Suganth

My story.. 

Scroll down to read my story about getting into design, oh and while you are on it, listen to my favourite playlist  

First time I realised I loved creating things from scratch, it gave me an incredible sense of pleasure and completeness.  I was not an active kid who goes outside to play, but rather I was a kid who rather spends time at home, watching Cartoon Network and admiring the artists behind those shows. I ended up building and drawing things related Batman, Tin Tin, SWAT Kats and other TV Shows

Got my first legos and started building small-scale buildings and architecture. I ended up building all the cool things that come in SWAT Kats, including the bikes, flying pods, cars, pistols and the infamous TurboJet. In the matter of time, I started to improvise the originals. I wrote my own storyline and even drew improvised characters.

I started building model houses made of cardboard and playing cards. Well, this might sound simple, but this made me aspire to become an architect. My Summer vacations were filled with new drawings in my notebooks and pencil shavings all around my house.  

Discovered that I like to be creative and it's fun in its
own way.

During my early teenage years, I upped my game of modelling houses, with more concrete materials. As a result, I managed to add some lights and I was able to go creative with tiny gardens. But this faded out when I got a new toy with unlimited potential, my first computer. 

It had 256gb Ram memory and it ran on Intel Pentium Processor. ost importantly, it ran Windows XP. 

At that time, I wasn't really into digital design or User experience, but I felt something great about windows XP. I fell in love with those icons, sounds, and overall colour system. I got super hooked into strategy and first person games. Age of Empires and other open world games let me be creative, resourceful and artistic. 

Encountered my first
digital inspiration.

I got my first good computer. It entertained me to play endless games, but most importantly it enabled me to start designing. I designed my first poster, first app, first website, first 3D model, first render, first game. 

I was so hooked to Google Sketch Up and Autodesk Maya. The combined passion of creating something from scratch and painfully wait for it to render gave me so much joy. I was doing creative sprints on long weekends and summer vacations.

I was pursuing a bachelor in computer science engineering and I was trying to bridge the gap between tech and my passion somehow and I ended up making a game out Unity Engine. The whole project taught me how to learn and try out from community resources, work with one developer and understand tech feasibility while designing, do different kinds of design: Product, Graphics, Gameplay, Storyboard, Asset, Sound and Visual effects and video editing

This was also the first time I started freelancing and I earned around 23$ for my work. I picked up motion design to aid my graphics and digital design passion. I started looking into few game loading videos and tried to mimic the same for the game I built. Little I know that the basic keyframe animation and tracking would help me on a long run in building prototypes for applications

Finding my path into
Digital design. 

This was the peak period of my interest quadrupling towards design. I met my first mentors, inspirational Senior designers and Design Managers, and worked with amazing user-focused products and delivered value to millions of users.

This is also the period, I learned to start writing, start taking photos and started taking life more preciously. I learned the art of sweating on details and designing functional+beautiful products at Cleartrip. See what I worked on there

I started travelling, and started contemplating about my comfort zone. In 2016, I finally stepped out of my comfort zone and moved to South East Asia.  I joined Carousell, an Incredible mission focused startup in Southeast Asia. Here I'm trying to ship value to our users through impactful designs. The best part of working at carousell is that I get to design for majority of users who have a totally different culture than my background and I get to learn how they use products to understand more about them. See what I've been working here.  

Embracing Product Design and it's responsibilities.