Story- recession- how people with practice based on art and culture lost jobs- Vodafone saw an opportunity to sell chip SIM cards- People working on commercial projects were saved- capitalism saved lives- INTERESTING PERSPECTIVE
“Form a world for each of your brief”
Paul
I had an interesting discussion in the Language Development class today. The discussion was about collaboration. It helped me land upon the fact that none of the work that I do is truly mine. There are always external factors garnering my decisions. Claire put forward such a poignant perspective of natural phenomena occurring as a result of collaboration happening within its elements. I came up with the example of a rainbow which is the outcome of the successful collaboration between the Sun and the raindrops.
I feel the need to design the collaborative process for my briefs and decide beforehand which areas of the briefs that I have selected require my intervention. I also agreed with Rob when he stated that you do not have to take the lead on every project.
Collaboration also reminds me of the sincere efforts Neha and I took to book a boat ride from Canary Wharf to Waterloo. We went there to click pictures of the winter lights. We saw the last boat of the day (RB6) leave right before our eyes. It was disappointing but made for such a funny story. We might try to do it again.
What else? The WIP show was also a great example of how collaboration can result into great things. I helped the curation team stick manifestos on the wall. It was not a very ambitious job but I enjoyed interacting with the team and got some amazing amazing BTS footage with the inta360 camera.
I will be honest, working on this assignment has turned out to be more fun than I ever imagined. I took my camera out for the first time. I took him to the Bankside to work on this assignment. I returned back home with beautiful pictures and the desire of visiting Bankside more often. I am so proud of my pictures.
The other adventure has been finding books related to brand archetypes. Here is a fascinating book that I found in the library:
Archetypes in Branding- A toolkit for creatives and strategists. Margaret Pott HARTWELL. Joshua C. CHEN with CHEN DESIGN ASSOCIATES.
I found this book just sitting on the rack of the un-borrowed books, almost as it was anticipating my gaze.
Apparently there are sixty (and counting) archetypes in the branding world as opposed to the twelve fundamental archetypes that I was initially aware of. I am attaching images of the book here. This book qualifies as the first entry to my ‘Library Gems’ page.
Moving on to the assignment.
Needless to say- creator archetype- first glance- got the book- got a little confused- still confused- process
Design 1- I am not too happy with the design, it could use some more design input.
The title does not makes sense, nor does my Unit 1 hand-in, but the good thing is that I am done with it. I am already regretting not blogging enough in term 1. (I did have my reasons. I needed to get comfortable with the surroundings- both inner and outer). This blog is to prove my future self that I do in-fact learn from my mistakes. I am trying out a new way of documenting things. It includes experiencing things and racing straight up to the ninth row of tables in the LCC library, sitting on the first monitor there, gazing out of the window to make people think that I am thinking about something important and getting straight down to writing, not giving my brain any chance of thinking whether or not would my writing would make a mark.
Today was definitely eventful. I am glad I chose this day to begin blogging (again). I had a very healthy lunch and boy did it feel good to eat real food after surviving on literal crumbs during the submission week.
While walking here, I realised how subtly London makes you realise that you actually are living in it. You might think that you would have the ‘eureka moment’ of arriving in London after stepping into Heathrow, taking your first tube ride, watching the Big Ben, getting on the London eye, clicking a picture in front of the tower bridge but no. I realised I was in London today when I was walking to the college today. The sky was gloomy, the light was dim, I was overstimulated by my jacket, my scarf, raindrops, a tote bag containing fifteen library books, my spectacles which have started slipping down my face ever since I have got here (should I be worried that I picked up the wrong size? should I be concerned that occasional starving has slimmed down my face or should I be happy that my skin-care is working? I do not know) (see how I keep getting distracted by my thoughts? It is utter mayhem up there in my head) and my headphones playing the Marathi song ‘Ka Kalena’ This was definitely a main character moment.
I did a photo-lithography workshop today. Needless to say, it was amazing. I go absolutely crazy when it comes to booking workshops and borrowing things from the kit room. Call me gluttonous and I would not care. I got the insta360 x4 camera today. It is an absolute beauty. Did I mention it is new and I should be the first person using it in the entire college? It does not matter but it helps me feel ambitious so I am going to say that it does. I am thinking of documenting the work-in-progress show, hopefully I will get it done.
