Unbox Podcast
This is Part 1 of the podcast. Part two is available later on this page.
Gyan
Hi and welcome to Unbox. This is Gyan, I’m interviewing Ratik today.
Ratik
(laughs) बाद में करता हूँ मैं record intro… अभी नहीं करूँगा मैं (I record the intro later, I won’t do it now)
.
Intro music
‣ Feels like Summer by Childish Gambino
Ratik
Hello hello hello. Welcome to Episode 4 of the Unbox podcast, and also welcome to summer! It’s officially May, and the temperatures are rising every day here in Delhi. So yeah, were officially in summer! And summer brings an interesting challenge for podcasters, especially with the setup I have, which is not really a setup, but you can’t have fans running when you record episodes with guests because the mic catches the fan noise and I don’t want to give you that to listen to and as a result the episode for this month was recorded without the fan with both me and the guest being all sweaty. I guess it was more intimate in a way?
Moving quickly on from that pathetic joke, this month we have Gyan Lakhwani on the show. Gyan is a very dear friend, and he is also a self taught designer—specifically he has worked in UI and UX. For people who don’t know UI is User Interface design and UX is User Experience design, so designing what something looks like visually and then designing the experience of that thing. Basically, you’ll probably understand more when we go deep into it later in the episode. That was like a quick intro.
Apart from UI/UX stuff, he’s also worked on like conventional graphic design stuff. So logos, branding and that sort of thing. He is currently studying Interaction Design at IIT Bombay. So we talk about that in this episode, and how it feels for him to actually formally study design after being self taught. So that’s something we’ll go into.
Another thing we’ll talk about with Gyan is his wealth of freelancing experience. Because he’s done a lot of freelancing and earned a fair amount of money, so we’ll be going into like his tips and tricks for you. So if you’re somebody wants to get into freelancing in any in any sort of sphere or career, it need not just be just design freelancing.
Interesting thing about this month episode is that it’s going to be in two parts, that’s because I thought that the episode was a bit too long, and episodes in general have been getting longer, and I don’t really like long podcasts. So, I decided to split this month’s episode into two parts—although don’t worry, they’re both gonna be out together so you can listen to the first part, which is this and then just go and start the second one immediately if you want, or if you want to listen to it later, you can do that too.
In terms of what the two parts will contain.
So the way I’m trying to break this is the first part will be just Gyan’s journey from 11th, 12th grade to learning design and picking up a few internships and his freelancing work and then the second part will be more specific to his Masters degree, and finally yeah recommendations. Second part has recommendations, which is the recurring segment on the show. So yeah, don’t miss that. And once again they’ll both be out, so you can go and listen to the second one right after this.
And I think that covers everything that I had to say in the intro. So yes, let’s get into part one!
Ratik
But all right, let’s start the show. Hi Gyan, thanks for coming on.
Gyan
Hi Ratik
Ratik
Welcome to unbox. So how have you been? You’re in Delhi for a couple of days. How life, how’s Delhi? How’s the heat treating you?
Gyan
The heat is terrible, but it was quite bad in Bombay also.
Ratik
So yeah, you were mentioning, I think before we started recording that the last two days when you would in Bombay was heat was pretty bad, so I think a good way to transition into Delhi.
Gyan
Yeah, from one smelly under arm pit of a city to another.
Ratik
Lovely.
Just maybe then start with like a quick intro of who you are, what you’re doing, what are your interests? You have like 12 seconds, go.
Gyan
Hey everyone, my name is Gyan. I’m an interaction designer. I largely work on designing apps and websites and I’m currently doing my Masters in Interaction Design at IDC School of Design at IIT Bombay.
Ratik
So how would you—this is something out of curiosity—how would you define what interaction design is? Because I’ve definitely heard of what UI/UX design is, but interaction design is something that I’ve only recently started hearing.
Gyan
So interaction designers is, anytime a person interacts with technology, how do you make that interaction as smooth as possible?
And so you’re not the only one. I mean, each time I say I’m doing a masters in interaction design to anyone, I kind of have to explain what it is.
My favorite way to put it is—so you know how your bank, website and app is kind of terrible but PayTM is pretty good. Or when you try and book a train through the IRCTC website, it’s kind of terrible. But if you try and do it through, say Makemytrip, it’s a lot nicer?
That’s basically it.
Ratik
That’s interaction design, so would you say like it’s a combination of both UI and UX?
Gyan
Yeah, definitely. It involves interface design, experience design. There’s a lot of research component to it. There’s also hardware. You can also have interaction design for hardware devices, so it’s not just digital screens.
Ratik
Oh, Okay, nice. So it’s a pretty broad term then.
Gyan
Yeah, I mean these days you’d even consider AR & VR and designing for natural language interfaces part of interaction design.
Ratik
Got it, got it. Yeah makes sense.
