I did this sketch of a woman covered in chocolate during the end semester of my undergraduate study while I was preparing a portfolio to get into a good design school in India. Alas! Design schools are a distant dream and I’m talking about good ones. huh! Who am I kidding?
And well… The real photo was from a magazine. Not a real model, you see! 
Click to see a bigger image.
Another new character! I named her ‘Woo’. The characteristics of Woo will be divulged soon. As of now, Woo is a little worm in pink. She’s attractive as well as intelligent unlike Tingle. The name of Woo has been written at the bottom of the above picture. That is the permanent visual identity of Woo.
Click the image for a bigger size (1024×768).
Update: I changed the background in the Polaroid photos to black as the visibility is affected on a lighter background. I hate the laptop screen when it comes to showing the correct colors! 
© Saawan.
New Wallpaper! The title says that ‘Design, Style and Saawan go hand in hand’. I tried to say that in three words (it is said with an attitude!).
Design. Style. Saawan.
Click the thumbnail to view large image (1024×76 
Hi all!
Thanks for your response on my character - Tingle. I created few more designs of Tingle. It took almost five hours to finalize these two drawings. I hope you’ll like them. From now on, the preview of my works would exclusively be shown to the members of the Saawan EliteClub before I post them officially on Blog De Saawan. So, if you’re not a member, you’re requested to send in your mail to me with the subject line ‘Saawan EliteClub’. Remember, I may not post some of my works on the blog but the club members have an exclusive privilege to look at them. Membership for Saawan EliteClub is absolutely free!
Tingle, the Hiphopper! The usual and popular mannerism of hiphoppers and the boombox!
I’m absolutely against smoking and so is Tingle! The above comes as part of a story that’s still under development.
Both the pictures are scanned and edited in Illustrator CS3. So, they are 100% vector drawings. Click the picture to go to GFX Por Saawan and download the original resolution (1024×76 from there.
© Saawan.
As web 2.0 is becoming ubiquitous, everyone’s jumping onto the bandwagon. You may have seen nifty Ajax loaders on websites around. There’s even a website to download these Ajax loaders. You can access it at ajaxload.info. It allows you to download animated gif’s of different kinds of loaders. But, if you want a loader in Adobe Flash, these gif’s won’t be any good as there would be quality loss. Then, how about creating your own ajax loaders in Flash? It’s very easy. Read on to know how. This is a simple tutorial targeted at beginners.
1. Create a new Flash file. Change the frames per second to 24fps in the properties dialog box. Select the ellipse tool, hold shift and draw a circle.
2. Select no color for stroke and for fill color, select ‘Radial’ in Color palette. Click the left slider and select white. Now, select the right slider and type #0099FF in the hex value box to give a blue color. Now, select this blue slider and click at three different points in between the two sliders so as to get three more sliders of varying blues. The colors should be (from left) #9DDAFF, #7ECDFF, #58BDFF.
3. Now, select the Gradient Transform Tool (Click and hold the Transform Tool (shortcut is Q) to see the Gradient Transform Tool in Flash CS3). Select the gradient. It will show the handles. Using the handles, get the gradient ellipse similar to the one shown in the picture below. The idea is to get the white gradient close to the edge of the circle.
4. Select the circle with the Selection Tool (V) and click ‘Convert to Symbol’ (F8). Save it as a Graphic in the library.
5. Now create a new layer (Layer 2) in the Timeline and create a white circle and place it at the center of the circle that we created before.
6. In the Timeline, right click on the 15th frame and click Insert Keyframe. Now, right click anywhere between the frames in Layer 1 and press Create Motion Tween. In Properties, select CW in Rotate. Select Layer 2 and right click on the 15th frame and click insert frame (f5). Test movie and voila! Our ajax loader is here.
7. If you play around with gradients, you can create different kinds of Ajax loaders. You may cut a small portion of the white gradient to make the ajax snake loader that’s quite famous!
