Weblog of A Designer

Few months back while flipping through the pages on Flickr, I bumped upon a series of nice line drawings, said to be drawn by The Scribbler. I explored more and found this small but lots-of-fun-to-do tool, The Scribbler - an on-line application that allows user to draw freehand simple line drawings, and create a complex and interesting line drawing, automatically, from that.

The Scribbler, created by ZeFrank, takes simple vector based input and creates its own drawing on top of it based on a number of simple rules. When a new scribble line is created it chooses a few numbers at random that eventually determine what sort of line it will draw. As it begins to draw it fine tunes those values to the type of drawing that you’ve made. Because there is randomness built into the program, each scribble is unique.

In the on-line version, user can adjust some of the values that Scribbler would normally choose at random, such as line thickness, line color, and the maximum length of a scribble line.

Once drawing is reached at the desired stage, the user needs to ‘Pause’ Scribbler and take a screen shot. Well, it seems, that this is the only way to save your Scribbler art. Take a look at Scribbler gallery to check Scribbler art created by people at the Scribbler gallery. Some images are really impressive.

I could not resist myself to try my hands on fun toy and found that this small tool can create amazing results, if one can collaborate with the application. If you follow the logic that the application is using to create the complex lines and eventually form a complex texture from those lines, it will be easy for you to draw the right curves, that might create a nice output, once Scribbled.

Following are a series called Scribbler Earth, that I have created using images generated through The Scribbler. I was trying to doodle on the application, and thinking about earth. These are what came out, after I manipulated those scribble screen shots and added some color on them. Of course, being a first-timer my scribble skills are not so well, but I think I will improve and come up with more Scribbler arts.

Scribbler Earth 01

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Scribbler Earth 02

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Scribbler Earth 03

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Scribbler Earth 04

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Scribbler Earth 05

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I have been fascinated by Internet or worldwide web since I was introduced to it, initially as an user and later as a designer, during mid 90s. I remember those days when there were ‘Web Pages’ and how the idea of ‘Web Site’ as “a group of interrelated ‘Web Pages’ seamlessly integrated together to form an information pool” evolved. I noticed how simple formats and default fonts in normal black and underlined blue of the text-heavy sites started getting eager for cosmetic make-overs, often ending up over-doing it, when Graphics were introduced on web pages. How usability experts has started defining the minimalist parameters and how ‘Rich Media’, equipped with high-speed broadband, has overwhelmed the cyberspace with gigs of data. I was always fascinated by the changes of the behavioral patterns of people as they move on from early one-to-one telnet chats to the applet-based public chat-rooms to Webex conferences to voice chats to cam chats. The changes of user psychology that create an complex yet logical mesh of on-line habits as the users evolve themselves from early mailing lists and threads users to someone with multiple profiles in more than one web business and social 2.0 communities and networking sites.

Below are few websites that I like, among all other web presences designed be me in recent past.

Website Design for Altered Black

Altered Black
Being a design shop providing creative design and related services primarily to the corporate clients, I wanted a sober and conservative design scheme, that will eventually make the corporate visitors feel comfortable and confident while visiting this site. At the same time, I also wanted the web site to represent creative ability of the organization and provide sensual pleasure to its visitors. I tried to achieve these goals by using pastel shades, lots of white and empty spaces, a so called ‘Arty’ look, a simple but comprehensive navigation and IA, and a flexible layout that can accommodate enough information about the organization. The site is also well optimized for search engines, has a page rank of 5 and secured its position in Google top ten for targeted keywords.
Visit Altered Black’s website here »

Website Design for South Asia Center, UPENN

Website Design for South Asia Studies, UPENN

South Asia Center & South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania needed a strong visual presence for the websites of their South Asia Center and Department of South Asian Studies to reflect the exclusive nature of these two departments. The main challenge was to create multiple distinctly different visual identities on one single theme and combining multi-cultural characteristics of South Asia on the layouts without emphasizing on a specific one. In these designs I tried to merge various socio-cultural values of different parts of South Asia and meet the visual expectations of people from various demographic zones, by creating ethnic yet cross-cultural design scheme for each site.
Visit South Asia Center’s website here »
Visit South Asia Studies’ website here »

Website Design for Boipara Dot Com

Boipara Dot Com
Boipara is a vernacular literature archive that features alternative Bengali literature, e-books and magazines. I have created an informal design for the site to express the unconventional nature of this particular initiative. The main challenge was to create a template-based design scheme that can be handled by non-designers, later.
Visit Boipara Dot Com here »

Website Design for Films for Freedom

Films for Freedom
This is an on line platform for Indian documentary film-makers, where they can share their views, showcase their movies and organize screenings. A huge group of documentary film-makers led by eminent directors, has started this initiative as a protest against the role of censor board at MIFF 2002. I decided to take up the theme of ‘protest’ for this site and used a photograph of a demonstration by the group as an integrated part of user interface. I have used Courier font for the content, which is not very common in websites, to simulate the feel of manually-typed legal documents or petitions.
Visit Films for Freedom website here »

Self-portrait – The Unwanted
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The above illustration shows a hypothetical self-portrait, that I have drawn last year for a personal project. The reason behind calling it ‘hypothetical’, is the fact that this self-portrait does not exactly portray my physical features and tries to bring out my psycho-somatic conditions at that particular moment. I aptly named it, “Self-portrait – The Unwanted”.

