By Two "______"

It was the month of July, last year, when the seed of Perch Project was sown. My friend, Hazel Karkaria and I slowly and steadily watered the seed, and made it into a sapling. While working on Perch, we had this hope within us that one day this project would shape up as one of those giant trees, and its very roots will be the haven for the animals and birds. A year passed and we are still nurturing that hope. But Perch wasn't the very first act for both of us working together, we studied together and we had worked on many projects before. We churned out an identity for the college graduation in a time when everything seemed done and dusted with our efforts. We worked on Ramabi Book Project where we spent hours shuffling from studio room to Library, interjected with tea breaks at chai kadhe. There were many other projects where we jotted days and nights of work without any compromise. We could work well together. Be it our shared understanding, ethics and thoughts, when put together, it rewarded us in measures that left us satisfied and humble. Time passed, but we sustained this precious hope of working together someday. With Perch, we realised that it's time to shape the ideas we had preserved for so long. 

We knew what we had to do, but putting a name for it was an ordeal. To sum it all up in a few words and make it the name of our studio was no easy fish to catch. We grappled with it for months, feeling dejected and perpetually caught in a cycle of thesaurus rant. We would walk down streets just to catch a local flavour for our name, sit with rounds of tea and coffee, hoping that some caffeine would brew the omnipotent name. All failed, and we had to look back at the end of the tunnel, catch the smell of Rava Dosa batter spreading on the steaming stove and how fondly everyone 'by two-ed' their coffee. 'By Two', the phrase that encompassed it all for us. We always took pride in the fact that it's two friend working together, two people who would stick around through thick and thin. We found that meaning in 'By Two', it was grounded, it was us. Once we knew what to call it, rest was an easy ride. By no means I am underplaying the current of this long tumultuous ocean lying ahead. But we have a boat, we just have to row and grow. 

'By Two' is not only about working together. It's about what we see each other become through this journey. 

Do check our work here - bytwodesign or drop us a line bytwodesign@gmail.com

Do read what Hazel has to say about it - By Two

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It's summer officially with the calendar page flipped to 1st of May, and Perch Project finally has its poster up on the site encouraging people to share a bowl of water and some grains for the birds. I think we don't even need to wait for May to realise how hot it is outside already. Birds feel the pinch of it especially, to help them we did a DIY on making a bird feeder using plastic bottle and tetra packs, you can see it over here. The poster followed the DIY post with the hope of people spreading the word around. 

Now, a bit about the making of the poster - from the very beginning, we were very inspired by the work of Charley Harper, his approach to simplification and construction of a complex visual with simple shapes intrigued us. I think we tried to borrow that sense of simplicity in our poster, the idea was to create the form of a drop with tied up shapes of different birds. The process started with sketching out a rough placement of elements that would come together, and then shredding down those elements to its basic beautiful form. The treatment had to be uniform for all the elements, yet communicate the species of birds we worked on. Here are some of the sketches that went into the simplification process. 

Once the shape of birds came on the artwork, we filled the empty spaces with elements that are associated with birds, for example - the fruits they eat or the flower they suck the nectar from etc. After putting together the elements, we contemplated on whether to fill in the elements with solid colours, but just the plain strokes communicated the form of a drop better. Here's a trial version of the one done with fills.

After long chain of emails, we finally churned out the poster just in time. You can see the poster on Perch here. If you feel like sharing it - You can use the high resolution file from this link.  

Please keep a bowl of water out for the birds, this tiny effort would do them a lot of good. I have one out near my window for the squirrels, it's such a joy to see them come and quench their thirst.

Uttarayan Edition, Perch Project

Uttarayan is a kite festival that is celebrated mainly in Gujarat and the states neighbouring it. It's a long old tradition which many participate in, in fact a lot of preparation goes behind it, making kites, getting manjas ready etc. The manjas for kite flying are made especially razor sharp to cut other kites, and the options have increased much more with the availability of China made strings. This competitive desire of cutting others' kites doesn't go very well with the birds though. Every year many birds get injured and die after getting entangled in the kite strings. My friend Hazel told me that days after Uttarayan you could see birds hanging dead from trees. 

