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@warakkiways
A TVC we just finished making for Vespa Store (Tulshi Motors). A bit different from our earlier works, this one is all pep and colour! We would like to thank the models for hopping on at such a short notice for such a hectic production stint; and the staff at Vespa Store for their support.
Kudos to Ratika!
We would like to congratulate our copywriter and Media Officer Ratika Yumnam (Leika) on getting into Oxford University for MSc in Contemporary India. While it means that she will be leaving her post soon, it is a matter of great pride to have worked together with her. We wish her the very best in the imminent phase of her life and share her excitement for the days to come. We agree when she says 'It's like getting that letter from Hogwarts'!
Logo Design for Colour & Space
Colour & Space is an upcoming service based enterprise which provides interior as well as exterior design solutions. The name has its root in the concept that color and space are two of the most elemental and necessary components in design.
The logo for Colour & Space has been conceived keeping in mind these two components. Our efforts have been chanelised towards coming up with the best way to represent these two ideas in keeping with their fundamentality. The finalised logo tries to render these two ideas in an image depicting a minimalist colored room-like structure enclosing a pristine space.
This is one of the most extensive logo design project we have done yet. Our client being in the design business themselves had many well articulated design objectives for the logo. We welcomed the challenge! After brainstorming over several cups of coffee and tea, we came up with three distinct logo concepts.
The last one was one of our favourites. It is minimal and sharp. Stating the bare necessity, and with elegance. However, this was to be discarded as our client wanted something more abstract and this has a very prominent '&' which had little bearing on the identity of the company.
We went back to the drawing board and developed some more concepts to explore other avenues of representing the company identity.
The client found the last one satisfactory, and was almost about to finalise on it. However, we compared all the concepts again and decided that the second concept of the first batch has a great scope as well. It happened to take the most abstract meaning of d words 'colour' and 'space' and illustrated it without referring to popular symbols like the other concepts.
We worked on that concept and refined the design further. We explored the concept in various ways.
And many versions later, we found the one that works. We presented the basic idea in a more dynamic way, while the execution is minimalistic yet detailed.
Yes whew! But it was a challenge we thoroughly enjoyed taking up.
Wãrakki welcomes its newest member, Leika Yumnam. She has been a witness and a passive participant of the projects that Wãrakki has been working on till now. Not only was this because of her being my sister, but also because of the passion and vision that she shares with the group. Her inclination towards journalism and the media as such has fulfilled an empty niche which was there in the group. We are glad to announce her as our Media Officer.
In search of the giant bamboo.
We were on our way to check out a four side planing machine for bamboo when Ka Ibomcha asked us if we had seen a Marubob plantation. Ka Ibomcha is the proprietor of Khwai crafts and he has been working with bamboo for some years now. He has been helping us by sharing his experience and letting us use his workshop for making our prototypes. None of us had seen a Marubob plantation before. Marubob is the largest variety of bamboo indigenous to Manipur.
So, after we were done inspecting the planing machine at an agarbatti stick factory at Keinou, we decided to head to Singda where Ka Ibomcha knew a Marubob plantation site.
That's Ka Ibomcha leading us to the site where the bamboo grove perched on the hillside.
The stalks reached high into the sky. This was indeed a large bamboo.
Some of the trunks were so big that both my hands couldn't wrap around them.
The site was near a village and we could see some vegetable farming near the bamboo grove.
The sheaths that fell from these stalks were as large as, well, Rahul's torso!
This is a piece of half decomposed bamboo sheath revealing its network of fibers. This is particularly of interest to us as we plan to use it in an upcoming project. More on it later.
And this unusual looking plant which, Ka Ibomcha told us is called Lairen Cheisu, was also growing near the bamboo grove. The name translates as a python's walking stick. Now, pythons must be very forgetful animals since I have always seen them crawling without one.
We also saw some local chicken foraging away with their tiny chicks.
And also a dog which looked more like a fox!
The Third Person!
We are glad to welcome Rahul Laishram as our third partner. We have been associated for a long time now and he has been part of the many discourses which has led us to prioritise and articulate our concerns. That is to say, he fits snugly in. He did his BFA Applied Arts from Sir J J Institute of Applied Arts, Mumbai; and is currently pursuing PG Diploma in Animation Film Design from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. He will be collaborating long-distance and whenever he can take a break from his course. Meanwhile he can't wait to finish it and start working full-on!
Labour effective bamboo lamination technique
We are conceptualising a major project which deals with researching the potential of locally available, sustainably acquired materials to replace petro-plastics, other toxic and limited resources. This project is considered in the context of Northeast India. We are yet to finalise the details of the project; but we have started working on it already!
