Finding.Design — A Promise to myself!
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Finding.Design is an initiative to find an answer to a simple question (pun intended), What is Indian Design? Here if I say Design then it is about Visual/Graphic Design. For this, I would be travelling across India to experience art/ crafts and design which have been practised out of the Design studios for centuries and still couldn’t make their way into the Design domain in any way.
Why am I doing this?
Last year during my internship at 2x4 Inc. Beijing I was asked the one simple question stated above (Tell us about Indian Design.) moment of grave silence crept in!!!!! Now you are going to call me stupid or amateur or whatever but, think for a minute do you have the answer? Oh! you have one, India has so diverse art and crafts practices across the country and this is what I had in my mind at that moment as well but, we were talking about Graphic Design so this answer was not an appropriate one. How? If we talk about a country’s Graphic Design then we are referring to the style which is widely used and iconic. Eg: Swiss Design, you see it and you recognize it. What we have is western-influenced design and there are several reasons for that and I don’t blame the designers for it, I will address this in another post.
That was the day when I decided that once I return back to India I will dedicate a good amount of time exploring Indian design. As part of the same, there is an ongoing series #hinditype which is about getting Hindi to the youth in a more interesting way that is easy to adopt for them (check it on my Instagram)
Finding.Design is another leap into the promise to myself and I have shut down all my projects and commitments to solely focus on the project and travel across India. Another interesting thing that I have in store for you is the sub-project which will go by the name “India through type” for this you will have to wait for a while.
This project is part of self-exploration for the answer (prospective answer) because I am no one to decide the country’s identity. So, what I will be doing is sharing and documenting what I feel can be adopted and has the potential to be used in graphic design. Here is where you kick in, the designers who can use that info to create amazing stuff out of it and drive it to the mainstream and help the country’s unique design to grow.
Personal opinion, love it or hate it. Indian design is not about truck art- HORN OK PLEASE or curry of goddamn all the colours you can think of! Then what it is? For this come along with me on this journey (at least in the virtual world.)
If you want to stay updated on each and every detail: http://finding.design
Would like to have a visual bite of the project then head over to Instagram http://instagram.com/wanderni30
Just want to read about the stories and experiences (Disclaimer I don’t write that well but I what I am to write about is going to interesting) follow me on Medium https://medium.com/@niteeshyadav
