December 2017

Kalo Healthcare Solutions - Final Identity

Kalo Healthcare Solutions – Brand & Identity Design

December 17, 2017 Design
Building a futuristic brand identity for A forward-Thinking Canadian healthcare consulting company.

This holiday interval provided an enriching creative opportunity, and one, which has resulted in an excellent culmination to my 2017. I met with the Founder-CEO of Kalo Healthcare Solutions, a Toronto-based company and involved in digital healthcare consulting for enterprise solutions, and over a coffee, it was decided that I would create a brand identity system for them. After following up with some conversations, I decided to build a branding concept that conveys the message of Kalo’s assiduous focus on its stakeholders, large and small, to transform into digital healthcare by offering both strategic consultation and delivery services. This is a story of the how the brand identity design came into being.

Developing A Narrative

From the beginning, I felt I was dealing with ambiguous data with challenges in forming a right approach for developing the brand identity. So I resorted to a strategy similar to some of the other identities I have designed in which I had to conceive a series of ideas through storytelling in order to get to a metaphorical context for the brand. On the other hand, since the brand of ‘Kalo’ was fairly new I saw ample opportunity to envision a unique brand styling not influenced by its past. I was aiming to connect with a brand value in not just building a mark/symbol with type and colour schema but also depict Kalo’s mission and vision through a story. Since Kalo was a new company, the limited knowledge about its organizational structure and its lack of vision/mission proved to be a blessing, in that I wasn’t constrained in my visualization of what the company could or could not bring to this world. I had a brief which was limited in its information yet brimming with critical touch-points which I could develop into tangible concepts. I was told that ’Kalo’ is a Greek term for ‘good’, and I parked that thought for now. Instead of taking the simple route I deliberately avoided expanding that keyword into concepts and challenged myself to think further and into Greek mythology and culture. I also consciously avoided conceptualizing around the typography, although the alphabet ‘K’ did latch onto my visualization. But in terms of exploring the virtues further, what else could a company named ‘Kalo’ signify?

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Stuff I Didn’t Know About This Image of India

December 15, 2017 General

I am passionate about anything that is even remotely related to space, and this one has stuck with me since schooldays. So, as a kid from India in the 80s’, I would ponder endlessly over this satellite imagery on the back of my geography textbook probably the 6th or 7th grade, that showed the Indian peninsula alongside the island nation of Sri Lanka. All along I was curious to know the origins of this photo, like, who captured it? What was that strange pole? etc., and I was thrilled to have stumbled upon a NASA website carrying this information.

India - Gemini 11 Photo

Picture of peninsular south India was taken from space in the 60s!

So this image was taken by the Gemini 11 crew (Conrad-Gordon) on September 14, 1966 “using a 70 mm lens on a modified Hasselblad film camera”, and I don’t know why but it somehow made it to the geography school textbooks in India and into my inquisitive mind. And as I discovered later, that “strange pole” in the picture is the “7-FT Retractable L-Band Boom Antenna” from the Agena Target Vehicle.

Source: India by Night and Day : Image of the Day

Giving up on ‘InFamous: Second Son’!

December 15, 2017 General

Being a gamer and someone who takes his challenges much seriously, it’s particularly harder for me to accept that I am giving up on ‘InFamous: Second Son‘. This is a great game, the greatest exclusive perhaps on the PS4 made by Sucker Punch, and I am sad not only because I wasn’t able to beat the ‘He Who Dwells’ boss fight, but I would be left deprived of the most amazing game experiences just for not beating this boss fight. It hurts. But I tried my best – I watched videos and read tips online, and concluded that I am not ready yet to jump platforms over lava AND engage with multiple targets at the same time. The last time I faced such a difficult challenge in a boss fight was with Kessler in ‘InFamous’ on PS3 and I quit after like spending months trying to beat him. Thankfully, that fight was the last boss fight of the game and I had played the game mostly. Maybe I will return to Second Son in the distant future, but for now, I am giving it complete rest because I need some rest too.

Quotes from ‘Steve Jobs – The Lost Interview’

December 7, 2017 Design Technology

Steve Jobs - The Lost InterviewThis is one of my favourite documentaries on Steve Jobs, an interview with the legend who’s at his best reliving his time at Apple, NeXT, and beyond. It’s full of anecdotes from his thought process on product design, and why Microsoft is after all…Microsoft and I thought to reproduce some of his insightful quotes. This interview was conducted by Bob Cringely in 1995, it was lost until the director of the series found a VHS copy in his garage, and released to theatres in 2012.

At a time when technology has virtually seeped into our psyche, this interview brings a tremendous insight as to how far we have come, and especially for Apple as a company as it continues to innovate.

On Becoming a Millionaire at a Young Age

“I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over $10 million when I was 24 and over $100 million when I was 25. And it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money. I think money is a wonderful thing ’cause it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback and things like that. But especially at that point in my life, it was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the company, the people, the products we were making, what we were gonna enable people to do with these products.”

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Why You Should Be Embracing ‘Inclusive Design’

December 3, 2017 Design

Today is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, promoted by the United Nations since 1992 as an understanding of disability issues and to mobilize support for the dignity, rights, and well-being of persons with disabilities. I find this an excellent opportunity to reflect on the choices we make as designers of the modern digital revolution in embracing inclusive design for our products.

Product companies are increasingly aiming for an equitable relationship with its diversified customer segments. Designers in the ‘customer experience’ and ‘user experience’ field whose primary focus was streamlining user-interactions would have to accommodate a strategic-level thought process in incorporating a 360-degree outlook which includes a product’s physical & environmental aspects besides UI. For design professionals, therefore, the boundary between ‘industrial design’ and ‘experience design’ has blurred exponentially as customers evolve and companies remain committed to delivering business value.

As a consultant, I am involved in the framing of a viable design strategy for digital systems and applications, and it becomes imperative that I acknowledge the ambiguity of connecting the product goals with user needs and make amends in advocating a design which is inclusive for all. In more specific terms, that means integrating a systems design that reaches out to the masses by helping them achieve their objectives regardless of the physical and mental hurdles. In the words of the legendary Steve Jobs lies vital clues for designers in approaching products from the context of an ‘inclusive design’ which is engaging.

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

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