Akosoto.com is a place where nursery rhymes, songs, riddles, games, do it yourself toys, illustrated stories… are compiled in the Malayalam language. This is a new venture from antzFx.com. Let us try to know more about the website.

Click on the following images for full size view.

Here are the posters in the language we all speak.

What is ‘Akosoto?’

No, the word is not Japanese. The name ‘Akosoto’ is a tribute to the 1992 Malayalam Film ‘Yodha’ directed by Sangeeth Sivan. The hero of the movie is fondly addressed as ‘Akosoto’ by the Rimpoche – a small child. We are sure that all the Keralites will identify themselves with the name. We are presenting Akosoto as a friend of your child.

A small talk on the inspiration

It was some months ago. When I was singing a nursery rhyme to my daughter (now she is two years old), my father asked me in surprise “Do you still remember this song? I taught you this song some 30 years ago from a children’s magazine!” My father has forgotten many of the lines. This made me to think about a website where we can collect and publish old songs, stories, games, ‘do-it-yourself’ toys…

My brother FULLfx | aneeskA immediately jumped into this and he made sure that the website will be up and running. He plans and posts the articles and does a lot of house keeping of the website.

The Akosoto Team

I must say that a big group of people contributed and encouraged us. Apart from my brother, my wife and daughter, my parents, my in-laws, my friends… are consulted for various articles posted here.

I should name two friends here: Geo Paul E and MahEsh C Menon. They are with us in every step and provides unconditional support, ideas and criticisms.

@AkosotoDotCom

Our Twitter handle is ‘@AkosotoDotCom.’

Tell us what you think

Simple. Shoot an email to:
write[ at ]akosoto[ dot ]com

Image Credits

Following images are used to design the poster and header of the website.

• Think: Jesse Therrien, Alberta, Canada.
• Pills: d-s-n, Warsaw, Poland
• Medicine 2: Sergio Roberto Bichara, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Download JPEGs of the whole Calendar (ZIP, 4.38MB) »

January 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)	February 2012  Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)

March 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)	April 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)

May 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)	June 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)

July 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)	August 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)

September 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)	October 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)

November 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)	December 2012 Download (JPG, 1440x1030px)

Design Thoughts

Compared with the designs of previous years, we have changed the format of the calendar.  Earlier we used to give two months in a sheet. This time, only one month is in a sheet and the digits are arranged inside ‘S M T W T F S’ — representing ‘Sunday Monday… Saturday.’ The digits are in the font Constantia.

Following images show the metamorphosis of  ’S M T W T F S.’

The first version had  ’S M T W T F S’ in Constantia Uppercase. The second version had Constantia Lowercase. The current version uses an outline (without fill) of modified Swatch font.

I modified ‘t’ and ‘m’ in the Swatch font to better adjust the digits inside. The ‘s’ for Saturday and Sunday are rotated 90 degrees. These changes ensured that the dates coming under a particular week are in a single column rather than staggered as you can see in the first two versions (Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday). Also, I removed the black fill of the ’S M T W T F S’ and retained a thin grey outline to give more emphasis to the dates and images on the sheet.

Dear Reader, I hope all of you will like this and will buy a print version from us.

Design Date: 09-Nov-2011

Extra – Our calendar designs over the years – 2011 Flowers, 2011 Green, 2010, 2009

Click on the image for a closer view.
Blank ‘Business Card’ stock image by: Brian Lary, Madison, US

A page from my notebook

I don’t remember from where I got the inspiration for using a notebook page background, but I have successfully used it twice thrice in the past. First, for my brother, I designed prize certificates with ‘notebook’ background for “Melange 2006,” organized by University College of Engineering, Thodupuzha. Then a notebook page served as the background for my e-mail wedding invitation card. People liked this unique look.

For a final assignment/presentation of a Post Graduate Degree subject, I again used this background for the PowerPoint slides. Initially we (two of my friends and I) wanted to project the slides in ‘portrait’ format; but reverted to the traditional ‘landscape’ format a few minutes before our turn as its readability was better.

