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We ended our last newsletter bidding good riddance to 2020. Little did we know that 2021 had completely different plans. In the six months between the two emails, the world around us has endured some significant blows. A couple of our neighbouring nations have experienced the toppling of democracies, and here in India, we suffered a heart-breaking second wave of the pandemic. These past months have been a rollercoaster of emotions, anxiety and dwelling on existential questions. Hope you’ve been keeping well during these times.
Amidst the gloom, work has been a saviour of our spirits and mental health. We’ve had our hands full doing some interesting gigs and feel lucky to have enjoyed a steady rate of incoming enquiries. Having had to turn down several interesting opportunities during this period, we’ve decided to undertake a different challenge i.e. adding a senior web developer to our team. More on that (and how you can help us) a little later. But first, let’s run through some highlights from this period —
- 📅 In February, shortly after we turned 10, we organised another edition of the World Information Architecture Day. This is the first time we pulled off a virtual event with logistical support from our friends at Hasgeek and local WIAD volunteers. The talks touched upon some interesting subjects: Computational Gastronomy, Indoor Gardening and Visual Narratives. You can catch the recordings on YouTube in case you missed the event.
- 🕊️ In March, just like last year, we donated a portion of our profits towards three causes — one that impacts our work, another that impacts our industry, and finally one that impacts our society. After much deliberation within the team, we picked these three wonderful organisations—
- Software Freedom Conservancy (supporters of several open-source projects)
- Mozilla (the makers of Firefox web browser)
- AltNews (fact-checking media organisation)
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We urge you to join our efforts in supporting them.
- 🐣 Over the next couple of months, three of our projects went live —
- First up was Obvious — a Bangalore-based digital product and strategy consulting firm. We developed their new website in Craft CMS in close collaboration with their designers and communications team. Their new site launched in February, with a gradual rollout of newer features over time.
- Next was Azim Premji University — an institute in Bangalore widely known for its emphasis on education for social change. The university was set up to fill the need for well-qualified professionals in the social sector. We built their website in collaboration with Shalini Sekhar and Kavya Murthy. The site was launched in May and has received great feedback. We’re excited (and humbled) to have played a small part in their journey towards a more just, equitable, humane and sustainable society.
- And the third one was Internet Democracy Project — a Delhi-based policy and advocacy organisation working towards digital rights and democracy in India. Back in 2013, we’d created a WordPress-based website for them. This year the website underwent a complete technical overhaul with migration to Craft CMS and some minor updates in design. This site also went live in May, with some new yet-to-be-revealed sections bidding their time.
- 🏛️ Having spent over a year working remotely we realised that it was hard to find time to interact as a team. So in May, we started a new internal initiative called Townhalls. Every Friday, for about 1.5 hours we get all hands on board to discuss various work-related topics. It can be a past project retrospective, internal policy discussions, working out issues faced at work, sharing new learnings, or exploring new territory. The idea is to facilitate team communication beyond day-to-day project talk (and once-a-month chill sessions) and for the team to grow (and chart out the studio’s future) together. If you’ve dabbled with a similar initiative within your organisation, we’d love to hear and learn from your experience. Do drop us a note.
- 🗣️ In June, Souvik was invited to a global panel on “Curiosity and Information Architecture” at 24 hours of UX. The hour-long conversation between Ghada Kandil (Egypt), Hertje Brodersen (Germany), Jason Roa (The Philippines), Andrew Jung (Canada), Luis Alveart (Colombia) and Souvik Das Gupta (India) was insightful and represented views from around the world.
- ✨ Also in June, Prateek took the online stage at TypeLab Asia (part of Typographics 2021) to demonstrate a new Type Testing Tool that we’ve been developing closely with Universal Thirst (a type foundry in Bangalore and Reykjavik). If you missed the live demo, you can catch an early sneak peek through Prateek’s slide deck.
- 🎙️ In July, Souvik and Tejas (from 3 Sided Coin) kick-started Two Studio Heads Walk Into a Bar — a space for discussing the business side of small creative service agencies. You can catch the live stream on YouTube and ask questions every alternate Saturday at 11am (or go through the recordings at your own leisure). If you’d like us to discuss a particular topic, or participate in a future conversation, please reach out to us @twostudioheads on Twitter.
- 💉 By August our entire team got fully vaccinated. This is certainly an important milestone. We feel a lot safer and we hope that the vaccination numbers around us climb up rapidly so that we can get back to normalcy.
Job Opening
We are looking for a mid-to-senior level web developer (with around 5-7 years of experience) to help us continue making great websites. This is a remote position and the candidate may be located anywhere in India or the rest of the world (with at least a 4-hour time overlap with the Indian timezone). Would you know a suitable candidate who shares our passion for web development and can confidently handle modern web projects? If yes, please refer them to us (we’ve got a handsome referral fee for a successful hire). Please do spread the word.
Coming Up: Double Appearance on Sat, 28th August
- The next episode of Two Studio Heads Walk Into a Bar will feature Hamsa, Tejas and Souvik discussing the two modes of running a small business — as an independent freelancer/consultant, or setting up a team. Catch Episode #5: “To fly yourself or to build a crew?” live on YouTube at 11am IST.
- Prateek will give a talk on “Micro-caching in Nginx for High Performance” at the 6th Edition of Bangalore Site Speed. In his talk, he’ll deep-dive into our caching strategy for lightning-fast websites. Catch the online event from 11am to 1pm IST.
Leaving you with some snaps from the conferences, chill sessions, and a rainy day when 4 of us managed to get together and play some badminton. Do write to us about how things are going at your end.
Stay safe and see you around,
– From all of us at Miranj
Miranj is Archit, Divya, Paul, Prateek, and Souvik.