Weblog of A Designer

My Visual Art Blogalleria is one of my favorite personal Blog projects that I have initiated in the beginning of 2006, the time when I started thinking about various possibilities of a Blog and looking for different ways to use blogging as an effective tool to build a credible web presence. I coined the word ‘Blogalleria’ joining ‘Blog’ and ‘Galleria’ together, to establish this blog’s identity as ‘an on-line art gallery created using a blog’ and also, ‘a blog in form of an art gallery’. For last two years, I have been posting my personal as well as non-commercial graphics, photographs, photographics, illustrations, paintings and sketches on this Visual Art Blogalleria and it has become a public archive of my personal as well as other non-commercial artworks.

Recently, I have overhauled this Blogalleria, changed its look and feel and the sidebar content, added lots of new exhibits and items and tried to establish better interactions with my other web-based public initiatives. I am quite excited about it to see how this change affects the visitors of the site.

There was another parallel thought process brewing in my mind, when I was revamping this Blogalleria. Being a designer, I usually believe in eternal design truths, like “a dark text on light background is easier to read”. But, since I stumbled upon two interesting posts on green computing and black google by Mark Ontkush on ecoiron.blogspot.com, almost a year back, I have started thinking about Mark’s argument and since then, I have been following his blog and hist posts regularly. His argument is based on the fact that, “a given monitor (CRT) requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen” and derives a conclusion that says, websites with black background save a minuscule amount of energy, each time opened in a CRT Monitor.

Inspired by Mark’s idea, this time I have decided to change the background color to Black and to use Black as much as possible instead of any other lighter color on flat areas of the site. This effectively means that whenever someone will open any page of this Blogalleria in a CRT monitor, he/she will save a little amount of energy. A small step towards saving energy, saving earth.

I have been fascinated by Internet or worldwide web since I was introduced to it, initially as an user and later as a designer, during mid 90s. I remember those days when there were ‘Web Pages’ and how the idea of ‘Web Site’ as “a group of interrelated ‘Web Pages’ seamlessly integrated together to form an information pool” evolved. I noticed how simple formats and default fonts in normal black and underlined blue of the text-heavy sites started getting eager for cosmetic make-overs, often ending up over-doing it, when Graphics were introduced on web pages. How usability experts has started defining the minimalist parameters and how ‘Rich Media’, equipped with high-speed broadband, has overwhelmed the cyberspace with gigs of data. I was always fascinated by the changes of the behavioral patterns of people as they move on from early one-to-one telnet chats to the applet-based public chat-rooms to Webex conferences to voice chats to cam chats. The changes of user psychology that create an complex yet logical mesh of on-line habits as the users evolve themselves from early mailing lists and threads users to someone with multiple profiles in more than one web business and social 2.0 communities and networking sites.

Below are few websites that I like, among all other web presences designed be me in recent past.

Website Design for Altered Black

Altered Black
Being a design shop providing creative design and related services primarily to the corporate clients, I wanted a sober and conservative design scheme, that will eventually make the corporate visitors feel comfortable and confident while visiting this site. At the same time, I also wanted the web site to represent creative ability of the organization and provide sensual pleasure to its visitors. I tried to achieve these goals by using pastel shades, lots of white and empty spaces, a so called ‘Arty’ look, a simple but comprehensive navigation and IA, and a flexible layout that can accommodate enough information about the organization. The site is also well optimized for search engines, has a page rank of 5 and secured its position in Google top ten for targeted keywords.
Visit Altered Black’s website here »

Website Design for South Asia Center, UPENN

Website Design for South Asia Studies, UPENN

South Asia Center & South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania needed a strong visual presence for the websites of their South Asia Center and Department of South Asian Studies to reflect the exclusive nature of these two departments. The main challenge was to create multiple distinctly different visual identities on one single theme and combining multi-cultural characteristics of South Asia on the layouts without emphasizing on a specific one. In these designs I tried to merge various socio-cultural values of different parts of South Asia and meet the visual expectations of people from various demographic zones, by creating ethnic yet cross-cultural design scheme for each site.
Visit South Asia Center’s website here »
Visit South Asia Studies’ website here »

Website Design for Boipara Dot Com

Boipara Dot Com
Boipara is a vernacular literature archive that features alternative Bengali literature, e-books and magazines. I have created an informal design for the site to express the unconventional nature of this particular initiative. The main challenge was to create a template-based design scheme that can be handled by non-designers, later.
Visit Boipara Dot Com here »

