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Hello! It’s been a while. How have you been? What’s the weather like where you are? Does small talk get boring for you, too? Where do you go once you’ve exhausted all the small talk?
Dan Mall wrote a great piece about how to have better conversations. as part of becoming a more respected designer. Dr. Emily Anhalt has a collection of ice-breaker questions — they are funny, witty, insightful, sweet, and spicy. 👀
But first of all: we turned a year older. And we launched Jamun Verse on Dessert Roz, our Mithai Cinematic Universe™. That called for celebrations! Colleagues, collaborators, and friends joined us over a video call, with desserts of course, to share the joy. Thank you for your wishes!
Cover image credit: @rasagy
work
design
Post our hibernation in the first quarter, we picked up new work this quarter for one of our favourite clients from the past year - Canoo. We are designing multiple properties for Canoo and we can’t be more excited to share the work with you soon.
We also completed primary research and analysis for a top e-commerce company that spanned 24 months! In this time, we conducted more than 150 interviews to understand online and offline buying behaviours of Indian shoppers. While our NDA prohibits of publicly naming the company in perpetuity 🙁, we will pull some insights and share those with the world soon. Follow us to know as soon as we post them.
This quarter we picked up work going from transforming existing brands to designing products where visual flair was of lowest priority. The latter pushed us to investigate how we could use existing frameworks as jumping-off points to focus on journeys. In the former, our experiments with Wordpress site editor gave us an opportunity to see how closely we could bring our designs to life ourselves.
coming real soon!
writings
Karthik picked his Five favourite Figma plugins, in what is first of a long series.
The second-most asked question to us is about how we maintain morale and bonding as a remote team. Bhavya wrote about processes and rituals we follow for smooth communications and to foster stronger bond in team members. She will write part two of this to cover our non-work rituals. Stay tuned!
community
digital and disability - self determination
We attended a workshop on Disability and self determination, organised by the good folks of Design Beku and Point of View with swissnex.
Not only did we participate in a discourse about the inclusivity in digital mediums, we heard from people with disabilities and what digital self determination means to them.
People from tech, design, policy and people with disabilities got together to make each conversation rich and powerful. They pulled off making an inclusive environment at an event, which helped facilitate meaningful participation from everyone attending. Little things like being aware of not using the term ‘normal’ when referring to people, not only made it a comfortable space for people with disabilities, but also got attendees to pay attention to what matters.
eChai Ahmedabad UX-UI meetup
eChai hosted a Design meet in Ahmedabad where Tejas participated in a panel discussion with design practitioners from the city.
tejas, sitting second from right, figured out why small water bottles were shaped the way they were by the end of this panel
Instagram AUA
We hosted an Ask Us Anything session on our Instagram where anyone could ask us any work-related questions. People asked questions about work philosophy, how we handle clients (and ghosts 👻), and how we work well remotely.
good stuff
books
Vitaly Friedman shared a huge collection of free design books on Linkedin on topics ranging from design, to product management, to marketing and growth. You have to check out that list.
resources 👀
essays
No More Boring Apps by Andy Allen
Andy Allen runs !Boring (Not Boring), and they design apps that don’t look like any other apps. In this essay, Andy lays down the manifesto for bringing life back to product design. Though the current trend of competitors literally ripping off each others’ ideas mean that your path to interface ikagai might be more rocky than you imagine.
!Boring’s work (on left) has often been an influence in our approach to visual design
misc
So yeah, apps actually looked like that a decades ago. With a few painfully sliced image sprites, and lots of passion, people around the world poured their creativity in designing free skins of the world’s most popular music player. And who knew Winamp would be trying to find relevance again with multi-platform apps!
hustle
(still) un-named
For some part of the last 12 months, we have been using every free block of time fine-tuning our internal product idea. The design is finally complete, and we are waiting with excitement to bring it to life.
forward
We picked up some simple WordPress development again after long gap, and are blown away by the possibilities of the new site editor. It is astonishing how close their visual design editor has come to our Figma workflows. While the new WP versions are finding their way around building any features beyond default, it is intriguing alternative to webflows, readymags, and framer. Can we offer more development services with this? Too early to tell, but never say never. 😉
That’s that, and all the good things in-between.
Until the next one, 🖖🏽
Abinash, Avinash, Bhavya, Karthik, Kasturi, & Tejas
