Meet the Navik
Navik means navigator in Hindi. The one who reads the water, sets the route, and answers for where the ship ends up. that's closer to my job than "designer" is.
I'm Harsh Chelani. Nine years in, working across brand identity, packaging and design systems for FMCG, beauty, gaming and commerce. I build the visual language first, then the system other designers work inside. Most of what I make is meant to keep working after I've left.
Where I've been
Currently at Fynd (Reliance Retail), building Design systems across AJIO, Trends, JioMart and the Jio Commerce Platform & Fynd. Before that, Nykaa, and Art Director at Sterling AG.
Along the way: TATA JTP, Dolby, Supercell (Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars), BGMI, Riot (Valorant), Diageo (Johnnie Walker, Black Dog), Raymond (Park Avenue). Plus a run of smaller brands where I was the whole design function. HYGO, PRYDE, Kozai, Double Tape, AlphaBake, SipSailors Society.
Research first, always
Not because it's virtuous, but because the interesting answer usually sits two layers under the obvious one. On Retail Vista my first idea was a location pin. It took another two weeks to work out that the pin was never the point. Everything converging on it was.
How I decide what to kill
My taste runs minimal. Most briefs don't, and I try not to confuse the two, so I kill work from the audience's chair rather than mine. I don't raise a problem I can't name a fix for. And I turn every stone even when round one is right, especially then. You should be able to say why the others didn't work.
The one I bring up at dinner
SipSailors Society. The brief was minimal packaging, to match everything else in Amazon's barware aisle. I made two versions of minimal and didn't believe either one. Then one early morning I started sketching cocktail glasses for no particular reason and the pattern turned up on its own. Thirty-odd cocktails laid diagonally, so the box reads as gift wrap. It was the opposite of what I'd been asked for and it's still the work I'm happiest about.
What outlives me
Whenever I solve something new it becomes a prompt, a skill or a brand book, so nobody has to come back and ask me. At Nykaa I ran design sessions for the whole team. At Fynd I stopped running sessions and started shipping the teaching instead.
The one I'm proudest of isn't a project. An editor came to me straight out of college with no English at all. Months later he'd taught himself 3D, then AI, and had worked out that prompting in Russian got him better images than English. He didn't get that from me. He just got comfortable enough to go and find it himself.
Away from the desk
Cooking, jogging, whittling and long conversations with people who don't work in design, which is where most of the useful ideas come from.
Working together
Most of my work comes from people I've worked with before, or people they sent. That's the measure I care about.
If you're building something, or hiring someone to run design, I'd like to hear about it.