Website Design for Films for Freedom

Films for Freedom
This is an on line platform for Indian documentary film-makers, where they can share their views, showcase their movies and organize screenings. A huge group of documentary film-makers led by eminent directors, has started this initiative as a protest against the role of censor board at MIFF 2002. I decided to take up the theme of ‘protest’ for this site and used a photograph of a demonstration by the group as an integrated part of user interface. I have used Courier font for the content, which is not very common in websites, to simulate the feel of manually-typed legal documents or petitions.
Visit Films for Freedom website here »

If you are a visual artist and looking for an on-line WEB 2.0 community, where you can showcase your artworks and photographs, share them with fellow artists, build your own network, create an online portfolio and publish it, then Dripbook is the perfect place for you. In a nutshell, Dripbook is a full-fledged WEB 2.0 community for visual artists, painters, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, animators, fashion designers, printmakers, sculptors and architects. One needs to register with Dripbook to avail the services offered by the site. Currently Dripbook is invitation-only for new accounts and does not offer direct registration. To create a new Dripbook account, you need to send a request to them with a little brief about you. Once they receive your request, they will review it and if satisfied, they will send you an access code to your email address. This access code is needed to create a new account on Dripbook. The standard membership is free, but one can upgrade a free account to a premium account with a nominal charge of USD 12 monthly, $ 30 quarterly or $ 108 annually. The premium membership will allow the user to publish customized website, upload more images and create more books.

Once registered (Standard or Premium), one can start uploading the images, publish books (portfolios), create his/her profile and portfolio page. Dripbook allows all its users to have customized URL for their portfolios. The URL is simple to remember and looks like this: http://www.dripbook.com/[username]/

I have created my art portfolio on Dripbook and got my personal URL too. Please visit my art portfolio on Dripbook at following location:
http://www.dripbook.com/visualsamit/

If you are a visual artist and want to create a Dripbook profile and portfolio, then please visit following URL to request a membership:
https://secure.dripbook.com/restricted/

Self-portrait – The Unwanted
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The above illustration shows a hypothetical self-portrait, that I have drawn last year for a personal project. The reason behind calling it ‘hypothetical’, is the fact that this self-portrait does not exactly portray my physical features and tries to bring out my psycho-somatic conditions at that particular moment. I aptly named it, “Self-portrait – The Unwanted”.

Early Story Illustration (1989)
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One more illustration from the initial days of my career in pre-digital era. In 1989-90, I used to work for a daily news paper as an illustrator and commercial artist. The attached illustration is one of the hundreds illustrations that I have drawn for them, during this period. Being a literature enthusiast and an avid reader of all literary forms, I used to enjoy the stories as well, for which I was supposed to draw the illustrations and my formal education in language and literature used to help me a lot to come up with the most effective illustrations for them.

Book Cover: Ceiling of Clouds
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Being an avid reader of Bengali poetry and an Bengali literature enthusiast, I always take special interests in the design initiatives that are related to Bengali literature and language. I have designed covers and illustrations for many Bengali poetry collections, novels, short story collections, literature magazines and other similar Bengali publications. Though, I always enjoy working for Bengali books and magazines, I often get really excited if I am working on books that are written or edited by my favorite Bengali authors and poets.

All the covers featured in this post are for poetry collections or novels written by my favorite Bengali authors and poets. It was more the mere professional satisfaction, when I received accolades for these covers from the writer or poet, himself. Quite natural for a designer who loves literature, isn’t it?

Book Cover: The Other Side of the Bread
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Book Cover: Eh Lulu!
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Around My House 1605
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I am always surprised whenever I find a stunning visual, hidden in our usual day-to-day life. Most of the time we really do not realize the visual potential of our mundane surroundings and we tend to ignore them very easily. One needs to develop an eye to see the usual things in an unusual manner. Once you are able to identify the awesome possibilities hidden in our regular context, you will get flooded with numerous stunning visuals, every time you look around yourself. The clichéd scenes from our regular context will start unfurling an endless world of powerful images and effective visual expressions. The attached photographs are taken in and around my apartment and demonstrate the fact that how a common object in an usual context, can become unusual and at the same time, quite stunning, too.

