Illustration

An illustration I did sometime back during IDC days. They were great. The illustration depicts the architectural invasion in city. Well I have tried to make it secular too.

Illustrator 9

Taking some time out of busy work, I managed to come up with this.
Tried out blend option to blend two different strokes. And then touched upon a bit with blur and linear blur in photoshop.

And we are there ...

So the wait for few of us has ended.
The efforts of a 15 days of slogging and playing for one common goal, Designing a game has shown colors.
I can't keep my mouth shut any more now but just boast of it...

For those who feel strange to this post some track back in time >>
Games are in market. Go grab it, before it's out of stock.
It's available online at Indiaplaza.

Here's the screenshot of page where they are available for sale online.

Alternatively you can visit any toy/game store nearby selling Funskool products and ask for these.
Currently following four games are in market
1. Triplets
2. Chakraview
3. Gotcha
4. Sixteen Fixteen

2 more are yet to come in short time.
Holding my breath till then.

All of these games are effort of Prof. Uday Athvankar who guided M.Design students of IDC, IIT Bombay and taught them how to play and set the rules for game design.
More on game design at >>

Design (for) User Experience

Well what have been misinterpreted so far even in design community comes to my notice while watching a session by Daniel Makoski. Daniel is User Experience Designer at Microsoft and a part of MS surface team. He pointed out that Liz Sanders defied the term User Experience Design.

You cannot design an Experience. You can only design FOR Experience.

Well she also defined experience in very good way. Liz says
experience is a point where users memory and dreams coincide

Well good enough. So now onwards we won't say User Experience Design but Design for (better) User Experience.

Interaction Designer

“In the same way that industrial designers have shaped our everyday life through objects that they design for our offices and for our homes, interaction design is shaping our life with interactive technologies – computers, telecommunications, mobile phones, and so on. If I were to sum up interaction design in a sentence, I would say that it’s about shaping our everyday life through digital artifacts – for work, for play, and for entertainment.”
- Gillian Crampton Smith

Diwali-Rangoli

It's been tradition now at my home that me and my brother come up with new Rangoli designs every Diwali. Both of us get together discuss some sketches and see if they can be done using the available colors or not. And yes budget is also to be considered. Never has happened that our Rangoli costed us more than 50 bucks. No use of stencils. Sheer imagination and hard work.
So this time we though of some freehand. And what else can we think of other than Lord Ganesh himself. He fits in every shape and size, irrespective of his shape and size (no hard feeling here, this is with utmost respect to him). And yes wishing every visitor a new beginning for the new year can be best represented by him. Well when we think of new we think of light and if light be combined with Lord there won't be any darkness.
I don't have initial sketches. I'll just put the final output.

Happy Diwali

Music phones

So what different things have you though your music phone (mobile) can do or look like.
The following page shows some of the very creative ways of designing music phones.
Music Phones
I know this will be very short post but can't resist to bring it to your notice.

My blogs' DNA Blueprint

Hey all blog and web freaks with a little bit of biological bend. Check this out. Well that's DNA blue print of my blog by WEB2DNA. My friend Atish brought it to light. You might also want to check out another application that shows your webpage as graph. The link is inline on web2dna webpage.
This is utterly new way of representing a page on web. And see how beautiful it brings out different information.

Tips for Bloggers

Those of you who want to add a little bit extra to your blog, be it hit counter or site map or statistics or a new show off image gallery there are many free 3rd party widgets available. But they come either with price or advertisements. But why pay them when Google allows you to do so in house. Hmmmmm.. so the question is where is it?

Well I was trying to search for the same answer and I landed up on TipsforNewBlogger blog which lists down different methods that are simple and inherent in Blogger that we can use to enhance the richness of our blog.

Happy blogging !

Google goggles

Ever been in situation when you had just hit send button of your email and repented of not doing so?? Well many of us have been victim of such conditions when we do that's not intended or that's not the right thing to do at that time.

