May 2022 – Present · 3 yrs 10 mos · India

• When it comes to funding, it's about time Design is used as one of the core metrics to evaluate startups. What does Design reveal? How co-founders think. Privileged to join SUNiCON as an advisor to the fund as well as a mentor to the startups we fund. Working with the #WealthEnergizer SURESH JAIN and Saloni Jain along with a sharp team of seasoned professionals from diverse backgrounds. May a hundred unicorns bloom in India in the shining wealth energy of the Sun

Jul 2021 – Dec 2023 · 2 yrs 5 mos · New Delhi, Delhi, India

• Solving tough challenges at scale while building and nurturing a team, at the intersection of Health AI, privacy, culture, and community. Confidential.

Nov 2020 – Present · 5 yrs 4 mos · Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

• Helped launch Narrativ.Design for the emerging new normal across the globe. Collaborate closely with the team, working with C-suites across diverse industry verticals. The role is fundamentally simple: Explore exponential growth for your business by tapping into cultural resets. Re-brand and re-position your business offerings as products of culture, and your business as a producer of culture.
• Please refer to the Narrativ.Design website for more details

Aug 2020 – Apr 2021 · 8 mos · India

• Working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, biometrics. Solving wicked problems at a global scale for the Digital Identity (Digital ID) market, as well as for digital document-workflows. Especially riding the digital transformation triggered by the COVID pandemic.
• As CVO, my role was to study and anticipate the emerging industry trends, pore through hundreds of pages of reports and insights, conduct product research, work closely in the team with the CTO, CPO, CEO to define the magic in the product and help define the roadmap. Use Designthinking to solve for multiple types of wicked problems: productizing and business. Help author pitch-decks. Collaborate and strategize closely on the business plan. Author the brand narrative and the brand design. Set up the design system. Nurture structured system thinking while authoring multiple and complex mindmaps. Formulate the visual design language. Author the UX design across the product ecosystem. Collaborate on the marcom strategy and plan. Set up and lead the growing design team

Mar 2020 – Jul 2020 · 4 mos · India

• Solve wicked problems using Designthinking: in productizing, story-telling, business innovation and marketing. Design the user-experience of an endoscopy machine for multiple stakeholders. For globally divergent cultures and markets in the West and in the Far-East. Completely hands-on with the design team: starting with insight gathering from exhaustive UX Research, authoring the pitch-deck, creating a unique enterprise framework for design and productizing, leading the product ecosystem UX and design, to iterations through feedback loops. All this while also solving unprecedented challenges for ops in the breaking of the COVID situation and lockdowns that severely disrupted our workflows from exactly day 1 onwards of the project

May 2019 – Present · 6 yrs 10 mos · India

• Sabadnaad is an audiophile hardware project for the global market. Led by award-winning music producer, sound engineer, and entrepreneur K.J. Singh. In collaboration with some of the greatest musicians and scholars of Indian classical music, Indian devotional music, and of Sikhism. It brings excellence, purity, and the highest quality technically possible today, to the rendering of devotional Sikh music, known as 'Sabad'.
• My role is to productize and design the user-experience for the hardware speaker, and the multiple surfaces of the software ecosystem. I also collaborate on defining the digital specs for the hardware, and various technical and design inputs with respect to the productizing, prototyping, and manufacturing.
• The role combines my deep passion for music, sound and audio, propels me to deep dive and further research into the theory and understanding of Indian classical music. My job is to especially make the rich complexity and depth of these domains intuitively understandable for worldwide appeal. I also work closely with the core team on strategizing for manufacturing, business and business-modelling, marketing and outreach, as well as other aspects of brand and design

Sep 2014 – Present · 11 yrs 6 mos

• Conducting professional training every fortnight in User-Interface Design and UX, for startups, IT, tech, and media companies. Since January 2015 being supported by NASSCOM under their 10,000Startups initiative, with industry sponsorship from various synergetic organizations from time-to-time. These workshops are for creating and nurturing a vibrant and growing community of UI design and UX professionals in India. The objective is to kickstart a revolution in design from India that impacts the world, this needs to go reach out to at least 10 million people in India. Check out the growing list of events here: bit.ly/niyam and view the pics from these events on my flickr page. Help me in spreading this revolution across India.

