POOL Editorial

Institutes and colleges need to focus hard on building the design attitude amongst their students. Young designers need to believe that they can change the world. They need to aim higher, and attempt the impossible with confidence because that is the only way the impossible does become possible. Students would start questioning early on: what does it mean to be a designer? How does a designer behave? How are designers different from other social beings? What does it mean to be a professional designer? How is being a designer different from being an engineer or an artist? These are great questions that need introspection at a very early age.

Logos have become an essential tool of business. You absolutely need to nail branding upfront for any business or venture to make a lasting impression on the customers you want to attract. While there is a lot of information on what the logo should be, here is my list of things you should avoid when making a brief for, or designing a logo.

Designers can absorb information and data about a current scenario and suggest tweaks or changes to the market, technology, usage, and geography, and ways to transform an organization into an imagined business in the future. In fact, they can take an existing idea of a traditional business and transform it into an imagined business. A reimagined business model uses traditional business and technology solutions to create value that hasn’t been possible so far in terms of reach and convenience.

I have been using this tool from the Danish Design Center to inform my clients of what I do. I have also found it very useful to explain to young designers their future progression as professionals. Though these are seen as four distinct steps, I see them as four different roles that we land up playing in projects – ranging from playing one of them in one project to all of them at other times in the same project. I think playing together, they complete a project in totality. 

The purpose of design, or for that matter, anything, is to bring in clarity. The purpose of education, in general, is to give you enough information and tools to process that knowledge so you can make sense of this world and also make others understand it better. At the heart of every design project is a big question that needs clarity.

It is difficult to see change or believe that this change is likely to stay forever. It all happened suddenly, almost like an accident, and many of us still have to accept the change. We are still hoping that things will soon be back to what we have known them to be. We are putting our hopes in too many things: a vaccine, the human spirit, free markets, talent, and the human quest to do better despite the struggle. 

We know that industry engages in mass production and businesses solve mass issues; they address a mass audience, and want their brand to talk to more people. The purpose of business is to make a profit and make more of it, and for this they need to sell to more people. That’s what we mean by mass. Industry amplifies brand communication and messaging, and reaches out to more and more customers – in this process, it lands up diluting the product or service to appeal to more people.

Judging creative work is a huge responsibility and is extraordinarily difficult to get right. Everyone underestimates how difficult this is because: 

a) Everyone believes they have good taste. 
b) They believe that because they look at quality work all the time, they can instinctively distinguish good from bad. 
c) Deep down everyone is a frustrated designer. 

It almost sounds like the joke we often make in our country — World Famous in India — but it is no longer a joke. You can be world famous in India, and you can be a professional at home. Being professional is an attitude, and you do not need to compromise on that at all.

We recently lost Vikas Satwalekar, one of the best design teachers we have ever had in India, and a friend and mentor to me and so many others. As Executive Director of NID, and Head of its Visual Communication program, he made a deep impression on his students, leading them on to much success in their later lives.