 6th. The need to write on last four years is now
becoming as painful as the neck-sprain from lending my own angle to The Breakfast Club
last night. I shall take heed, later.

The empire just tweeted back.

Pre-diploma Display.

2011-04-07T07:31:00.000-07:00

This is happening. I am trying to be busy with the Jury and this.
There aren’t many people left in the campus. Have been waiting
four years for this. So the footfall doesn’t really make a difference,
I guess. If you are in Ahmedabad or planning to visit during these
two days, please do drop in.

(Pre-diploma displays feature collections of student work from the
years he/she has spent at NID.)

Poore Pachaas Hazaar. Elective Documents Online.

2011-04-06T09:04:00.000-07:00

Download all three here.

Or, can be downloaded from: http://keyaar.in/classroom

The Four Year Itch. Pass Me the Ketchup.

2011-04-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

Google’s ketchup, Ps and a little Ai. Prediplomadisplay on its way.
Or not. Or both.

Drawinci Code #1

2011-03-26T07:14:00.000-07:00

An illustration update from the third project.
Unfortunately not titled Drawinci Code.

In Which the Ticket to Kozhikode Gets Cancelled Ruthlessly.

2011-03-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

Four months and nightmares about losing it to a program later…
Made in Processing. Next I’m trying to figure a way to introduce more
controlled variety into it, and try using a book as an interface. An ambiguous
(and ambitious) project brief can be downloaded here. (I have made
considerable changes to that initial proposal, but the idea is
more or less the same.) Trying to circumvent questions about subjectivity
by an analogy with rorschach blots and concentrate more on the experience.

Any soft/hard-ware suggestions are welcome and will be credited.

The Nonversation Must Go On…

2011-03-17T15:30:00.000-07:00

This is what I’ve been working on for the past couple of days (two couples — four).
The project was completed at Codesign Gurgaon, over the July-August-Septembers of
the past year. This documents the shamanic bit that goes into designing an identity.
Had fun and Momos for weeks aligned on a baseline grid of perfectly spilled bottles of
Slice in beer glasses. This one is a private publication on Issuu, to be wiki-leak-ed
in a few days once the other two documents (with the C and Y covers) are ready.
_
The blah must reach a meaningful pause before Bun Maska calls from the BBC manage to
unsettle this nonversation. Also, I am happy I could put yet another ellipsis in a post title.
Like that somebody else I stumbled on the internets awhile ago, I too like ellipsis and
windows that open in new tabs.

P.S. This is more or less a WIP. If you spot women in mourning clothes
crossing them water bodies, ignore.

This Revelation Will Not Be Televised.

2011-02-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

Few days past, turned twenty-two without much effort from my part.
(Or anybody else’s for that matter.) “Aap ki aankhon mein kuch…”
played in loops with a presumably annoyed Lalabhai at the other end
of the phone, before I finally realised it wasn’t Kishore Kumar putting up
a live performance to celebrate the occasion and picked up the phone.
In the following forty minutes, monospaced letters were just getting real.
_

Found this at the Sunday Market two days earlier. (Location on
Google Maps below.) At around 12 Dollars/500 Rs., not buying this
right off (even as it meant a dent on major saving plans to buy a
Lubitel 166+ this year.) was out of syllabus.

In a not-so-happy turn of events, the wait-listed tickets to Delhi
get automatically cancelled, leaving us stranded in Ahmedabad
for the time being. Will be attending (and possibly live-tweeting,
depending on the data plans) The Unbox Festival in and around
The Green House in Delhi.
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Sunday Market Ahmedabad on Google Maps.

How the Elephant Hunted The Snark Down: RGB 2011 Poster.

2011-02-14T14:53:00.000-08:00

RGB is NID's home-brewed Design Festival, celebrating the essence of
(Indian) Design. Behind the curtains is an assortment of enthusiastic
students from across disciplines and grades of ripeness in terms of Semesters.
_
Given the opportunity to pull off something sans a definite design brief,
few hours in front of the vector drawing program and little bits of rather
important-looking ATM receipts later, this happened.
_

While riddled with clichés from all over the place, the poster stands true to
the internal share-design-play that happened while in its making. The process
involved ruthless copypasting of the basic skeleton (where the long face makes a
more-than-cameo appearance) over to multiple layers, and letting the program
reign free, high on pre-loaded effects and transformations. The initial chaos had to be
tinkered with, to arrive at the younger brother of confusion that went out the
bitten-apple-field decked-up with crop-marks et al.
_

Brockmann-agitation was the initial intent, not sure that got me far. While
half-way through the composition, well-meaning friends suggested I better
take a look at the fish-market in the background or be penalised for sense-crime.
Read the book cover-to-cover instead.
_

Registrations, as the poster manages to say, are on till March 1. The thing itself
is happening on 11, 12 and 13 of March. Have a look at their Facebook Page,
or contact the team via mail at rgb@nid.edu.
_
The title is an adulterated rip-off of a chat conversation with a friend.

