creative
200/www.CreativeGaga.com
VOL5/ ISSUE1
Jan/Feb 2015 the enthusiastic creative journal
Appiness on
USER CENTRIC APPROACH
Google Fonts
Devanagari the Digital Revolution
Spin the digital world with Chloe Galea
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Contents EXHIBIT 08____TrendFeed Inspiring design with potential to be influential. 10____NewsFeed Just concluded creative events. 12____SpendThrift Thoughtfully designed stuff that you can acquire. 41
14____Flying High/ Paatangaa Paatangaa displays a colourful array of its logo transformations before us. 18____Font Fame/ Google Web Fonts Renowened font designers, Dave Crossland and Pathum Egodawatta discuss the Devanagari script with respect to font and typeface through the Google Fonts Project. 22____Design with a Heart/ Mohamed Minhaz Young designer on his lifesaving web design concept. 24____Tamil Type/ Prabhagaran Enthusiast type designer, Prabhagaran, speaks on his Tamil font project. 26____App-reciation!/ Montu Yadav Creative designer, Montu Yadav, brings forth refreshing app designs. FIGURES 30____Thinking Beautifully/ Infigo Labs Infigo Labs tells us about how they wear their design goggles all the time. 34____Too Used to be True/ Appiness Interactive The young digital consulting firm, demonstrates their take on the world wide web. 40____Web Chat/ Miracle Studios Miracle Studios busts some myths and conceptions about web and digital design.
46____Design Democracy/ Kenil Bhavsar He talks on user importance and how they dictate what and how we design. 50____Web Maestros/ Wise Advise Renowned digital designers discuss the exciting medium and how it has changed communication. 54____No More Walls/ Chloe Galea Berlin based freelance Graphic Designer, talks about the web and how it enhances the scope of design. GYAAN 60____Celebrity Heads/ Sri Harsha Graphic design student, recreates Scarlett Johannson before our eyes. 66____Talking Portraits/ Aman Chotani Travel Photographer, on how to make a photograph come alive. DESIGN PLEASURE 70____Do the Craft/ Varnam Varnam finds inspiration in Indian craftwork and takes it further to serve in everyday life. PODIUM 72____Not so Everyday!/ Renik Umar Digital designer, showcases app designs that do and surprise. 74____Fab App/ Dhanish Gajjar App designer, uses simple designs to make for exemplary user experiences.
FIGURES_IconWatch Visakh Viswambharan, founder and CEO of Appiness Interactive, a Bangalore based high technology digital consulting firm, striving to raise the standards in the wide world of web. Started in 2012, their user-friendly designs have won acclaim for various brands.
Too Used to be True It’s happening; the focus of design is shifting from being brand centric to being user-centric. Appiness Interactive, a digital consulting firm, believes that every design needs to ensure optimum user experience, not radical changes in the structure just to create shock and awe. “We do not want to reinvent the wheel”, they say. Below, they put on a little show and tell. Wow.jobs. The driving force behind any good design is the user experience. In order to accomplish that, exhaustive steps need to be undertaken to deliver a UX which is simple and functional for users. A designer’s expertise determines how an optimum solution to a problem is sought and solved. Before Wow.Jobs manifested, a study of insights was necessary. Appiness, therefore, dug into the minds of jobseekers to try and see what kind of problems and questions they possess. ‘Do I have a good resume?’, ‘What should I include in it?’, ‘Which format is the most preferred?’ the list was endless.
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That’s when a platform was created that would create the apt resume in just 2 minutes. Problem solved! That later grew to also cater to other aspects of the job search process. From creating a resume to applying for a job, Wow.Jobs makes the process of finding a job in today’s world easy, efficient and simple. Minimalistic, intuitive and experimental in its design, Wow.Jobs uses bleeding edge technology and proprietary algorithms to give users a flawless experience. People are accepting technology quicker than brands today. It explains how Gmail showed the way to Yahoo mail and how iPhone showed the way to Nokia. We need to adapt according to people and not vice versa >
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FIGURES_StudioScope
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web chat It’s easy to have opinions but difficult to have answers. As the world changes at top-notch speed, there’s something new every day waiting on our computer and phone screens. The web has changed people, communities and countries and thus, it has also changed design. Chandigarh based web solutions company, Miracle Studios, discusses some changes that have and should happen, by asking you questions and stating answers. India is a hub for IT, so why not for design? From the time of the millennium, there was a spurt of IT work that began setting up and sent to India. In ways, it was a revolution, opening avenues for jobs and professionals. While programming and other such categories began getting praise and recognition, what India lacked was quality in design work. That was an ideal opportunity for talented and budding designers, those with a vision, to focus on the design side of things. And now, it’s the revolution stage for Indian design. People are understanding the value of design in everyday life, and that’s what professionals and design studios are tapping in to provide high quality work and long term solution > 02
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Rajan Arora founded Miracle Studios in 2004 and is currently based in Chandigarh. Offering quality web/digital design solutions to national and international clients, like Saint Pure, Vega and many more, they design, develop, market and produce cutting-edge web solutions.
01 SAINT PURE, INDIA. An ecommerce website for high end beauty products, this website is designed to lure the audience and increase presence.
02 EMERALD, INDIA. This concept design for a blade manufacturing company highlights how important good website design is, be it any brand.
03 TIME FOR DIAMONDS. The design embodies the character of the brand, bringing forth an aristrocratic and classy web design.
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FIGURES_MadeInBerlin Chloë Galea is a British graphic designer, currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. After a number of years working at Pencil Agency in London, she now works as a freelancer. Her skills encompass both print and digital, with the majority of clients coming from the fashion, luxury and lifestyle industries.
01 01 02 03 04 A PRINT-DRIVEN CUSTOMER NEWSLETTER FROM CATH KIDSTON’S 2013 CAMPAIGN.
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To engage Cath Kidston’s newsletter subscribers and drive traffic to their site, a new creative direction for their
2013 newsletter campaign as mapped out by providing the brand with a large suite of suggested layouts
and a toolkit of graphic elements, in a structured manner.
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NO MORE
WALLS
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The barriers have broken and the people unified, all thanks to the World Wide Web. For designers, it’s nothing less than a revolution. British freelance graphic designer, Chloe Galea, who now lives in Berlin, has made the most of this invention to provide modern designs for clients situated worldwide. In a conversation with Creative Gaga, she tells us more about how she reaches out to the wider audience with her design and technology.
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GYAAN_DexterArt
Born in May 1991, Sri Harsha Andukuri is graphic design student at IIT Guwahati. Specialising in UI/UX illustration and digital paintings, this architect graduate from NIT Patna, is also a keen traveller and soccer fan.
Tools used • Adobe photoshop, Lightroom (for post editing) • Wacom Intous
Celebrity
Heads
It’s a digital age, one doesn’t need a subject to pose before them for hours, simply a photograph is enough. Graphic design student, Sri Harsha Andukuri takes us through a step by step guide on making a digital portrait of any famous celebrity, in this case, Hollywood’s own Scarlett Johansson.
01 Fixing the Canvas and preparing the outline The process begins by fixing of the canvas. This is achieved through Photoshop, where a new file is opened with an A3 size. This is followed by creating an outline of the image using a red colour, on a new layer. The colour red is selected because it highlights profiles and edges in the middle of the painting. Then, marking of highlights and shadows in a new layer using red color and a textured brush with opacity 7% and 14%.
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