When we projected the slides, our Professor was surprised and she blurted out a “What is this?” Fortunately the GE Healthcare team, who were evaluating our assignment along with the Professor, liked it and we got an ‘A’ grade. In the clutter of plain vanilla and PowerPoint default templates, our presentation did manage good ‘brand recall.’

Because of these experiences, I wanted to use a notebook page background for our new business card.

The design

The logo, company name and URL follow the antzFx logo and typography standards. They are placed on the top of the page. The person’s name (14 pt font size), Mobile phone number (8 pt ) and E-mail ID (8 pt) are in a font called ‘Hand of Sean.’ The font color is a blue (#003399) that we usually find in gel ballpoint pens. The mobile phone number is given a yellow (#ffff30) fluorescent highlighter effect. A single ‘space’ is given at both the sides of ‘@’ for easy readability of the E-mail ID.

The reverse side of the business card has a green (#009f00) background. All the text is in ‘Trebuchet MS’ font, except the ‘Arial’ ‘@’ sign of Twitter handle.

Download a blank PSD template for this business card (ZIP, 64 KB).

Who printed this?

Many asked this question to me. I printed 96 business cards for Rs.185/- (This includes printing charges, cutting charges and VAT for double sided prints on four 300gsm A3 sheets, matte finish) from Print Xpress, Richmond Road, Bangalore. Their customer service is the worst among competitors, but they are also the cheapest in Bangalore.

Reactions

Click on the image for a closer view.

The few ‘lucky’ people who received my new business card generally favored the design and mentioned that the card is quite memorable. Well, what do you think?

Design Date: 03-Sep-2011

Year Planner is a Single Sheet Calendar

“This time, we will design and print an year planner for our organization. Well, are you volunteering?”

This is my Creative Director talking to me in the last week of December, 2010. I thought: “Why not? After all, an year planner is nothing but a single sheet calendar with some boxes to write notes.”

Armed with a Google image search, I started the design.

Jerry and Cheese

‘CheeseCare‘ is the name of the organization and we generally place images of cheese in all corporate communication. I started with a cheese, then I came to a mouse chewing it and then a punchline emerged out of nowhere: “CheeseCare: We use mouse to carve out design.” I decided to add a computer mouse somewhere in this line.

Design Decisions

This is the draft version I submitted for review. Click here to download (1280×800 px; 256KB) When this is approved, I shall update the latest version here.

• Yellow Color: I took the inspiration from Yellow Post-It notes.
• 2011 is not mentioned anywhere because I wanted to increase the shelf-life of the planner. So, you can probably use it till the world ends in 2012!
• Since year planners are stuck on walls above eye-level, I thought that placing the names of months at the bottom of the sheet will be better.

• Care is taken to color alternative columns differently to assist easy reading. The same rule applies to weekdays and weekends.
• Fonts used: ‘League Script’ for the punch line with a ‘Wingdings 2′ computer mouse; ‘Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed’ for the calendar; ‘Baskerville Old face’ for the website address. “Design Matters” came with the logo and the font is ‘Hand of Sean.’
• Image Courtesy — ‘Mouse’ by Galina Puzyrna, Ukraine. Thank you for the comical illustration.

That’s it! What do you think of this ‘yellow planner’?

Can you decipher the following equation?

If yes, you are as smart as the symbolist Prof. Robert Langdon. You can stop reading this and continue with your intellectual life. Others, read on…

In the past 10 years, I had to attend a lot of job interviews. Some of them were enlightening; some others were embarassing to me as I repeat the “I don’t know” line for the nth time. Once in a while, I have faced challenging questions that need me to show creativity. Today I am going to discuss one such question.

“Design a business card for you without using any alphabets.”

Although I was expected to do only one design, I came up with four. Let us start with the obvious solutions.

