An MBA grad by the day. By night, an artist.
Harsh Brahmbhatt
With Sanjana Parikh and Margie Parikh
I have done a lot of graphic designing for my Grad School over the last two years. Design itself is fun and I found buddies through it — consider that as a bonus. But designing for a TEDx event is a first for me. So being a part of TEDxGujaratUniversity team is different.
The first item on our to-do list immediately after getting our license was finalization of our theme. There were sessions upon sessions of brainstorming. Search team huddled together in our committee room for God only knows how many hours.
Well, it’s a story already told in the previous blog. My task started once the search team finalized the event theme “Netrutva — An Eternal Journey”. My first question was, “How do we show LEADERSHIP (Netrutva) in the Graphics form?” We had no time, because the Facebook page had to be up.
So we had some more brainstorming sessions. This time it was me and my buddies — Pankil, Mohit, Gaurang and Vatsal. You’d know how we did it, if you have been to a B-school. There is no time! Being the Sem-IV students might have its perks, but they don’t come for free for sure. To make the long story short, I’d say I changed Avatars. A B-School student by the day and an artist by the night.
We did some renderings. Pathik is a student of PG Diploma in our school. He showed a sportsman running. He thought it showed pace, a goal, a chase. It showed that one had to exert. And train one’s self.
But rendering a concept visually is not so easy as stating what you see in the image. Like, in the case of this running man, there were issues — we wanted our portrayal not to be about the gender. Also, the main character which was the largest was not liked by the organizer. She said it looked like a ghost. And then all this running and jumping to the finish line was not doing enough justice to our idea of leadership, which was not one-time. How do we bring in the continuous nature?
And then who was this running person? Was he a leader? A follower? Our image could not b ambiguous. Our understanding of leadership was clear: it was about the others.
Arjun brought in the tree.
It was magnificent, multicolored, looked so well-aged. Look at the leafy span — would you not like to sleep under it or make a good Jhula on it?
A tree like this implied being rooted, it embodied the concept of giving. And it also brought in self-renewal. We agreed. Who asks a tree to grow out of a seed? And the trees like Peepul find their own way. They need no nurturing.
But our early image had limitations when we tried to render it for purposes like making presentations and banners. We loved the tree, but we had difficulty with its deep colors. For example, one of our early slides that tried to make it lighter by adding a screen looked good but had issues with readability.
We decided to find another one.
I thought that a banyan tree would be classic. The guy was capable of growing anywhere, it had a massive spread, and it just lived on. Have you been to Kabeer Vad near Bharuch? So, I worked with some trees, but then someone asked our organizer, “I appreciate the concept of rooted learning and giving, but does the tree have to be there?” Well, she won’t get rid of it — so we thought we’d set it aside for time being.They say that the job of the creative artist is to tell a huge story in just a sentence or an image. I say he does that because he understands what’s the soul of the story. I also say that a well conceptualized image goes beyond the story and leaves behind a dream. Or, it takes a plot of a short story and gives back a novel.
That’s how I see my role.
Wait just yet — if you are going starry-eyed about the life of the artist.
Obviously, I can’t render the graphics in the day, right? With classes, assignments, field work and all? I also couldn’t afford interruptions, while I still needed feedback. So, on went our midnight exchanges. What started as a running man turned into a Peepul tree, into a Banyan tree.
Next, I had to bring the eternity into the picture — literally.
“Netrutva: An Eternal Journey” had to be said in words alongside the graphic backdrop of the tree.
I decided to tackle the first word first — Netrutva, Netrutva, Netrutva — the word went round and round in my mind and I simply put it inside a circle — a circle — could it be a coin? Margie Parikh thought that it had to be a coin so that we could depict an undying value irrespective of time — like a hidden treasure. Again, we go some coins from Arjun. But Margie Parikh said there had to be some other fonts.
So now I started working on NETRUTVA fonts, oh and there were so many possibilities. Definitely DEVNAGARI was the choice, the one we wanted, to achieve the desired ancient look. After trying more than 20 different calligraphies, the font was finalized. And yeah, it was on paper, yes, these designs were on paper.
Netrutva LOGO version 1.0 was finally created.
Time to go digital!
There were hitches. We began to work with Mr. Kiran Thakar to convert this font in vector form. But if we started with paper, then went into Photoshop and some other Apps, then the final rendering into vector form meant that many things had to be done all over again. So, we allowed adaptations. The tree changed once again, so did the fonts.
We stepped back and looked at the screen: how much would this cost when we rendered these images in the print form? So, under the cost filter there were some more changes — this time with the curation team was around.
We had the final version — phew. See the banner? That’s that.
I am not sure what was more — pain or pleasure. But I look at the banner with our logo, and I feel — well, cool.
TEDxGujaratUniversity acknowledges its partners: these and growing!
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