View the complete series “Around My House” here

Around My House 1605
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Around My House 1705
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Story Illustration for Newspaper (1990)
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One more story illustration from the early days of my career as an artist and designer. Pen and ink is still one of my favorite analog drawing media and I guess, my love for this particular media has started back in 1989-90, when I was working on these illustrations for a Bengali Daily.

Digital Illustration
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This is another illustration type I have drawn for the anti-human trafficking project for UNIFEM/Equations. At the visualization stage I tried to come up with a various illustration forms with different emotional quotients. The illustration I have shown in one of my previous post was less emotional and more associated with logical deduction of actual activities and its physical references. Unlike the previous one, the illustration shown above in this post is more attached with emotional suggestions. The key phrases for this illustration were, Compassion, Sympathy and Humanity. Where as for the previous one, the key words I had in my mind while designing, are Plan, Development, Result and Hope. Below is a thumbnail image for the previous illustration, I mentioned.

Previous illustration:

Story Illustration for daily newspaper (1989)
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This illustration is from my old paper-made folder of story illustrations from the my ‘teen’ days that I have done for news paper, during 89-90! I started working as an illustrator and commercial artist while I was still in my college, pursuing my graduation in Literature.

This particular illustration is one of my favorites from that era. I still remember very clearly that how I used the nozzle of a watercolor tube to draw the basic thick lines to form the figure, directly on the paper without any pen, pencil or brushwork and then tried to bring out the details with small strokes and thin lines of a felt pen. The thick, long lines drawn by nozzle  and the finer and shorter lines by felt pen, when juxtaposed with each other, broght out the field of depht, quite successfully, irrespective of the limitation of space, tones, and colors.

Book Cover: A Roof over Every Head [IRASEC]
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Based in Bangkok, the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC) is a member of the network of research centers of the French Foreign Ministry. They were looking for an overall visual identity for their next series of studies on different political and economical issues of South East Asia. They often used real-life photographs of objects from the region being written about, which failed to give any idea about the exact cartographic location to the global readers. They also needed an identity that stood out from conventional covers using photographs. I decided to use drawn illustrations for the covers for their publications.

For the cover of the book on housing policies of Singapore - “A Roof over Every Head”, I used the conventional idea of a metropolitan skyline with high-rises, tweaking it substantially it by imparting a hand-drawn texture suggesting the thickness and solidity of built form.

More details about this book can be viewed here

… then … as sin dripped down from the sky … sin dripping down … sin dripping … and then … dripping from the sinful sky … the sins of the sinful sky … only a trickle … only … just … no more than … sins gathering sins accumulating … sins accruing sins multiplying … sins swelling sins surging … more sins piled on sins … and more sins heaped on sinful sins …

[English version of the Bengali text scribbled in the visual poetry featured above, as translation by M Mitra]

… ensuite … la pêche descendait du ciel en coulant vers la terre … et en coolant du ciel pêchant … et les pêches du ciel pêchant … qu’un chatouillage… rien que la pêche … se reunissent … s’accumulent … s’accroissent … la pêche gonflante … la pêche sautante … plus de pêches posées sur la pêche … et plus de pêches balancées sur la pêche péchante …

[French version of the Bengali text, as translation by R DOREES]

Poésie-visuelle de Samit Roy-Rouflaquettes DOREES

Few years back, while trying to understand the enormous amount of possibilities that could be generated by putting image and text together and fusing them into one comprehensive concept, I realized if I remove all direct references of the so called ‘image’ part of this unique concoction of ‘image’ and ‘text’ and use only the visual elements generated from the ‘text’ part, it might lead me to another set of possibilities. Letters do have their own visuals. A line of text has a specific visual appeal, apart from its literal meaning and literary connotations. It has specific shapes, lines and colors - the essential ingredients for an ‘image’. It is like, drawing with text.

I was trying to create a visual image of sins, constantly dripping from the endless sky and piling up forming a heap of sins. I formed a long and continuous sentence, as if it is an one-line description of the entire scene and used that text to generate a visual form which suggests something is dripping down continuously and piling up at the bottom. It worked for me!

When a group of scholars and academics involved with a publishing initiative that seeks to bring out significant works on political theory, approached me to design covers for their upcoming publications, I was genuinely very excited. Their approach demonstrated a disregard for the cover and visual identity of the publications. Portraits of writers independently done by recognized illustrators were used, with a conventional serious color scheme of gray-blue, irrespective of the subject of that particular publication. They needed covers for two of their next publications emphasizing the content.

