Interview – 10 emerging web designers from India (part3) : Nitin garg, nitingarg.com

Thanks pals, for the encouraging support to the interview series so far. In a quest to filter out and showcase some of the real talents from the country, i am fascinated by these individuals, and their achievements, which are driven solely by passion and perseverance. Being able to know these guys closer is something that i consider lucky enough, and i believe this series would help any designer to rekindle the spark and find some inspiration in their design life. After the outstanding Manoj paul from Chennai, we have a young and vibrant designer from the capital of the country to be featured as the third one.

About the designer

Nitin garg (http://www.nitingarg.com/) is a young entrepreneur aged 22, from New delhi. brought up in a small town in Rajasthan called Bharatpur.

Nitin’s fascination with computers and design started way back in 2001, when his dad bought him a brand new PC. Since then, he has been glued to the domain and have been trying to improve every time on whatever he works on. Having stayed nearby Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, he fell in love with wild-life – specially ‘Project Tiger’ and collected  a lot of data, information about the project by frequent visits, magazines, people etc. And just for fun & excitement of the new PC, he made a little offline website out of it using Photoshop 5 & notepad, and that marked the beginning of a pursuit, which he still continues to carry on with the same passion. It was his brother who probably realized this passion of his, and suggested to opt for a design education. Then after a formal education in user experience design he got a chance to work with Philips Designs in Pune for some months. And was lucky during his early education years, to get a few clients to work with. After that, he have been working for many organizations, start-ups for their needs on interaction, user-interface & sometimes branding assignments. Later, again worked full-time as a Lead designer with a creative agency in New Delhi for few months. Soon he realized that this payment & comfort is making him a bird in a Golden cage. So, he quit his job, and is now focusing on executing his own ideas into products like web-apps, tools etc. Right now he is working with few experts for marketing & development support & two of their first products should be up for beta release, by this year end. Right now he is engaged in a massive redesign of his online portfolio, which is due for release by November end of this year.

Lets get close to this design graduate, through some thought provoking dialogues

Thanks for taking your time out and giving us a chance to know you more closely. Can u please elaborate on your skill sets and your core strengths?

Hi Ranjith, its totally my pleasure & thanks to mysticpixels for giving a chance to share my own thoughts & get inspired by other great design professionals in country. Its an honour.

If we talk about skill-sets, when i thought design as a long term career, i started with mostly Digital-Arts & understanding the basics of visual language – Grid & Type. Which i have been practising from start & i feel that is something i use as one of the major tools in any kind of visual project. Later, mind opened up towards process of interaction design and got myself aware of how to plan a long term project, understand users, collect & organize data & finally techniques to make all that reflect in visual & architecture of product. So, i would say, early affection to aesthetics & visual perfection and later understanding of design as a process is what i can consider as core strengths.

From your career path, i believe, taking up a formal design education was the turning point in your career. How do you attribute your current position to the education from Symbiosis?

I would say being in a design college don’t really guarantees you that you would be an “intellectual-educated design professional”. As Sir Andy Rutledge has written in one of his recent articles about UX education ( http://www.andyrutledge.com/the-ux-design-education-scam.php ) things could go in other directions as well. So, in any case an obsession to what you are doing & regular habit of teaching yourself something with the time is must to survive & most important to satisfy your own creative hunger. But yes, in other way it was a turning point because of the people i met. The fellow students, you talk to them, you do activities together, you discuss, you learn. Which really helped me open up & see myself in design industry. It gave me a feeling & confidence that Yes, this is what i want to do, through-out my life.

Does a design education instill all the needed skills and wisdom to kick start a design career? What do you think is missing in our design education curriculum?

