Where I am now

I am currently leading product design for the creator side of things at Dashverse. Its been an insane experience being at the forefront of AI tech applications in the creative space. Over the past 3 years, I have worked on 2 products, Dashtoon Studio and Frameo, with the vision of democratising the storytelling experience for comic and video creators.

A sticker design representing the Frameo.ai cat mascot, in a levitating pose, with legs crossed, controlling various surfaces hinting an agentic behaviour

Looking back

I was always fascinated by design from my childhood being a very visual person, but growing up in a Tier 2 city, I didn't have a lot of exposure. So I did what most of my peers were doing, and ended up doing Mechanical Engineering for my Bachelor's. I didn't really understand at that point, what I was really getting into and once I did I was like: Nopes, this is not really my thing.

And one fine morning, while walking down the hallway in my first year in college, I came across this poster for a design degree from a prestigious college in some corner of the notice board. And I think it was that moment that kinda changed my life in a way.

I googled the shit out of design related stuff in India, stopped studying for my grades letting them drop faster than gravity would allow, and started picking up a couple of design skills instead. I learnt how to use the camera, clicked some amazing pictures, handled most of the design work for college fests and stuff like that and got 3 years of hands on design practise in graphic design, product design, print media, motion graphics and some basic processing stuff.

And guess what, I got in. I did my masters in design, and all those hands on experiences kinda helped.

Design college experience

It was like a 2 year vacation for me tbh. I realised early on that I didn't really wanna do those boring classes and wanted to expose myself to the chaotic world of design, instead of focussing on a particular focus area. I started exploring more and pushing myself to just making cool stuff, failing and learning some random shit I didn't know what to do with. I learnt the design basics and got more and more into generative art and some media theory. And luckily landed a job at Samsung as a Senior UX designer.

A watercolour and ink sketch from 2017, meant to represent the internal universe, 'The universe in you'

Understanding myself

I started working at Samsung and I was really stoked for the first time in my life. It was like all those bad decisions that I thought I had made in the past weren't probably all that bad. And that feeling of that first salary hitting your account was like a fucking orgasm. I was happy, at least for a short while, I found the love of my life, had a lot of fun partying with my friends and tried to do my best at work, but I was bored real fast. I was craving challenge and fun and suddenly there was none. So one fine day I sold all of my belongings, packed my bags and found myself in the center of Moscow, as a part of the Terraforming program.

It was intense, and it taught me 2 things:

Design is more than just making pretty boxes.

You have the power to decide what You do in Your life.

It was 2020, the year of the Covid, and I was back in India, doing nothing, feeling more hopeless than when I had left. My realisations informed me about what I didn't want but it didn't exactly tell me what I could do.

So I started back from square 1. I started working in this startup and I worked on my skills creating my first 0 to 1 product, making websites, videos, managing their socials and a bunch of other random stuff. At the same time, I found an artistic outlet in the form of generative art as NFTs in FxHash.

It helped me understand myself better, improved my skills and gave me a purpose.

Make cool shit again.

An output from my generative art explorations in webgl involving parametric surfaces, noise and point-clouds as an investigation into the shape of information

And I have been doing that ever since. And I think that's about it for this post. Its already gone into the tldr zone for me. My intent from here on out with this corner of the internet is to just dump my stuff. Its gonna be messy, chaotic and hopefully beautiful. Mostly honest vibes from when the thinking is still half-baked.

Fingers crossed.