FACE\OFF

My friends, who recognize my face, can have this business card. My mobile phone number appears in the card (No alphabets; that means, numerals are allowed).

Code Play

The idea was to encrypt my name and address as a barcode. This can be read using a barcode reader.

On second thoughts, from a practical point of view, this can be implemented using a QR code. Modern smart phones can easily decode them.

Gmail

This card features my e-mail ID as a screenshot of my Gmail account. Technically, this is disqualified as the screenshot — although an image — contains alphabets.

Ban Me!

OK, this needs some explanation.

If you don’t know it already, my name is ‘Anas.’ In the equation depicted above, the first image is ‘bananas.’ The second image is the ‘ban’ symbol that usually appears in ‘Do not smoke,’ ‘No parking’ boards etc.

What will be the result when I subtract ‘ban’ from ‘bananas?’ Now you understood the logic, right?

I agree that this is a little convoluted. But as a result of me coming up with this design, I landed in the job!

Image Credits

• Bananas: Elembis
• Empty Card: Ilker, Turkey
• Business Card: Vivek Chugh, India
• Hand with Card: Christoffer Vittrup Nielsen, Denmark
• Business Card: Brian Lary, US

What will you do?

I am very much interested to know your answers to this business card question. Inform me your ideas in the ‘Comments’ section.

Download the whole Calendar (ZIP, 5.74MB) »

January 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 425KB)»

February 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 384KB)»

March 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 376KB) »

April 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 624KB) »

May 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 538KB) »

June 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 434KB) »

July 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 600KB) »

August 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 679KB) »

September 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 696KB) »

October 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 345KB) »

November 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 279KB) »

December 2011 Download (JPG, 1920X1200, 783KB) »

Dear Reader, Thank you very much for your time and I wish you a happy and prosperous New Year!

Extra – Our calendar designs over the years – 2010, 2009

Download the ‘CPDM Illustrated’ newsletter from here (PDF, 2.3MB).
Download the High Quality Version of the same from here (PDF, 11.3MB).

The three generations
It is decided to devote pages for three batches of M.Des. Students with contact information.

1. 2007-2009 Batch who are no longer in the institute and have started their career in various organizations. The farewell group photo of this batch is included.
2. 2008-2010 Batch (Final year students) has done summer internship in different reputed companies. Their internship work is featured in the news letter.
3. 2009-2011 Batch (First Year Students): Since they are the newcomers, I asked them to e-mail me any work they have done in the past. So I got a lot of good works like photographs, drawings, paintings, collages…

The cover
I started the layout pixel by pixel and word by word. In the cover, I wanted to showcase the idea of ‘pixel’ as a basic building block. This led me to choose a photograph of a yellow flowered tree in our campus (Photo: Urvesh Bharambe). The image was rotated 90 degrees clockwise and the ‘stained glass’ filter is applied. Two versions are made by using white and black as the cell wall colour. I finally chose the black cell wall color.

The font of ‘CPDM Illustrated’ was retained from the first issue of the news letter (Designer: Arunkumar Francis). CPDM logo was dropped from the design and a round post-it sticker is used to denote ‘Issue +2.’ A transparent ‘Seal King’ like band was added to make the newsletter look unopened.

Page Layout

A clear heading and subheading are present on almost all the pages. Images are surrounded by a halftone patterned frame in grey and light yellow. The contents of the pages have 5 degrees of tilt. This tilt and the presence of ample white space in a page favour marginalia. As footer, a small band of single layered cells of the stained glass pattern is placed. Full page photographs are used to separate the three sections.

Software: InDesign, Photoshop
Design Date: 11-Nov-2009

The alphabet ‘M’ in the department name ‘CPDM’ is modified to resemble a heart or love symbol. Using appropriate color coding, the message can be read in two ways. It can be either ‘I am in CPDM’ or ‘I am in love with design.’

