My tryst began after meeting Pradeep (read ‘The Tour Director’ and ‘My Good Pal’), Ravi (the Doer and Cycle Champ), Sharath (the Model, the Marketing-Whizz, Cycle Lover) and Arun (brand lover, perfectionist, the boss). As they poured out their plan for the tour and the ideas behind it, I was left wide-eyed with the sheer passion that exhilarated from these gentlemen. One could feel their love for cycling, and clearly see that they were out to do something BIG.

And as I was listening to them, the old school days came tumbling down the less-trodden memory lane. Those long cycle rides were the most memorable moments of my life till date. While cycling, you realize how connected one can stay to the place, people and all the beauty around. You think you could care to stop on a bike than to lower your car window every time you wanted to experience something?

Now that I knew about their plan, which was called ‘Tour of Nilgiris’ (TFN from here on), I think I was more than fortunate to design the brand (posters, website, badges etc), including one of my best works: The TFN logo.

And trust me, I haven’t stop talking about these guys ever since!

What is TFN?

Imagine yourself away from the hustle-bustle of the jam-packed roads, away from the daily routine, away from the world of Internet, cell-phones or anything that keeps you connected with that materialistic part of your life that keeps you ‘busy’ and far far far away from the deadlines and the worries.

And, now imagine yourself on an 8-day breakout for once-in-a-lifetime experience amidst the forest ranges and the small pathways, traveling through the tiny villages breathing the fresh air, pushing your limits without the need to fuel your saddle. To add to the adventure you won’t be alone, you will be accompanied by 80 odd new people who wish to cherish all this beauty along with you in crudest and purest form possible.

Just imagine the HIGH! Experiencing it is twice as much as said.

So much will happen over these 8 days and at the end of it possibilities of new human beings are created. Why do I say so? Because participants go Eco-friendly, a new sense of comradeship emerges, self-confidence multiplies and of course you get to beat your own cycling record with the feeling of triumph!

So what does it really take to do a TFN? Money?  A kick-ass bike?  Prior experience? Nah.

It takes a heart and the will to do so. Last year I saw Dattatreye Patil ride bare foot on a cycle no better than a hero hawk, I saw people take on cycling for such long distances for the first time, I saw young women challenge the men on the track, I saw 12 year old Sukhdev cycle all the way up to Mysore. One thing was common; each one had the passion…the zest. They hardly cared about the world around or the reasons not to do it. They had the two wheels, a saddle and a journey calling them…

And if TFN08 was such an experience, you can well guess what TFN09 could be. If you haven’t done TFN, you haven’t done much yet.

Now this boils down to why I posted this write-up almost 10 months after the tour. Simply to relive the magic moments in the virtual world and look forward to a bigger, better, exciting TFN09. Well this also happens to be my chance of being the official blogger for TFN09. I want to capture the Nilgiris, the ranges, the green & wild with it, the trail, the people, the sweat and blood behind (literally), the local food, the spirit of sharing and spirit of  ‘2 wheels and a saddle.’

Are you game to experience the spirit of cycling? I AM!

TFN09 -  “LETS RIDE AND SHINE.”

The most exciting day of my life. As my mom celebrates her birthday today she gets to press the ‘upload’ button on the ftp to catapault NetBramha Studios  into existence!

NetBramha will focus on three cores areas – branding, web solutions and viral marketing. Of course we are still small and nimble but surely have huge plans like any other.  I believe as always the journey is far enthralling than the destination itself. It gives me immense pleasure to invite you all to be partners of this wonderful ride ahead.

I’am looking for a place to settle, people that live & breathe design, a team full of joy & abundance.

Drop me a note at : aashish@netbramha.com

Cheers

I recently wrote an article on Top 10 Design Blunders for Web 2008 

This was published in AlooTechie here, as a guest post. Re-posting it below.

1.       Crappy form designs.

One of the biggest turn offs for any user is forms! Cut down on extra fields; let the user fill them later in his profile if he wishes to not right in the first go! Highlight clearly the optional and required fields. Also mention the privacy policy you follow. This builds up user trust and experience.

A very good article you must see here.

Read a very good pdf here.

2.       Overdone layouts. Confusion while choosing b/w fluid and fixed.

Simplicity is the key to gaining pleasant user experience. Do not complicate simple tasks such as contact, navigation, products/services, and login. Choose the right experience – flash / static pages / dynamic or a CMS?