Great so I haven’t really heard a lot of people doing masters in design, especially in India—I hear a lot of people going to colleges like Srishti or NID and they study bachelors there. Masters is something I’ve only heard from you so maybe we can like dive deeper into what led you there?
Ratik
So maybe we start as we can just start with this section I like to call the origin story section of the podcast. So how did you even end up in design? Is this a thing you picked up in school or later on?
Maybe you can just start talking about 11th and 12th grade, maybe. So what was that like for you?
Gyan
11th and 12th was a pretty confusing time because I took commerce in 11th and what I really wanted to do was computer science—I think you talked about this in another podcast also, there is no way you can take computer science in India unless you take essentially, PCM. Physics, chemistry, math. I was okay at math and terrible at physics and chemistry.
I did okay till 10th but when I… just 11th and 12th was hard. I took PCM for a while, didn’t work for me… so I shifted to commerce. And then a year into it, I realized that I was really hated that also. There is this idea that commerce is easier than science, and I feel like it’s that’s really not the case. It’s more of what you have an aptitude for, and I felt I had an aptitude for… if I had to take my pick, I would have taken English, Psychology, Computer Science, I don’t know… maybe history? But that was just not a choice I could make.
Ratik
Dude, definitely agree with this. I think about this a lot, especially nowadays ‘cause my brother is picking his subjects. The system is so rigid here and you don’t really have a choice to explore your option, you just kind of have to take one thing and see if it works, that sort of thing. So your experience is completely valid I think, and it’s it’s hard… and what you said about commerce. I too believe that I had a good time with science because I wanted to take science, but I don’t think I would have coped with something like commerce or humanities. But then again I’d also never tried them, so maybe I would have been fine with them.
Gyan
But here’s the thing, because I realized that I didn’t like commerce either towards the end of 11th, I had this conversation with my mom, where I told her that I just felt like I was going wrong, and this is just not something that was for me. She took me a lot more seriously than I expected her to honestly, but we went and talked to the school about whether it was possible for me to repeat a year and do 11th in science this time.
But a couple of the teachers who knew me told my mom that listen, if you drop a year, that that’s usually not a great experience for anyone, because you see all your friends go ahead. So what you can do is just try and skip 11th and go to 12th in science.
Ratik
Oh wow, I mean that’s also quite nice of your school. I don’t think a lot of schools will allow that.
Gyan
So this is what the teachers felt, but then the administration said that if you don’t pass 11th in science, you can’t go to 12th in science. And if you don’t pass 11th and commerce, you can’t go to 12th in commerce either.
So they told me to give the regular finals in with my commerce subjects and then when they held re-exams for students who could not clear the main exams, then I give the exams in science. I took crash courses essentially in class 11th science subjects, so physics, chemistry and computer science, and just, just managed to scrape through.
Ratik
That’s a mess though, dude, like I mean I’m sure it must be not easy like doing this.
Gyan
So advice for anyone listening to this—do not do this! I was lost all through 12th because I studied my science subjects only to pass the exam and not to understand the subject. So it was a bad way to do class 12. And with my boards I really struggled, I think I didn’t do great in my boards and that was largely because I didn’t have that 11th base. I just jumped straight to 12th.
Ratik
Yeah, it can be a lot of stuff thrown at you if you directly pick it up in 12th. So what’s interesting is… where did the interest in tech and design come from? I know it’s a probably a different debate that you need to be creative to be working in design, but were you a creative person already all through your life and you were growing up? How did you discover that you were interested in doing this?
Gyan
So a large reason of why it took me so long to realize that I didn’t like what I was doing in 11th because I wasn’t doing so much of studying… I was really into extracurriculars. My school’s computer club Exun at DPS RK Puram is a great computer club. Shout out to Exun. I went for a lot of competitions—interschool competitions—back in I think 10th, 11th I was largely making videos.
So I learned After Effects merely because that’s what there was a need for at the time, we already had enough graphic designers, we already had enough coders, but not enough people doing video, and that was sort of a need the club had at the time. So I started with video. I did motion graphics. I tried shooting my own short films. I made a couple of ads. And I won a lot of competitions back then. Which gave me a lot of confidence because I felt this was something I was good at, and there’s a lot of positive feedback from winning competitions.
Ratik
Yeah man, I can’t even begin to talk about the existence of these computer clubs in school, at least the schools here in Delhi and Noida. A lot of them have these clubs and I think there are good place for you to meet like-minded people and just learn from them and work on things that you want to work on. So that I definitely had that also with me.
Ratik
So what happened after school was about to end and you had a turbulent time with science and commerce, board results—what was happening around that time with you?
Gyan
So when it came to… when I got my board result it wasn’t great.
I did not get through JEE mains, and what everyone assumed was that I’d do engineering because I was good with computers. But the thing is, I was good with making things with computers, so I was always interested in the more creative aspect of things. I wasn’t ever really coding or doing more of the engineering side of things.