Click here to see few other loaders that I’ve created. (swf file, 2kb)
Downlad the source file. (fla file, 37kb)
Few days back, when I mailed to my contacts about my Design Studio, I received a reply from one of my friends asking me for designing a logo of his name. I replied that it would cost him certain amount. I know he was kidding as I knew his nature. He didn’t reply to my mail. Recently, one of my acquaintances, commented on my blog to design a logo of his name. Again, I sent him a mail explaining the viability of personal branding and the amount that it may cost him. He retorted in his reply mail saying that he’s feeling great that I’m doing business even with classmates in school. Now, should I be feeling guilty for this? I guess no! And I justified myself in my reply mail saying…
The way I perceive Logo Design and the way you do seem to be conflicting here. When a logo is designed, the purpose, the necessity, the personality, the character, the qualities etc of a company/ individual are taken into consideration. Right from the rough draft to the final design, it takes approximately 20-30 hours of work. And if the client’s inputs are considered which puts me again onto modifying or redesigning the whole logo, the working hours may increase to 40 hours (approx.). And to imbibe all the qualities into such a small graphic that becomes your visual identity is not a small task. Apart from this, I have college assignments and personal projects to attend to. It’s not like I have a rough idea and I scribble it and boom! - a logo is done! Lot of work goes into a single design.
Sometimes, I feel a little bit lazy to work on the undertaken assignments. So, there should be a driving factor. And that’s where money comes in. The client has paid me money and I need to work for him/her. If that driving factor isn’t there, I may keep dragging the work for a long time and eventually stop doing it.
I call this professionalism rather than business. Several of my friends would like their own logos to be done by me for free, given a chance. What do you think they would do with that logo? They look at it for few minutes. Feel good about it and leave it. So, the work I did for 20-40 hrs is just for preening at it and feeling good about themselves? Then, where do you think the respect that design deserves would be? Everyone will feel that it’s so easy that he does it for free! Already India is facing a slump as far as design is concerned. I would never accelerate that putting my hard work at stake.
Certainly, I would design for free. But that would be for social organizations. They work for the society and they could use my service for free. That’s called Pro Bono/Gratis work. If Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were classmates, would Microsoft develop MacOffice for Apple for free? No. Right? This is just a similar case.
And my words in my reply above are underlined by this very good article at alphablogdesigns. I got to read this post today and even without my knowledge, I’m getting good at freelancing. I’m quoting the best lines from that blog post.
Yesterday, one of my faculty asked me for my mobile number. He gave a surprised look and congratulated me when I said that I don’t have a mobile! Strange. These days, I find many people asking me for my mobile number. People who know me are content that this guy will never get a mobile for himself. So, why don’t I use a mobile?
I generally hate talking over a phone. It’s good to talk in person rather than on phone. If necessity arises, I do talk on phone but otherwise I stay away. My mom whines about me talking less to her while my brother calls her often to speak for hours together! I used to have a mobile (Siemens A52, lovely design!) when I was in BITS (which I’m now using as an alarm to wake me up early in the morning). Even then, my validity used to expire instead of the balance and people used to express their surprise at it! Damn! Even for an alarm, I’ve to charge it every single day.
Another thing is I hate to see people talking on mobiles and showing off as if they are very busy even when it’s not necessary. I like smart phones than mobiles. So, when I get one, I’ll surely give you my number until then I’ll guide whoever asks me my number to read this post. iPhone, here I come!
Somebody could have created a song named ‘mobile phone killed the landline’ in a similar way Buggles created ‘video killed the radio star‘. Now, don’t take me for a mobile phone hater! It’s just that I’m more comfortable talking face-to-face. Moreover, cell phones cause harm not only to the user but also to people around him.
Saawan EliteClub is a limited closed user group. The club members will get lot of benefits some of which are listed below.
1. You get to preview the projects that are in the pipeline before the blog readers have a look (Some of which can’t be shown to the blog readers). Some of ‘em are Corporate branding, Character development (like Tingle and more), Web designing (Designing my blog and primary website) and more.
2. Your opinion will be asked for and eventually considered during designing.
3. You’ll get to participate in any research that would be undertaken.
4. and lot more events that will happen eventually.