Walks into a bar…

2011-02-07T14:22:00.000-08:00

An exercise in progress. Christened ‘Why The Long Face’.
_

_
Originally drawn for a symbol design competition yesterday (solely in it
for the money). The numbers, the z and the g to some extent are a mess.
It is just an entry-level illustrator thing to do, but yesterday was a long day with
Post-Office hopping to figure out where they had sent my Arduino kit to.
By the time I was back, with a considerably thinner wallet, the packet was waiting
in the hostel office. For those buying the kit, Rhydolabz is the place.
_
I have that dropshadowy poster mock-up file saved as a template. The last encounter
with FontForge resulted in huge DavidCarsonry, but things change…

This too, shall pass: Typography Day 2011 Poster.

2011-02-04T08:34:00.000-08:00

This poster on “Expressing India Through Typography” was my entry
for the Typography Day 2011 Poster Competition.
_

From the 150 words description:
“~~Geographical~~ Political boundaries and the disputes that constantly redraw them
aside, freedom is the one thing that defines the Indian experience of being.
Swatantryam is a Malayalam word that reflects the beauty of the concept it
signifies in its spoken and written forms alike…
…the appended explanatory text is meant to allude to the dictionary
definition of the word liberty, which again is the single biggest collection of
words and typography that a common man encounters and is perhaps the
most familiar body of text in a culture that emphasises and reiterates the
value letterforms hold…”
_

(If you haven't already quit reading, and are curious about what the poster says,
which is highly unlikely, you might want to go ahead and view the Poster in
much bigger dimensions (900KB, 3308 px wide). There is a (what I thought
at the time to be a rather clever) reference to Palatino being designed in the year of
Indian independence.)
_

_
Took two days to finish. Towards the end, it wasn't the poster I
was concerned with anymore. Getting closer to the sketch was more fun to
look forward to.
_

_
Technical side-note:
Minimum nodes, handles at 0, 45 and 90 degrees wherever possible,
just like a typeface. With my not-so-happy experiences with deadlines in general,
hadn't expected to complete it on time. There are many issues with visual correction,
since I never took a print-out to check it upside-down and so on. Also, some
shameless shortcuts like the circle inside a circle could have been avoided for the
better. There are some spacing eyesores right at the middle, where the parallel lines and
the lowermost letter meet. This too, shall pass, for the time being.
_
And it was selected as one of the 24 winners who get free passes to the
conference and stuff happening. With FontLab for a sponsor,
I was thinking of a licenced software or something. No, seriously.

Here comes the sun.

2011-01-25T03:13:00.000-08:00

Found the Daniel Shiffman book sitting at 006.7 in the KMC.
_

More toilets, not typefaces.

2011-01-22T18:43:00.000-08:00

Vector copypasta. A remarkable colleague mentioned I write
no straight angrezi on this blahg. So, shall keep the blah out of this
post in honor. This is part of some little green pieces of paper I was
getting acquainted with while carefully avoiding the work that would
see me through my juries and eventually out of the institute for a
diploma project. Click through the second one for some not-so-flattering
amounts of copypasta. Shall reap what you saw.
_
Easy on the bytes, not so on your 15 inch monitor. I was supposed to go see
the exhibition happening in its full glory and click some pictures with
people all over it and stuff. Never happened. So this is it, it seems.
Sad, but true, never even got to know what the exhibition was called. FML.
_

All your Byte are belong to us.

2011-01-15T08:27:00.000-08:00

Whining virtually over the loss of countless gigabytes of data I managed to

transfer to a Seagate Goflex on our honeymoon night, came the rather

sad realisation that the work that is lost, is probably not worth a ‘mindblasting’

Rupees Fifty Eight Thousand. This has indeed put things in an (albeit skewed)

perspective for me.

The delicate creatures that they are, hard-discs are more complex

when it comes to maintenance than an overgrown country garden.

(Decided against the demanding-girlfriend-reference on second thoughts

over lack of experience in that department and stuff.)

Shit happens. To add to the happiness that ensued, the left laptop fan is

trying hard to make its presence felt.
_

If anyone knows of a *cheap* data recovery firm, please let me know.

…And Thanks For All The Chana Masala.

2010-12-30T11:20:00.000-08:00

I'm ~~not~~ going to go on about things. This is what remained under the wraps
in 2010, which was, by the way, quite a happening year in the 21-plus-some
years so far. First, there was the internship, then the Dharamsala trip,
which redefined boundaries for me in the weird way things happen to
a 21 year old. HP remains the northernmost I have been in India.
_
And I have seen the capital, markets of Chandni Chowk and the
Qutub Minar from multiple Meru-Cab windows.Met some significant
and interesting people in all the three places that happened to me,
grown the practically nonexistant strands of hair from highschool to a
remarkable length, discovering shampoos and rubberbands in the process
and bought more books than last year. Malaria and the ensuing lulz
can be anything but forgotten.
_
Now to the less preachy and more pixellated stuff. This is a poster
for a pitch that few friends from NID were working on a few months back.
(They wrote back later saying it flew over multiple heads and landed
on none.) So, that was that. You can't help but notice how I have
recycled rather shamelessly from the Rorschach phase of life.
Can say “Time nahi tha” in my Jury-ready voice, but no.
_

