grid – Musings of an eccentric mind

Alphabet

Several years ago, my uncle gifted me a bead loom kit. Seeing the actual tools used to make bead jewellery got me excited. I couldn’t wait for my holidays to start using it. My mother and I read through the manual and she assembled the loom. I drew out an elaborate design on the drafting paper provided with the kit and had begun imagining a bracelet on my wrist!

It was only once I had drawn the grid for the design of my bracelet and begun weaving each individual bead into the loom that I realised the effort that is involved in beading.

I have always found it difficult to haggle with street vendors selling these kinds of bracelets. Having tried it out myself, I don’t even think of negotiating.

This one with my initial is one of the handful of bracelets I weaved on the loom.

Explore all the alphabets over at the Daily Post

Design Grid

Sometimes we fail to see things that are right in front of us. And it took me four days of looking around and racking my head, to see the obvious.

Be it the drafting paper or the guides of a digital tool, the grid is an important part of a designer’s work.

After I finished kicking myself for failing to realize this, I began seeing grids everywhere. The mosaic on the building’s wall, the tiles on our balcony floor, the chessboard inside the attic, the flannel of a train passenger, the gate of my office, the pattern book for cross stitching, the visible and imaginary separators in the drawer…

I realized that the grid is not just a tool for a designer, it is design — working for us without drawing attention to itself — hidden in plain sight.

This is a screen grab of the logo I created some time ago for a t-shirt ‘brand’ I tried to create*. It is the letter ‘ka’ written in four languages — Tamil, Hindi, English and Bengali (the last one being accidental!)