Design— A big umbrella of opportunities in India

Before you start reading, let me share that the instances mentioned in this article are strictly from Indian-mindset, and Indian backdrop. Indian society and neighborhoods have a very different way of functioning, compared to the rest of the world. Enjoy!

Whenever I tell someone that I chose to enter ‘design’ after software-engineering, usually I am looked down upon with a pair of eyes screaming — “WHY?”

The ‘WHY’ is a big question, especially when it comes to Indian mindset. Engineering, medicine, law are the three favorite occupations of our parents, because usually most of the high paying jobs are in these three domains. But today, jobs have diversified. Technology has advanced, the basics are almost covered, and now we need people who can focus on the beautification part.

The sole purpose of a website or an application is to make business meet customers. But when a website or app is easy to use, friendly for the customer, soothing and pleasing to his eyes, he is more engaged and eventually the business multiplies. Now we are in an era of beautifying websites and applications, by making them much simpler to use, and more engaging for the users.

And this is how we come to the design part now. Whenever I tell someone (in my neighborhood) that I am doing my masters in Design, they think it’s ‘Fashion Design’, and they think that I am making garments, working on clothing, and so I will open up a fancy boutique where I will charge people a thousand bucks to stitch a napkin!

NO.

Fashion Design used to be one of the most popular design domains in India, so the mindset people have is that, whatever is related to design, it has to be related to fashion in some way, but surprisingly the meaning has changed.

With that said, I have sincere and utmost respect for people in fashion industry, and I have some of my friends working as designers under some high-street fashion labels, so I know the hard work they have to put in, even for a napkin!

In this article, I will cover different design fields that Indians can explore, and know more about. If you know about them already — great! But if you don’t, some of them might be new to you. So, here are twenty design domains that are not only interesting to work in, but also offer well-paying jobs —

• User Experience Design — UX is all about enhancing the overall experience of a user. What he feels while using the app, or a web site— is the flow interesting and does it keep the user engaged? It is much more than just user engagement, it is also about how a company can perform better business. Considering all the financial constraints, a UX researcher or designer is supposed to create a great interface keeping users in the center. It includes Colors, information flow, user psychology, user research, usability analysis, wireframes, creating high fidelity prototypes and finally getting to the final design-part.

(User Experience itself is a huge domain)

• Game Design — Game design is all about designing a game, and those who learn game designing not only design the characters or background scenes of a game but they also design the “game” itself. Like the rules of it, the number of players who can comfortably play it and all that. It includes animation, 3D modelling and simulation, as well as in-depth knowledge of software like AutoCAD etc.

(Creating a character for a Game in AutoCAD)

• Automobile or Automotive Design — As the name suggests, automobile Design is all about cars, bikes or maybe futuristic automobiles. A designer must have knowledge of functioning as well, and not just outer appearance. Hence, you also need to understand ‘how’ a car or an automobile works, before you design something for it.

(Automotive Designer working on a car)

• Graphic Design — It is a very popular field and includes a lot of things from designing icons, logos etc. to typography and color psychology. Typography is one of the toughest things ever! Can you create a font from scratch — when millions of fonts are available? Graphic design further has a lot of scope in different fields and not only typography.

• Packaging Design — Now this is something I personally find very interesting! Designing package to fit a product so that the product becomes sellable. Have you noticed the peculiar design of “Paper Boat” drinks? They are the first ones to come up with actual paper based bottle design to sell their drinks and now many brands are copying it. Notice this for instance —

(Such a simple tissue holder)

• Product Design — Product design is a very vague term to be honest because for tech companies the application or website is the product! But originally, the term ‘Product Design’ is coined for items that are tangible and companies that manufacture hardware need product designers — like car manufacturing companies, furniture manufacturers, industrial equipment etc. Product Designers must have impeccable sketching skills, if nothing else!

(Just a glance into a Product Designer’s notebook!)

• Fashion Design — Fashion design is more than just stitching garments. It’s visualization of future and creating an analysis of fashion trends that will be popular in future. That’s why designers come up with summer-collection in winters itself. It includes Colors, fabric, patterns, designs etc. That’s trend forecasting! Hence, a fashion ‘designer’ is also a fore-caster.

(Just a small example of Fashion Forecast of Colors that will be popular in coming years)

• Design for Special Needs — Design for Special needs (DSN) is an entire field where a designer works for people who have special needs like — blind people, deaf people or people who don’t have working limbs. Such designers focus on making the lives of such people easier. The designs may include anything from a product to a device to a gadget — anything that makes their lives better!