The Paradox of Freedom
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For the first book, “The Paradox of Freedom” my challenge was, how do I express the idea of “paradox” in the context of India’s freedom from British rule, and its emergence as a nation? How do I assemble these ideas with the writer’s strong Marxist viewpoint? I decided to use solid bold text to form a puzzle-like complex structure with flipped and interlinked letters, randomly filled in with the familiar saffron, green and white of the Indian flag. Approximating the look and texture to that of the Soviet propaganda posters, I used the communist red for the background to suggest a Marxist reading. The result was quite effective.

Revolution by Consent
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Designing acover for the second book - “Revolution by Consent” was more challenging for me. How to communicate an abstract idea like ‘consent of the people’? How to represent revolution graphically? I started working with the idea of the mass and abstracted it through a set of hands raised as if in protest signifying a revolution. A closer look at the gesture of the hands in silhouette demonstrates that instead of protest, the hands represent consent or agreement to a cause. The cause is the backdrop - the first few words of the Preamble to the Indian constitution. The red color seeping into the Preamble represents the Marxist framework used to read these historical events.

STOCK.XCHNG
http://www.sxc.hu

STOCK.XCHNG is one of the leading FREE stock photo sites that allows users to browse a huge image gallery containing 350000+ high-quality stock photographs, permits sharing of personal photos and hosts more than 25000 photographers from across the world. The site also features a very active and useful forum on photography and stock images.

While most of the images are free for download and personal use, there are many photographs distributed under hundreds of categories that are free for commercial use. Though users are encouraged to upload their images on this enormous pool of stock photographs, however one needs to be extra sure about the visual clarity and aestheticity of the images. Unless the photo represents excellent creative and technical skills, it is hard to get selected in the pool. The quality ranking process of the images and their respective ratings ensures the visual, creative and aesthetic qualities of the stock-pool.

STOCK.XCHNG also runs STOCKXPERT (www.stockxpert.com), an online shop that allows users to buy and/or sell high-quality stock photos photo at a great price!

MORGUEFILE
http://www.morguefile.com

MORGUEFILE is an archive to store post-production material for reference, an inactive job file, as the term is explained on the home page of the site. MORGUEFILE contains hundreds of free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

The website says, “The term morgue file is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats, although the term has been used by illustrators, comic book artist, designers and teachers, as well.” The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits. MORGUEFILE is the world wide web’s morguefile repository.

MORGUEFILE allows the users to browse and download large stock photographs for personal as well commercial use. It also allows the users to contribute images to the site’s stock photograph pools. Registered users can access lightbox, create their online portfolio and submit photos. Once submitted pictures are approved by the editors/admin, the user is considered as a contributor. After the user is verified as a contributor, his/her account will forever remain within the archive of Morguefile.com as <username>@morguefile.com and the user will be given an access to this mail account as well as few other additional features at http://www.morguefile.com/horde.

Recently, MORGUEFILE has launched Morguefiles Shop (http://morguefile.com/store/index.php), with collaboration with Amazon.com, which enables their users to buy cameras, prints and other photgraphy related stuff in a secured and safe manner.

OPEN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY
http://www.openstockphotography.org

OPEN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY (beta) is mashup created to help designers find free stock photography (or public domain photography). Much like Wikipedia (and Wikimedia Commons), Open Stock Photography, is a multilingual system and allows the users to search for stock photography in virtually any language!

The Wikimedia Commons, a central media archive operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, contains more than 2,402,261 images, uploaded by over 30,000 registered users. Each of these files is available under a free content license or in the public domain; there are no restrictions of use beyond those relating to use of official insignia. Licenses which limit commercial use are considered non-free. The website OPEN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY enables its users to search, browse, view, and download these images and also encourages photographers to submit their photographs to this unique pool of free stock images.

This site offers various features and functionalities that enables the users to browse, search or download images in a more effective manner, like Search (by term, tags or colors), light-boxing, implicit tagging, search translation, Public or private image commenting, and many more. Apart from these online functionalities, OPEN STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY also offers few exclusive off-site features like, image resizing, image cropping and image printing.