I would clearly say, its not the curriculum, its the people. You know how when a kid goes to primary school for first time, he has no idea what the teacher says, what the books are. But, he gets more kids around him who think in his own lost frequency of exploration, so they talk, they perceive things in their own format & learn things mutually from each other, which acts as a very important experience & start of whole education. Similar was the design school for me, it was a start. You work with people, if somebody is doing it wrong, tell them. If you are doing wrong, you have somebody to tell you and now it depends on you how you take these activities seriously & develop a habit of doing things as perfectly as you can. And for that, a four year education program is not enough. So, you have to keep teaching yourself whole life.

I am not sure about the other institutes. But from my personal experience, what i found lacking in curriculum is the activity based learning & a thought of accepting the simplicity & practical common sense. Specially in field of UX, I sometimes feel we are too addicted to jargons. And sometimes projects are too dramatized to make them appear big. So, i believe instead of investing knowledge in that, it should be just visible in final product. So, for me an ideal design curriculum first teaches you the basic & then provides a supervision to help you pick a project right from the industry ! Which comes with a responsibility of delivering something that “really works” instead of something with a consideration that “Ya, it would work”.

As Manoj pointed out in the last interview, there are some skills that come innately to some of the designers, like color sense, aesthetics and much more. What do you think about this?

Yes, i totally agree with Manoj sir. I believe design is primarily a combination of two things – Logic & craft. And craft does comes innately to few individuals. May be depending on past childhood experiences, how you grew up, family traits etc. I have seen a lot of fellow designers are great at sketching, fine art, few with music, sculpture etc. So yes, a bit of love to craft skills & the understanding does exists in designers innately.

And later, it depends on practise & own skills that how well you blend the Logic & craft, which becomes Design.

You mentioned that, working for somebody made you feel like a ‘Bird in a golden cage’. But don’t u think getting industry relevant experience by working with some reputed organizations, is an asset to your career path?

It absolutely does, it did. In my short work-span at Philips & then at other organization, i did learned few really helpful things. Specially in terms of project management & professional expectations of industry. So, i would definitely not suggest fellow designers or students to think of directly jumping into something of your own, no matter how skilled you are.  Working somewhere for a couple of years is must ! And you should continue till you get that feeling of Bird in a Golden cage. And may be there are few  organizations who will never make you feel that, which is great ! But if you think you want to work even harder for your own personal creative hunger, go ahead & also be ready to learn from failures, you can’t avoid them And which is okay, i did failed in business sometimes, so as a lesson i learned the importance of contracts etc.

So, as a final thought -

Working for experience, learning – Yes, you should !

Working for a comfort of monthly pay & sacrificing your thoughts & what you really want to learn & practise – No!

What is the theme of your new to-be-launched portfolio design? Can u please share some info on this?

Ya, sure. In portfolios i have always kept minimalism & simplicity as a basic guideline/theme. So, the current redesign is following the same. Its mostly white, black & one color. Focus on presenting projects & images. And at few places would be using subtle icon language to enhance the communication. A bit of it is already updated at http://nitingarg.com/

You have some amazing illustrations and artworks in your deviantart gallery. How do you stay motivated and how do u overcome the creative blocks at times?

Thanks Rajnith ! I am glad to hear you liked them ! For me motivation & obsession comes together. I start feeling uncomfortable if i haven’t drawn, created something for few days.In case of creative block, for me what works best is to stop thinking. Just get involved in something else, take a walk, listen to music, do some sketching, doodling etc. And automatically an idea will appear randomly & hit that block hard !Earlier this year, i started a small project ( http://nitingarg.tumblr.com/archive/2010/1 ) where i decided to pick my favorite song/soundtrack of that day & illustrate something very quickly inspired by that. And i surprised myself that i was really able to think & execute something everyday for first 6-7 months ! Later had to slow it down, because some commercial projects wanted the priority.

So, probably some personal project/activities like this really helps the creative juice running in head. And in-fact, this project has given me some great ideas. On which, now i would come back & probably make small animation, poster series etc.

Which are your favorite places on Internet where you hangout for inspiration and productivity?

