Aneesh Bhoopathy is a designer based in Philadelphia and New York City. As a founding worker-owner at Forge, Aneesh leads identity, design systems, UX, and end-to-end creative for consumer brands and left political campaigns alike. His client work ranges from D2C brands like Jambys, and Birthdate Candles, to movement organizations like DSA and electoral campaigns including Zohran for New York City and Julia Salazar for State Senate.
What principles guide your design decisions?
a) Develop your instincts through continuous observation, curiosity, and experimentation.
b) Trust those instincts. If a creative direction is capturing your attention and interest, follow it. Even if it isn’t in the brief. Your attention is showing you a path forward and you have to follow that attention where it leads. More often than not it is trying to tell you something useful.
c) Where possible, learn how to translate those instincts into words. This is the hardest part for me. Artists speak with this language more fluently than designers, so it was very useful for me to take some art classes. Where a designer will defer to their client or frame a decision in business terms, an artist can confidently assert that one option is “more compositionally interesting” or flat out “more visually striking” – giving voice to their own instincts.
How do you stay relevant in an industry that changes so quickly?
Tinkering. Side projects, personal explorations, half-day logos made for friends bands – these are the projects that are best suited for trying new tools, techniques, and approaches.
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