Design Chords Blog

Hello

Design Chords was recently covered by Indian media in the month of March 2010. The mediums were web(pluggd.in) and Television (ET Now – Starting up).  You can find the links here

• ET Now: We were covered on their show S’tarting Up’ in the ‘elevator pitch’ segment where the team pitched the business model and the  funding needed and a VC (Anand Lunia from Seedfund) gave his feedback on the same.

• Pluggdin: Naman from pluggdin evaluted the site and gave his feedback on the same.  Article : http://www.pluggd.in/designchords-marketplace-for-design-needs-297/

As mentioned in our previous post we’re covering our first Non-Profit, based out of India – GEC. A good friend – Akash Deep from Chandigarh is a part of this social initiative who will be talking about its operations and how their NGO can benefit from work done by professional designers. (GEC is willing to get their Mascot designed from DesignChords community if they find a few volutneers here, interested may let them know)

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GLOBAL ENVINRONMENT CONCERN (www.globaleconcern.com) – GEC works for spreading awareness and protecting our environment by educating the people. We started as a youth organization aimed at developing innovative projects to spread the concern about the state of environment.

Work: We have started projects like Gift a Plant, Pick a Plant and Be a Santa which involve gifting of plans to friends, planting trees and distributing free saplings. Within a year we have started with an evening school for slum children in Chandigarh. Recently with the efforts of our president – Mr. Rahul Gupta, we started with a evening school in a building provided by the Chandigarh Administration. Our volunteers teach the slum children and help them to work toward a better and prosperous future

Need for Publicity & Networking: Manpower is of most importance to an NGO and thus recruitment is very important activity for us as we want to  recruit like minded people who have a passion for the cause. Due to lack of funds NGOs are not able to reach out to volunteers  in time who feel for the cause and want to work for it. In-spite of working in this sector where there are ~1.2 millions NGOs in India itself, I barely know utmost 50. This highlights the need to step up the publicity & networking means for such initiatives. Another prominent problem is that we have to reply on in-house skills for creating websites, designing posters, bringing out newsletter reports and making animations & videos. The work is rarely completed and if done it mostly lacks the much needed professionals touch.

I still remember when I asked one of our member to sketch something for ‘Gift a Plant’. Here is the poster which our member Kavijit made by hand.

Role of Designers: I have worked with many NGOs before starting GEC who have great ideas but very small platforms to spread them. I think designers can help them realize their dreams. Posters, newsletters, websites, logos, mascots, animations, videos have a greater impact at the people. These lead to more visibility for the organization as well as more awareness among the people. An event or a project is limited to particular set of people but a good animation can impact millions of people within no time.

Through the platform provided by DesignChords many NGOs can benefit as they can reach out to quality designers throughout the world who feel for the cause and help create an impact with their talents! Though social organisations don’t have much to offer on the financial side, I can tell from my personal experience that the inner happiness and empowerment that one feels by helping someone improve his quality of life is a priceless experience.

Thanks and Best Regards

Akash Deep

Hello Everyone

We all are aware of the great contributions that Non-Profits make around the globe to make our world a better place to live in.  We at ‘Design Chords’ have been brainstorming since long if we can somehow help such organizations (Non-Profits) that operate on minimalistic budgets, through our portal. The team came up with an idea that DesignChords will not be charging any fee to such organization for posting creative projects. On the same lines we have another thought – No project cost for Non-Profits

If we go ahead with this, the ‘Non-Profits’ are keen to post projects but the success of this initiative ultimately lies in the hands of the designers – if they are willing to volunteer to participate if such a project comes by. We’re not looking for everyone’s participation, but just a few interested designers would ensure that the project will not become a total failure.

We’d also like to invite suggestions from everyone on -

1. Another way Design Chord’s could help Non-Profits / Projects on Social Cause
2. If the project won’t award any prize money, any other thing that will be of value to a designer that a Non-Profit could give in return for the efforts put.

It would be  helpful if everyone could chip in their suggestions below in the comments section and the interested designers could let us know if they want to volunteer for this cause.

In the next few posts we’ll introduce you to a few NGOs/Non-Profits who’ll discuss what they do and how their initiatives can benefit from creative designing.

Regards

DesignChords Team

I Keep tumbling upon new and fresh articles on what various entrepreneurss have to say to their fellow species (entrepreneurs across the globe have the same habit – preach even before you make it big;D)  I particularly liked some of the points, one of those that makes sense.

For the interested ones – here is link -

http://www.inc.com/ss/start-secrets-tips-americas-coolest-young-entrepreneurs#0

Regards

Design Chords Team

Hello Everyone

We’d like to thank all the participating designers for their wonderful contribution to this pilot project. We were a little apprehensive how many design ideas will be submitted and if we’ll be able to get our word out in the creative community by just using the email medium. But result was much more promising than our expectation. We not only received 98 design proposals, but a lot of them were very unique and piece of great artwork.

Unfortunately we can pick only 1 winning entry (and trust us it was toughhh to just pick 1!).  Below is the winning submission along with some other mentioned designs -

Winning Design - beenish (http://www.designchords.com/content/corporate-design)

Beenish takes away the 100$ award. The team unanimously loved this design. It is just what we were looking for – simple, corporate touch, elegant and has that look which will make our brand recognizable when present among other logos. There is a feedback element we’d like to discuss with the designer for the final delivery, but overall we have found our Logo.