Ratik
So what did you end up then choosing finally? Because I have noticed a lot of times people want to pursue different things, but there are no routes to do that, so they end up doing engineering only if they want to work in tech.
Gyan
So I decided to do engineering because that’s the only thing I could figure out at the time. I got in for IT engineering at Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, which is a College in IP University. For the first year of college, I just had this whole thing about not doing well in the boards and how I should just buckle down and study hard and get a good job. At the time my parents had just just gotten a divorce and there was a lot of family pressure for me to do well and financially support the family also.
I was still fairly interested in all these other things I was doing, all these more creative things and I kind of slowly… I was just doing them as favors for people.
Ratik
Yeah, that’s how usually how most people start. I guess we’re just doing favors and just looking for projects and doing them, because honestly, it’s because you like doing that stuff, and that’s why you sort of seek it. And yeah, that completely makes sense.
So whatI want to talk about is, you were in your first year of college and you said that you wanted to focus on your studies because like you mentioned, you wanted to do you want to be a good engineering student, but you are also still super interested in all these creative things?
Ratik
How did you make that into like a freelancing career? Or like, how did you manage to freelance alongside college? How do you start? I think that’s what I want to ask you.
Gyan
Back in school I worked on a lot of print magazines that because the different departments in my school published magazines every year. I’d done a lot of that, so I’d learned how to do layouts. I used Microsoft Publisher back then because that was the one tool I knew, but slowly I started doing graphics.
One time my mum’s friend had a restaurant and he was trying to design a logo for it. He showed me some options he was working on and I told him I could maybe help him out and show him some other ideas.
He really liked one of the ideas I came up with, and so I told him he could just take it because I didn’t really know this was a marketable skill. He said I could have a free meal at his restaurant.
Ratik
Oh, that’s cool.
Gyan
And so, and so I was very proud of it. I posted about it on Instagram. A senior of mine from school who who’s now working at Spotify as a designer, Achal, he told me that I got cheated out of… I mean he told me that I got under paid for the work and…
Ratik
You did not get paid.
Gyan
So I didn’t get paid, it was… I mean no such thing as a free meal, it was a free meal. But that was the first time I ever thought that I could actually charge for the work I was doing and.
Ratik
Wow, that’s that’s pretty cool that your senior reached out and like told you that because I don’t think you would have, you probably would have realized at some point, but him telling you this might have accelerated the process in a way.
After this point you started doing more projects, I’m assuming, and started asking to get paid?
Gyan
It was a little slow. Once I realized that this was the thing I could be doing… I was on this Facebook group called HH Design. It’s still around and it’s a great resource for young designers wanting to learn more, but back then it was a much smaller community and people would sometimes post about projects they were working on. So I would just message people on Facebook and ask them if they needed some help with their logos.
And then I’d quote them something like give me $25, I’ll show you 3 options for logos and so I mean I started small and because I was working cheap, enough people responded to me and I set up a PayPal account, started randomly doing logo design without knowing anything about it for strangers on the Internet. It was surprising how well it worked. I mean, I had a roughly 50% response rate for my cold Facebook messages.
Ratik
Wow, that’s really good dude.
So what’s the story behind your transition from doing graphics work, which is like logos and branding to more like UI & UX, which is like design for the web and apps. I know you still do a lot of graphics work and it’s like a combination of the two at this point.
But how did you even discover that UI/UX was a thing considering you weren’t going to a design school… how did that happen?
Gyan
So right out of school when I joined college, my college started about a month later than most of my friends. So I was looking for an internship because I figured I didn’t want to sit at home in the summer, wait for college to open, so I did a one month internship at this… again, this was I saw this posted on a Facebook group, but there was a internship opportunity at an advertising studio in based out of Shahpur Jat, in Delhi. I thought it was interesting because I was mostly doing graphics at the time and I went and interviewed and they liked me. However, the founder who himself was, I think a 23, 24 year old guy from Bombay who’d been running this ad agency and then shifted to Delhi because that’s where most of his clients were.
So he said that he was also working on a startup called Surgge with two of his friends and both of them were IIT engineering grads. He asked me if I wanted to split my time between the startup and the ad agency because they were running out of the same office, but they were essentially two different outfits and so I thought that sounded interesting and I decided to help them out with the startup as well.
Gyan
I ended up spending my entire month kind of helping the startup Surgge with their web product. So my job there was to do some user research which is the first time I had ever heard of the concept of user research. And then I had to design their web UI for for their engineers to build, this was the first time I’d really done work on a UI project and I realized that I really enjoyed this and this was something that was more fun to me than the kind of graphics work.
Even though I don’t think I made a very strong distinction at the time because I was using Illustrator for essentially everything I was doing, including the web work.
Ratik
Right, so did you have any like people who guided you here or when you were like learning things on your own? That sort of thing?
