ASHISH RAJPALI

Nobody says the way a hospital corridor is lit so you feel less like you're about to receive bad news. Nobody says the signage that moves thousands of people through an airport without a single person stopping to think about where they're going. Nobody says the chair that held your back correctly for eight hours without you once noticing you were sitting.

Good design does that. It works so well you forget it's there. And the moment you forget it's there — that's when people stop calling it design.

I have a fidget spinner on my desk. These days every product is selling you two things at once — buy our fridge that also streams Spotify, this phone that also snaps into a projector, this laptop that's also a tablet that's also a drawing pad. Everything has a second function, a bonus feature, a reason to justify its existence. And then there's this. No screen. No second use. It spins. That's it. That's all. And it took the entire world by storm.

I like it because I actually do have trouble sitting idle. My hands keep spinning it, playing with it — until at some point I've completely forgotten I even own the thing and I'm just working. That's the whole product. Complete commitment to one purpose. And it delivered so completely that it disappeared into the background of my focus.

That's design. Not decoration.

Somewhere, a designer sat down and thought about how a city should feel to walk through at night. Which streets should be wide and which ones intimate. Where the light falls and where the shadow sits. How a park bench should be angled so strangers can sit near each other without feeling like they have to talk. These weren't decorative choices. They were decisions — real ones, with real outcomes — about how millions of people would move through their lives every single day. You feel those decisions every time you step outside. You just don't call them design.

When people mix the two up, designers get treated like finishers. You make the real decisions, then hand it to the designer to make it pretty. Sprinkle some colour. Clean it up. Nice.

But the thinking was always the job. Design is every decision that shapes a human experience — and yes, that includes how something looks. Because how something looks is also a decision. Aesthetics aren't separate from function, they're part of it. Making something feel warm, or urgent, or trustworthy — that's not decoration, that's design doing its job at the surface level. It all belongs to the same discipline. Designers think about everything. The colour is just the part everyone notices.

I spent three years as the only designer in an organisation that didn't know it needed more than a designer. Every brief that reached my desk was already broken — not because anyone was careless, but because the conversation that should have happened before the brief never did. Strategies were decided in meetings I wasn't invited to. Mental images were formed. Assumptions were made. And then a request landed on my desk: "Make a poster. 10 ads. Design an invitation."

No why. No who. No what are we actually trying to say.

One time I was asked to design a poster for a student exchange program. No brief, no direction — just an itinerary. I made the best call I could and picked the most recognisable locations. Upon review I was given the look. "You missed the important ones." The important ones nobody mentioned. The ones decided in a meeting I was never part of.

That look is what this article is about.

It's not the look of a bad designer being corrected. It's the look of a process that was broken from the start — and a designer standing at the end of it absorbing blame that was never theirs to carry.

When there's no Art Director in the room, no one asking why before asking what — the designer becomes a production machine. Fast hands, no seat at the table. And slowly, without noticing, you start to shrink. You stop asking questions because the room laughs when you do. You stop pushing because nothing moves. You start measuring your worth in how quickly you can turn a request around instead of how well you can think through a problem.

He wasn't just famous — he was trusted. Globally recognised, impossible to replicate, decades of genuine affection. And they quietly shelved him.

The story was right there. An airline founded by Tata, nationalised against his wishes, returned to the family 70 years later. The Maharaja, finally free. That's a campaign. Nobody built it.

I'm Indian, grew up around Jharoka architecture, and I only got the reference after I read about it online. A symbol that needs explanation hasn't done its job.

The concept wasn't wrong — they were too nervous about being "too Indian" for a global audience. That nervousness is visible in the final mark.

Script is not decoration. It tells you who the design was made for.

FutureBrand London led this project, and it showed. When the people in the room aren't from the culture, decisions like this slip through.

Red had 91 years behind it. Aubergine came in because Vistara was being absorbed — a logistics call dressed up as a creative one. The palette felt like a committee made it. Because one did.

