Where I am now

I am currently leading product design for the creator side of things at Dashverse. Its been an insane experience working on AI tech applications in the creative space. Over the past 3 years, I have worked on 2 products, Dashtoon Studio and Frameo, so more people can tell stories.

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 building my first product from scratch, 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.

Fingers crossed.