Around a year and a half back, all I could do was study, sleep and eat- a typical JEE aspirant. I couldn’t edit a photo properly, let alone designing user interfaces. I had no idea that a term like UI/UX existed and one day I’ll be into it. But now, if you don’t find me socializing or watching anime, I’ll either be nit-picky about the pixels or would be brainstorming on some random problem statement. It’s surprising what a year and IMG can do to you.

This is an account of my journey in IMG as a designer so far. Let’s go with the flow!

IMG has an imbibed atmosphere to promote user-friendly design and therefore lays out a lot of value to good design principles and practices. We are a team of 9 designers across all years among other 40 odd developers.

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Back in December, last year, scrolling through my Facebook feed, posters of various tech groups gleaming at me, I was overwhelmed just like every other freshman. I was confused and scared but excited. Being exposed to the design culture of IITR through Geek Gazette, I had a slight inclination towards Design.

IMG released a recruitment assignment for designers, with the problem statement covering aspects diversifying in logo designing, product critique, design thinking and wireframing. I remember doing a last-minute submission after 3 days of thorough analysis and voila, I was selected further for a personal interview and HR round. While waiting for the interviews, we were made comfortable by our seniors as we played Pictionary with them. It was a cute gesture as all of us were tensed sitting there and they helped us get away with the interview blues.

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After 2 days of anxiety and overthinking about the results, I was glad to get the mail welcoming me to IMG. Next day, slightly nervous, I climbed up the ICC stairs and entered the cosy lab full of about 50 people, for the introduction meeting. A little intimidating at the start but by the end, I already felt like a part of a big family. Soon, we had our Intro Chapo and it was one of the craziest chapos where we danced off our worries, staying true to Work Hard, Party Harder.

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Now, comes the part for which we were recruited. We had lectures regularly followed by assignments to regulate the learning process. In the first semester, both the designers and developers are supposed to attend all lectures and learn the basics of design and development together. Being a designer, I found it a bit tough to cope up with the assignments but it felt good to complete them and get it checked by your seniors. Everyone was eager to help one another and the lab always had a very positive learning environment.

Connect with your peers

At IMG, you’ll find people engaged in countless domains, trying out new technologies or fixing that one bug which is taking forever, but however busy they might be, they’ll always make time for interaction, gossip and fun XD. Keeping up with this culture, we all went for Solani Walk early morning, played badminton and had a breakfast chapo amid the extreme winters. Soon, we went for an annual trip, and it won’t be an exaggeration to say that it was one of the best times I’d spent after coming to college. I am pretty extrovert and got a chance to bond with all seniors and made wonderful memories.

Add skills to your profile

2 months drifted away and it was a week-long mid-semester break (still going on?). It was a good chance to clear your backlog of assignments. We even got another assignment to keep ourselves busy and productive during the break. Developers had to build a game using Javascript and designers had to design a portfolio website, though we were open doing both the projects. All our games were later released for the campus junta to play. You can check it out here.

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Sadly, we couldn’t return back to the campus owing to the COVID situation and there was a lot of disappointment with the disturbed semester plan. Since there was uncertainty regarding the new normal, we had to shift all our work remotely. Our lectures were conducted on zoom calls and our IMG seniors made sure that our learning proceeds smoothly online. We’d learnt the basics of frontend back on campus, and we started off with backend at home.

Time for backup?

May had begun and it was time to bid farewell to final yearites. Had we been on campus, we would have pulled off the traditional IMG farewell which is a series of events quite famous in the campus, as we’ve been told. But, there was nothing much we could do about the situation and geared up to make the farewell of our seniors more than special even in these circumstances. Our year shot videos at home for various parts of the skit and we made a slam book and collage for them. Farewell went off well with amazing speeches by the so-called pseudo-alums, and IMG made sure that we don’t miss any of our campus fun here at home.

Pick up where you left!

At the beginning of the official summer break, we were given an IMG exclusive summer assignment to keep our brains whacking. In Design, they were a series of 4 assignments, which covered a wide range of topics right from Typography, Deciding the user flow, Redesigning pages from a famous app and little UX exercises. I had some free time up my sleeve and even tried out the Developers’ Assignment, which was to build a web application to manage the testing process within IMG, from scratch. Every alternate week, we had our GBM, where we shared our progress. We even had separate Design Meets to just discuss the new trends, catch-up with one another and share new ideas.

Complete your profile

When the next semester started, our work also escalated and each one of us was given a project to work on, which impacted all the residents of IITR. It felt like a huge responsibility but it was great to be able to do something that makes a difference to R-land. We were divided into teams, each consisting of designers, developers and seniors as mentors. I was given the project to redesign the IITR website. I didn’t expect this big a project and was pretty amazed to get this opportunity.

It’s been more than 3 months since I’m working on this project and there’s a lot I have learnt. We are working directly under ICC and IWMC for this project and I’m quite intrigued by the fact that despite the amount of importance this project holds in the institute, we’ve been given pretty much freedom to experiment and improve the design in our own way. It is pretty challenging to execute this right from re-organising the entire website to ensuring how the images change on hovering, but it has really been a wonderful experience so far. The work is still in progress and I hope that we’re able to get the new design on production soon!

Share with your friends

While working throughout the year, little did I know that IMG will become such an integral part of my life or how my mentors will become the best of my friends. A group is made by its people and I can confidently say that IMG has a bunch of amazing people working together day and night to enhance the digital experience of IIT Roorkee. My learnings in IMG have not been limited to how to design well or code decently, but also other valuable aspects like time management, working with deadlines and progressing with the team, apart from getting exposure to all the tech in this world and the best advice and support possible from some amazing seniors out there.

Become a beta user

Whenever any app is ready for the launch, it is tested internally. The testing process is vital and the feedback is really important to improve upon. While testing, the app doesn’t remain limited to the creators but also all other IMG members can help improve the final product. When the app launches, we, as designers make posters and think of ways to help the campus junta get the best optimal experience from these new applications, we’d built. This entire product cycle is really a process you’d expect in any industry-level tech firm, and we at IMG try to follow a similar process with utmost precision.

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To all the freshmen this year, I would like to say that don’t worry much about the results but participate and try your best. I’m sure you’ll learn something or the other. It is not always about how well you know your stuff but the zeal to learn and try, the spontaneity to deal with unexpected situations and the way you adjust with new people and surroundings. The online semester must have been tough for you as it was for us, and keeping that in mind, we are here to help you out. You can reach out to us through Facebook, our Discord Server or ping any of us personally. We are hoping to interact with you all soon in the workshops and let’s find out if you are one of us. Good luck for the recruitments :)