So gmail team has come up with a new feature in their labs edition. It's Gmail Goggles.

What goggle does is to divert your attention to some other thing when you are going to take a critical decision so that you get enough time gap to rethink on it. It does this trick by giving you simple math problems of addition, multiplication etc. when you hit send button. Once you solve the problems correctly your message is send. And yes you still have time to revert or discard your message. You can set time when you want this feature available. Say Friday nights after parties you are most likely to be in unstable state of mind. So you enable this feature to work for Friday nights. And then whichever mail you compose and send on Friday nights will encounter goggles filter.
To enable this option go to Settings and then Lab option tab.

Happy goggling.

Composition of Life

Life is constituted of experiences.

They are of three types: physical, emotional and intellectual. The quality and
quantity of experiences determine the nature of life. If your experiences are
happy, your life is happy. If they are unhappy, it is unhappy. If dynamic, it is
dynamic. If dull, it is dull. Therefore, to bring about a chnage in your life
you need to change your experiences. An experience is a unit of life. It is made
up of you, the experiencing subject and the world, the experienced object. The
union of the subject and object, you and world brings about an experience. It is
like a chemical reaction between two chemicals. If you wish to enrich your life
you must deal with its constituents. Improve both, the world and you. Study the
naure of the world you contact. Develop it to the extent possible. Also study
the structure of your personality. Improve it as well. When the constituents are
bettered, the experiences arising out of their union must necessarily improve.
then the law applies - as the experieences so the life. Your life takes a turn
for the better.

And excerpt taken from "The Eternities - Vedanta Treatise" by A. Parthasarathy. I am reading this book these days. Very good for self realization.

Trying out Gtalk Labs edition

I got to know from my friend that Google is trying out hands on Gtalk in their labs. And it's available for download to test it out. So I just went ahead and downloaded this new kiddie with lot of enthusiasm, anxious to see what new has Google team done with Gtalk.


But after installing it and using I just can't bear it for more than few minutes. I uninstalled it. Listed below are some of the usability issues I found with it.

• they have put all chat windows into one. there is no liberty of moving (drag-drop) of different chat windows of different users
• sign out option is removed from chat window
• you need to right click on icon in task bar and then sign out
• limited settings options
• the title text color is grey which doesn't go well with blue tint of chat box
• when u are chatting with someone you can't say who's online
  closing the any chat window will bring up the last left chat window on top rather than the adjacent one
  

Idea Generator

We often fall short of ideas. Majorly when we are looking for them. Remember one of those brainstorming sessions. How many ideas did you generate 10? 9? 15? But what if you want more of them. And whacky ones. There are lot of methods and formal skills to generate ideas. But the tool I am going to show will just lay enough foundation for new ideas and get you going with the whackiest idea in the world to play with.

IdeaGenerator
The tool works by combining three random noun and/or verbs creating a name of something which is out of the box. You can scroll through one word with single click or have some random creation by clicking on shuffle button.
Try it. It's real fun

Master of Design - Jack of all trades

The title. You thought what it could be?
The T-shirts of all the 44 students at IDC read this line proudly.
We have succesfully completed our Masters in Design. Though the degree has not been given, we put up a great show (exhibition) Degree 44 at Nehru center, Worli, Mumbai.
Here are some pics of the show.
Though the post 2 months old the memories are still fresh.

The multi touch feel

Ok so being an interaction designer you got to do things which makes people say "AHA" or "WOW"
No no it's really not like that. But that's the byproduct of whatever work we do. People are going to exclaim these words implicitly

Stealing some time out from their busy schedule few of the hole-diggers (well this is what we have started calling ourselves at IDC, it's an alias for Interaction Design students @IDC) have planned to make this DDS a big event by putting up some of the works which are going to take the eyes of the audience out from their head. I'm sounding too violent !?!?!.