Gyan
So my boss Ravi at Surgge, even though he was an engineer, he studied at IIT Kharagpur. He’d read a lot of books about design and he guided me through how I should be thinking about it. I think having him around, having him talk to me about what he was thinking and I think then he moved on to product management himself.
So even though he was not a designer himself, he pointed me in the right direction and so going into college I already kind of had this idea that this was something I was finding interesting and fun.
Ratik
That’s so cool, man. Kudos to you for taking the internship opportunity up. It ended up teaching you a lot of things and it opened your eyes to the UI/UX path which eventually led you to where you are today.
So before we sort of move on, I wanted to touch upon one thing that you mentioned before, which was these online communities like HH Design and how that helped you progress in your freelance work. Because that sort of information might be valuable for somebody listening to this. So do you want to talk about that quickly?
Gyan
Because I didn’t study design, I essentially taught myself things on the Internet.
I read a lot of articles online, so online communities were a way to discuss work, get feedback on what you are doing, look at what other people are doing, try and help them out, and HH Design was, at least back then, was a very active community and a fairly small community, so you kind of had the same people posting over and over.
It was an open community. Anyone can send a join request so people can still do that right now.
Ratik
Yeah, I’m definitely going to put the link to HH Design below. Gyan is actually a moderator there now, so if anybody wants to join, I think it’s a pretty cool place. I’m part of the community too, and it’s a pretty active community. Lots of interesting stuff happening there, so if you’re a new designer then yeah, check it out.
Ratik
So next I am going to talk to you about your freelance work. How did you get into it? I mean, how did you even manage it with college? Do you have any tips for people who want to start freelancing? Maybe like shed some light on how you went about it and I think that should be good information for people listening to this.
Gyan
I went about it in a pretty haphazard way because I didn’t really know what I was doing, but there’s always Internet articles that you can refer to. There’s always resources on the Internet and I strongly believe that you can teach yourself anything on the Internet.
But in general, I’d advise they advise people to create a portfolio of work so anything that you’ve done, whether it’s personal projects, whether it’s client work, always show it online somewhere, say on Behance or Dribbble, or if you can put together a website then that automatically makes you look more professional.
Gyan
And what I’ve done personally is write Medium articles about most of my projects and then just sort of link to them on my personal website. Once you’ve done that then you can start reaching out to people and asking them if they need your services and you can.
One easy way to do that is through Facebook. I did that back in my day on a lot of hackathon groups where young people who were starting to work on startups or had ideas where they wanted help on the design side of things.
These days I think it’s a better idea to target startup groups. There are a lot of Facebook groups where startup founders kind of discuss their ideas and sometimes they clearly post a need for a designer, like they might post that they need help with UI/UX for their app or they need a logo design. Sometimes you can just see that it doesn’t look great and maybe you could do a better job and you can pitch your services to them.
Some general advice—which I learned the hard way, is how to handle payments. Always make a contract and as a freelance designer early on, I just trusted my clients to pay me… and some people are good they’ll do that.
Ratik
Do you have like bad client stories also?
Gyan
I have so many bad client stories.
Ratik
Okay, let’s not go into those right now, but yeah, so payments, yes.
Gyan
But as a general rule, create a contract and a contract doesn’t have to be very complicated. What you essentially need to mention is the work that you will do in terms of deliverables—so if you’re going to design a logo and and do the branding then deliverables, may be
- A logo—three logo options, one finalized logo
- A branding PDF document
- Some business cards
- Letterheads for them
So you list all of these things down, and for larger projects it makes sense to create milestones and so your contract should clearly mention the deliverables you’ll have, what format they’ll be in and all of the milestones and the payment you expect at each milestone.
So for me, usually the first milestone is an advance payment. So I take 10 to 20%, sometimes higher of the entire estimate for the project as an advance, and I only start working once I have the advance in in my bank account because I’ve just had a lot of projects where I’ve put in effort and then the client has backed out, so my advice is just don’t start working till the client puts their money where their mouth is.
Ratik
Yeah, that makes sense because you don’t want your clients to ghost you essentially. How did you balance this while being in college? Like freelancing and also like coursework?
Gyan
I realized I think around my third year of college that engineering was not for me. Freelancing work was going well, I was already making roughly what I was expecting to make as an entry level engineer from my college. My mother was fairly okay with me doing what I wanted to do and she saw me working hard.
I kind of deprioritized college at the time, but I was still studying—I gave all my exams, I was skipping a few classes, but I was still managing to do last minute studying and clear my exams and to my credit, I didn’t have a single back in four years.
Ratik
Wow, that is… because a lot of people not doing freelance work also have backs, so it’s pretty good that you were able to manage that. Wouldn’t have been easy. A lot of hard work. But that’s good that your mom was supporting you and I feel like our parents if they see us working hard towards something, and they see that we sort of know what we’re trying to do, that they end up supporting us.