Also another very important aspect usually neglected is choosing b/w fluid vs fixed layout. Usually a content rich site is fluid and a personal/corporate site goes well with a fixed layout. Judge carefully what YOU can pull off!

CSS Layouts – http://layouts.ironmyers.com/

3.       Inconsistent color schema, color palette undefined.

Uneven use of colors gives a disturbed user experience. A website should reflect an integrated environment and different sections of the site should belong to the same family. Keep your logo as the most important standpoint of your site and follow a strict color palette.

Life can be simple using www.colorlovers.com , www.kuler.adobe.com

4.       Unreadable and cluttered text.

Brilliant content, great design but cluttered typography! Typography can make or break your entire site. Select carefully the font and their sizes for various headings, tags, paragraph text. Font size should never go below 9px-10px. This is the effective threshold for human readability. Use white spaces around text for better readability and composure.

Fall in love with TEXT @ www.ilovetypography.com

5.       Separating SEO from Design and Development.

A lot of times design, dev and SEO are seen as three different phases all together. I believe that SEO has to begin right with the design and development. For eg: Using appropriate Image names, Use of <h1> tags effectively so on and so forth. Give due importance to it while laying out your project plan.

Loads to learn @ www.forums.digitalpoint.com

6.       No browser and resolutions compatibility.

This is the biggest pain that a designer or a developer has to go through. Call it the ‘Labour pain of Web –Design!’

IE inherently does not support a lot of CSS and JavaScript’s hacks making our lives complicated. With no good parallel for ‘firebug’ extension on other browsers consistency goes for a toss. Also make sure to test the site in wide screen monitors. During development make sure you have the site tested on top 4 browsers and top 6 resolutions. Avoid ignoring sets of users based on your clever understanding of site analytics!

Try using IE developer toolbox.

7.       Trying hard to be web 2.0 and user generated content.

I really wonder if we all need so much of so called user generated content at every other place. Be very clear why UGC on your portal / site is required. Never succumb to it just because everybody else is doing it. Also certain ‘web 2.0ish’ fundas don’t really go well with what you want to communicate at times!

On a lighter note, excellent example of effective site with no web 2.0 – www.indianrail.gov.in

8.       Design Imbalance due to uneven flow of layout.

Subtle yet important! A design has to be balanced and consistent. The icons, typography, navigation, interactions and all other elements need to ‘belong’. Simple things like use same Font Family, a same icon family, use of CSS based forms etc.

Try not to use extra icons and graphics just because they were offered free!

MindBlowing stuff @ www.smashingmagazine.com  &  www.cssbeauty.com

9.       Whitespaces hamper effective space utilization.

One of my favorite things in design is white spaces. The more of it the more focus on the things that you want to communicate to your target user!  Clarity is evident around white spaces.

A must thing to adopt in any design is space and minimalist approach.

10.    ‘Beta’ used as an excuse for bad user experience.

Don’t kill me for this. But give it a thought. Why is beta used so damn commonly used?? For a certain period of initial launch I completely agree but anything more than that becomes an excuse!

Eg: Google did that with GMAIL!

Avoid ‘Extended’ Beta tags to gain user trust is what I would say.

The above points do have exception at places but that definitely happens after getting few basic things right. Enjoy designing the user experience and allow your creativity to try new never before things!

Cheers.

Dear All,

I have been associated with web, design and starting up since the last couple of years. I’am glad that GOD let me chase my dreams right from my standard 10th.  I still remember the turning point of my life. It is etched so clear in my memory. It was a weekday and I was sitting in a cyber during my class X trying to build website on www.homestead.com. It was the year 2000 and the dot com was on a high. I was completely mesmerized by Internet by then! Whatever little money I got went straight to cyber cafes. As I sat in my chair fiddling with the options a gentleman next to me peered over to see, what was I doing curiously. He was MD of a startup called Together Technologies Pvt Ltd. He promptly asked what I was doing and will I be interested to come over to his office to discuss a few things!

My joys knew no bounds. A 14 year old me was called to discuss things … the gentleman was ‘Ashish Saraf’, funny thing is that he shared my name as well! So I landed up that Saturday at a house-turned-office which had about 6-7 member team. I was greeted by a warm lady Annapurna, who later became my first teacher-mentor. I was asked to draw few things and comprehend a paragraph in English. They were reasonably happy with my enthusiasm and unpolished art.

