My father’s buffalo, my drawing, and how design needs rebranding.

“There’s nothing like bad design”

These words ring in my ears every time someone talks about design. I write, but I am also blessed with a group of friends and a decent YouTube subscription list both of which make sure that my aesthetic sense does not drop below a certain level.

Owing to that aesthetic sense, I am often approached by people for design related assignments. And while anyone looking for design often assumes the role of a designer, there are some who do it full time. And this little piece is for them.

I have a friend who would say this every time someone would use the words, “that’s a bad logo”

Her line used to be,

“There’s nothing like bad design. There’s only the right design and the wrong design”

Now at the outset of whatever I am going to say, I would like to make it very clear that I am not a graphic designer. Neither have I studied for it nor have I done enough work to be placed close to one. But I sure do admire the lot that does good design. And that admiration springs from a childhood fear. Here’s the little story of that fear.

This one afternoon, determined that I wanted to draw something beautiful and that too without the aid of a drawing someone had already made, I sat down with a huge chart paper and a pencil. I had thought this through, I was going to work on my masterpiece, and it was going to be beautiful.

This is again the early 2000s’ so the chart paper was almost my size. And As I make my first line, I realise that there is something wrong with where I am starting. So I erase it and start over. There is still some spilt graphite over on the side which kept itching me. I couldn’t seem to not think about it. I try rubbing hard on it so it would go away but I kept seeing it there. It was all gone but in my head, it remained, in a weirdly haunting way.

That was the day I realised, somewhere internally, without really having a word for it, what composition was all about. By simply placing a short, insignificant section of line on a piece of paper, I had changed it forever. And my inspiration of everything that happens next, depended on that one line. In itself, it was powerless, but the aesthetics it generated merely by the power of being seen, were mind blowing.

I hardly ever drew again, because I was always scared that I would ruin a picture with the wrong composition. It was only 15 years later that a friend of mine from NID told me how one of their composition exercises simply involved placing a red dot on a white paper and studying how the paper changes with it.

At this point, I am uncertain if I have connected with you at all. So let’s bring in my father, like I always do when I have no clue whatever the fuck I am supposed to do to make things right. He is quite the buffalo connoisseur, a conclusion I derive from the number of times he would tell me, “akkal badi ki bhains?” Which literally translates to, “what’s bigger? Intelligence or a buffalo?” And while the obvious answer is a buffalo, what he really meant to ask was, “what’s better? A smart force or brute force?”

This was my cue to stop doing whatever I was doing and to start thinking about a smarter way to do it. A lesson that I still carry with me. If it’s taking too long to do something, there’s gotta be an easier way to do it, invariably so. The key word being the definition of ‘too long’, but you get the point.

Now let’s jump cut to April 2016, the location is Dochula pass in Bhutan, on a cloudy and foggy Spring-Summer afternoon. The Hyundai Santa Fe that was carrying us down the mountain got a flat tyre. The driver was a woman and while my friend (Deep) and I couldn’t understand what she was saying, the frenzy told us that she didn’t know how to change it. None of us were rich enough to own that car and it was in the middle of a mountain pass with not a soul around.

So we decided to be the men that we were genetically assigned to be, and change the goddamn tyre. Now it took us a while figuring things out and getting them done but the most beautiful part was that the only things we really remember out of that tyre change is the part where we discovered how to do it, and the part where it was done. Everything that happened in between will take me a while to recollect.

That emotion is not a bad memory, that’s good design. Which is where I often tell people, good design is like a good date, if you found the right one, you wouldn’t even know when it ended and all that you’ll walk away with will be happiness, but if it’s not right, it’ll itch you even before you get to the dinner table.

Unfortunately, the utility of design, it’s character, continuity of emotion, and the magnificent power to disappear in the greater scheme of things, is being lost amidst a frenzy of businessmen trying to be louder than the others.

My father and the mark on the paper were the major inspirations behind my discovery of what design is all about. I don’t qualify to do it, but I do qualify to tell you, that there is no good or bad. There’s only the right, and the wrong. The one that works, and the one that doesn’t.

Design has a purpose. It has metrics of success, measurements of discretion, and critiques for improvement. So the next time you look at something and feel like saying it’s “bad”, think again, think about what it makes you do, and then wonder if that’s what it really wanted to do to you.