I guess we’re also lucky that our parents do support us in a way. What are your thoughts around just getting your parents to understand… if somebody wants to talk to their parents about the design field. Do you have any thoughts around that?
Gyan
I had my fair share of issues with my mother because, uh, I kind of wasn’t sure if I wanted to do engineering, and I kind of wanted to take a gap year and explore my options, and especially since I did that one month internship right before college.
If I had had the chance to do a little more of something like that, maybe do that for 3-4 months and really realize that this is what I wanted to be doing. I could have maybe avoided those four years of engineering and done an undergrad in design. So I do have certain regrets but I understand why my mother did what she did back then. She felt if I sat at home for a year I would just waste time and who knows that maybe I would have wasted a lot of time, but it would have also given me time to think, so I feel like if you are confused, then if you can afford to then you should just take a gap year and kind of think about things.
Because there are a lot of fields out there and engineering is not the only option, even though that’s how my mom felt. That’s how I felt because I didn’t think design was a field you could work in.
Ratik
Yeah, yeah. I’ve also been thinking about this so I have you heard about this thing Ashoka does, this Young India Fellowship thing?
Gyan
Yeah, I mean I actually got in for the Computer Science and Entrepreneurship program at Ashoka and I kind of wanted to go for that, but that was the first year. That was that would be their very first batch and they offered a B.Sc, not a B.Tech, and the consensus seemed to be that a three year program is not as valuable when you’re looking for engineering jobs.
Ratik
Yeah, so this fellowship. What basically is like. This something I’ve also been noticing a lot of my batchmates from college instead of working or studying more, they ended up going for this fellowship, which is like a one year program and they basically expose you to a lot of things in the world, like a lot of fields. So for example, for a month you study what the finance field is like and for a month you look into what, for example, design is like. So that you’re exposed to a lot of things because there are a lot of things now that you can do.
And after that year when you spend there, you can actually decide what your interests are. So a lot of stuff is happening in the world where such opportunity opportunities are coming up, we didn’t have these when we will sort of getting into college, but there’s a lot of stuff out there which is doing this right now.
Now just wrapping up on college. When did you know that you want to actually get into design? Did you have like, a moment when you thought that this is working and I should probably pursue it?
Gyan
So around my third year, as freelancing was going well and I think at that point I’d already proven to my mother that this could work as a career, so there was no longer this pressure to take college very seriously, study hard, get a job because I also got an Internship at Zomato I think again in my third year in the winter, so I had kind of proved that design was a feasible career and I kind of considered dropping out at the time because when I was working at Zomato, they offered me a job, they told me not to return to college and just start working and I kind of did consider it, but I also felt that if I wanted to study further then it just made sense to finish off the remaining one 1, 1 and a half year of college.
So I think by my third year I already knew I was not going to do much with my degree, but I also just didn’t want to drop out because I felt I was able to do both things. So I just wanted to finish it off.
Ratik
Yeah, that makes sense.
Ratik
I mean, you’ve also invested so much time you do something. So you might as well wrap it.
Outro music
‣ Summertime Magic by Childish Gambino
Intro music
‣ 3005 by Childish Gambino
Ratik
Welcome back to Unbox, and you’re listening to part 2 of episode 4, my interview with Gyan. If you’re here without listening to part 1, then why the hell are you here? Go back and listen to part 1. It should just be below this episode on whatever app you’re listening to the show on. And if you’re somebody who’s heard part one then I will not waste a lot of your time. Let’s just quickly get back into the conversation. Enjoy!
Ratik
So you decided to finish college, and when college was ending what was going on in your head? Did you want to get into a job after college or were you looking at other options? What was going on back then?
Gyan
So I was just really glad that college was getting over, firstly. It was the happiest time of my life.
Ratik
Yeah, yeah. Can relate to that, yes.
Gyan
So, around the time I was about to graduate someone at Flipkart saw my profile. I think they found me through Twitter. They saw my work and they liked what I’d been doing and they flew me out for an interview to their office in Bangalore, and I interviewed with them and I got the job.
Ratik
So this was more like you got called, so you were like let’s just go try it out.
Gyan
That sort of thing, yeah, I mean honestly my goals back then were to be a designer at one of the big Big 5 tech companies. At the time I was very keen to work at Google or Facebook or Apple, but I think Google and Facebook were my favorites back then because those were the companies making the software that I was using on a day to day basis.
Ratik
Right, yeah.
Gyan
But Flipkart happened and I wasn’t really thinking about jobs at the time, I was thinking I will continue freelancing. But because they made that offer, I just felt like it was a the good place to learn, and Flipkart was doing some very interesting work with their progressive web app at the time. So I remember thinking that this was…
Ratik
An interesting project.
Gyan
…an interesting project to be working on.