STOCKVAULT
http://www.stockvault.net

STOCKVAULT is a photo sharing site that enables its users to browse and search their photo gallery of over 8.000 royalty-free, high resolution stock photos, templates and logos to use in personal and educational design projects. Users can also share their own photos and participate in the revenue sharing program.

The users can register themselves on the site as members and access the photos, lightbox and other features. Once registered as member, the user can sign up for a photographer’s account. On activation of the photographers’ account, users will be allowed to share their images with other members. STOCKVAULT is a photo sharing site and does not allow the users to sell their photos, but it does offer a unique revenue sharing program, powered by Google AdSense, to the photographers. STOCKVAULT also organizes online photography contests quite often.

Apart from a huge gallery with over 8000 stock photos, STOCKVAULT also offers a section dedicated to various tutorials related to photography, photo editing, HTML and CSS. They run a separate site with various Photoshop, CSS and Dreamweaver related tutorials at http://www.tutorialvault.net. They have two other sites featuring stock templates and stock textures, available respectively at following locations - http://www.templatesfeed.com and http://www.texturepacks.net.

STOCKVAULT also has a very useful link section that features multiple websites offering free stock photos, images and other graphics.

AMAZINGTEXTURES
http://amazingtextures.com/textures
[Please Note: The site available at http://amazingtextures.com, does not seem to work properly, but http://amazingtextures.com/textures runs perfectly fine]

As the name suggests, AMAZINGTEXTURES is a site that provides hundreds of free, high-resolution textures, images, backgrounds, wallpapers and texture maps for personal use. All images are intuitively categorized in 19 separate categories for the users to search them easily. The site also has a separate section especially built for Tiled Textures.

One can visit the “Free Sample” section to access larger images without being registration. The users need to register to download high-res files and to get access to their Lightbox feature. Lightbox enables the users to gather up to 10 textures and download them at once, as a zipped file. The registered users are also allowed and encouraged to contribute textures to this pool. If user uploads 10 high-resolution textures in 15 selected categories and/or 3D image textures, the user can get “Full Access” to the site.

To use these textures for commercial purpose one needs to contact AMAZINGTEXTURES. Please do not forget to read their Terms of Use and Disclaimer before using any images from AMAZINGTEXTURES.

ALTERED STOCKS
http://alteredstocks.blogspot.com

ALTERED STOCKS is an archive of free stock images, conceptualized, developed and being maintained by Altered Black - the one-stop creative design agency providing business-intelligent design solution for your organization and your brand.

Altered Black, as a part of their endless effort to distribute and disseminate design assets and design knowledge among designers and design-users of the world, proudly presents - ALTERED STOCKS [alteredstocks.blogspot.com], a manually updated archive of high-resolution, large stock photos and images. Anyone can download these free images and use them for personal or professional, non-profit or commercial usages.

Though, ALTERED STOCKS currently offers only high-resolution stock photographs, however other design assets like icons, illustrations and graphics will be made available soon .

Death of A Mustache
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When I saw the news of Veerappan’s death in a police encounter on the news paper, along with a photo of the deceased brigand, the first thing I noticed was the absence of his great mustache. I was not sure how Veerappan lost his legendary mustache, but I thought, ‘It’s not a death of a man or a sandalwood smuggler or a notorious bandit or the infamous brigand; it is actually a death of a great mustache!’ I might sound funny or weird but I was very much impressed by his mustache, since I have seen his picture on a newspaper when I was in high school!

Within next few days, I came up with this work!

Illustration: Under Construction
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An illustration I have done for a UNIFEM project. The project was to document the progress of various NGOs working in the area of human trafficking with fund provided by UNIFEM. I have visited those organizations and tried to capture visual references of the development and work happening there. Later, I created various collages with the photographs taken at the spot and tried to bring out my understanding about the development happened there. The illustration shown above, was for an NGO who has started to construct a huge building for the benefits of the victims of human trafficking. The building is yet to be completed, but one can easily see their hopes and happiness, around this building, still under construction. When I was there, I captured multiple low angle shots of various parts of that incomplete building and later, combined those photographs to create a collage that emphasizes on the hope of the members of the NGO, around this building, still under construction.

These 4 logos shown in the above image, are my favorites among all the logos I have designed in recent past. I guess, the main reason for these logos being my favorites, is the fact that I have enough creative freedom while designing them.