There was one time during Techfest when even people from Computer Science and Electronics dept. of IIT were found numb looking at the applications designed and developed by Hole diggers.
If you remember I posted about in "Illumiletter" the gesture based input system for drawing and playing with letters. You can see the video here >>

And this time during DDS (Degree 44) we are going to strike back again with some jaw dropping works and experiments. Multitouch applications are in our focus now. We have been working hard on this to get it to work. Thanks to NUIGroup which provided open source files on building these applications and the product.

Plagiarism-1

In this post and the subsequent series of posts that are going to follow this, I will discuss what this word "Plagiarism" mean and what threat does it pose for the one who creates and the one who takes. As a designer and a honest person I thought it would be nice to take a note of this.

I confess that even I have done it many a times. But not after an instance when my professor pointed to graphical icons (they were small to represent sections) in my portfolio work and asked me whether I made it. Though my answer was no, he said that I had not done the right thing. I should have atleast acknowledged the creator. And that was an eye opener for me. Today it's me who's taking the portion of work of the original creator and publishing under my authorship, tommorow it can be some body else doing same with my (original) work.
I am not at sounding sarcastic or arrogant when I say "my" work nor am I being selfish.

Ok so here goes the first session with meanings of "plagiarism" from around the web.

Wikipedia says it thus
"
Plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement. Unlike cases of forgery, in which the authenticity of the writing, document, or some other kind of object itself is in question, plagiarism is concerned with the issue of false attribution.
"
And it goes on by classifying plagiarism as

• Academia
• Journalism
• Online plagiarism
• Other contexts
• Self-plagiarism

Now there is something called self plagiarism too, in which you reuse your published creation again and again without attributing to the original work and calling each a new creation. Now that's not fair too even if it's your own work.

Dictionary.com says thus
"

• the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.
• something used and represented in this manner

"

Now without being plagiarist myself I would thank Wikipedia and Dictionary.com for providing such a nice resource.

And you know what, am thinking of doing some creative assignment on the same topic.
Keep reading

Degree 44 on the rise

More on Degree 44 at>> at Suri's blog.

Thursday films

Well very rarely do I see two movies in a day. And it was today that this happened. After having a heavy lunch I felt asleep at my workstation itself. Waking up after a while I went to see what others are doing to raise the level of seriousness I had been loosing since last few days. Biju was watching Mr. Bean on Holiday. Though he was listening to it with headphones on I can still make out what's going in the movie. Mr. Bean movies rarely requires you to listen anything. It's always watching and having fun very little verbal comedy.

So in this movie Mr. Bean wins a trip to some famous place (I don't know which coz I wasn't listening). The movie is about his experiences on the trip. I note one thing. Mr. Bean is a very diligent man. Though he doesn't know the priority of his works he does it best whatever he thinks of doing. And this leads to all sorts of problem. But he never took any of them as problem. And that's why at the end he is happiest of all. Simple (huh !! I sometimes behave like that).
That was quite fun watching him do many innocent things.


Later in the evening was the turn for another movie. Well we decided to see "Bhool Bhuliya" a recent Bollywood flick. But then I thought to try some random stuff. So I double clicked "Antitrust". At first I thought I was a romantic drama but later it came out to be something related to all computer programmers and scientists around the world and Business.
This brought the hidden programmer within me on surface and I felt like doing something :D (Mr. Bean effect). Antitrust is a movie which every programmer would love to watch and enjoy and think upon. Tag line "We take nothing seriously unless it's on hard drive". The cast is perfect and sequence of the story is kinda bit fast. Some of the things seems to be exaggerated but it's ok when it's a movie.
Recommended watching : Mr. Bean and Antitrust

Illustration-Twirl tool

Was playing with illustrator and I found a new tool in Illustrator CS3. It's called Twirl tool. It's twirl whatever vector object it acts upon. See below image for the location of it.


After playing with it for some time did this vector art.

Playing with Illustrator is real fun. The vector graphics are cool.