Ratik
So also what’s interesting is they reached out to you. So do you want to talk about how online presence is like important and because you had Twitter and you even mentioned your personal website? I feel like those things and having a brand are often like overlooked by people?
Gyan
So I’m @gyanl on the Internet everywhere to a point some people call me gyanl in real life.
Ratik
(laughs) Yeah, I do that.
Gyan
But so I feel like it’s important to have your work online somewhere, and if you can blog, if you get used to writing about your experiences and what you think, that’s usually very valuable because other people can come across it and learn from it. And there’s a lot… in order to write about something, you have to really understand it well. So there is a lot of value to writing about your work and explaining your design decisions because when you’re interviewed for a design position, they largely want to see how you think, how you work and what is the process that you follow.
So writing about your work is a very good habit to have and posting about it online kind of ensures that other people see what you’re up to and sometimes opportunities can just come to you—at this point, even though I stopped freelancing as much, most of my work comes from clients who get in touch with me, instead of me reaching out to clients.
Ratik
Yeah, I think it feels like you’re putting out your work in the void, but there are people looking for things, especially on places like Dribbble and Behance… like recruiters and people who just want freelancers do end up looking in these places so I think there is a lot of value in having such an online portfolio and your experience sort of confirms that, yeah?
Gyan
So, strangely enough, I’ve not had such a great experience with LinkedIn…
Ratik
Oh dude, yes.
Gyan
…or Dribbble or Behance in order for generating work. I’ve found more success through Instagram and Facebook and Twitter somehow.
Ratik
Oh?
Gyan
So these are not channels that you’re typically told about when you’re trying to do business on the Internet, but these are where people might be more open to having a conversation, and so sometimes I’ve just sort of given feedback to people about some project they were working on and then suggested that if they wanted me to work on it further, I could do it as a paid consultant.
Ratik
So when you went to Flipkart and you interviewed and was after that, what happened?
Gyan
So I’d interviewed there without any real expectations of what would happen, but they made an offer and it was a lot better than what most of my peers were getting after graduating for engineering roles.
Ratik
Yeah
Gyan
But I mean at the time I was still feeling like there were a lot of gaps in my knowledge and how I approach design. I felt like I didn’t really have a great process for approaching design problems, and I felt that I could grow at Flipkart, but I’d also applied for masters programs because I felt that I could do with some formal education in design and learn the theory and maybe a better way of going about solving design problems.
Ratik
I’d imagine… was there a lot of impostor syndrome here?
Gyan
Yeah, maybe I mean honestly, at the time I feel… (laughs) If you look at the Dunning-Kruger curve, I was feeling that I knew a decent bit at the time, whereas I didn’t know anything at all. Now I know more, but I feel like I know nothing at all. So I’ve actually hit rock bottom now while doing my masters because I’ve learned how much I don’t know.
Ratik
Great. So yeah, the more you know the more you realize that you don’t know anything. Basically.
Gyan
Yeah, that’s true.
Ratik
Yeah, it’s slightly strange.
Ratik
So you you were on the side applying for masters programs because you wanted to fill gaps in your education. So where were you applying and where did you even find these masters programs for design?
Gyan
I decided to only apply for Interaction Design at NID Bangalore. But when I was applying, I talked to a few people about how the courses were and a few people suggested that I apply to IDC’s Interaction Design program as well, because that was considered as a good program.
So the only two places I applied to were NID Bangalore for Interaction Design and Information Design and IDC at IIT Bombay for Interaction Design.
Ratik
OK, so you ended up going to IDC and what has that been like? You wanted to fill these gaps like you said, and how has that experience been and how has that affected you as a designer? How are you different now than what you were before the Masters program?
Gyan
Back then, my plan was to start working at Flipkart and suddenly I get an email saying that I got through at NID, and I remember just being really, really happy because I’d gotten through college, but I didn’t top or anything, and in general academics had been (laughs)
Ratik
Yeah, I can imagine this was like a… You got into a course based on your merit that you had self taught yourself in a way?
Gyan
Yeah, that was a very proud moment for myself and I ended up clearing NID and I just really wanted to go there and then about 2-3 days later I got the email for IDC as well—I got in for the Interaction Design program at both places I guess because I had enough work to show an interest in the field. Eventually I decided to go with the IDC because I talked to some people and they felt that specifically for interaction design, the IDC faculty had an edge and was a better place to study.
I think I’ve been very happy with the decision, IDC’s Interaction Design program has 12 people in my batch and nine of them are engineers, two of them did design in their undergrad and one person did urban planning so it so it has a fairly high ratio of people who did not start out as designers and so there are a lot of introductory courses that I I found very interesting.
Like there was a one week introduction to photography course, there was an introduction to 3D forms course. There’s an introduction to filmmaking course—a ten day course where we had to write a script, shoot a film, edit it, present it at the end of the course… so the course has been designed for someone who has not studied design before, and I found that to be a big advantage because it allowed me the space to explore some of these tangentially related things that people might not consider core interaction design.