Ashish offered a proposition: I work for them during my 10th holidays and they train me on PhotoShop, Dreamweaver and Flash. Believe me I could not have asked for anything else! Man, I was on top of the world. 2 months from morning 9 to evening 6 I cycled to this wonderful house and lived my dream. Annapurna patiently gave me both skills and live projects! I remember Archana as well who was from ChitraKala Parishad guiding me during those crucial stages.They had sowed the seeds of design!

Of course at times I felt I could have enjoyed my holidays or gone on a vacation instead.. Thoughts like why am I doing this and what will I do with all this came up.. But nevertheless the passion for web remained.

If not for Ashish Saraf and Annapoorna I would not have been the way I’am. My heart felt gratitude to wherever you are & you were the most important mentors of my life.. I’am sure we will bump into each other again!!

Class 11 ( or I PUC ) is a time which most youngsters look forward to. As any other teenager too I was excited about my first college! Chirst College was a great place to be. As though things were planned something miraculous happened. On the very first day of the college I met ‘Sunny Shah’ who later went on to become my first partner and an even bigger mentor!

Sunny was from Gujrat and had come down for studies here. He had immense passion for computers and design. When we got to know about our common interests our joy had no bounds. We found our perfect entrepreneurial partners. It was very clear for both of us that we started something together. While Sunny had named his secret company as Genius Tech, I on the other hand had visioned to call my company Dream Technologies. Now that we clicked together we wanted a name that will inspire both of us. And we came up with ‘Genius Dreams Technologies’ and it stuck!!

At age of 16, Class 11 we both set off.  Our first client was a student who wanted to learn to build sites and animations. We got ourselves cards printed and showed them off as our prized possessions! We did a couple of sites, branding, computer assembling and what not! The happiest moment was when I got a call from Deccan Herald. They wanted to interview us!!  It was raining heavily in Bangalore, Sunny & myself didn’t have a snap together then. We rushed to the MG road office in that rain, got a photo clicked near by and spoke to the reporter. We felt we had conquered the world. I know you all must be thinking how ‘teenish’ we were or how ‘glamour’ crept in!

But trust me.. at that age it was fun. It was a sense of achievement and pride. I can never forget the smile on my mothers face and the glow in her eyes when she saw her son’s photo in Deccan Herald. God has been generous, very generous indeed!!

We continued to take up projects. Learnt to handle clients. Many a times the hard way. What we thought was professionalism was our innocence and weakness! Nevertheless we sometimes got underpaid or worked out too many designs for a commitment that was not formalized … so on and so forth.  But as said the journey is always important than the destination.

Sunny was a pillar of strength and a guiding force. He re-inforced my passion for computers and impressed me every time with his logic and creativity. He gave me the space to grow and showed the right doors at right times!

By this time we had moved to our engineering. This time around Sunny being in a different college. Genius Dreams chugged along smoothly. As I say, God planned another torchlight for me. I met Sridhar G at BNMIT (my engi college.)

Sridhar was 2 years senior to me and was an exceptional programmer and an uncommon thinker. He appreciated my design skills and even introduced me to ProInt Software where he worked part time during engineering days. My work at ProInt involved designing their corporate site, product collateral and a few other things. ProInt was a startup in the enterprise integration space.

The moment I met him I saw that the world has multitude of great people like Sri. The urge to make a bigger difference grew. While he went out to do his masters in London we would often discuss ideas, toss few thought processes that could change lives..  Finally Yulop happened. I have spoken earlier in detail about our Journey to Yulop.

I’am extremely humbled to say that in this 2 years of association with Yulop, it has taken its shape and form & grown beyond expectations. Yulop is today making inroads into Mobile and Location Based Services apart from being a ‘Local player’ on the web. I have gained immensely from this team and I think the story & growth of Yulop will be different from 6 to 8 months now on.

As a co-founder at Yulop, I saw what it takes to build something from ground zero. I experienced team being built, I experienced how we faltered. I experienced how to learn quickly from the flaws. I saw Sri taking on things head – on. Personally I grew leaps and bounds as well!! The kind of mentoring from MAK and the support from the team has been exceptional! I shall cherish these for the rest of my life!

Today I set to pursue my love for web and design. I’am heading off to design for people, startups and corporates as a designer. I believe in giving brands and user interfaces to different and varied sets of people which will let me sleep to my content in the night. My interest for design and online marketing has widened and strengthened! I would also explore another area which always interested me – Experience Design.

As I take this plunge a big hug and a thank you to all you folks for getting me this far!! You all ROCK!

More to come soon!

PS: www.netbramha.com