_
The monsoon fiesta T-Shirt entry under the pretentious moniker
“John Paul Ringo George, Ultralight, sans the Ampersand” got printed
and distributed, much to my delight. EJ has since 2008 dragged me
first into Myspace and then with much ado, the Zuckerberglands.
_

_
CD Cover Calligraphy for Rahat Fateh Ali Khan collection.
In stores now, layout and the opportunity thanks and credits Mira,
from PG Graphics. I have done just the calligraphy part,
with a kitta held at a Devnagari angle, referencing the feel of the songs.
_

_
To great regret, the client ended up using a watered down version,
with the duplicated a, killing the whole thing in the process. In full
Yudhishthira fashion, I take responsibility for the crimes that be. And,
by the way, Company Policies can be extremely painful in the other
end of a year, when all you don't expect is an ‘eviction notice’ banging
on your door as you push minutes through that wintery Ahmedabad morning,
dreaming of Lubitels and Istanbul.
_

_
Being the signing-off-post title of the year, I could not help but reference
the Dolphins and my fixed menu item at Roopalee Mallu restaurant that
has seen me through countless nights of cold and compulsive thela shopping.
Thanks also to the wisdom of imagine store employees who happen to be
quite human. I am eyeballing the new magsafe adaptor as I type after days
of living off Fazal's charger and kindness.
Thank you all, that continue reading in between long lines of blah.
May 2011 be an easy one to tame.
_
Peace.

Raghavan, the Red-Haired Unicorn.

2010-12-24T15:09:00.000-08:00

Onmousover, Pedro.
_

_P5+Ps

The curious case of the retro doctor. New old work.

2010-12-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

As I wrap-up my second project and start documenting the long story,
found the time ripe to place some old work into the working templates.
Prakriti is identity for an alternative learning centre in NOIDA.
Lucida is a collective of Photography Design Alumni from NID.
The images also link to details and more images.
_

_
Projects from 2009 / Uploaded here and here.

De-Zainul Abid. Malayalathinte Kidd.

2010-12-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

_
Zainul Abid. Chip Kidd to malayalam book jackets.
Last time I went home, Rathri had a cover by him, and a copy
now sits in the bookshelf back home. I haven't told people
more than half the reason I subscribed to Pachakkutira was his covers.
_
He recently won a prestigious award for two of his covers.
Sadly, there is no malayalam google translate yet.
_

Photograph and article at: http://goo.gl/FvCGG

http://cartoonacademy.blogspot.com

Show Him Some Love. Commandment #3.

2010-11-30T13:45:00.000-08:00

Alternatively titled 'Signs of Growing Old.'
While the Nine Point Five Commandments weren't intended as statements,
once in a gradient infested moon, one is tempted to let them be.
I had my cup of Comic Sans hate when the time was ripe for some,
while having used the harmless fellow on quite a few occasions to
(even positively dramatic) effect, in the days when widows
were people in monochrome Sarees and broken glass bangles.
I know this was hip, like decades ago, and is probably irrelevant by
the time I hit the publish button, but, what the hell.
_
This is to you, Comic Sans:
_

Intertext, they say, maketh teh mensch über.

2010-11-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

Some M.G.S.-worthy wine in proverbial Avant Garde bottles.
Having a Storm Thorgerson cover projected next to your artwork = therapeutic.
Para Vayu live at Blue Frog. Though I am repelled by loud music
(The Advaita Room being a curious case of middle-class living)
and forms of expression that resist conformity to earbud standards,
this is truly an honor.
_
Economics is a strange subject. So is sociology. Lolcats are so passé,
but who gives a Zark?
_

Image screengrabbed from the youtube video at paravayu.com.
_
When you are at it, check Thijs de Jong's experience in and around
The Advaita Room, and the NCR. Translate, if you don't understand
Dutch, that is.

The beginning of civilisation was overrated by three and a half stars anyway.

2010-11-21T04:28:00.000-08:00

This blog SO needed some cat pictures.~
Here is who I found in Room 102 after vacation.

_

_
I think s/he is up for grabs*, that is, until s/he responds to "Kalman" or "Bantjes"
or some name to that effect. You are welcome, cat. With the mouse+cat picture,
this post might make all the other clichés in here look respectable.
_
Also, here is the mandatory cat-nap picture. Straight from the camera, no PS.
_

_
Tagged as: Collaboration.
_
*Update: Multiple sources Identified the cat to belong to a fellow who kerns.
I'm keeping the post.

Mosquitoes bite twice. Most quitters never admit to have.

2010-11-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

Malaria helped sandwich two months between paperback covers.
And some house arrest, barring occasional trips to and from
the diagnostics center in town. I discovered some drawing on the phone.
Credits: Scribble Away
_

_
There are a few other pieces for my classroom and other projects,
which need proper introduction and all the accompanying short stories.
And there is one that has been running for a whole year and still
keeps me warm.
_
Read some essays from minor/major/inbetween gods which eluded me
freshman year. And more of John Gall and Rodrigo Corral
(Have a Catch As Catch Can paperback now).
_
Till the RBCs rise again, there is this.
_

_
The Freeman kid once famously stated he has upwards of 3/4 nicknames.