All you need to do to become an elite member is to send me in a mail to this address with the subject line ‘EliteClub’. It’s free! The first 100 replies would be considered first for the membership. Please include any comments or suggestions in your mail and don’t comment on this post about your membership. If you’re a designer, it would be even good though that’s not necessary. I retain the right to allot the membership.
Send in your mails now! The selected ones get further mail regarding Saawan EliteClub.
Note: This post is officially closed now.
Freelancing, most of the times, is a tough job. And that too, in India, wherein design is underrated and people compromise when it comes to good design. I try to explain the design to the client and take inputs from him/her. But, it gets difficult if the client is not clear about what he/she wants.
A month back I was commissioned to do a flash presentation for a budding ad agency. Observe that I underlined the word budding in order to highlight the qualities of a budding agency in India. They try to desperately comply with the current standards. At times, they don’t even shy away from aping the famous and established ones in their sector! Appalling. And the experience I had is something of this sort.
I went to the agency (I had a tough time locating their office) and waited for a long time for the agency head to come. Finally, he arrived and showed me some examples on the internet about how he wanted his presentation. I showed him my work so that he could expect what kind of work I could deliver in the end. He seemed to be impressed by my work. He drew a small sketch and asked me to work in similar lines. On my way back home, I thought about the template and I finalized on a design, mentally.
I went home and designed the master slide template and the page templates in Photoshop. They looked like the ones shown below. Click on the images to see their original size.
I thought that I’d design the flowers in red if he doesn’t like pink. Then, he said he’d like something corporate. That’s a good way to make the I-don’t-like-it sentence look otherwise. So, I designed the following templates and gave them a web 2.0 feel so as to make them look corporate.
I thought that he’d like this template. This time, the follow-up mail came with an attachment. It was a power point presentation of a famous ad agency that does similar work as that of this budding agency. I was asked to do something similar to it. I couldn’t understand that. It didn’t contain any graphics and moreover, it is just a Power Point presentation with white background. And I’m totally against copying someone else’s work or imitating them.
I was going through the ‘Foreign Magazines’ section in Landmark in City Center here in Chennai today and picked up RollingStone. I was flicking through the pages and suddenly I saw an ad wherein I noticed a store ad with Bangalore, Chennai, Noida etc written at its bottom. I was confused at the sighting as foreign magazines don’t publish ads containing Indian locations. So, I flipped back to the cover and saw RollingStone India and the price is Rs. 100. I couldn’t believe it. It’s for true that the king of all music magazines - RollingStone, has now an Indian edition. Psst… and it was the mistake on the store’s part to place an Indian magazine under foreign magazines section.
I did a review on Indian music magazines few months back here on my blog. I wrote about The Record (which I can’t find on the stands, now!), Rave and RSJ. I guess in the coming months, these magazines are gonna have a tough time. Priced at Rs. 100, the Indian edition of RollingStone contains 174 pages (incl. of covers) unlike its foreign editions which have less number of pages. (Note that it’s a monthly magazine in India as opposed to the biweekly magazine in the US)
The inaugural issue (i.e., March 200 has five different covers featuring Amy Winehouse, Led Zeppelin, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen and Anoushka Shankar. And I picked the one with Amy Winehouse. The Indian edition is brought by Wenner Media LLC in collaboration with MW.Com India Private Limited, the Mahindra backed company that publishes Man’s World Magazine (as you may know that FDI is not allowed in India!). Man’s World recently underwent a change in its logo design. RS India would have articles on International artists as well as Indian artists and Bollywood music as 70% of music sales in India are of Bollywood’s.
With the launch of VH1, we’ve already witnessed many international artists coming to give live concerts in India. And I hope RollingStone would help accelerating this trend in the years to come. RollingStone India would be the brand’s 14th edition outside of the United States.
The magazine is infused with some quality ads and content, of course. It gives Jodhaa Akbar a 2 star rating! It has articles on Kailash Kher, Rabbi, Leslie Lewis etc.
The quality of the magazine is far better than the three music magazines that are published in India. I’m onto reading the magazine now. The website is under construction but you can subscribe to the magazine or else head to your nearest store to pick your copy.
What next? Will Billboard and Q Magazine come to India? Anyway, RS will be here to rock us!
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