These workshops that I have been doing help me realise how intertwined the streams of science and the arts really are. I wish I could just do the workshops at LCC till I die. Experimenting is fun. It also takes care of your physical health. I had a full blown upper body workout in the workshop today- rolling the ink and turning the press’s wheel. Good times.
The other thing that I witnessed today is London’s mood swings. It relieves me to think that London is just as indecisive as me. I was in the workshop, I looked out of the window and it started pouring. Pouring, mind you, not drizzling. For a second, I thought we were amidst a storm. Then I received a weather app notification on my phone saying that the rain will stop in two minutes and it did, and at the very next instant I was blinded by a ray that had made its way through the workshop window. I wish I had taken pictures but my hands were dipped in paint. Crazy day.
I am excited as I will be going grocery shopping now. What has adulting turned me into?
This is it for today’s yap session. I really need to think about a navigation system for my blog so that my lovely godsend tutors do not end up reading this instead of the academic blogs.
This is an experiential video depicting the narrative of a square being just as adorable and fun as other shapes. This task was a part of our experiments in PlayLab.
I was not very happy with the narrative that all of us subconsciously kept assigning to the form of a square. Initially we ended up thinking of square to be a boring and restrictive shape, someone who does not like to experiment, socialise and leads a lonely life. I do not blame us, that is a thought that every designer has come across at least once. Why do you think the ‘anger’ in Inside Out is square in shape? Even the phrase ‘don’t be a square’ means to not be a conventional, old-fashioned person. I knew that this narrative needed to change.
My introverted temperament helps me empathise with squares. Some of us like to know people better in order to know if they truly deserve to experience our personality and our presence. So we came up with a story that shows how interesting squares can be. They might look boring on the outside, but what if they are always having a little party of theirs in their head?
The aroma of freshly brewing ginger tea whirled above my face, rested horizontally on my pillow and tingled my nostrils. Sun’s rays pierced my corneas through the crescents of my eyes and ushered me into the day by giving my torso a warm embrace. This quintessential morning affair helped me establish the fact that I had in fact woken up at my home in Pune, India.
My favourite part of being a brand designer, a place-brand designer to be specific is that I get to travel a lot, explore the unexplored, experience the full spectrum of emotions, soak in the complex information and build a narrative of being swamped with branding projects instead of sitting in my bed with a blank face placed between the two palms of my hands, giving in to the traps of the existential questions that have lodged themselves permanently into the attic of my mind palace.
My life has always revolved around questions. Even as I took the first sip of the tea brought to me in bed by my mother, I remember thinking why at all did I decide to go forward with the alumni event at my school when project deadlines were literally pouring down on me like torrential rains. I was not particularly excited about visiting my school. The idea of living a past reality all over again made me feel uncomfortable. I was not the same person as I was fifteen years ago when I graduated school. The only thing that was similar to the eighteen and the thirty-three year old Rutvi was the internal battle of FOMO vs JOMO that was raging inside my mind even at this moment.
The birds on the trees across my window, however, looked cheerful and chirped almost as if in anticipation of the day that was yet to unfold, a day that I had lived in my dreams or perhaps in a parallel dimension that could only be perceived by them.
Today was indeed a very special day in my life but I could not get myself to admit it. All my values as an empath and as a designer have to manifest within my actions, within my designs and heaven forbid if I decide to acknowledge my wins and talk about them. I was supposed to receive an award at my school recognising my contributions to India’s design sector. I was also supposed to deliver a ten-minute long speech to the current cohorts at my school today. I got dressed as I thought which of the two tasks felt more daunting.
“Kon tu”? (Who are you?) the security guard asked me as I stepped into my school’s premises. Ironically, I had been asked this question at the exact spot fifteen years ago. In fact, a spiteful “Kon tu?” uttered from a certain person’s mouth was the foundation of my career. And to think of it, who really was I? Was I a boring human pretending to be a brand designer or was I a shrewd brand designer pretending to be humane? Over the years, the nature of the questions I ask myself has kept on evolving in an unhinged manner but the “Kon Tu?” has been my constant companion.
