New darlings of digital world

In June last year, months after half the world had gone into lockdown and the retail sector was experiencing its most abrupt, forced hiatus, among the first automobile manufacturers to take the wares home to customers was

Nissan Motor Company

, UAE. And the team they reached out to, to facilitate this was from XR Labs — a five-year-old immersive technologies firm based in Chennai. By September, the pilot project was up and running, and anyone with a smart phone worth as affordable as Rs 5,000 could log on to Nissan UAE’s website and view the car they fancied in all its functionality, specifications and vibe — from their living room.


XR Labs went on create similar experiences for Louvre, Abu Dhabi, and has been working with a young design team at city ad agency Whoa Mama Design, to create and market immersive experiences for an interior designing client.

For some years now, budding design artists — particularly graphic designers and illustrators — have been quietly contributing to the nascent space of multimedia art from their homes and studios, unveiling their experiments with animation, VR and AR on their Instagram pages. Some, who pioneered working on these technologies and arrived, found their platforms at niche sections in art festivals and biennales. However, in a matter of months, they are suddenly the creative army every major brand wants onboard. What began as a matter of contingency during the lockdown — when consumers forced inside their homes were spending a bulk of their time on their smartphones and laptops — is growing into a digital boom that’s both extremely challenging and rewarding to virtual artists with a rare voice.

“To be honest, these months have been exhausting,” says

Mehek Malhotra

, the young CEO and founder of Mumbai’s four-year-old design studio, Giggling Monkey. “While a digital transition was always on the horizon, we weren’t fully prepared for the way it was fast-tracked by the pandemic. We’re getting clients who are shooting their own videos and sending them across to us to be animated. We’re pretty much working on the entire second half of the designing process,” says Mehek, who created animation work for comedian Kenny Sebastian’s quarantine single and a campaign for Facebook.

This has also given brands the opportunity to understand the nuances of a so-far untapped workspace and hooked them on to it for the future as well, as they realise it’s also cost-effective; wherein a lot more ground is covered by a small team virtually, in the absence of cost-intensive physical events.

At a time when building a bridge between the real and the virtual world has emerged a vital skillset, early adapters of these technologies are often the ones getting the meatiest jobs.

Saim Ghani, a young fashion designer from Kolkata, started putting together hundreds of frames on Photoshop as a fun way to create stopmotion art to survive the long, winding days of lockdown. But what he probably didn’t anticipate was for it to emerge as an aesthetic that would go on to score big points among leading brands and designers.

In the following months, his Instagram page caught the attention of magazines like Travel & Leisure, Current Mood and Harper’s Bazaar, for whom he employed his botanical artwork and striking imagery to design animated covers. “No one wants a still cover now. There are brands who want to collaborate and do something new and multidisciplinary once a week for their social media handles,” says Saim.

Goa-based Avinash Kumar is the founder of Quicksand Design Studio, and also runs the decade-old UnBox Festival that brings together creatives, and incubates ideas and collaborations. And his observation is that the creators who have been successful in these times are the ones with a lot more in their toolkit. “Essentially, diverse skills and new ways of engaging with the public from the early pandemic months,” he says. “Also, technological innovations and media consumption platforms have proliferated over the past year, creating new habits for artists. This makes it a natural choice for consumerfacing brands to get in there, monetize the phenomenon and use the equity that hundreds of young creators might have.”