Details below: [Clockwise from top-left]

Logo for Altered Black:

Altered Black is a Bangalore-based creative design house, providing Business-intelligent Creative Design Solution for corporates. The idea behind this unusual name of the company, is very simple, as they explain it on their website, “Black altered and altered to black - a double-edged idea that plays on the possibility and impossibility of change. Black cannot be altered. What is impossible is what makes a quest possible. Design, for us, is a journey, a quest to make the impossible possible, and the possible perfect. With dynamism as a core value, to alter and itself be altered, Altered Black is a company that evolves and changes as it alters the world of Design.” I was really excited when I came up with idea of ‘altering’ the ‘black’ by hiding the ‘c’ of the ‘black’, behind the black ink splat. Also, here I have tried to go beyond the conventional idea of standardized corporate color scheme and designed the same logo with the ‘BLACK’ written in 7 different colors, each representing a basic hue. All of them are being used in various materials. Even the employees of Altered Black are allowed to choose the color of the logo on their business card, from these 7 pre-defined corporate hues. The strong message and recognizable visual of the logo, make all logos look consistent and related, in spite of having different colors. The attached image shows the logo in Green, Orange and Blue. You can view few other colors here.

Visit Altered Black Site here

Logo for High Resolution:

It was actually fun to create a logo for a closed group of digital and new media artists, called ‘High Resolution’. The group is primarily aimed to organize online and offline exhibitions of digital art and new media art. All they wanted to have a symbol that is very simplistic, informal and loose, yet represents the technical as well as conceptual meaning of this term ‘high resolution’, a highly popular and often used term in the industry. I put a question before them and before myself as well. What represents ‘the highest resolution’ in our known real world? The answer was obvious - the Sun. And I got my symbol! Now, what could be a simplistic, informal and loose way to represent the visual of Sun and the name - ‘High Resolution’ as text? Who is simple and informal enough to do this? Again the answer came very promptly! Our friend’s 4 year old son, who was hopping and running around us through out the entire session. With little effort, patience and few candies, we got 2 suns and all letters of ‘high resolution’ on 6 different sheets of paper, in various sizes, by him. After that, only scanning and little retouching was needed to get the final logo ready.

Logo for South Asia Center, UPENN:

The logo for South Asia Center of University of Pennsylvania is probably the simplest of this lot, again the most challenging, too. It was really tough to identify one single graphical motif with pan S. Asia feel, considering the vastly diverse culture of South Asia and combining multi-cultural characteristics South Asia in one single alpha-glyph symbol. I realized that it would be easier, if I can go beyond the present time and look into the historical past of S. Asia, for the desired motif. I started looking for graphical symbols in ancient architectural remains of S. Asia, as I beileve, ‘architecture’ is the area, where lots of cross-cultural interactions happened, in recent and distant past, in this region. And, soon I came up with this symbol, simulating and combining the visual charactersitics of various graphical motifs, from the mosaics of Taj Mahal (India, 17th Century), murals of Wat Long Khoun (Laos, 18th Century) and the age-old ‘Gold Leaf Stencil” art form (a popular and religious art form seen on Buddhist temple walls through out South Asia).

Visit UPENN’s South Asia Center website here

Logo for Boipara.Com:

Since, we started Boipara.com, our primary goal is to archive alternative and marginalized Bengali Literature, books, magazines and other published/unpublished material, digitally, on Internet. Boipara.com is a totally non-commercial, non-profit and co-operative initiative that is voluntarily run by a closed group of Bengali Literature enthusiasts, who has a keen interest on alternative and marginal literary forms of Bengali language and literature. When we needed a logo for this initiative, I happily agreed to volunteer. While designing the logo, my first challenge was to express the idea of the co-operative initiative and establish the concept of a ‘group’ behind this whole initiative. I decided to go for a ‘figurative’ logo, a logo with multiple human figures connected to each other visually forming a group, that would represent the closed group of people behind this entire initiative. The next challenge was to express the semi-urban socio-cultural features of this specific group, working within a particular demographical arena. I combined modern stick figures with traditional figurines as seen in tribal paintings in rural Eastern India and added a strong hint towards the informal approach of this group by simulating hand-drawn lines. Once I had the form ready, I tried to illustrate various activities with this figures that could be associated with alternative literature movements in Bengali language and literature and soon came up with a series of hand-drawn tribal stick figures, standing, walking, painting, reading, writing, carrying side bags on their shoulders and so on. I selected four of them to form the graphical part of the logo, based on the activities they are representing, as well as their interrelated visual rhythm. Once the graphical symbol is ready, it was easy to add the textual part. I used a thick marker to draw all required letters, separately, and later combined them to form the name “Boipara Dot Com”, written in Bengali script. Everyone liked the outcome, including me!