Aug 2014 – Present · 11 yrs 7 mos

Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 · 0 mo

Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 · 0 mo

Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 · 2 yrs

Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 · 2 yrs

Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 · 2 yrs

Jan 2003 – Jan 2006 · 3 yrs · New Delhi, India

• Created and conducted advanced workshops on:
• 1. Color Theory and digital color theory.
• 2. Digital Typography and Pre-Press and PDF Workflows.
• 3. Print-Design and Print-Production.
• 4. Graphic Design, Logo and Branding Design, Digital Illustration.
• 5. Digital Photography
• 6. Digital Photo-editing and Photoshop.
• 7. Digital Video Compositing.
• 8. DVD-Authoring.
• 9. Digital Sound Theory, Sound Design, Production.
• 10. Linux and FOSS adoption for Digital Creativity.
• 11. Creative Commons and free-culture.

Nov 2001 – Mar 2002 · 4 mos · New Delhi, India

• Vogel-Burda Group, the parent company of CHIP magazine from Germany, was to enter a formal joint-venture agreement with M2M India Pvt Ltd., subject to the Indian government clearing such Foreign Direct Investments and ventures in publishing and broadcasting. Apart from being the Executive Editor, I was soon handed the additional responsibility of being the CEO. In this role,
• 1. I had to travel to Germany to the headquarters of Vogel-Burda in Munich, to understand business processes and editorial practices, mentored primarily under Dr. Gerald Dick.
• 2. I also had to put together the Publishing strategy for the magazine, worked on its business strategies and models.
• 3. Strategize and work out the envisioned scenarios for print-production with Tata Press in Mumbai. 4. Helped put together the envisioned marketing strategy and gameplan for the new and emerging scenarios in the Indian market.
• 5. Along with HR put together a hand-picked and growing team for editorial; design; lab-testing at our Chip labs; distribution; marketing; sales.
• 6. Do a lot of number-crunching and business-plan studies and tweaks.
• 7. Flew to Germany again in 2002 to represent Chip India at the CeBIT technology Fair, Hannover, and for further consultations in Munich with Vogel-Burda.
• The project ended and the team disbanded when the expected government approvals for the FDI in joint ventures in media and broadcasting did not come through till the end of that financial year.

Aug 2001 – Nov 2001 · 3 mos · New Delhi, India

• Executive Editor, CHIP Magazine, from Germany, for its relaunch in India subject to a government approval for a Joint-Venture in media and publishing, between CHIP magazine's parent company at that time, Vogel-Burda Group, and a newly-formed company M2M India Pvt Ltd., founded by Amtech Auto as a new venture in publishing. My tasks included putting together the editorial strategy, planning the editorial and publishing plan, getting a team together, and advising the Managing Director. Within a few months I was given the added designation of becoming the CEO. More details next.

Jan 2000 – Mar 2001 · 1 yr 2 mos · New Delhi, India

• Started as a columnist circa 1996 for PCWorld magazine in India, writing the 'iconoclast' column for the MacWorld section of the magazine. In 2000 was made the Chief Editor, handling the entire editorial of the magazine, its devoted editorial team in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore. Also handled the in-house tech-labs, testing, and product shoot-outs. Plus had marketing report to me as well.

Jan 1998 – Jan 2013 · 15 yrs

Jan 1996 – Present · 30 yrs 2 mos

• Digital Dionysus is my professional consulting firm, officially recognized as a service-provider or 'OEM Vendor for Services' or similar, by Apple, Adobe, Intel, Xerox, Living Media, Dorling Kindersley, and about a dozen more global and prestigious clients.
• I work and consult in user-interface design, mobile-app design, web-design, graphic-design for print, newmedia. Also conduct professional training; offer IT-consulting; am a widely published tech-journalist and editor; work as a publishing consulting; consult on Linux & FOSS and Free Culture; and more.