Originally, I wanted this graphic to appear above the heart of a person when he wears the T-shirt. Some of my friends decided that the graphic should be bigger and so it got printed on the rear side of the T-shirt. The front side of the T-shirt has the following words: ‘Student of Product Design, CPDM.’

Pankaj Upadhyay (The organizer) and I (The winner)

The other five
Here are my other five design submissions, in no particular order:

Ripples

Could you recognize a ‘cpdm?’ ‘Ripples’ is the name of the Annual Design Degree Show in our department.

IISc and CPDM

Car

‘U’ r here!

Department Building

Software: Adobe Illustrator
Design Dates: 08 to 28-Mar-2009
T-shirt released on: 01-Oct-2009

Click here to download the CPDM Placement Brochure 2010 (PDF, 426KB) »

The task was challenging, as design is highly subjective. Everybody had ideas on how the brochure should look like and selling my idea to them was difficult.  It was a great learning experience because some observations made by my design friends helped me to see areas that I overlooked.

Here are the design decisions I made while designing this brochure.

Requirements
Following are the requirements I fixed for the brochure.

• The look and feel of the brochure should be formal. Because it will be sent to corporate companies and they should not take us lightly as a bunch of kids who know drawing.
• There should be a subtle touch of playfulness. This is the main reason for using a doodle logo on the front page as opposed to the official version. One of the inside pages features a character illustration by a fellow student.
• Samples of student work – 10 designs — are featured on all the 12 pages including cover. This will be a temptation for visiting the student portfolios.
• CPDM is a younger department in IISc and many people don’t know the existence of this Master in Design Course in Product Design. So, an introduction to the department, M.Des. Course Structure, Faculty Profile, Student profile of 2010 Batch… are added to the brochure.
• A very clean and structured layout is used for the brochure.

The Layout

1. Picture band – One student work is featured per page.
2. Sidebar – Sentences that need immediate attention are featured here. Font size is larger than the body text. A lighter version of the main color palette is used as the background.
3. Body text area – The title and descriptions run here.
4. Footer – This area is practically empty and features the main color palette. Various shades of grey, a dull flesh colored brown were tried before fixing the present fresh yellow color.
5. The facing page also features the same layout, but the features are mirrored to give a sense of equilibrium and stability.

Featured Works
Following are the works that are featured in this brochure.

The watch — Sharath Kumar

The Torch — Pavan Sridharan & AnasKA

The Refrigerator — Renjith Koshy John & Urvesh Avinash Bharambe

The Washing Machine — Sharath Kumar & AnasKA

BMW — Renjith Koshy John (A wireframe of this model also feature on the front cover).

Audi — Pankaj Upadhyay (A wireframe of this model also feature on the back cover).

The Bamboo Chair — Pankaj Upadhyay

Highway Mohawks — Pankaj Upadhyay

‘Sagat’ The Super Hero — Pankaj Upadhyay

‘I am in Love with design’ — AnasKA

I hope that all the 17 students of 2010 Batch will find good jobs with design studios and corporate companies.

Software: Adobe InDesign
Design Date: 07-Aug-2009

Our Design

It is a minimum clutter design with a stress on the logo. The reverse side of the card features the tagline ‘you have seen nothing yet!’ and our twitter ID. Here is a comparison between the existing design and the new design.

The existing design resembled our website, complete with the upper and lower shadows.

Design Specifications

• File format: PSD
• Color Mode: CMYK
• Resolution: 300 pixels/inch
• Canvas size (Full Bleed Size): 95mm x 56mm.
  • Remember that the background colors and background images should extend to the full canvas size.
• Card Trim Size after cutting: 89mm x 51mm
• Design Area: 85mm x 47mm.
  • All the text should be placed within this design area.
  • When the file is released to print, don’t forget to rasterize all text layers and flatten the image.

  Download a blank PSD template for business card (ZIP, 384 KB).

Software: Photoshop
Design Date: 29-Jul-2009