Photography Art and Craft

Many people I know are worried that they don’t have a good camera. To be precise, any camera is not a limitation. Photographers such as Terry Richardson (a well known fashion photographer) have made their career starting with cameras no better than a Kodak KB10. Great photography is not limited by the instruments at your disposal. Instruments do give you more options, but that is no limit for an artist’s imagination.

Photography: An art or craft?

When photography was started in late 1800s, it was not considered as an art form. By and large it was thought as a craft. Photographs were not even considered to get a place in art museums. Eventually, after a long series of efforts by artists, it got its place and was regarded as an art form.

Read more

Don’t Just Take Pictures, but Make Pictures – Product Photography

Everyone loves to have control over the situation in which they are present. People like dictating their own terms. Same applies to the field of photography too. You wait for the perfect sunlight to come up, so that you can take beautiful portraits of your model, or you can have the soft diffused uniform light on the flowers and get the beautiful saturated colours out of them. People wait for that few minutes at the dusk or the dawn to get the flattering light that make the picturesque landscapes.

Most of the time, light may not in your control; it’s in the hands of Mother Nature, unless you own a dozen of SB-900s that can turn the day-shot into a night-shot and vice versa. There is one realm of photography where it is not only important to have control over the light, but you have to depend on artificial source of light to have a creative control over what pops up on your LCD when you press the shutter of your camera.

Here I come up with one of my first encounters in this realm of photography called as Product Photography.

Read more

Design — 'CPDM Illustrated' Newsletter

‘CPDM Illustrated’ is a news letter that was started to showcase the creative work of Master in Design (M.Des.) students of my class. The first issue came out in February 2009. I got the opportunity to design the second issue that came out in November 2009. This post is about the design process of ‘CPDM Illustrated: Issue +2.’

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

Read more

Design — Beverage Retail Displays

Traditional Trade: Visi Cooler Tops

Read more

Design — LED Solar Lantern

‘SunFlow’ is an LED (Light Emitting Diode) Solar Lantern designed and prototyped by Geo Paul and I. The lamp on the left (Orange color) is a 3D rendered model and the one on the right (Yellow color) is the final working prototype.

Read more

Design — Toothpick holder: 'dpe' Contest 2

I won third prize for this design that can be placed on the dining tables.

Read more

Design — Doormat: 'dpe' Contest 1

Software: SolidWorks, Photoshop
Design Date: 13-Nov-2009

Design – Campaign for ‘dpe’

One lazy afternoon in November. I was chatting with my friends Pavan and Pankaj. We were discussing about cute product designs featured in a website and were admiring the designers. Suddenly, we had a spark: “Can we organize a design competition for such products in our college department (CPDM, IISc Bangalore) among the students?”

Thus ‘dpe’ was born. ‘dpe’ means ‘Design | Participate | Excel.’ I made plans for a teaser kind of series ads to generate interest among the students.

Read more

Design – Tshirt for CPDM

I am in love…
The department where I study design in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore is CPDM – Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing. To brand this relatively unknown department, my friend Pankaj initiated a T-shirt design competition in March, 2009. Almost all the students in my batch took part in this. The best design is selected by voting among ourselves. One of my six designs – ‘I am in love…’ — won the maximum votes and subsequently 30 T-shirts were printed and distributed on the 1^st of October.

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.’

Read more

Design – Brochure for CPDM

Have you ever designed anything for designers? Recently I got a chance to design a placement brochure for our batch of Product Design Students of CPDM, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

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.

Read more