Crap

Had been working on a booklet for quite a while. Fell sick, was hospitalised (even spent some time isolated as an H1N1 suspect :D ) and sent home for a month for recuperation (still struggling to come back to some semblance of normalcy), then faced a hard disk crash that wiped all my data off, and forced me to start from scratch (on this project, and much of the rest of my life too), then my laptop screwed up, and things just kept going wrong too often for me :( It’s been a bad semester, and with only 20 days to go, and my submissions on all my courses running atleast 2 months behind, it will only get worse.. Yeay.

Still,

I finally managed to complete the Web version of the Alcheringa 2010 Events Booklet. ..Must convey thanks to the 5 design juniors who worked with and assisted me, albeit in their own different capacities. Our collective aim was that they’d begin to learn to work on softwares, and practice them while working on what i assigned. In return, i managed some sort-of-an informal workshop, with assignments for them, and checking their work and giving feedback on it, and also managing the process for the booklet. Essentially, while they worked and i criticized it ;) i ended up teaching them the introductory basics of grid, hierarchy, a few brainstorming methods, typographic tools, visual balance and so on \ to whatever extent that i could.

In the end, i guess things turned out just about right :)

We made an attempt to follow a rather detailed process while working on booklet:

- Each module of events (and thus, each page in the booklet) was brainstormed-on and keywords based on colour, emotion and imagery were discussed, and ultimately all this was used to arrive at multiple options for the graphics to be used on each page.

- Existing images and graphics found all over the web were heavily discussed-upon. For guys as new to design as them (and me too!), i believe it is imperative to first observe work, and draw from it, while adding a little more of ourselves into each successive job we do. So – the images we observed were complimented (often!), and although most such graphics were of an exceptionally high quality, we consciously tried to understand different ways in which they could be improved upon, or simply, different approaches that could have yielded different or better results.

It is important to note here that these students who worked with me are 2nd-yearites at IIT Guwahati, and thus, only freshmen at the Department of Design (since the first year of every Design student is filled with a pathetic load of common engineering subjects – which, in some ways, is a good thing – but mostly doesn’t seem to work that way), and thus had been here only for about 3 months before work ended. So not every idea was solely original – a lot of existing concepts were evaluated and relied upon – but the bottom rule was that each graphic was to be made by us ourselves. Nothing was to be a direct copy or a rip-off, and even if we ran out of ideas and graphics, we made sure that nothing was the lift-from-the-web-and-paste-it-into-the-booklet-sort-of-a-thing that had always happened before, when booklets or such things had to be made for events on-campus.

- For each idea or concept, i encouraged discussions about whether it worked or not, and invited each person to table his views. Often, people disagreed and arguments stretched a bit, though frankly, i seemed to like it that way :) It was simple – no one was a senior or a junior among us. If you had an opinion, it had to come out. At the risk of sounding cliched: A design process just couldn’t exist if one guy dictated something and others worked as robots under him. Though, when discussions seemed to be going nowhere, i’d take a call (since i was the senior and sort-of more experienced in these matters), and unless someone had the strongest-possible conviction that said that i was wrong or being unreasonable, i asked them to go-along with me, for want of churning-out results within the stipulated time period.

I guess this worked quite well. All discussions do need to have a deadline, and then, the ideas that have come until then are the ones we ought to play along with. Else, creative thought-processes just don’t end. And while getting many ideas is a good thing, there’s this bit that Prof Ravi Mokashi-Punekar told us – learning when to stop pondering, beginning to organize the ideas and selecting the right ones is even more important, so that we may actually make something tangible, rather than only think about it.

- Each junior was to pick up one skill – one worked on floral brushes in Photoshop, one worked with simple type-based graphics, one began with the Pen tool, another was asked to create image-boards for each module, and one worked with the Glow effect for the backgrounds on pages. I did have a definitive plan in my mind, and thus selected those specific skills as the ones we’d go with. The fact that not each one of them would be able to deliver, was also accounted for – all that mattered was that they gave it their best shot, and asked me to teach them whenever they hit a roadblock.

- Discussions often related to the functional aspects of each element of graphics we used. A genuine attempt was made to try and convey the emotions with the use of the meagre-most of graphics – though i understand that our execution of the same may not have come out perfectly in the end. The juniors had only recently begun work on softwares (some, had to be introduced to the Selection and Pen tools), and i myself concentrated more on the layouts, fonts and explaining stuff to 5 guys who just couldn’t stop making mistakes every 5 minutes. But that was fun, and in most ways, i was egged on by the fact that no one (on the outside at-least) seemed to be embarrassed to hear me make verbal-sushi of everything they’d do. Then again, a lot of the work, given their newness to this all (pardon my english!), was quite encouraging, and, in some cases, simply brilliant.

Below are JPEGs of a few of the pages from the web version of the booklet. The print version, still to come, is what i’m waiting for – kinda expecting it to come out pretty decently, if the printing studio in the city can match the promises he’s made :) Also, the published .PDF can be downloaded from here.

Will write some more about the graphics:

- Music: Using Floral Brushes in Photoshop. The concept is not new, but the work is original.

- Alfaaz: Borrowed heavily from a popular work. However, i felt that the concept was strong and creating the adapted graphic did prove to be quite a challenge to the junior – i doubt he’d ever worked on Illustrator before, and i guess he did learn a thing or two about being meticulous and precise. I just hope i didn’t push him too much!

- Performing Arts: We weren’t able to create our initially thought-of concepts successfully. Then, there was this image that had come up during the assigned juniors research for mood-images, and though i’d hoped that we’d click a similar photograph (and thus, touch upon the photography aspect of a design process too, and stick to our guns about making everything in-house), things just didn’t work out that way. In the end, i treated that image accordingly, so as to best reflect what we’d wanted – a simple uncluttered graphic that impulsively invoked the emotions associated with the Events module.

- Fun-n-Masti: This was an in-house production that i’m thoroughly proud of. Among the keywords that came up for the module during the initial brainstorms, was Butterfly, for fun. It reminded me of the butterfly logo developed by Stylo Design, for ‘Made in Me’, which i’d adored since long. We kept discussing this motif time and over, and finally seemed to like the concept of creating a lot of fun out of small bits of joy – and using thousands of butterflies to make a larger one ticked. That was the idea, and frankly, as good an idea as those for the other modules. But the execution in this one was just perfect !

- Fine Arts: Simple use of the pen tool, and a simple concept. I believe it was powerful as an idea, but while the junior pulled off a good shape, i was unable to execute it to the extent i’d have liked to. But it just made me aware of my own limitations with the software.

-Other pages had their stories too, but they’re all quite like the ones above, so i’d rather not stetch it too far.

All-in-all, this was a classy experience. I like to teach, and, help people out. What better than finding juniors from my own Department, who’re ready to learn and work towards a definite goal, at the same time.. Agreed, we made mistakes and some things didn’t turn out the way we wanted them too. Had we lifted images directly off the web, the job would have gotten over much sooner, and maybe even looked better – but then, no one would have learnt anything. It’d just have been a stupid (so-called-)design like the ones churned out before:

And that was NOT what we wanted. So there.

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Oh and btw, the names of the much-mentioned juniors are thus-with: Shubhankar, Abhishek, Vivek, Shivanku, and Bharadwaj

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