– Present

Jan 1998 – Jan 2009 · 11 yrs

Jan 1998 – Jan 2005 · 7 yrs · India

Jan 1998 – Jan 1999 · 1 yr

• Conducted advanced workshops on:
• 1. Digital Typography
• 2. Film and Digital Photography
• 3. Photo-editing and Photoshop
• 4. Color Theory.

Jan 1997 – Jan 1998 · 1 yr · New Delhi, India

• A special project of Apple Computer in exclusive partnership with Ajanta Offset & Press, Apple Publishing Technology Centre (APTC) was set up as a centre of excellence by Apple to showcase its technology and superiority in the vertical fields of professional creativity and authoring: print-publishing; digital photography; pre-press; digital video; multimedia; new media.
• As Chief Consultant I reported directly to the CEO, advising on technology and strategy both in the organization and to clients from India's professional industry and community.
• As trainer, I authored several courses and workshops on:
• Digital Color Theory
• Digital Pre-Press and Production
• Digital Photo-Editing and Photoshop
• Digital Typography and Graphic-Design
• Digital Illustration and Adobe Illustrator
• PDF Workflows
• As trainer, I conducted the advanced workshops on the above topics for India's professional community from advertising agencies; design studios; newspaper and publishing houses; software houses; pre-press studios; printing plants; professional photographers; and graphic-design professionals.
• I also trained the trainers to handle workshops.
• As a consultant on Apple technologies, Macintosh, Postscript, Color-calibration and Color Management Systems (CMS), and Adobe software, in my areas of specialization, I was frequently called in to consult in-house as well as clients on various technical issues.

Jan 1994 – Jan 1997 · 3 yrs · New Delhi, India

• An award-winning Apple Solutions Provider partner, specializing in solutions for
• 1. Digital design, publishing and pre-press;
• 2. Pioneered textile-design solutions at least a decade before the rest of the industry caught up;
• 3. Digital Photo-archiving solutions
• 4. Digital Video-edit solutions, based on Avid and Media100.
• 5. Digital Sound solution
• Set up and trained a dedicated team of hardware and support engineers in-house.

Jan 1985 – Jan 1997 · 12 yrs · New Delhi, India

• Cut my teeth in graphic-design here, working in this discipline for 12 non-stop years.
• Set up and trained the in-house design team, eventually growing to become Art Director towards the last 5 years. Honed skills in font-design, typography, digital illustration, graphic-design, digital photo-editing, imagery, web-design, user-interface design, and print-production. Oversaw the adoption of all digital tools from version 1, of Postscript, Aldus PageMaker, Adobe Ilustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, HyperCard, HTML v1, and dozens of other software and resources.
• Concurrently, also worked as a writer, author, and Editor for various publishing projects.
• As a top-level design studio and turnkey-publishing company, Newstech worked only with international clients, authoring designs and publishing projects for the German Embassy such as the monthly 1,08,000 copies of 'German News' magazine in English and Hindi; a technology magazine 'FACETS' for the French embassy, a trade newsletter for the Australian Trade Commission, 'Carrefour' a cultural magazine for the Alliance Francaise, for the Indo-German Exports Promotion Council, for the GTZ, and several dozen other agencies.
• Also handled prestigious design and publishing projects for our sister-concern from Nairobi, Kenya, 'Newspread International'. Here, handled top-quality design and publishing projects for travel, tourism; United Nations agencies in Africa; Japanese cultural centre; and their clients from Europe.
• Newstech also published its own product, a monthly magazine sold across news-stands in India, 'CONNECT' India's first magazine on global entertainment, launched before the arrival of global tv and media in India. As Art Director of CONNECT magazine, created the bold and cutting-edge design language that won it national and international acclaim, pioneering many techniques in digital imagery and design.
• The design for the web-site of CONNECT won international awards, among the first for any website in India.