The identity launched August 2023. Fleet refurbishment started mid-2024. Passengers got a premium brand promise on aircraft with old interiors and unresolved complaints.

That's not a branding failure. That's a trust failure.

No campaign. No conversation with the public about what had changed or why. The identity just dropped — and in the silence, people filled the gap with every frustration they already had.

India's hospitality, art, and cultural texture is something no other airline can claim. That was Air India's one differentiator. The thing Emirates and Singapore Airlines could never buy.

They spent the rebrand softening it.

Fix operations first. Let the experience speak. Build the identity around what's actually true — not what you're hoping to become. Then tell people. In that order.

When I first watched Alabasta, I thought: great villain, sad village, evil ruler. Good story. It felt like another anime doing what anime does. I had no idea I was already inside something enormous.

It wasn't until Skypiea — Roger's Poneglyph, the realisation that he was here centuries ago — that the scale cracked open. But even then the emotions didn't all arrive at once. They unfolded arc by arc. Accumulated.

One Piece doesn't give you the manual — you just keep going until one day you look back and realise you were already inside something huge. But that's the thing: neither does life. Nobody sits you down at 15 and explains what's actually happening around you. You live through things — relationships, failures, moments that feel small — and only later, with distance, do you understand what they were part of. The meaning is always assembled in retrospect. One Piece just makes that process visible.

The world is maximally absurd on the surface — a rubber man, islands in the sky, a clown who detaches his own body parts in a fight. Oda makes the vessel as ridiculous as possible. And then underneath: slavery, colonialism, corrupt institutions protecting themselves over people. The same human tendency to control and seize, reappearing on every island, across every arc.

Give humans every crazy possibility in the world and they'll still build the same hierarchies and crush the same people. The absurdity is the Trojan horse. The real world problems are what was inside it the whole time.

Luffy is the embodiment of how it should be in a world full of chaos. He simply ignores the broken systems and moves anyway. It looks reckless — but everywhere he goes, things get more free, not more chaotic. His freedom isn't the absence of problems. It's the refusal to let control become the answer to them.

A kid watching One Piece at 10 doesn't understand colonialism — but they understand what the World Government did to Ohara. They don't understand institutional corruption — but they understand Spandam. And when they grow up and the news becomes real, they won't be phased by it.

Oda has been inoculating an entire generation against the real world through the back door — for 27 years, inside a story about a boy who wants to be King of the Pirates. That's not entertainment. That's moral education disguised as a cartoon.

Then the game pulls the rug: halfway through, you're suddenly playing as Abby. I was appalled. But within an hour, I understood her. I sympathised. The story doesn't justify what she did — it just shows you why. That shift in perspective is what makes this game genuinely uncomfortable in the best way.

The core mechanics don't change much between characters, but the feel does. Ellie is weaker but scrappy — resourceful, improvising. Abby hits harder but isn't as sharp with crafting. It's a small design choice that actually mirrors who they are as people.

And no matter who you're playing, the game never lets you off the hook. Every action has weight. It's unforgiving in a way that feels intentional — like the game itself is quietly judging your bloodlust.

The flashbacks between Ellie and Joel are the emotional gut-punch of the whole game. You watch their bond grow, and then fracture when Ellie learns the truth about the Fireflies. My read: her revenge isn't just grief — it's guilt. She pushed Joel away, and never got the chance to fix it.

Her relationship with her father reframes the ending of the first game entirely. Her tangled feelings around Owen and Nora make her feel genuinely human. And then there's Lev — her decision to protect him and Yara is what finally moved her from antagonist to just another survivor trying to survive in a world that doesn't reward mercy.

One thing that stuck with me: Abby is afraid of heights. The game doesn't just tell you this — it shows you through the camera. When she's forced to look down from somewhere high, the angle slowly tilts and the frame wobbles slightly, as if the camera itself is struggling to hold steady. You don't just know she's afraid. You briefly feel the vertigo with her.