Early Story Illustration (1989)
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One more illustration from the initial days of my career in pre-digital era. In 1989-90, I used to work for a daily news paper as an illustrator and commercial artist. The attached illustration is one of the hundreds illustrations that I have drawn for them, during this period. Being a literature enthusiast and an avid reader of all literary forms, I used to enjoy the stories as well, for which I was supposed to draw the illustrations and my formal education in language and literature used to help me a lot to come up with the most effective illustrations for them.

Book Cover: Ceiling of Clouds
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Being an avid reader of Bengali poetry and an Bengali literature enthusiast, I always take special interests in the design initiatives that are related to Bengali literature and language. I have designed covers and illustrations for many Bengali poetry collections, novels, short story collections, literature magazines and other similar Bengali publications. Though, I always enjoy working for Bengali books and magazines, I often get really excited if I am working on books that are written or edited by my favorite Bengali authors and poets.

All the covers featured in this post are for poetry collections or novels written by my favorite Bengali authors and poets. It was more than mere professional satisfaction, when I received accolades for these covers from the writer or poet, himself. Quite natural for a designer who loves literature, isn’t it?

Book Cover: The Other Side of the Bread
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Book Cover: Eh Lulu!
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Around My House 1605
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I am always surprised whenever I find a stunning visual, hidden in our usual day-to-day life. Most of the time we really do not realize the visual potential of our mundane surroundings and we tend to ignore them very easily. One needs to develop an eye to see the usual things in an unusual manner. Once you are able to identify the awesome possibilities hidden in our regular context, you will get flooded with numerous stunning visuals, every time you look around yourself. The clichéd scenes from our regular context will start unfurling an endless world of powerful images and effective visual expressions. The attached photographs are taken in and around my apartment and demonstrate the fact that how a common object in an usual context, can become unusual and at the same time, quite stunning, too.

View the complete series “Around My House” here

Around My House 1605
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Around My House 1705
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Story Illustration for Newspaper (1990)
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One more story illustration from the early days of my career as an artist and designer. Pen and ink is still one of my favorite analog drawing media and I guess, my love for this particular media has started back in 1989-90, when I was working on these illustrations for a Bengali Daily.

Digital Illustration
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This is another illustration type I have drawn for the anti-human trafficking project for UNIFEM/Equations. At the visualization stage I tried to come up with a various illustration forms with different emotional quotients. The illustration I have shown in one of my previous post was less emotional and more associated with logical deduction of actual activities and its physical references. Unlike the previous one, the illustration shown above in this post is more attached with emotional suggestions. The key phrases for this illustration were, Compassion, Sympathy and Humanity. Where as for the previous one, the key words I had in my mind while designing, are Plan, Development, Result and Hope. Below is a thumbnail image for the previous illustration, I mentioned.

Previous illustration:

Story Illustration for daily newspaper (1989)
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This illustration is from my old paper-made folder of story illustrations from the my ‘teen’ days that I have done for news paper, during 89-90! I started working as an illustrator and commercial artist while I was still in my college, pursuing my graduation in Literature.

This particular illustration is one of my favorites from that era. I still remember very clearly that how I used the nozzle of a watercolor tube to draw the basic thick lines to form the figure, directly on the paper without any pen, pencil or brushwork and then tried to bring out the details with small strokes and thin lines of a felt pen. The thick, long lines drawn by nozzle  and the finer and shorter lines by felt pen, when juxtaposed with each other, broght out the field of depht, quite successfully, irrespective of the limitation of space, tones, and colors.

Book Cover: A Roof over Every Head [IRASEC]
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Based in Bangkok, the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC) is a member of the network of research centers of the French Foreign Ministry. They were looking for an overall visual identity for their next series of studies on different political and economical issues of South East Asia. They often used real-life photographs of objects from the region being written about, which failed to give any idea about the exact cartographic location to the global readers. They also needed an identity that stood out from conventional covers using photographs. I decided to use drawn illustrations for the covers for their publications.

For the cover of the book on housing policies of Singapore - “A Roof over Every Head”, I used the conventional idea of a metropolitan skyline with high-rises, tweaking it substantially it by imparting a hand-drawn texture suggesting the thickness and solidity of built form.

More details about this book can be viewed here