Kultur Experiment #2: Fan-art

2010-09-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

Taking a pun to its unholy extremes. Fan-art is a series of ceiling-fan-generated
images exploring the idea of a drawing machine.

A thread was tied to the ceiling fan in the room, a paintbrush/folded threads/wacom
stylus were attached to the end of the thread, and the fan was switched on.
The markings were thus 'generated' onto paper, or in the version involving the stylus,
the tip coordinates were input to Processing to generate visuals at a second level.
[There is an explanatory diagram of the whole setup, which involves
more ink-drops than one can imagine, on the laptop screen.
(Those on the shirt were dismissed as collateral damage.) As the fan is put on
'fast' mode, the thread twists, shortens and sprays paint all over the room.]
_
The images are all 700 px wide. It is intended that they be used by anybody jobless
enough. Which also means the post will take more time to load than the usual ones.
_

Details:
_

More images:
_

_
The whole thing is extremely pointless. And thus, fun. The sole raison de aitre
being keeping myself awake after getting up at 4/5 in the morning to wash clothes.
Sadly, it works.
_
iCringe: On second thoughts, the title could've been: "Putting the 'fan' back in fan-art".

Up-date.

2010-09-18T05:18:00.000-07:00

The site is up and running again. Shame on you, Database.
_

Kultur Experiment #1

2010-09-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

_
Kultur Experiment #1: Visual Identity for an Indian Cultural Festival in Ultralight
Helvetica. (Note to self: Will look sick on a dumb PhD thesis.) Since getting back
to Ahmedabad after a two month stint in Delhi, I haven't done much, that is,
apart from turning up at sharp 5 PM for Chungi, reading Boondocks while
listening to the Laya Project and counting raindrops.

Was seriously considering a Diu/Kozhikode/Udaipur trip once the projects get
pulled out of their limbo. Divine interventions were anticipated. Then came along
the call for Garba Identity. Though the laziness is overwhelming and looking at
time on its trip has become part of the nonexistent daily routine, decided to
give it a shot. As I patched together a presentation and waited for somebody to
kick the work in the butt for its lameness, this idea of putting totally-not-working
stuff together and making it solve the proverbial 'Design Problem', dawned.

Does it work? Don't know. Fingers are crossed, pixels switched on/off.

As for the treatment of the identity, an overall, and essential feeling
seems to have escaped from the work. Things have become bolder,
but colder, too. Clueless how Experimental Jetset pulls off so much
Helvetica with such finesse.

Haven't sent the entry yet. Suddenly, I am not sure of all this stuff anymore.

Lawn Mower ≠ lone |lōn|. mover |ˈmoōvər|

2010-09-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

_
Old photo of Bananas.
Cliché.
_
In the process of moving the website from an Indexhibit base
to a Wordpress one. Also, myself from Delhi back to Ahmedabad.
Mixed responses.
_
So, meanwhile, the processing based posts might suffer a bit.
And some of the downloads. Also planning to convert
this into an all-play-no-work weblog. (I overestimate
the reader count anyways.)

Them Bluepill Moments.

2010-08-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

Proves either E is still (mc) squared or I am working.~
Mousemovements after 2 hours inDesign.
Credits: IOGraph.
_

On/Off/Plantain Leaves.

2010-08-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

Onasamsakal.
_
It is Onam again, and there is hardly any Sambar in sight.
Looking out of my window at work, this is what presents itself.
Then, Douglas Adams gets terribly misquoted: "largely concerned
with the movements of small green guides on paper..."
_

_
That typeface is Hommage à Escher v2 by Tibor Lantos.

Sample #02

2010-08-13T18:32:00.000-07:00

Move the mouse over the white area below.
Press 1 or 2, click once in the white area and move the mouse
to change the colours. Press 3 and repeat to start over again.
_

Inspired from a sketch by Ghate. Unfinished. Shall update
with a better version soon.

_

The Watercolur God / Gurgaon / Brands / TL;DR.

2010-08-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

If watercolours were to have a God, Ronney Devassia would be
the one, his ideological stand on the said issue mercilessly ignored.

Almost worshipped for his simple and incorruptible character

and his mastery over the craft, Ronney finished his diploma film

a few weeks back. The film, titled Chila Kannatakalum Moonnu

Kathakalum (Some Stories and Three Spectacles) is based on

O.V.Vijayan's political satire Dharmapuranam (1985).
_

The poster is just photo ink 'thrown up' on a 23X36 supersunshine
paper (so the drips—the trails of which, on the wall of B102, were
later mistaken to be Paan Stains). There were hazaar posters
around the campus, and the one I liked the most was Hari's 'subtitled'
poster with "05:00 pm, AUDI" transliterated to mallu, which is
funny when not re-translated, "ran away at 5 o clock".~
_
The images were lying in the MicroSD for too long.
_

The details were rubber-stamped, with the in-house toolkit.
And, thanks to the in-house buji for the brushpen from Kinokuniya
Dubai. I was procrastinating an e-Bay order.
_

Days in Gurgaon are long, with ample pauses and rain.
Branding sees a new light, making me raise pseudo,
serious-sounding questions for 42.
_
In other news, the caveman has finally laid his hands on
Chip Kidd's first novel, and wouldn't mind going hungry for the
second one.