Consolation prizes -

becks (http://www.designchords.com/content/logo-1)

Very straightforward, good communication and nice colours used. The design was amongst the final 3-4 designs we were considering for the Logo. We have a movie voucher from Kyazoonga for the designer.

HD-Designer (http://www.designchords.com/node/144)

A very nice and trendy logo. We especially liked the way ‘S’ has been shown inside the L. Simple and elegant design for a logo. Again was amongst our finalist. The designer gets a voucher from Cafe Coffee Day.

Exception –

We could award the consolation prize only to an Indian designer as the prizes are applicable only in India but we’d like to mention the design by alteredinnovations (http://www.designchords.com/node/138)

Both the idea of a pencil depicting the ’sketch’ part and its execution, both are simply brilliant.  This is  was amongst our favourite for the consolation prize, and thus we’re mentioning it here.

Honorable Mentions

There are a few designs that the team as a whole loved but could not be awarded the winning design (again – picking  just 1 design is too too tough) -

We found the design very artistic – something we would like sketch lounge to stand for as well. Bravo to the designer for the way L has been disguised shape of  pen/brush. Great execution.

KhyatiBhatia (http://www.designchords.com/node/139)

Great, amazing concept. The idea of a person  at ease, as one should be in a lounge, while he sketches is simply superb. As for the overall design, We wanted to see much improved execution to use as a logo.

ankitsethi (http://www.designchords.com/content/sketchlounge2)

Very stylish and yet very simple. Nice work.

Abhishek (http://www.designchords.com/content/sketch-lounge)

The globe representing the WorldWideWeb, and the brushes depicting the creative part are some really nice thoughts put into this. For a logo, wanted to see a little simpler depiction of the same concept – this fitted more of a background or poster design. But again nice idea.

Thank you everyone for the nice design ideas, it was a good brain exercise for us to come up with this list of a Few selected ones. Over the next few days, we’ll be reaching out  to the awarded designers for their details.

Also to bring to your notice, the team is currently working on giving the site a ‘face-lift’ and add-on the remaining basic functionalities like – designer portfolios, tutorials, designs voting, automated project posting etc.

We’re still in initial development and would love to hear from  you guys on what all can be done better, what features should be included on the website that will help the designers raise the bar of the design work and also fetch international client work.Drop your feedback on team@designchords.com, feedback button on the site or even here In the meantime we’ll work on completing the site at the earliest and try to bring in some client work.

Thank you

Regards

Design Chords Team

Hello Everyone

There is an update – the results for SketchLounge Project have been shifted from 5th to 6th October. We apologise for the delay. We will be publishing the results here tomorrow.

The same shall be updated on our twitter and facebook page.

Thanks

We just wrapped up with our first test Pilot project today on Design Chords – Sketch Lounge Logo 100$ Project.  The project ran for a 31 day period and we got 98 unique entries from 21 designers.. All in all its a pretty good start for us as not only did we receive some great design ideas (and that too plenty of them), we got some valuable feedback from various well wishers. We’ll be declaring the winning design here on the blog on 5th Oct, and we’ll also mention some designs which we won’t be able to buy, but were outstanding. Watch out for that. Over the next month we will be giving the site a face-lift (we know the present design needs some makeover,& we’re working on that) and completing the left over basic features.

THE TRAFFIC STATS: We had a look at the analytics of the site from the time we started the project till it ended. Pretty interesting data to look at  (the hits from our team have been filtered) -

• We overall had  1193 Visits in the entire month
• Each person on average viewed 5 pages and spent ~5 minutes on the site (not bad actually, considering we don’t have a lot of pages yet)
• 1/3 visitor left the site from the homepage itself (pretty bad I admit, we’re working on that)
• The traffic really dies down on weekends, whereas Monday see a great spur Guess we all know why.

Geographic Distribution : Geographically, the traffic pretty much came from India and kind of did expect it. We hope the ratio will decrease in the coming months -

• India – 75.3%
• USA – 11.4%
• Singapore – 3.8%
• Pakistan – 2.4%
• Brazil -1.3%
• Australia – 1%
• We also got some visitors from – Canada, UAE, UK , Switzerland, France, Germany, Finland, China, Indonesia, Ghana, Ireland, Philippines and Portugal

Browsers and Operating Systems : Now here is an interesting trend to watch out. We’ve all heard and observed how IE is being sidelined by Chrome and Mozilla, our site’s traffic says the same with Mozilla and Chrome together sharing ~73% of the traffic! Have a look -

• Mozilla – 45.3%
• Chrome – 27.5%
• IE – 21.1%
• Rest is Opera and Safari ~ 3% each

But apparently Open Source has been able to do the same charm in terms of Operating system, Windows leads the competition and the others don’t even come close -

• Windows – 90.7% (~68% is XP, 26% is Vista)
• Linux – 3.8%
• Mac – 2.4%
• Symbian – 1.6%

Traffic Source : i.e From where did our visitors reach the site. No surprises here, since we only took the help of mails and facebook the stats prove the same -

• Direct Traffic – 63.70%
• Referring Sites – 33.78% (shared b/w facebook, orkut and twitter)
• Search Engines – 2.51%

We’ll be more regular here as the development of the site makes headway and will have another post asking for every-one’s suggestions and feedbacks. Leave your comments if you have any thoughts.

Regards

Shashaank Shekhar Singhal

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