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Greetings, humans!
The world has changed. We see it in the water. We feel it in the earth, We smell it in the air. But that’s always the case when we send out a newsletter once every quarter and this one is late! We had Humane pin, Rabbit R1 and Apple Vision Pro within months of each other. Each with a promising new paradigm of interaction. Not to mention the accelerated march of generative AI models. Exciting time ahead!
Community
Bangalore meetup
We began the year with a bang by bonding with Bangalore's design & tech community over brunch. About 18 people came together on a beautiful Saturday morning and talked about work (a little), life (more), and their aspirations (a lot).
thank you, maverick and farmer!
Design Baithak with Kshitiz Anand
In February, we hosted Kshitiz Anand for fantastic Design Baithak session with at our Ahmedabad studio. Kshitiz shared his experiences of working with #ComplexProblems in Education, Healthcare, Gender Empowerment in the Indian context.
Design Baithak with Bhakti Dudhara & Sanjay Raval
On 16th March, we are hosting the last design Baithak of this season, this time with guests Bhakti (Co-founder and Chief Design Officer, Aubergine) & Sanjay Raval. Both will talk about the changing landscape of design jobs and design hiring. Register here: https://lu.ma/589frknm
Work
More work for Canoo
We have been doing a lot interesting work with Canoo. On top of additional pages to their website and improvements to their app we also built a volunteering and partner portal. We are already getting tons of good feedback about the volunteering platform and cannot wait to bring in improvements and more capabilities.
Play and our website
We have fresh content and some twinkles of surprises for you on our website, baked by Chuck from Rough Paper. What started as a content writing gig for the website turned into a more ambitious finding-our-core journey. In Chuck’s own words:
I worked closely with Tejas Bhatt, the founder, and his team of “internet gadabouts and tinkerers”. After figuring their team did a lot of lateral thinking and experimentation to arrive at solutions, we crafted the positioning to be on the lines of putting play to work. And boy did we have fun putting the content together for that.
We don’t want the play to only be surface-level empty philosophy. Kasturi has taken the lead on making the idea of play an essential part out our culture and our work. She plans to document the whole process in public so you will hear from her soon. Kasturi and Bhavya have been hard at work in redesigning our website to reflect this playfulness.
Our own UI kit
I have been building a Figma UI library to work as a base component library for all our projects and customize it to give each project its unique style. You can read more about it in Beyond One Size Fits All. Our search component is published on Figma community and we plan to share the whole UI kit soon.
Writings
In December, we took it upon ourselves to write about typography, the highlight being this intriguing article about Devanagari typefaces written by guest author Pooja Saxena. दिलचस्प देवनागरी अक्षर was written in Hindi first and then translated in its English avatar as Delish Devanagari typography. Rounding off the month were collections of our favourite Blackletter and Mono typefaces.
Cool things/Resources
We usually share cool things we find online but this time we are doing something different by sharing cool things we build for the design community. Hope you enjoy them.
Rive animations
Avinash has been exploring Rive as an alternate to Lottie for Animations. So far it looks quite promising. He published a few animations on the Rive Community: Spiral Select interaction, Success confetti, Star Ratings
Blender texture
After playing around with unreal engine, Abinash started crafting magic in Blender. You can download the fantastical glass texture he created on Gumroad.
Ramen illustrations
Bhavya made Ramen Shop, a ramen illustration set in which you can customise ingredients, bowl and backgrounds. Your favourite Anime character will slurp it all up.
Icons and soundboard
I find spending hours drawing icons cathartic, so others asked me to make a small set of duotone shop icons. Inspired by all the cool prototypes people made for Figbruary I also made a soundboard prototype.
You can find links to all these more here.
Future
We have a lot more coming soon. In addition to the UI Library, we have a lot more experiments community resources lined up and a very cool XR concept. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram to hear about them. Or tell us all about how you are using AI in your work!