De Stijl Generator

2010-07-20T13:04:00.000-07:00

The De Stijl Generator.
Mondrian could have had it easy.
_
Move the mouse over the square, and when it gets
too Jackson Pollock, move the mouse slowly
to the bottom right corner. (The white circle)
Update: For best results, I suggest moving the cursor
over the white area quickly.
_
Processing lessons with Ghaté. #1

_

_

Commandment #2. When the mountain comes.

2010-07-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

Very situation specific.
Things are getting out of control/command these days.
Nonsense. Works well on a 1440x900 screen.
No strings attached. Avant Garde.
_

The Monsoon Fiesta Tees / 2010

2010-07-06T14:34:00.000-07:00

Monsoon Fiesta is a college festival that happens every year at NID
during monsoons(!). T-Shirt designs are invited from the community.
Voting and much internet happen to the designs, 'winners' are
then printed, get worn by India's largest design community, go
all over the country in their luggage bags. It is near orgasmic
from a design-er's point of view.

These are my entries to MF 2010.

Entry #1 / Anatomy of (a) monsoon.
_

_
Warmed me up for the next three. There are a few favorites in there:
Univers Condensed, the bitten apple, some glyphs and dotted line
connections that sneak in some flowchartery into the design.
'Some' thought also has gone into the mix if you are familiar
with the context presented.

Entry #2 / Massimo Vignelli is right. (I have nothing against him
for ditching Univers, and Avant Garde).
_

_
If, by sheer luck, this gets printed, I'll have a Helvetica tee in my
ever-dwindling collection of non-full-sleeve-shirts. Otherwise, it
is a play on breaking up mon and soon, and amping the anticipation with
an overlay of versions. (Remember the wait for CS5 when CS4 is still
getting to know the nooks and crannies of one's hard disc?)
Also tried: getting a third colur by visual mixing. Thought of using
this as a sole concept later on, but, laziness happens.

Entry #3 / John Paul Ringo George, Ultralight, sans the Ampersand.
_

_
Netherlanders are The Beatles of graphic design. Experimental Jetset
is the capital B. This one is a ghost of their John & Paul & Ringo &
George tee, remixed for the rains. Like they said, the ampersands
(and the absence of it here) is a compositional decision.
_
Plus I have a thing for white and orange on black.

Entry #4 / Illustrator rules.
_

_
The Adrenaline rush after a sleepless, rainy? night and the
Bun Maska accoutrements later, Wacom and Illustrator get into a
near-perfect sync. This tee attempts to steal bits of limelight
similar type-related illustrations receive. There is a bit of rain
and peacocks.
_
And then there is Bodoni.

Thirteen, with a wallpaper version.

2010-07-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

An improvement? on the rorschach series, this is not technically
or otherwise of the same lineage. Made around a photograph
from the last vacation, of my neighbour's son. This one falls into
the shallow, popular side of things, but as an excuse for
doing something, stays.
_
On my 1440x900 resolution setting, a longer version of this looks
quite passable as a wallpaper. You can download that here. 1.1 MB, Jpeg.
I place my icons/folders on the desktop's right, so, will advise
a flip in any of the image editing programs for the left-oriented.
The type, you will have to live with, in that case.
_
I have been thinking of submitting a calendar to the Smashing
magazine online, but always tend to remember it when it is
past the 29/30/31 of that particular month. Shall do one for
August, in tricolour.
_
PS: Sky image (BIG) credited to Hubble.
_

Twelve

2010-07-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

Based on (mere) whims, and sometimes, random-not specific-topics,
the rorschach series of image mash-ups serve the sole purpose of
having lulz when one feels like. These are, I feel, better suited
to live performances where the topics and elements are crowd-sourced,
on-the-spot. I remember seeing a similar thing online a few months?
ago, part of an event promoting Wacom Cintiqs.
_
Number twelve uses a photograph from a (rare) morning cycle ride to
the other side of the bridge, under which con-struction work is ongoing
since when I arrived (3 years ago). Added some totalitarian tones
with the yellow star, I wish.
_
These WMDs are beautiful when taken out of context. Also, I have
memories of standing and staring at what we used to call JCBs at work.
Removed the 012 in fette fraktur since that doesn't seem to fit
the line of style I appreciate these days.
_
Also, one needs to get out of the flip-art mode. Things are
getting sillier by the numbers. I know.
_

# 011: Getting out.

2010-06-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

I am going to get out of the room.
He stays.
_

# 010: Kisne kiya yeh...?

2010-06-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

Kisne kiya yeh sat-elite?
_
Belong to whom?, do these satellites?
_
I say, the night is long-ish.
An early 2008 Mac is whirring its way
through this sleepless night.
_
Image by NASA, manipulation outsourced here.
_

# 009: Moar of the Juju.

2010-06-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to Malpuas and the associated hallucinations.
_
Back to work. It is snowing outside my room, in Ahmedabad.
The weather is so nice i want to do one "Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Jaana Sanam"
right now in the balcony.
_

#8: Ubervisual / Bleh!

