Kshitiz Anand

In one of my earlier posts, I had written about analyzing logos by using Semiotic Theory. What it basically was to take a closer understanding through different point of views related to the viewer, the designer, etc. Of late one notices that even the governments have been interested in getting their logos designed, and seeking inputs from designers. It is a healthy sign indeed. One such example is the Government of India working hard on the Unique Identification Project under the name of Unique Identification Authority of India and headed by former Infosys co-founder, Nandan Nilekani.

Nandan Nilekani launching the new logo and name

They recently had a new name (Aadhaar) to the whole project and a new logo unveiled.

I am going to do a critical analysis of this logo based on the semiotic theory and seeking the explanations from the phenomenological understanding that I have developed over the years of designing logos and branding solutions.

To start with, when trying to understand the semiotics behind the logo, one first has to understand the referential function i.e. the content of what the logo is composed. The Aadhaar logo is primarily composed of three parts namely, the sun and the finger print and the text below the logo. There are two prime signs in the logo in terms of the imagery. These signs signify certain attributes independently and then as a collective they have a different meaning. While doing a critical analysis, it is important that we understand the signified meaning of all the individual signs and what they signify and then finally the overall logo.

Being an Indian, I understand that the association with the Sun is perhaps more than any celestial body out there. The sun is an element that is worshiped across the country and hold an important cultural significance in the state of things here. Metaphorically a sun would signify brightness, progress, sunshine and the ray of hope in a dark world. At the back of the mind one is also thinking progress and the development of the masses. The aim of the project is indeed to do that. Things like getting identity, removing irregularities in ration cards, and other loan procedures, for the primarily rural audience is a big goal of this project.

The number 7 again holds an important status in the Hindu Mythology, and that could be an explanation for the seven rays of the sun. The shape of the says of the sun has a motif that is inspired from the lotus petals and that too has some significance in the Hindu mythology. Based on these points, one may get the impression that it is a non-secular logo, but looking at the universality of the sun, it is best to assume secularity in the logo.

One of the key aspects when looking at the logo is the sender-receiver relation. The sender in this case is the government of India, who owns the project, and the receiver of the information (and the meaning) is the public and the citizens of the country.  You want a logo that is easy to identify, and hence the sun and the finger prints have been used. Both of them are easy to identify with the audience (which is an Indian audience) that we are looking at.

However notice that at some point of time the finger print actually morphed itself graphically into patterns. he abstraction leads to it becoming a pattern instead of just a finger print. This is good, as the project uses not only finger prints; but also iris patterns, and therefore a graphic representation of the pattern was required.

The presence of the similar names (do a Google search on Aadhaar and see the results you get) , as compared to a totally new word (which would have come about if UADAI was used to create the logo) could create some confusion in the initial days, but it will be overcome by the mass usage of Aadhaar for this project. The choice of the name is smart, as the word can be found across languages and is easy to connect with a larger pool of people. Having its root in the Sanskrit language definitely has a wider reach, but still misses out on a few pockets.

I am not to impressed with the choice of colors here. The red and yellow gives it a communist feel to it and could lead to some controversies. Would love to see more of the India blue, or the usage of the saffron in the logos. The red being so dominant a color, the yellow / orange is totally overshadowed and its only when you come near to the logo that you notice the sun’s halo.

Overall, I feel there could have been a better design, but I think to start off with this is a good choice. Once the project is up and running and the word Aadhaar is on everyone’s talk, there can always be a redesign of it. I congratulate the designer of the logo and the government for working on this project and valuing designers!

Cheers!

I have been out of blogging much for quite some time now.

It has been mostly due to the startup Deskala. We recently completed 6 months there and the journey there has been truly fascinating. During this period we have interacted with a lot people, and me personally got to know a lot more because of my photography workshops too. The other reason is the travel, which if something I just love, so cannot put an end to that too.

One of the biggest challenges that we have faced as Design Entrepreneurs, (Designpreneur) is to sell the service of design to people in the Business tea. And when this happens inspite of having close to 10 years of experience between us, it surprises me. My friend and co-founder of Deskala; Porus wrote an interesting article on this phenomenon, and what both the parties namely the Business and the Design team should work towards.

In my opinion, I think that its relatively easier to become a Designpreneur, but more difficult to sustain oneself as that. It’s easy, because right from the college days, one is designing and creating products and services. The innovations is happening then and there itself and its actually their first meeting with the entrepreneurial life. Now let’s see what happenes when that particular developed idea is marketed and sold properly. Viola! you have the idea for the company that you are going to put up.

The other big challenge that we have is to position Deskala as a design firm and not a development firm. There are already numerous firms who start off with software development and slowly add designers to the team.  As Deskala, we are going the other route, wherein we say build a design centric team first and then we move forward.

As mentioned  do not want to position Deskala as a Web Design or UI Design firm. With the founding team members hailing from different design and related backgrounds, i.e. Graphic, Product. Interaction Design and Research, Architecture, etc it is not justified that we stick only to the UI part as a service.

The journey as been filled with all possible emotions, but in the end it is been very satisfying!

Of late there has been a sudden rise in interest in the propagation of Design Thinking. The impetus  to this has been hugely due to some articles in the Harvard Business Review(last year), and  Businessweek (this year).

If the need of the hour is to think innovation and think beyond the obvious, Design Thinking is definitely an essential tool. A lot of companies like Apple, who are driven by Design, have been doing it for years now. A few more have joined the bandwagon, as mentioned in this another post by BusinessWeek.

Apart from these above, there has been the recent publicly available talk by Tim Brown at the TED conference this year. Brown is evangelizing that Design Thinking needs to go to a much larger scale and also that designers should start to think big.

Everyone seems to be acknowledging it. A few seem to understanding it, and a fewer seem to be to be understanding it. The interesting point about Brown’s talk is that he looks at going beyond the notion of consumerism with which Design has been traditionally associated with.

One of the other great design thinkers, who I admire, and have been a student of myself, Erik Stolterman also talks about the notion of Design Thinking in his blog Transforming Grounds. He also makes the very valid point that Design Thinking is been there since a long time and has found its applications in numerous fields.

I strongly believe that one of the areas where Design can play a huge role is Design for Social Impact. This also happened to be the topic of my Masters thesis at Indiana. The challenges are immense, and the solutions are rarer to find, and that is why Design Thinking becomes important.

The outcome of the application of Design Thinking to create Design Models, to create actual solutions for a social cause, is not been explored much. Therefore in the Design Research Company that I have started, Deskala, we are primarily aiming to achieve this. The questions that we ask day in and day out, in due course of our field studies, is how Design can be used to bring about the Social Change. Being in a country like India, where there is a certain amount of Social Innovation happening at the Base of the Pyramid, we stand a good chance to see the applicability of Design Thinking and its measure its success.

Design Thinking however need not be culminating in Social Innovations in the form of  products only. The outcome could be an interface, it could be a service that is designed, it could be a model etc. Because Design Thinking itself tends to see its application in different areas, the outcomes vary.