DESIGN

My design career started as a 20 year old, when I found a copy of Macromedia Flash on my brother’s PC.

Managed to make a ball bounce with gravity within 3 days.

I was pursuing a B-Tech in Computer Engineering back then in 2007.

This eureka moment led to a whole 15 years dedicated to graphics, animation and interaction design, still going strong in 2022.

I designed my first website for myself. The erstwhile ujjwalagarwal.com, which used to have a hand drawn animated character - my alter ego - an under paid corporate person with dishevelled hair who would walk across the screen, perform antics and take you through my portfolio very reluctantly.

Here are some very low-res screens from an all-flash website from 15 years ago.

While at university, I designed a lot of websites for Business Schools across India for their annual business festivals. The brief was always the same but the result had to be different every year for every b-school.

Here is one done for IIM Lucknow, that was a sort of an ‘on ground visual radio’ during the festival days. It had an interface to fetch and display tweets and videos connected with specific hashtags around the event. The participants were pre instructed to tag all their content with the designated hash tags and we generated quite a bit of traction on the live website during the three days of the event.

In 2009, I finished Engineering and got to my first job in Mumbai at Pinstorm Technologies Ltd. Back then, a one of its kind, pay-fo- performance digital advertising company. We worked on extensive online campaigns for major brands like Canon, WSJ, Samsung etc that were measured on performance and improved over time in order to achieve financial goals that were set by the brand. I unfortunately don’t have much documentation of the work I did here.

In about a year’s time, I moved to a pure design house - Grandmother India Design a group of very highly skilled individuals producing award winning work across branding, advertising and digital design. I was their UI designer for over 2 years.

Here is a website for Tabula Rasa, a world music school affiliated by The Berklee School of Music. A full flash website that had audio reactive backgrounds inspired the Tabla, Guitar and Flutes.

Next are 2 websites for USHA International - a leading Home Appliances company from India. We did a year long project for them that included an experiential Flash website and a more formal Corporate website. We directed the entire product range shoot specific to the assets for the respective websites, worked with 3d modelling studios to get animated product demos and built a full fledged CMS for their entire online catalog.

While at Grandmother I also designed another experiential website for a real estate brand called Heliopolis, which means the ’Sun’. Here are some screens of the same.

In 2013 I took a bit of a break from full-time jobs to work on my music while constantly freelancing and taking up part time design jobs for various small and medium brands. One of them was a food, events and nightlife web portal called Crowpati. I designed their identity and first look of the website here.

In 2015, I joined another bunch talented folks over at Webchutney Studios, later acquired by Dentsu Network. Here is a website I designed there for a luxury chain of hotels called Aaina while there.

In 2016, I moved back to my hometown Jaipur, to continue my work in electronic music and worked with a bunch of local brands on their branding and digital assets.

One of those brands was called UNJUNK. A health food startup that basically sold fresh salad jars. Here is the branding and packaging for them.

I also worked with a very popular food cafe in Jaipur called Tapri to design their website.

I then worked on a website for Suryagarh - a marvellous boutique hotel in Jaisalmer, the desert land of India. I stayed with them for over a week, got a taste of their best offerings and designed a website unique to their personality. Here are some screens.

Just breaking the timeline a bit here to show a bunch of logo designs I did during and before this time in my hometown. Logos for likes of a dentistry in the mountains in the US, a travel company, a jewellery brand, a law firm, an interior designer and some others.

In 2019, I went back to Mumbai, to work with FITCH - A retail experience design company where I worked as a UX designer for both digital and physicals artefacts around the retail needs of the brands. We undertook a massive project for one the biggest telecom companies in India to design their extravagant experience centre in Delhi. Here are some sights from the project.

While at FITCH, I also worked on a website for Disney’s range of exquisite jewellery called Enchanted. A range inspired by all the princesses of the Disney world. Here is how it came out.

I came back to my hometown during the corona lockdowns, stayed pretty dormant and got myself into generative art. The only design project that kind of stood out from that time was an app for an online learning startup called X Billion Skills. Here are some screens from the mobile app I designed for them.