Design Chords Blog

We are starting a series of blog interviews of some designers from our community. These designers are high contributors to the Design Chords art community.We’ll cover the background about the designer, his inspiration, his fav work and the challenges faced in day to day work.

For the first interview, we choose a designer who won the first project (for sketch lounge) that we ran on Design Chords back in september 09, when we were still testing the concept. She has also helped us later  to develop the UI of the current site (though we couldn’t replicate her designs exactly the way she gave us, but still her inputs helped us a lot) We are very proud to present: Beenish Samuel Clegg – our first winner on Design Chords. Beenish lives and works in Pakistan.

Tell us something about yourself and your background

My name is Beenish Farah Samuel; i am a software engineer from Pakistan. I graduated in the year 2006 and have been working as a free lance designer/ programmer ever since. Although i did my majors in software programming but i have always been more interested in Graphics. I addition to that I hold a diploma in graphic designing.

How is the design industry in Pakistan?

The design industry in Pakistan is ever growing. With the advent of the internet the world has become a global village and we are no longer constricted to boundaries. Everything has gone international including the design industry and the competition has gone global. Although there are not many institutes offering a professional degree program in graphic designing but the field is making slow and gradual progress and it won’t be long till design industry will be recognized as a professional institute in Pakistan.

What challenges do you face as a freelance designer?

I had to face many challenges in pursuit of making a career out of my passion. Being a free lance designer hasn’t been easy. It’s a full time job. When you work in a professional environment, you have dedicated hours to finish all your assignments along with all the facilities provided but if your office is in your home your working hours may never end and juggling your job with other responsibilities is not easy. Like everything else it too has its pros and corns but for me free lancing has been a great experience. I get to work on my own terms whenever and where ever I please, no boss and no dress code plus I can work on a wide variety of projects. The only challenge so far has been balancing my responsibilities with my job but that’s what makes it exciting. One has to be disciplined and self motivated to be able to manage both side by side.

What factors influence your designs/ your inspiration behind designing?

I have always been very specific about what I want. I usually think Big and reality normally falls short of my expectations. Nothing really inspired me to get into designing, just the NEED to get things done the way I want them to be and Instead of getting others to do what I want; I prefer doing it myself.  Most of my designs are creative accidents. I don’t stop working on the Project until I am completely satisfied with it. Time is the only other factor that may intervene. I do get inspired by creativity; a creative spark is all I need to get started and it can come from anywhere. The inspiration may influence my work to some extent but it is never intentional.

What is your approach when you are presented with a design brief from the client?

I call it the “Empathetic approach”. On being presented with a design brief I put myself in place of the target audience and see if I would BUY what the client is trying to SELL. I treat my Target audience as Laymen who do not have any knowledge of the subject or the kind of time to invest in understanding the subject. So the BIG idea is to deliver the entire message to them in a nut Shell. The End product should be Attractive to grab the audience attention and precise to be able to hold it.

What tools do you use for designing / any recommendations?

For web designing I Use Adobe Photoshop, adobe illustrator and flash. I would recommend all the three software; it’s a perfect combination for the execution of all your design ideas.

Your favorite designs from your own portfolio

Each time I start a new project I try to do it better than my previous work. With every new project I set the bar higher for myself and challenge myself to reach beyond my capacity of delivering my best. My favorite design from my portfolio would be my most recent design work that is (www.Designchords.com). I worked on the look of the web site in collaboration with the Design Chords team. Due to some design complication we were not able to implement a lot of things but the work is still in progress and the end result will be promising. Other than that I have a few favorites from my personal portfolio.

• A digital painting of my fiancé and I
• A picture manipulation (Converted a picture into a stone statue)
• A poster of twilight with me in it

Anything you want to say to Design Chords creative community?

Designchords has provided us all with a Global platform to display our talent and cash our creativity. We all should work hard on taking designchords to the next level. Keep participating and giving it your all. Be proud of being a part of this brilliant idea.

Thank you DesignChords for sharing this

Beenish

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

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