Visit Boipara.com here

Rampage
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Being an avid gamer I used to spend lots of time on various versions of famous game series GTA – scheming a ‘rampage’, planning ‘bomb blasts’, executing a ‘mall shootout’ or simply ‘riding’ through the city ‘killing gang members’. This image is a kind of extension of my visual memories of those virtual images of deaths and blood and blasts, juxtaposed against our real context – a blasting population, often threatened, disturbed by deaths and murders, mass killings and genocides. It’s all about our time - restless and anxious, like the central character of GTA, standing in the middle of the blood and bodies of ‘wasted gang members’.

The Bengali text on the image says, ‘Our time’, repeatedly.

This work has been featured on the cover of Autumn 2007 issue of International Journal, published by Canadian Institute of International Affair (CIIA, Toronto), currently known as Canadian International Council (CIC). Thanks to CIC and IJ.

Park Street Jn., 2004
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Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, always amuses me, with her vibrancies, colors, lives, ever-changing moods and of course with her warmth. I was born and brought up there; felt her presence around me through my childhood, adolescence and my youth. Each node of the city has multiple images stored for me, multiple stories; each one reflecting various ages, various times of my life. Park Street was a place crowded with yellow taxis and traffic polices with white uniforms, as I used to see it when I was a kid. A kid from suburb, who came to visit a fair or an event near Park Street, and stumbled upon the busy policemen, busy traffic of busy Park Street.

Exodus
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Since I was a kid, I have often witnessed hundreds and thousands of homeless, uprooted people, coming out of the dark caves of poverty and hunger, crossing the borders & the fences and walking towards a darker future, with their face glowing with meaningless hope. They know that they might not reach anywhere; still they wish to continue their journey, their Exodus, for a better home, a better world. In this image, I have tried to capture, the endless, meaningless journey of homeless people, crossing borders and checkposts, hiding in the darkness of cloudy nights, and being threatened by their own transitory existence, for years.

Later, this image has been used as a supporting illustration, by Canadian Institute of International Affair (CIIA, Toronto), currently known as Canadian International Council (CIC), for the Autumn 2007 issue of their International Journal, along with few other works of mine. They have also featured my work ‘Rampage’ on the cover of this issue. Thanks to CIC and IJ.

Insomnia in red and white / Saturday 25th August 2007 6.22 AM
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My MacShot Project is a series of low-resolution unedited (except few basic built-in features in Mac Photobooth) photos of myself and other objects surrounding me and my MacBook, taken by the tiny inbuilt Web cam and PhotoBooth. In the beginning, the primary intention of My MacShot project was to capture few selected moments and feelings, involving me and my context, through the built-in web cam of my MacBook. They were visual expressions of few specific moments, sometimes accompanied by few lines of text and a date/time tag. Initially it was more focused towards the physicality of the webcam, the laptop and the operator (that is me), and their interactions and negotiations with their time - both physical and mental. It was more like a personal, as well as very much context-dependant photo-journal or something similar. But later, I got more interested to figure out how one can go beyond the physical limitations of in-built webcam of a MacBook.

As I started taking more and more snaps, often abstract, I started realizing the innumerable possibilities of this tiny in-built webcam and this simple photo-capture software called PhotoBooth. With simple features and functionalities, it allows you to turn usual objects, into amazing pieces of compositions!

I saw him .. the Green Monster .. with a bleeding heart! / Thursday 5 July 2007 20.54 PM
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• My MacShots: Selected MacShots

The second image (The Green Monster) is a close-up of my mobile screen, as captured by in-built Web Cam of MacBook

Boipara.com - The Online Archive of Bengali Literature, E-books and Little Magazines, is proud to release their title song - The Song Of Boipara (Boiparar Gaan) 
Download The song of Boipapra (Boiparar Gaan) here

The song is written, composed and sung by young and talented Bengali lyricist, singer and poet - Anupam Roy. This song talks about the poet’s feelings about Boipara.com.