2010-06-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

In the realm of not yet known visual emergencies.
"Marcel Duchamp critiqued the idea that
the objet d’art should be a unique product of
an artist's labour, representational of their
technical skill and/or artistic caprice."
-Wikipedia says so.
_
Unable to start work, does Redbull work on
saplings? Saturdays too?
_
Peepot, I say.
Spot them monkeys, smoke them tops.
_
Visual Muji. Saturday is not a working day.
So isn't sunday.
_

Room Number 103-102

2010-06-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

The internship at Codesign having come to a rather abrupt

end (two months seem to be week-ends), thought it was

high time I started journeys of my own.
_

Heated (Delhi temperatures helped) internal discussions,

Google searches and opinion polls later, I managed to 'catch'

the last Himachal Path Parivahan bus leaving to Dharamsala.

The journey itself was uneventful, co-passenger-ed (both ways) by

empty reclining seats and kha-pee breaks at odd restaurants

(where the bus driver and conductor had 'arranged' food stops).
_

Equipped with what Tenzin calls a 'Wired-like infographics',

I managed to get cheap (and ultra rom-antique) accommodation

at the Kalsang Guest House (Room-103) and figure my way

through lonely forest trails.

Long story short: That was one hell of a wandering.

I should totally get paid for doing this.

Here are some heavily photoshopped images:

Plus: The new room at NID is B-102. Sounds like a fighter plane.

Doesn't sound half as cool as Milo Minderbinder's Shhhhh!, I know.

_
This post also milestone-s the beginning of
no-work all-play ones in the blog. (After the archiving)
It is also the beginning of my last year
(official student life) here at NID.
Coincidences.

Pattupetti (Gramophone) + Ninja (Ninja)

2010-06-09T17:04:00.000-07:00

Another poster for Magesh Kolleri -(PG FVC student at NID)- Film.

This time, showing in the IFFK (Kerala International Film Festival)

at Tiruvananthapuram along with a couple of other NID films.

In the 'Short Fiction - Information' section, the film will be screened

on 14th June at 9.30 AM.

The poster was done last night, post-office, and suffers from the

spatial and material handicaps one faces when working from a

temporary location. For the first time my 'revamped' software skills
are put to 'useful' practice after a few self-initiated projects.
I (dangerously) tend to enjoy non-monitored 'graphic oddjobs' more than
the ones that contribute to bank balance (and demand phone calls).
_
That is also to say, my two-month internship

at Codesign, Gurgaon is coming to an end in a week.
And there will be one post on the two months, cooking
Rice-Roti-Tomato Curry, form corrections by the nanometer
well into 2/3 in the morning et al. And Ninja. Definitely her.

Enough of Rand/t, now the poster

*007: Pandemonium

2010-05-31T22:16:00.000-07:00

Illustrator and Ps.
_

Mockup.

2010-05-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

See it move. Click to run.

The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly.

2010-05-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

There is a new ampersand in town.
Laughed at me when I mentioned the last one.
_
Pshop. Pure Pshop.
_

Ampersand Down the Memory Lane.

2010-05-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

The Ampersand: An experiment in minimising anchor points in vector illustration.
23 of the 24 nodes have handles at 90 degrees to the axes.
_
The collage: Uses stock image from Advanced Photoshop magazine from
the studio, and a few from my own raster image collection.
_
On June 12th, the 14th batch students of JNV are having a biennial-ish
get-together, which I will officially and otherwise miss. The 'organisers' are
expecting an attendance like no other year. &ML.
_

Rorschach #6

2010-05-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

Untitled otherwise.
_

Dr. Jekyll and the girl named after the poet.

2010-05-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

An ode to a friend whose infatuations have always
been based on a simple, pop/peer culture logic. Shared.
Lately, have been visiting (involuntarily and out of the
window-shopping-frame-of-mind) quite a lot of malls.
Back from the studio, early into the morning, cooking lessons,
unresponsive software applications, SBBOD.
_
Putting proletarianism where it belongs.
A Scandal in Bolivia.
_

Nev-ar. Ev-ar. Mo-ar.

2010-05-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

It was the Chalo Dilli* weekend. The city was still
under Red Alert. Peerless is Chandni Chauk.
Always in Capitals.
_
The heat was fun. Metro had an air of the insides of
a Japanese movie. Sans the creepier shades.
_
*"On to Delhi!"

Insides.

2010-05-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

I would rather / a womb than a cocoon.
_
When you break stereotypes,
do you get good sounds and well kerned fonts?
_
Post - Office exercises.
See more similar ones at ror
_

High Art, Low Art.

2010-05-02T15:32:00.000-07:00

Nine Lives of a Cat. Now in fewer pixels. 12 colours.
Not coming to a theater near you.
_

Opporunity for Moar Spam.

