Week 3

Auroville, 2016

Last week just zoomed past me. But I also got a lot done. I don’t know how to write about the pandemic. I’ve hardly stepped out in the last one year now, seen my best friends only once or twice. My father has been having to go to work regularly since the first lockdown and he worries a lot. I can’t wait for him and my mother to get their second dose.

• I turned 24 today. I had a quiet birthday with my parents. Pizza, Monopoly (I went bankrupt), pani puri, and two cakes were involved. I’ve been dreading turning 24 the whole year but after much contemplation, I’ve decided to allow it to happen. Firstly, 24 is an even number. Hence so much better than 23, a repulsive prime. Secondly, most of the people around me are older than me and they seem to be doing just fine — equally confused and equally content. So I’ll take 24.
• Aishwarya and I did a branding and visual design exercise for our first project of the fellowship. We were both doing something like that for the first time and we had a blast. I went down a Pinterest hole where the art got so good I wanted to eat it all up. This video by The Futur on stylescapes was quite insightful. I ended up binge-watching The Futur videos on branding. I had no idea I’d find brand design that interesting. My relationship with beauty, aesthetics, the impact of visuals has changed a lot in the last two years. I’ll write more on that in my next weeknote so I can articulate it better too.
• My sister gifted me a Skillshare membership and I’m so pumped I could start 20 courses at the same time.
• In the same vein, while Micarah Tewers will always be my favorite sewing tutorials Youtuber, I’ve really been enjoying PaperStxrs’ videos this week. This one, in particular, gave me a lot of joy —

• The New Layer podcast had been my lullaby of choice this week. It’s also been very informative considering I’ll be actively looking for jobs next month.
• I’d also like to present you with an argument for why I think I should start a podcast.

This was fun, I’d like to do more of these

• I’m not done talking about podcasts yet. I also sat down and listened to Sneha Sankar on Kawal Oberoi’s Designed this way because I quite like her vibe on Twitter. Something I found interesting was how she talked about the difference between the approaches of people with design backgrounds versus those with engineering backgrounds. The difference being that the ones with design backgrounds may be overly critical of their ideas whereas those with engineering backgrounds directly jump to building their ideas and then keep iterating till it makes sense. This perspective was interesting to me because when I started teaching myself design, I found the approach refreshing and meaningful after years of seeing engineering students (me, included) build absolute nonsense with minimal understanding of the people and problems they’re building for, and then make lofty claims about their creations. I don’t know if the context is similar enough but this also reminds me of Ed Catmull talking about protecting your ugly babies in Creativity Inc. I like that approach. It sounds balanced enough.
• Okay, that’s that about podcasts. If you’ve been wanting to get back to drawing, a blind contour drawing is a very pressure-free way to go about it. The results always end up looking quite artsy-fartsy too.

I did take a few peaks while drawing, I’m sorry okay

That’s all for this week. It took forever to write this one.