I assured Sham kaka (the guard) of my identity and walked towards the venue hall to see my schoolmates hovering around the stairs leading up to the dais. We joked for a bit and I returned to the seat reserved for me. As I attempted to adjust the pleats of my saree gracefully, I saw a hundred cheerful and a hundred confused faces enter the lady Ramabai hall. I could easily place the eighteen year old Rutvi within their cliques. Fifteen years ago, I had walked into this very room with questions- Who is Rutvi? Did she ever exist for her peers? Would they remember her ten years later? What would they remember her for? hovering in my mind.
Today, my destiny perseverance had given me the surreal opportunity of answering all these questions myself. Today, as I walked up to the dais to receive my award, I witnessed my life come to a full circle.
The time I spent at UAL, London College of Communication pursuing my MA in Graphic Branding and Identity granted me the opportunity to ponder on questions. The MA dared to challenge the timid caterpillar of me to emerge out of the chrysalis of my self-conscious disposition and morph into a butterfly all ready to flutter along the stream of consciousness.
If it weren’t for the MA, I would not have been able to realise the beauty of these existential questions that my brain serves me as breakfast. The MA handed me the responsibility of catering to these questions in the most creative way possible by cooking up a three-course meal of complexity, capability and opportunity.
Experiencing a full circle moment made me think about circles. I think that circles make up for an interesting shape. They are an epitome of symmetry and grace symbolising life itself. As I stood up on the dais talking about my experience as a designer, all I could see was a kaleidoscope of vibrant circles forming and dissolving against a dark background. That is when it struck me.
I did watch a full circle moment unfold before my eyes but I had been unjust while turning a blind eye to the other moments in my life which were just as infinite and just as complete. I realise now that life is not about slogging everyday until you witness a full circle moment at last. Perhaps, life is about acknowledging a multiverse of a full circles being created and completed simultaneously. My design journey has led me to discover the enigma that lies within these circles.
“As humans, we have gotten the age-old saying all twisted. I believe it ought to be ‘circles all the way down’ instead of it being ‘turtles all the way down’ ” Saying this, I ended my ten-minute long speech.
The event went quite well, better than I expected, to be honest. Was it because of my award? or was it because I figured out the ‘circles all the way down’ analogy on the spot? No one will ever know.
There is one thing, however, that I know for sure. I will walk through the circle of inquiry with every project I undertake because that is what I think makes me a good designer. Questions increase my integrity as a designer and hence I will listen all my rude and intrusive questions with pure earnestness (Why do you think a question mark looks like an ear?) These questions push me to think about cultures, empathy, ethics and morals involved in any piece of tangible or intangible design. Questions lead me to discover and complete my circles. Why else would you think question marks flaunt the little circle in their symbol?
The aftermath of this long, painful writing task
I am not even kidding. You have no idea what just happened. Maybe I am putting a lot of thought into it, maybe it is just a coincidence, but who cares? I was writing this task when I received a message on my school’s WhatsApp group chat. I am attaching a screenshot of it beneath this. Make what you want out of it.
Language Development Class task (Twenty minutes) :
It was a dreadful Friday when I realized the amount of course work that had piled up after two months of rigorous academic class schedule. I could see data spewing out of unwritten blogs, incomplete homework assignments and rotation briefs. I was determined to get all tasks completed before the weekend ended.
I got myself a cup of coffee and sat at my desk. I stared at the screen for some hours. My eyes watered from exhaustion but my brain refused to think of solutions that would lead me to complete my assignments. I lay on bed dreaming about the demons of the unticked to-do list. I woke up and it was a Sunday. I spent the afternoon turning pages of my sketchbook, looking for inspiration. In the evening, I decided to finally leave my desk and do my laundry because I have learnt the hard way that adulting cannot wait.
I stepped into the laundry room and that is when the first idea hit my brain. As I poured the detergent, loaded my clothes into the drum and cursed the Circuit Go app, more ideas started coming in. I spent two entire days at my desk waiting for the ideas to arrive but they only manifested themselves when I left my workspace.
I realised then, that movement motivates me. The state of urgency puts me in a position to think creatively, giving rise to more ideas. In the future, not too distant, I will actively design my day to fit in all sorts of tasks instead of fixating and worrying about the assignments. I will stay in motion and try to enjoy the entire process as much as I enjoy taking pride in my creative output.