2010-04-30T12:22:00.000-07:00

I have an official 'Delhi' number. Call after office hours. *12:00 pm IST

Women. Like. Old. Wine. (Industry Interface at NID, 2009)

2010-04-24T01:05:00.000-07:00

_
Collaboration with Pratyush Kashyap, four years senior to me
at NID and a good mentor. Done for the Industry Interface.
Pratyush designed the interlocking I+I logo in his third year.
The way we worked on it, trying to leave behind the cliches and
the chats over morning chai at Paldi, were good, to say the least.

The art of looking backwards. #6. 2010.

2010-04-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

Students of Graphic Design at NID are required to 'publish' our works
every semester in a way that the Jury panel + the general public
get to know why we do the stuff we do. For me, each of these
have been 'dream projects' also since it is one of those expenditures
I am happy to live with. And there is always room for experimenting.
This time, the whole book minus the colour-image pages are printed in
Legal/green stock and hand-bound after stitching along the spine
sans thread in the sewing machine. The machine, when not stitching
student publications, stitches cushions outside the institute gate.
Please have a look at the inside pages, there is a page of info on
the book construction, stock and typefaces. The physical version
will be photographed and uploaded after I get back from the Internship.
_
Have a fruitful vacation if you have any.
_
The Issuu embed doesn't show up in RSS feeds.
(There is one, visit the blog please. You are missing something. )
And send me lots of SPAM via those email addresses.

I.DoT — Italian Design on Tour/New Delhi/2010

2010-04-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, I was asked to develop a visual style and
collateral materials for the Italian Design Exhibition that took place
in New Delhi earlier this month. Pro Bono / for design.
_

_
The elements I have used reference the Sanjhi artwork of
Central India. The form is derived from three dots/circles
touching each other and the negative space in between.
The project was quite challenging not only because I was
working for the first time for a non-Indian "client"
through someone else, but still, whose tastes I had to
guesstimate(just realised that this is a real word).
_

_
The project was interesting also because the whole system was
developed from an invitation card design the size of 1/3 of an A4 sheet.
I spent quite a lot of time figuring out how to fit in all the copy
and logos/image into the space.
_

_
There is a lot more related material to share. But I guess
this much gives an idea without stretching it too long.
_
And...
The most amazing (read: a sleepless night) part was when
the PU foam mounted prints were cut into circles.
No wonder why I love the circle cutter so much that I take
a peek at it every day before breakfast.
_

_
Update: maybe it makes more sense when you know that Sanjhi artwork was
used to define/enhance the exhibition space by the exhibition team at Delhi.
It was based on a product by one of the NID-ians (ex~) showing his work,
Ankur Khare.

Sem-end-ics

2010-04-09T20:26:00.000-07:00

Semester Six, I will miss you.

640×480

2010-04-03T01:05:00.000-07:00

The 9.5 Commandments. #1

2010-04-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

One.
Waiting at the printer for three hours, USB stick in hand,
hungry, foolish. Frustration becomes an understatement.

An ode to the xerox machine. It is the fiftieth year
since one of those fell in love with an office secretary,
somewhere in Rochester, New York.
The fonts were xeroxed, and the hot copies were put through
a lot of painful exercises to achieve the said effect.
Still need to work on the love on top, in CMY.
Might as well screenprint this one?

/be-cue

2010-03-30T15:08:00.000-07:00

~~Weirdly ill-inspired at the moment.~~

Deadline.

2010-03-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

"The ultimate inspiration is the deadline*," said Nolan Bushnell.
The Jury dates are on the notice board. First project is still in the notebook.
Previously, someone was wrong about *them making the whooshing sound.
It seems.

Rorschach/Project.

2010-03-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

Lately, have been doing some illustrations, mirrored ones.
And, was thinking of hopping into yet another weblogging platform.
I chose tumblr, and have uploaded the series rather weirdly titled
Rorschachproject. Please pay a visit. I hope to have 999 ones/
one per a day or two from 23rd March 2010, and have plans of
doing a print project.

"Onnennu Chollumbol"

2010-03-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

_
"Number One"
A cover image created for my Village Panchayat's collection of
children's literature from all the primary schools around there,
including my old school. My brief, was to have a nostalgic feel to it.
The book is now in production. Haven't seen the finished cover yet.
Few hours a night, scissors, cutters and coloured papers, photographs.
Mixed media.

Brawn/the/Book/w.i.p

2010-03-04T08:56:00.000-08:00

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Brawn is a limited edition, numbered set of sketchbooks/notebooks
we created and branded/marketed during our Design Management
course. They're in sizes A6 and A5, 40 Parchment paper pages,
Greyboard Title with hand-stamped endpapers. The product is
yet to 'hit' the market. So, more news/soon.
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Meanwhile, for those of you on facebook, (Moar images there)
this is a link to our Brawnthebook page.

Portfolio. Yourstruly.

2010-02-22T13:02:00.000-08:00

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Portfolio for my Summer Internship.

RGB 2010. Moar.

2010-02-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

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I am back in NID after my short vacation(?) from Kozhikode.
These are works for the recent design fest RGB 2010 at NID.
The first three images are of a book cover illustration, which
was to be presented to winning teams. The book cover is
based on Alice in Vegas, the theme for RGB fashion show.
(It says al-is-ve-gs backwards.) The illustration is rubber stamped
and then painted over.
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The fourth one, is another poster for the concert by Para Vayu.
In other news: They have featured the other one on their
home and facebook pages.