Using bamboo as a replacement of wood (esp. hardwood) has many benefits to the ecology, as it will directly reduce the rate of deforestation. Most hardwood takes around 20 years to mature as compared to 3-5 years for bamboo. Northeast India is home to various types of bamboo and its usage as a building material is a traditional practice. However in the last few decades, we see a trend of plastic products replacing the time tested sustainable products people of the region has been accessorising their lives with. This causes serious harm to the environment, health of the life forms (including humans), and the economic sustainability of the region.
The challenge is to explore new (and old) alternatives to these unsustainable and/or toxic materials; and upgrade them if need be using modern appropriate technology.
There is already a popularly used technique of laminating split bamboo culms to make solid regular timber, which can be used as a replacement for wood or in various other products. We were very interested in this technique as we were toying with the idea of introducing a line of lifestyle products including furniture (pssst!). Luckily, we found one person who has been using this technique to make furniture in Imphal. Khwairakpam Ibomcha was fascinated with this way of using bamboo, esp. in Taiwan. He started work on replicating this technique here using basic machineries, some of which he designed himself.
He is using the popular method where the bamboo culm is split and each strip is planed on four sides and then laminated to form sheets. We learnt through him that this process is very labourious as each strip is fed through hand in a crude 2 sided planing machine he made, and the remaining two flat surfaces planed by hand. Each strip is planed this way before laminating to get flat boards used in building furnitures. In an industrial setup this process is mechanised using a four-sided planing machine which consumes lots of energy/fuel and is not affordable for most small scale industries operating here.
↑ Conventional bamboo lamination technique
Due to the amount of labour his process needs, Mr. Ibomcha is not able to sell his products at a reasonable price in spite of bamboo being much cheaper than the wood used in conventional furniture.
We were in a bind. We were not interested in producing sustainable 'luxury' products for a niche consumer base. What we wanted was a real alternative to hardwood, which can compete with it and surpass it. Identifying the problem as one concerning the method of processing the bamboo, we proceeded to research on other methods relevant to our situation.
We came up with this method illustrated in the accompanying pictures. Here we use a bamboo species with a thin walled culm. We cut the nodes out and split it into strips of roughly the same size. After scrubbing the strips clean, we glued the strips together under pressure as such without planing. This is possible because the strip is thin and the difference in the curvature of the concave and convex surfaces is negligible. The resulting board is leveled using a band saw and then sanded. This method dramatically reduces the amount of labour needed as leveling is required only once on the resulting board, hence solving our problem. We have already made some prototypes using this technique and it sure looks great! We are now working on extending the size of the timber by employing a running bond pattern while laminating the strips. Then we will put it through some tests to measure its strength and compare it with wood.
Once finalised, we will be releasing all the details of this method under a copyleft license for all to use! In fact it will be part of a database of open-source sustainable and responsible design and techniques we are working on.
As we prepare to diversify, a w.i.p. screenshot of a design we are working on.
We have just finalised the logo design for Iteng. Stationeries and stickers are in the making.
Iteng is a group of small scale enterprises with a specific focus on providing employment and self support to people within one's community. It focuses on local crafts and skills to produce handloom, handicraft and other essential items for use within the region. It functions by bringing together domestic working units set up at the workers' homes under one management and marketing system, thus preserving and nurturing the tradition of working at home while leading a stable domestic life at the same time.
The logo that we have designed for Iteng is built upon the ideas of domesticity, productivity, and community. It illustrates the salient attributes of the enterprise with a very minimal design which resonates with the clarity and simplicity of Iteng's business model.
Our first visiting cards got delivered today!
First Things First 2000 a design manifesto: we sign
First Things First 2000 manifesto was published by Adbusters magazine in 1999 (actually an updated version of a manifesto published in 1964 by a British designer called Ken Garland) to generate discourse around responsibility and values in design.
The sense of moral impunity in one's profession is brought about by the watertight demarkation of 'work' and 'life' inherent in the artificial concept of 'Professionalism'. It induces one to defragment the organic whole of one's consciousness into stackable concepts which can be piled up to form today's hegemonic structures. This is why we at Wãrakki Ways remain amateurists!
We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.
Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession's time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.
Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.
We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.
In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.
We are pleased to announce the birth of WÃRAKKI WAYS!
Wãrakki Ways is a multi-disciplinary design and innovation consultancy based in Manipur. We are a team of serious amateurists who believe in tackling problems with creativity and an unorthodox approach. Also, we advocate sustainable and conscientious solutions.
Each project is conceptualised and directed by one of the two partners. According to the requirement of each project, we recruit or collaborate with relevant individuals or firms to form a team who will execute the project. This arrangement works well with our aspiration of tackling a broad range of tasks and applying our methodology to provide solutions.
Check out our site here.