Ratik
So through your experience at IDC, how you’ve grown as a designer from when you were finishing your engineering to maybe like one year now since you’ve been at Masters for one year.
Gyan
So I was calling myself a UI/UX Designer without having any kind of degree and that was working because I think there is not such a great understanding of what designers do after all and in terms of the outputs, I was able to show my client screens and they looked well designed and I had a reasonable common sense understanding of best practices, so I just went through those and I was just kind of doing whatever… I was doing my best, but clearly there was there was some theory lacking in what I was doing.
So at IDC, what I’ve really learned is how important user research is and how important it is to properly identify and understand a problem before starting work on it, and so often just the research phase of a problem can go on for weeks, months before you start working on it and my process tended to be look at the problem, read maybe 2-3 articles about it online and within a day start working directly on high fidelity screens.
Which is a bad process to follow… there is a lot of value to prototyping in lower fidelity and then kind of discarding bad ideas. Which is something I kind of knew in my head, but I kind of ignored, but I’ve learned to follow the process at IDC. There are certain skills that I’ve gained, I know how to interview people, and I’ve learned certain data analysis techniques, I learned brainstorming techniques and so I have more of a process for approaching problems now.
I’ve learned that design decisions can be rational, even say decisions that you have to make about visual design can be thought of from a very rational lens. Sometimes you feel like it’s a creative field, so some of it is just this inner sense that you have… but most design decisions can be thought of rationally.
Ratik
So would you say that going to IDC and formally studying design has given you a way to structure the way you work?
Gyan
Yeah, it’s really opened up a lot of avenues for me because there were a lot of introductory courses to different things, and I learned a lot about different branches of design and I had a chance to kind of figure out what I didn’t know and a personal take away from me has been the idea of technological solutionism—that better technology will solve any problem.
I started out just designing mobile apps and websites. And so you’d give me any problem and I would design an app to solve it, but something I’ve learned over time is…
Ratik
That doesn’t always work.
Gyan
… an app is, yeah, an app is not always the solution to every problem.
Ratik
Yeah, definitely yeah, that’s great man. Like going here… I’m glad that you’re gaining a lot from this experience
So now we’re in the last segment where essentially I want to ask you if you have any advice for people who want to get into design as a career. Also, do you recommend going to design school, formally studying it… what are your thoughts on this?
Gyan
So I believe that there are skills and there are tools… so tools you can kind of learn fairly easily off the Internet. So if you’re a UI designer then Figma and Invision Studio are two UI design tools that you can get started with on any platform and Sketch is my favorite UI design tool, but it’s Mac only. You can look up tutorials on the Internet, you can learn the tools of the trade essentially fairly easy.
And then you can read about design, but I feel it’s a fairly interdisciplinary field, so you can read about design, but also about behavioral economics or cognitive psychology or even business comes in handy when you’re a designer. I feel like you can learn a lot of things on your own… so it’s not strictly necessary. A lot of people get into design after either doing engineering or psychology or…
Ratik
Business or economics also.
Gyan
… or business or economics also. And I know people who’ve done that, so it’s not strictly necessary—but I found a lot of value in studying design formally.
Certain things are easier to learn in a classroom environment. Like say, how to do brainstorming is a lot easier when you’re working with a team of people. And getting immediate feedback from the really smart people who who have really spent years thinking about design has a lot of value.
Ratik
I feel like also going to a design institute gives you access to people and you can inherently build a network. Because you graduated with a bunch of people and you know them. So I think that is something that’s very hard to replace when you don’t go to such an institution, right?
Gyan
I’ve had a great time at college because I’m surrounded by like-minded people who are interested in similar things, and also the faculty at IDC are some of the smartest, most passionate people I’ve met and I’ve been very heavily influenced by the things they talk about and how they think. So I mean… I’ve found a lot of value in that.
Ratik
I think it’s a pretty good time to get into design… I mean, colleges are getting better here and there’s a lot of opportunity, there are definitely people who want design work to be done and you can get into a program and keep freelancing on the side.
So I think it’s a pretty cool space to get into, right?
Gyan
Yeah, design is a fairly nascent field right now and there’s a lot of demand because there are a lot of startups and there are a lot of existing companies that want to do things online and a lot of companies want to move their products online. Everything is digital now and you need people to be doing that right now.
Even though that’s not all there is to design, but UI/UX for mobile apps & websites is definitely where the demand is right now.
Ratik
Finally, we’re at our recurring segment, which is recommendations. So Gyan, have you read any books recently or in the past that have influenced you in any particular way? And yeah, just tell us about them.
Gyan
So I kind of came prepared with the books that I feel people who are who are interested in design should read. First one is the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
Ratik
Yeah dude, that’s been on my list for a long time now. Tell me about it, I’ll probably get to it more quickly that way.