For learn about design as a culture & profession

http://designobserver.com/
http://www.andyrutledge.com/
http://www.the99percent.com/
http://www.thejanuarist.com/
http://vignelli.com/canon.pdf

To read about UX process & other work related skills

http://www.uxbooth.com/
http://alistapart.com/
http://ilovetypography.com/
http://www.thegridsystem.org/

For quick visual inspiration

http://graphic-exchange.com/
http://www.cpluv.com/
http://colorlovers.com/
http://ffffound.com/

Generalization is a buzzword now in the UI arena, as there are more and more designers who are a blend of Illustrators, Front end coders and Visual designers coming to the domain, faster than ever. According to you, what are the skill sets that can make a killer web designer for the modern era?

Yes, you are right. Generalization is a buzzword and sometimes a requirement too. The beauty of modern web-design & applications is that overall they are actually a great blend of Art & Science. So, ideally one should always try keeping himself trained & equipped with these two. Now to break it down..

Art – One should totally fall in love with Grid systems & type. They are backbones of anything usable you are going to create. And most of all they help you respect your own idea. If you have a great thought that you want everyone else to know, these two are going to provide a language that everybody understands.Later a good understanding of color, shape, forms, basically all the surface level elements, really helps ! And to execute your art ideas in digital format – a basic understanding of all the industry level tools & mastery over a couple of them is must. In case of UI design, it could be Photoshop or Fireworks, based on personal preference.

Science – This is the process, ability to analyse things, simplify ideas, managing content,features & building architectures for your product, time management etc. Then, there is a science of different kind – the code.

Every designer active in web field should have an understanding of Html & CSS ! Not necessarily you would have to do it in projects, probably a dedicated developer would help you but while doing the static designs you should be aware of possibilities & practicality of how its going to be implemented at the end. And knowing about further technologies like PHP, Ajax is even great ! One should at-least know the basic fundamental knowledge of how they work.

Do you have any tips/advice for the budding designers, to help them grow and learn?

This brings a smile on my face as i am myself pretty young in this industry & always seeking for advices from great people. But, so far from my journey, i have few experiences.

Love the basics ! Design world is full of fancy terms. but the basic theories are the same, so a little bit of Study of how this whole culture started & how people used to work without the technologies earlier really helps ! To start, Gestalt theory, Type history, Golden section could be few things. And then Mr.Google is your friend

Find & accept criticism. Keep sharing what you are doing, Keep analysing what others are doing & then exchange thoughts. And we are lucky to have such good design communities/forums on Internet in case you don’t have similar interest people around.

Find your skills and keep sharpening them. Give yourself time to explore & find out what is something you really enjoy to do. And then just keep sharpening that particular skill. Sometimes, these skills could reflect in mastery of a particular Digital execution tool etc.

Get inspired from things out-side your specialization. Treat creativity as a generic character rather then focused on something that you do. For e.g. documentaries, music, travel, even something as useless as a daytime dream can inspire you for an idea.

Have patience, not everybody was a perfectionist from the first day of job. So, just accept that – Yes ! I am going to do mistakes..for the good ! Now, important part is to realize that you did it ! So, you can find it & then invent a solution for it.

Value time, knowledge. As they say Time = Money. In creative industry, it should be Time = Quality = Money. So, if you do good work that justifies the quality, you deserve a proper payment for it & i believe after a while when you really develop some quality people do understand & pay you. You need to build the trust !

For creative seeking for a self-employed career, you also need to be your accountant & presentation guy. So, always keep an eye on business culture as well.

At last, Be kind to other people in industry, love design, enjoy it, be obsessed with it !

Explore Nitin’s work via.

Behance ( http://www.behance.net/nitingarg )
previous venture ( www.designjunction.in )
noncommercial work ( www.freakyframes.deviantart.com ) and www.nitingarg.tumblr.com
Twitter ( nitinmgarg ) & dribble ( http://dribbble.com/nitingarg )