Listen to Anupam’s Bengali Songs here
http://www.myspace.com/anupamroy

Listen to SONG OF BOIPARA (Boiparar Gaan) here

• Add Boipara.com at Orkut.com
• Add Boipara.com at eSnips
• Visit Boipara.com
• Visit Boiparar Blogpara

WE PROTEST AGAINST VIOLENCE

FEW LINKS TO VARIOUS RESOURCES THAT CARRY VALUABLE AND REVEALING INFORMATION ABOUT THE RECENT DEATHS, MASS-MURDERS, RAPES, VIOLENCE AND ABDUCTIONS, AT NANDIGRAM, WEST BENGAL, INDIA!

• Nandigram Chronology
• Nandigram Genocide - A revealing video
• Nandigram 14.3 - Development-Dialogues
• Nandigram on Development-Dialogues
• Medical Report on Nandigram
• Nandigram Archive on SacredMediaCow
• Nandigram on singur-singur.blogspot
• Protest in Bangalore
• Photos of protest at Bangalore
• Report and photos on BlrMirror
• Report in Hindu on Bangalore protest
• Left is equal to Right in West Bengal
• Nandigram - Citizens’ Report
• Citizens’ Statement on Nandigram
• Nandigram on Sanhati.com
• Nandigram on Youtube.com
• Nandigram on Flickr.com
• Nandigram on Vinnomot.com
• Abhijit Mitra’s Bengali Poetry on Nandigram
• Download protest banners »

[If you know other resources/information/report on protest against Nandigram, please post a comment with the link. I will try to update the list.]

Comics
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Since my childhood, I have always been mesmerized by the magical world of images and text of comic books and the bikini-clad girlfriends of the super heroes with their funny speech baloons, crossing the boundaries of those small boxy frames and rigid panels. I have always wanted to create a comic strip, but it did not get done. The only thing that I could do is to bring together one of my unfinished poems about a weekend trip with a rejected photograph from the same trip, and make a conscious effort to simulate the eerie ambience of the first cell of a dark, action comics strip - still without a story, waiting for a hostile moment to begin its journey through the pages of our childhood fears.

The text on the image can be roughly translated as,

There are trucks and trucks and trucks, and more trucks, more and more trucks, truck after truck, standing still beside the yellow seat, before us, and the dark sleeves of their t-shirts wipe off from the dark, gloomy, night, the vaporized sodium of Highway no. 7!

Wild Pepper Forest (2006) - The work is inspired by a line from a Bengali poem by one of my favorite Bengali poets, Kamal Chakraborty (’80 – ‘90). The sentence goes like this, “… tomake dekhate partum buno maricher jongole thyangare ghumiye porechhe …” .

A rough translation of the line would go like this, “… I wish I could show you how the brigand has fallen asleep in the wild pepper forest …”.

The image was  used as the cover for 14th issue of Kaurab Online, the on-line edition of Kaurab, a Bengali Literature magazine founded by Kamal Chakraborty, which he also edited for 30 years.

I have written a prose piece in Bengali, along with this image, as a part of my response to this line. Rather, my work is a textual and visual tribute to the poet, Kamal Chakraborty, who has inspired me to experiment with the form and content of Bengali prose in my writings.

• Read this Bengali prose piece, “Tomake Dekhate Partum (I wish I could show you)” in Bangla UNICODE font
• Read this Bangla Prose Piece, as GIF

French and English transposition of the first paragraph of the Bengali piece has been done by Rouflaquettes.

French transposition:

Je pourrais te montrer
et je veux tellement te faire montrerles
les grattes ciels depuis les frontières de la cité… …
bric à bric
sable, bois
pierre à pierre
sur plafonds blanchis
vignes coulantes formidables de piments sauvages … …
dont l’ombre endorme le brigand faire à mesure
tel que le soleil de thésaures de notre parole
dictionnaires
examens et leurs cahiers verts
ainsi que le stylo à balle en rouges …

English transposition:

I could have shown you
and I would have wanted so much to show you
the skyscrapers beyond the city’s frontiers,
brick after brick
sand, wood
on lime-washed ceilings
flowing vines of elegant wild pepper
whose shadow shelters the sleeping brigand
like the sun of the thesaurus
and dictionaries of our speech,
exams and their green notebooks,
marked in red ball-point ink …

Later, in 2007, I reworked the image to create a cover for the printed edition of Kaurab.

The reworked image can be viewed here »