Gyan
Have you ever walked up to a door and then pushed and then realized you actually had to pull or pulled and then realize you had to push?
Ratik
Yeah, like so many times.
Gyan
When someone can’t figure out how to use a piece of technology, or even something apparently simple like a door, it’s not because they’re stupid, but it’s because it hasn’t been properly designed.
Ratik
That’s comforting, yeah, tell me more.
Gyan
And the design of everyday things talks about this concept of affordances, which are the properties of an object that show the possible ways you could interact with it.
So for example, adding a particular kind of handle to adore can sometimes give people a hint about whether it’s a push door or a pull door, and without one of these cues you might not be able to figure it.
Interestingly, doors where the user can’t tell whether to push or pull are now called Norman doors, they’re named after Don Norman who wrote this book.
Ratik
Oh man, that’s super interesting. I’m definitely going to get to this soon.
Ratik
What about the second book?
Gyan
The second book is called Change by Design by Tim Brown, who’s the CEO of Ideo, which is a creative agency. It’s a book that talks about how design thinking can be used in organizations to solve business problems that different organizations have, and it talks about the importance of building quick and dirty prototypes to test your ideas really quickly and see if they’re good and it also has some really great examples of design thinking being applied to solve real problems that different companies had.
Ratik
OK, that’s pretty cool. Great, I’ll link those in the description for anybody who wants to add them to Goodreads or whatever.
Ratik
What about… do you listen to podcasts? Do you have any recommendations for podcasts?
Gyan
Yeah yeah, I mean Unbox, I hear Unbox is pretty good.
Ratik
Oh you’re too kind, Gyan. (laughs)
Gyan
I don’t listen to that many podcasts, but I do really like The Vergecast. It’s (laughs) the flagship podcast of the Vox media network.
Ratik
Oh yeah, they’re they’re super interesting and I think what I like about the Vergecast is…
Gyan
Promo code.
Ratik
And just their personalities, all of them, just like they’re lovable idiots, all of them, who love technology.
Gyan
Yeah, so it’s like my friends who talk about technology.
Ratik
Yeah, exactly so it’s it’s got a pretty good vibe going. And if you’re into tech then that’s why I think a really cool recommendation.
Ratik
What about any other podcast? Do you listen to any?
Gyan
So a few friends of mine at IDC worked on a podcast called Styrofoam, which guides you through the process of applying for design courses in India.
Ratik
Oh wow.
Gyan
So if you’re if you’re looking to apply for NID or if you’re looking to give CEED, then I think it would be interesting to check that out.
Ratik
Oh dude, that’s so that’s such a cool idea because so many people are confused about this. And like I personally get asked so many times because I’m working in tech so I know designers so a lot of people end up asking me. I’m definitely going to link them to this whenever they do now.
So yeah, this is podcast-ception ‘cause you’re on the show to talk about design and you’re recommending a podcast about design. So yeah, good stuff.
Gyan
I heard you like design podcast.
Ratik
What about YouTube? Do you watch a lot of YouTube?
Gyan
I do watch a lot of YouTube and…
Ratik
You have any top two recommendations?
Gyan
So I watch a lot of food shows on YouTube? I think I just find them ready relaxing, just watching food, being made and food being eaten.
Ratik
Yeah, that’s true.
Gyan
So I think with my top two are Binging with Babish and also BuzzFeed’s Worth it series.
Ratik
Oh, I haven’t watched BuzzFeed but Babish is somebody… Binging with Babish is something I do watch.
But yeah, I’ll make sure that I’ll add the links to these channels. Also in the description.
But do you have any design channels? That you follow on YouTube?
Gyan
So I don’t have any design channels per se, but I remember looking at a lot of Aaron Draplin’s videos on YouTube and if you’re looking to get into visual design or graphic design, then he has some really great process videos for how he goes about creating a logo or branding.
Ratik
Oh wow.
Gyan
And generally I think Aaron trapping is a very interesting designer and I was very influenced by him early on in my design career.
Ratik
Oh great, this is something I’m gonna check out too ‘cause yeah, love design.
Ratik
Cool that was that was great. Um, finally, if if anybody wants to reach out to you on the socials…
Gyan
I’m @gyanl everywhere.
Ratik
Really, you you have that SEO locked down? You’re genuinely @gyanl everywhere?
Gyan
I think I’m gyanlakhwani on LinkedIn.
Ratik
Nobody cares about LinkedIn.
Gyan
Yep, then I’m @gyanl everywhere.
Ratik
Awesome, then my job is super easy. gyanl everywhere folks.
Gyan
#gyanleverywhere
Ratik
Great cool man. This is this was this was a lovely hour of conversation.
Thank you so much for being on the show and talking about your journey in design and yeah hopefully we end up, I don’t know, inspiring people in the process.
Cool, anybody who wants to reach out to Gyan you you already know how to do that, so yeah thank you.
