2013

Design is the art of expressing thoughts. It is a freehand manifestation of vision. It is the draftsman’s job to use lab instruments to reflect that vision into precision. The purpose of design is to understand how best we can absorb natural elements spread all around us. Lack of knowledge creates too many complexities around us. Outside wisdom is unlikely to remove these intricacies. It is from the study of the self, through concentration and practice, emerges design. To

I recently participated in an event where I was required to redesign Internet.org’s homepage and logo. The content had to remain the same, but the design was to be completely new. The website was required to be responsive, and good in code-quality and aesthetics, without the use of any external code. The logo was marked for creativity and execution. Here’s what I co-designed with Akshat Srivastava in five hours. And why. The relationship between form and purpose—How and Why— is symbiotic.

We’re a group of products and organizations which were proudly created in India. You see this meticulously made handicraft item which would be the perfect addition to brighten up any living room. You pick it up, admiring the attention to detail when suddenly you spot the ‘Made in India’ label at the bottom, instantly making the product you were admiring seconds ago feel as cheap as dirt. Why is it that a ‘Made in Italy’ label makes people feel as if the product had been made in heaven itself?

Redesigned brand identity of Internet.org for an event in five hours. Made a trustworthy, user-centric brand.

‘Reality control,’ they called it—in Newspeak, ‘doublethink.’

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Maybe Orwell was right, just a few decades wrong. One of the beliefs, the internet is free, and one of them, the United States Government controls the internet. It’s happening, and it’s happening now! I’ve figured it all out—it’s all about power—and information is power.

The ‘WWW’ subdomain is deprecated. There. I said it. Let me put it this way — When you type google.com in your web browser, you get redirected to http://www.google.com, right? But is that necessary? Do we really need to prove our world-wide web presence by adding a WWW subdomain? I don’t think so. Let us first recall the definition of WWW:

World Wide Web — n. Abb