Phool is India’s leading biomaterial start-up and its primary engagement is to recycle the flower-waste that is generated in the temples of India and is dumped into holy rivers like the Ganga. Phool repurposes this flower-waste by turning them into premium incense sticks.
The logo of Phool is a combination mark where the second ‘O’ forms a woman’s bindi. Phool employs women from marginalised sectors and from local villages. The bindi acts as an index and pays a homage to these women. It does put forward a beautiful metaphor, however, I think that a logo symbol would do more justice to PHOOL’s business. This analysis will argue that Phool.co should adopt a symbol in the logo instead of an index.
The bindi symbol encapsulates the personal struggles of the women employed by Phool. However, as their consumer, I fail to understand whether Phool is a B2B company selling incense products or an NGO working for the rehabilitation of women previously involved in manual scavenging and other menial, daily wage jobs. Currently, PHOOL’s logo seems to be stepping on two stones at a time. It tries to justify its decision of being a luxury incense brand while also recognising the social aspects of these women. This creates a communication barrier for PHOOL driving its brand identity into confusion.
Hall, S. (2012, p. 32) states that I need to know what a symbol stands for before I begin to associate it with a particular object or feeling in order to understand its meaning. In some cases, the connection between the symbol and its reference in the logo is not crystal clear. The bindi symbol requires me to put in extra cognitive effort to understand the brand’s offerings. I need to know about the origin story of Phool before I decide to decide to buy their products and until then, I am left staring at their beautiful packaging wondering what lies inside it.
The brand story pushes me to buy Phool’s products once but when I receive the moral gratification, I do not have any more incentives to repeat my order. I connect the logo to the women at Phool rather than developing a sincere connection with the products.
Sketching out possibilities for Phool’s new indexical icons
Crow, D. (2010, p. 31) helps me recognise the strength of an indexical sign which provides a direct link of relationship between sign and the object, logo and the brand. In Phool’s case, I could instantly recognise flower being an index to Phool’s unique flower-cycling technology. A flower helps me pave a logical way to understand that Phool (meaning flower in Hindi) is a company that sells incense products made out of fragrant flowers.
According to me, the flower encompasses the innocence of women at Phool and the sacredness of Phool’s mission. I cannot imagine a plain, boring, conventional icon of an incense stick being able to address a number of such creative problems at one go. Chandler, D. (2007, p. 42) writes in his book that indexical signs direct attention to their object through an inherent connection. While iconicity is defined by similarity, indexicality is defined by a direct, contextual relationship. This supports my design decision of using flower as an indexical sign to emphasise on Phool’s flower-cycling process and help it distinguish itself from other incense brands.
It complements the name of the brand. This form also slightly resembles the side-profile of Lord Ganapati’s face ultimately tying back my design to Phool’s idea of spirituality and the act of praying in temples.
Redesigned logo for Phool
References
Hall, S. (2012, p. 32) THIS MEANS THIS THIS MEANS THAT. 2nd edition. Great Britain: Laurence King Publishing.
Crow, D. (2010, p. 31) Visible Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics in the Visual Arts. 2nd edition. London: Ava Publishing.
Chandler, D. (2007, p. 42) Semiotics: The Basics. 2nd Edition. USA, Canada: Routledge.
I cannot believe it has been almost a month since the course began. I should have started writing this blog the second Paul uttered the first word of the course study in Lecture theatre B. It was a 9 am lecture, I remember, the lecture theatre was cold and dark. I was a sailor amidst the sea with a compass in my hand made out of brass, the surface of which gleamed softly in the light coming from the projector.
The sailor is still navigating.
It is 4:58 pm now, I am in the library writing this so that I can experience what a productive day feels like. Today I plan on designing my blog’s interface and writing the first draft of the academic writing assignment. I attended a letterpress workshop today. Andrew and Ruth were amazing. Today, as a matter of fact, was a very good day. I found such beautiful books. I also found out about the fact that the LCC library stays open on the weekends.
The sailor can now see a beautiful island over the horizon. She loosens her neckerchief as she shouts “LAND HO”