As Perch Project, we decided to cover this event. Our aim was to raise awareness about this issue, provide the basic set of instruction to help people rescue such injured birds and a few helpline numbers of organisations that have services running for rescuing birds during Uttarayan period. We figured that keeping an authoritative stance on this event by telling people not to fly kites won't help, it's a part of the tradition and taking that away would only turn the audience against us. Instead, making a plea to not turn a blind eye when they see an injured bird became the guiding direction of our initiative. We first made a poster to spread the message around. We had to keep the poster true to our motto, we had to be subtle, precise and good. Most of the time, work that is driven from personal passion tends to go overboard in their appeal, and we had to avoid doing that. Me and Hazel spent late nights on emails, whatsapp going through each step of the poster making, reviewing it, trying new things out, choosing our references, use of type and the right colour scheme. We took some feedback from Dhun, who helped us in sticking right to our purpose of this initiative. This constant mulling and trials gave us a poster we were proud to put up. Here it is -

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Colours inspired from - Half Chai 

We followed up the poster with the instruction guidelines. To keep the information crisp and clear, simple line drawings were created to go along with the information. More than the poster, we were keen on getting this instruction sheet shared around. 

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With our fingers crossed, we uploaded it all on our Perch website and then shared it on Facebook. We didn't have any grand expectations, but the response we got was pretty overwhelming. It got good number of shares and to much of our delight, the instruction sheet slowly gathered momentum with the audience too. We even got a small five minute radio interview on Fever 104 fm, Mumbai. Many thanks to them for hosting us and sharing the information around. Thank you to all of the people who helped us share this initiative around. Time after time, you have helped us in extending our reach. If all this effort even makes some small difference to people, I would feel grateful. 

You can check out our Perch post here - Uttarayan Edition. You can check our Facebook page too and if you find the initiative good enough, please share it. - Perch Project.

Although we chose not to mention it, but it would be great if people opted for cotton strings to fly kites than the Manja one. Also, if you find stray manja post Uttarayan in trees or wherever, then gather it and discard it. In any case, enjoy the festival food. Happy Makar Sankranti. I have got my share of happiness thinking that how a small thought that gave birth to Perch Project has become a part time job now. 

The Cat has Perched.

After the small success of the post on Common Myna done for Perch Project, Hazel and I decided to get a bit more challenging with the next post. We chose the Domestic Cat as our next animal to be rescued. In the beginning we thought that the availability of information won't be a trouble for this post, but we were overwhelmed by the amount of text. Generally, large amount of instructional text can leave a reader a bit daunted, therefore we opted to break it into charts, worksheet and illustrations that can bring in relief to the reading eye. Hazel being the more knowledgable one, got busy with writing the text, making charts and worksheets, while I had to draw the cat. I knew right from the start that unlike the birds, a furry cat would surely be a lot more difficult. To be honest, I am not a pro at using watercolours, and when doing science illustrations that are meant to be precise and do the job of identifying the drawn subject well, one shouldn't falter. Not to forget, getting the anatomy right is an ardent task too. Some of my initial drawings of the kitten looked like sausages. I kept drawing it day after day but nothing good turned out. Finally, when the time was not in my favour, I decided to cheat by using pencil colours. I console myself over this by telling myself time after time, 'It was all for the right cause.' Here are some of the better ones done during the process - 

The final days of putting the Perch post up were pretty crazy. If one goes through our chat history, they would find enough evidence to prove us lunatics. Here's one - 'Also, can we make the poo a bit 3d?'
You can check out the post here. We have also made a facebook page - Perch Project, 'Like' the page if you would like to get future updates from Perch. 
You should read Hazel's post too - Domestic Cat on Half Chai.

Perch Project

It was about four months back when I had gone home for a small vacation, I found a baby Myna bird lying on the ground near my mom's car early in the morning. I looked around and couldn't find the nest to put the bird back into. If I had left it over there for long, the ants would have taken care of it. Helpless that I was as I had little knowledge about rescuing a Myna, I called up my friend Hazel who knows about taking care of birds and animals well. I am very sure it's a news in the animal kingdom about which door to knock when in danger, they all end up coming scared, broken and tired to get their nursing done at her place. So after a few calls exchanged, I had some basic idea about the very first things to do when you find a baby Myna. Sadly, the myna didn't survive for more than a day. That's the time when the very first seed of Perch Project was sowed, an idea to create a publication or portal where basic first aid information can be provided to the public about birds and animal rescue commonly found in the urban scenario. Although, there are existing platforms for such information but it's mostly not put in the Indian context. Hence, Hazel and I started investing hours off from regular work to put this blog together called - Perch Project. We have put together the basic details for rescuing a Common Myna as our first post with a few illustrations. We may have missed some things and it will be great help if the readers can bring it to our notice. Feedback is always welcome. 

Take a look - http://perchproject.tumblr.com/
We are planning to cover a lot more birds and animals from urban wildlife soon and make it a useful archive for all of the people who want to rescue but don't know how. Lot more hours to steal now for this but I think it will be worth it.