(This is a tricycle for children)

• Interaction Design — You can say that UX design is a big umbrella under which many other tech related design fields come and interaction design is one of them. Designers here focus on micro-interactions in a technical application or a web portal. Like — animating a logo, animating a button or adding subtle effects that make the experience of the user pleasurable. In interaction design, designers enhance the interaction of the users with the product. Micro-interactions also include gestures. If you can make an app that uses multiple gestures by the user (apart from just one finger touch, say — two finger swipe or three finger slide) — that’s like enhancing the interactions user can have with the device or the application.

(This is an example of a micro-interaction (gesture control) on a mobile device)

• Visual Design — It is all about advertisements, posters, visuals and everything that the customer sees or hear about the brand. Visual designers also work on improving the VM (visual merchandising) of a store. A window display is what you see in front of the store, and that is also a part of a job of a visual designer! Look at this window display for instance, it is for a brand of shoes —

(A window display for a brand of shoes)

• Leather Design — Leather design is a dedicated course in NIFT in which students learn all about leather and products of leather. They make a range of products like — purses, belts, wallets, dresses and even accessories — all from leather.

(A collection of leather products)

• Jewelry Design — The name itself explains that designers have to design jewelry here. But it’s not so easy as first you must know about all metals and non metals and which element you can use or mix to produce a design. Some designs are so intricate and detailed that they can’t be produced with some specific metals. So, even though a designer’s job is just to give designs, still the true success is only achieved if his designs are at least easy to convert into actual products!

(Just a glance of how tough and minute it is for a jewelry designer to work!)

• Apparel Design — Now you must think what’s different between apparel and fashion? Well, a lot! Fashion design is more about communication of upcoming fashion trends, while apparel design focuses on creating apparels (dresses especially for particular occassions). A wedding dress for example — is an apparel, and not just a garment!

(Working on an apparel!)

• Textile Design — Textile design is about creating designs and patterns on a piece of fabric. For this you need proper knowledge of every fabric ranging from cotton to silk to khaadi to polyester, etc. You need proper knowledge of what kind of dyes you can use, what kind of Colors and what kind of material. FabIndia is the best example I can give you right now who are famous for their “fabric”. Most of the stuff at FabIndia is organic (or so they say), and they might be employing a lot of textile designers at the back-end! Textile designer is more than just being a fashion designer, you can call such a person, a fashion-engineer instead!

(How a pattern influences the overall look of the garment!)

• Knitwear Design — Knitwear is all about (yes, you got it right!), fabric that is produced by knitting strands of threads — like woollen clothes. Wool is the best example of knitwear.

(Knitwear Design)

• Information Design — It is all about how you visualize the information and convert boring excel sheet data into interesting stuff that is easy to process. Like bar graphs and pie charts is the school level example I can give you of information design, the real thing is way more sophisticated, something like this —

(Information about shoes, segregated visually!)

• Animation Design — Designers here work on animating stuff and not just animation, but using different techniques and technologies to come up with cartoonish as well as realistic animations. They focus on a lot of things, like movement, gestures, expressions etc.

(Animation Design)

• Ceramic and Glass Design — This field includes designing and understanding products using glass and ceramic. It includes understanding the texture, composition and strength of each material, constructing things out of raw material, and making products that are stylish as well as useful.

(Pottery is an example of Ceramic Design, although it is a different course altogether!)

• Film Design — Film design focuses on direction of a film, how a scene should unfold and how the light should be etc. There are hundreds and thousands of particulars that film designers must keep in mind before directing a movie!

(Film Design)

• Furniture Design — Designing furniture that’s ergonomically shaped, and designed to provide comfort to human body! It is one of the most complicated fields, because it covers both — form and functionality at its best!

(furniture design)

• Accessory Design — It is about designing accessories according to occasion and apparel. Accessory design covers both — jewelry design as well as apparel design (because accessorizing someone always happens ‘after’ a certain apparel has been chosen). And accessory design includes all other fields — may it be leather design, using metal, fabric etc to produce accessories.

(Accessory Design)

These are the twenty design fields I can think of, and know (a little) about. Hence, there are a lot more things a student can be — apart from an engineer, doctor or a lawyer!

Happy Reading…