About
I'm Rakesh, a multidisciplinary designer specializing in product design. I design web apps, mobile apps, and brand identities. I work with small startups as their founding designer, taking care of almost everything related to design. I've been designing professionally since 2011, and recreationally from 2001. Previously, I was a project engineer in a multinational manufacturing firm in India.
Complex design problems excite me. The high that comes from distilling all the complexity into an elegant, simple and beautiful interface is invigorating. I love designing complex, data-heavy products with intricate information architecture and labyrinthine flows (Bipp is one such product that provided me with a lot of juicy design problems).
I believe how something works and looks are equally important, and strive to strike the right balance between both through thoughtful design. While I care for design at a microscopic level I also have the bigger product picture in mind to know when to push the dev team to fix that 1px misalignment.
I'm open for remote work either full-time, part-time, or on freelance basis.
I like to work with startups that give as much importance to design as engineering, and are flexible with whatever software development methodologies they follow (Agile, Lean, Scrum, Kanban, etc.) and doesn't try to force fit design into those methodologies.
Wherever I work, I like to have complete autonomy in identifying the problems, prioritizing them and making the design decisions. I work on a maker's schedule, where I get uninterrupted time to solve the design problems. Rather than attending compulsory, scheduled meetings, I prefer to choose the mode of communication according to the situation at hand, be it face-to-face meetings or asynchronous.
I always try to establish systems and improve efficiency of the whole workplace. I'm very particular about not letting developers (or anyone) do unnecessary work (for example, building a feature without design and then rewriting everything once the design is in place). I know that at early stages startups have to do things that don’t scale, and I'm flexible to fit it, but I also try to minimize such rework by establishing a solid design-development workflow, where features are implemented in a systematic way, as quickly as possible.
I don't believe much in design sprints (where design is done collaboratively in groups comprising of most everyone in the company, and the designer acts more as a facilitator than a designer). As a designer I like to decide on what, when and from whom to get feedback and what to do with the feedback. Besides, people are too busy to take part in such collaborative design exercises to make it the default mode of doing design.
Download my resume.
