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Back in February, as we turned 9, we sent out our very first newsletter. It’s been exactly six months since. Never imagined that the world would take such a dystopian turn, did we? We are all stuck at home, days on end, trying hard to find some cheer in our lives. We know several people who have fallen sick with COVID-19. Most have recovered but a few have sadly succumbed. The pandemic has naturally taken a toll on our work and productivity, as well as that of our clients’. Project launches have been thrown off schedule, sales conversations have stalled and most organisations are tentative about the future. Suffice to say that everyone’s collectively riding out this disruptive period.
However, disruptions also help us grow. They create an opportunity to step back and rediscover ourselves. We already see signs of people starting to accept the new normal and adapting to the circumstances. There’s reason for optimism and we’re definitely clinging on to it. We thought it’s a good time to reflect back on some highlights from the first half of this year.
- 🏁 We kicked off 2020 with a successful Craft 2 to Craft 3 migration of one of our large web projects. This was a big achievement since we were making a comeback from two failed attempts in late 2019 (owing to the significant underlying technical changes involved).
- 📔 Souvik contributed an essay reflecting on the journey of New Media/Digital Design in the last decade to DxD@10 — a coffee table book celebrating 10 years of Design X Design. The book serves as a design directory and an archive of all DxD activities since its inception. Naturally, it presents a unique insight into the status of design in India. DxD@10 was launched in January at Alliance Française New Delhi alongside the opening ceremony of the tenth 20under35 Exhibition.
- 🎙️ In February, Souvik appeared in a devMode.fm podcast episode titled “Developers are from Mars, Designers are from Venus”. It touched upon different facets and challenges of designer-developer collaborations in the context of the web. (Developer #protip — subscribe to devMode.fm for some enlightening chatter on the modern web.)
- 🎉 Our work got featured on The Hard Copy in a newly launched design showcase section called Gadzook! The Hard Copy is an online magazine that covers stories at the intersection of design, technology, product and innovation, particularly in the context of emerging economies. (Designer/Freelancer #protip — lots of gyaan to be found in THC’s Community and Resources sections. We found Rahul Gonsalves’ business tips and Meeta Malhotra’s strategies from the last recession particularly useful in navigating the pandemic.)
- 🌐 On Feb 22nd we celebrated the third-edition of World IA Day in New Delhi. Four local speakers shared their experience in information architecture, archiving history and culture, digital interactions and data visualisation. Here’s a recap of the event.
- 🕊️ In March, as the financial year was coming to a close, we finally put in motion plans to give back in the form of regular institutional donations. We decided to split our pool three ways between projects or organisations that impact our work, our industry, and our society. We’d urge you to magnify our efforts by donating to Gulp (a toolkit we’ve been relying on for development automation workflows), The Internet Archive (a digital library that’s archiving the web) and Goonj (a disaster relief and humanitarian aid organisation in India). We also extended our support to Internet Freedom Foundation by committing to host their upcoming website (which we’re building for them) for the next 3 years.
- 💆♂️ April was a month of learning. We kicked-off a large university project that put Craft’s multi-site feature to test — how often do you get an opportunity to architect 18 websites inside a single CMS? And all this as we, our collaborators and the client adapted to working from our homes. Phew!
- 🗣️ In May, thanks to some nudges from Jitendra Vyas, we started having weekly sessions on content websites. It gradually evolved into Content Web — a series of freewheeling online conversations on the various aspects of creating and managing content-based websites. (More on that below.)
- 👨💻 In June, we added our fourth team member. Meet Paul — a Frenchman living in Cambodia who first reached out to us after watching Paul has been building websites for over 10 years and collaborated with us briefly in 2019. Paul’s experience, approach and values are a natural extension to Miranj and it was a perfect opportunity for us to join forces.
Content Web
Continuing from above, Content Web has turned into an ongoing weekly session (usually every Saturday morning) hosted on the Hasgeek platform. We discuss various facets of creating and managing content-based websites such as marketing/business websites, publishing sites or e-commerce sites. We try to touch upon the three key practices that work together for any website creation i.e. content (content strategists, information architects, copywriters, photographers, story-tellers etc.), web design (graphic designers, illustrators, art directors, etc.) and web development (backend and frontend developers). Here are some topics we’ve covered so far —
We’re in the process of diversifying the topics and including more design and content-focused sessions. If you‘d like to share your experience or would like to learn/discuss something please reach out (or submit a proposal).
Recent Blogposts
As we conclude the first 6 months of the pandemic, we’re close to completing one of the largest information architecture challenges we’ve undertaken so far (70 content-types and 18 websites in a single CMS/design). We’re also looking ahead at the new developments in the world of web like the Core Web Vitals (the next official Google Ranking Factor) and Craft 3.5.
But amidst the (often draining) Zoom, Slack and Google Meet calls, we sorely miss quality social interactions. We think emails are a great channel to stay positively connected in this socially-distanced world. So hit reply and write back to us. We’d love to hear how you’ve been doing and what you’re up to.
Until the next edition.
– From all of us at Miranj
Miranj is Archit, Paul, Prateek, and Souvik