Unilever.

2010-01-30T16:52:00.000-08:00

Loc(k)us.
*Thanks to Dipankar for lending the lock.

meh.

2010-01-22T12:40:00.000-08:00

Wacom+PS. teamaker's digest.
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Tea, the shirt.

2010-01-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

My entry for RGB 2010 (T-shirt Design).
Was waiting for the voting to end before posting.
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/Front.
Says share, design, play (RGB Tagline) in a mutilated Zine Sans.
The idea was to use Bauhaus-ian forms–Circle, Square and Triangle
to fit the tagline. The triangle here is a Samosa (an Indian snack)
saying "Share" and the accompanying hand graphic making
a "share" gesture. I made use of the 56+ hands shot for my
packaging design course, and some random lines
with the Wacom in PS. Circle–a ball and square–a kite saying
"play" and "design". Pink is to you, Karim Rashid.
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\back
The forms make an RGB. Had fun in the making.

PARA VAYU comes to Ahmedabad.

2010-01-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

Update on the RGB poster. RGB is the NID design festival
happening in the first week of february 2010,
(contact the RGB officials at rgb@nid.edu. and
tell them how passionate you are about design,
and do attend). The poster is for a rock-show during the fest.
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Deliberately chose not to use skulls. And Black.
And *Grunge* type. Para Vayu is a Mumbai based band.
Typefaces are Caecelia (again) and Bodoni (Poster).
And P A R A V A Y U is Zine, traced.
Pencil-led, then Uniball black pen outlined, xeroxed
and coloured. Photoshopped, lay-ed out in Illustrator.
Green is the official colour on college posters.
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Plus the computer screen turns *negative* once in a while.

~ness.

2010-01-16T13:13:00.000-08:00

A quick one.

binding clips and hands. january.

2010-01-16T12:41:00.000-08:00

Two film posters for Magesh Kolleri's "Pattupetti"
(Gramaphone-yes 'a' not 'o', malayalam version)
film adaptation of Vaikom Muhammed Basheer's
"Premalekhanam" (Love Letter) and a work. in. progress.
(the one with the hands) for my packaging project.
The posters are photocolours on various textured sheets,
with hand-stamped credits and information. Background
texture from last vacation.

ink, paper, lines.

2010-01-05T23:51:00.000-08:00

work in progress. ink on paper.

two-zero-one-zero

2009-12-31T16:06:00.000-08:00

new year. happy.
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Lakmé fashion Week

2009-12-22T13:09:00.000-08:00

identity+mini portfolio+brochure+copy for manuprasad mathew's
spring summer 2010 collection for the upcoming Lakmé fashion week.
'Crash assignment' in 2+printing+binding hours. The in-between
pages have the text printed on one side and diagonal lines
'reminiscing' the garments' origins printed at the back of translucent paper.
The impressive photographic input is by two photography design
post grad students-Pradeep Menon and Rahul SR.

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photographs digi-offset printed on 300 GSM matte paper. text on 'butterpaper'.
font creds: Caecilia LT Std. Chinese bound with cotton thread.
16 pages with cover. The misprinted title page was later used on
an accompanying CD cover.
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In other major news: Packaging design nearing completion.

abbey, wan

2009-12-11T01:31:00.000-08:00

little something that's being worked upon, apart from the
'mainstream' workflow, which, at the moment, is, packaging t-pins.
maybe, futura isn't the best choice there is.

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would also like to know if someone has seen this before somewhere
on the internets. a google search did not give me much.

old wine

2009-12-10T11:07:00.000-08:00

poster, a3, on paul hughes's upcoming lecture on
design thinking. black print on orange paper.
update: + guidelines.
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Edit: Now (10/Dec/2010) when I look back from a distance, the dashes
are placed in an ugly awkward x-positon next to the E in 'De'.
Remorses.

more wip and cream

2009-12-08T22:08:00.000-08:00

classroom 'branding' project.
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excavated.

2009-11-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

ink on paper. circa 2007.

W(H)IP!

2009-11-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

workinprogress.
identity for an imaginary architecture firm.

The Semdoc Project

2009-11-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

The semester document that features work done in the previous semester.
The book was printed at home, on an HP Deskjet.
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It was a very ambitious+fun project and the printer took care of the

registration quite well. Printed on TNPL copier paper 80GSM and

some coloured paper.

Cover is some old textured paper. Japanese style binding,

cut to size at a local bookbinder's.The page with

the 'storm' poster is printed over thrice. The photographs were

taken in a hurry, so the quality. Typefaces are Caecelia LT Std

and Avant Garde Gothic.

november

2009-11-07T19:28:00.000-08:00

Three book covers. November.
The first one reads "sareerabhasha".
Body language, two stories on relationships.

Second one, reads "prakasanam", disclosure.

Three, "kusinarayilekku". To Kusinara.
Novel on enlightenment.

2009-10-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

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Home.