Suganth
Principal Product Designer, based in Melbourne
Computer Science grad, found myself more into Art & Design. Over the 12 years, I met great mentors, who helped me grow as a designer and ship great products for Cleartrip, Carousell and Canva.
Things that recently got me excited in Design
- Inclusive Design.
- Virtual & Augment Reality.
- Design Systems
Things I like to do on the weekends:
Going for Photo Walk, Travelling, Post Processing Photos, Learning to cook something new, Unsolicited design and picking up new tool
My guilty pleasure:
Watching Netflix, Crime thrillers and spending hours analysing the direction, cinematography of Spielberg Movies. Umm also Twitter and Instagram.
Year
Product Designer
Canva, 2018 - Present
Carousell, 2016 - 2018
Cleartrip, 2014 - 2016.
Web developer, Freelance Designer
Happy Fox, Getmeashop, 2013-2014.
Skills
- Product Design.
- Rapid / Detailed Prototyping.
- User Research & User Testing.
- Web & Responsive Design.
- Designing for MVP and Validation.
- Handoff, Shipping & Iterations.
Tools
- Sketch, Zeplin, Abstract.
- Marvel, Principle, Flinto, Framer Studio.
- HTML & CSS.
- Realtime Board, Dropbox Paper.
First time I realised I loved creating things from scratch, it gave me an incredible sense of pleasure and completeness. I was not an active kid who goes outside to play, but rather I was a kid who rather spends time at home, watching Cartoon Network and admiring the artists behind those shows. I ended up building and drawing things related Batman, Tin Tin, SWAT Kats and other TV Shows
How I got into Design?
Got my first legos and started building small-scale buildings and architecture. I ended up building all the cool things that come in SWAT Kats, including the bikes, flying pods, cars, pistols and the infamous TurboJet. In the matter of time, I started to improvise the originals. I wrote my own storyline and even drew improvised characters.
I started building model houses made of cardboard and playing cards. Well, this might sound simple, but this made me aspire to become an architect. My Summer vacations were filled with new drawings in my notebooks and pencil shavings all around my house.
1997-2001
Discovered that I like to be creative and it's fun in its own way.
During my early teenage years, I upped my game of modelling houses, with more concrete materials. As a result, I managed to add some lights and I was able to go creative with tiny gardens. But this faded out when I got a new toy with unlimited potential, my first computer.
It had 256gb Ram memory and it ran on Intel Pentium Processor. ost importantly, it ran Windows XP.
Nostalgic design details in Windows XP. Courtesy: GUIdebook
Microsoft Paint, I spent countless hours on this app to just get some concept right
At that time, I wasn't really into digital design or User experience, but I felt something great about windows XP. I fell in love with those icons, sounds, and overall colour system. I got super hooked into strategy and first person games. Age of Empires and other open world games let me be creative, resourceful and artistic.
Encountered my first
digital inspiration.
I got my first good computer. It entertained me to play endless games, but most importantly it enabled me to start designing. I designed my first poster, first app, first website, first 3D model, first render, first game.
I was so hooked to Google Sketch Up and Autodesk Maya. The combined passion of creating something from scratch and painfully wait for it to render gave me so much joy. I was doing creative sprints on long weekends and summer vacations.
I was pursuing a bachelor in computer science engineering and I was trying to bridge the gap between tech and my passion somehow and I ended up making a game out Unity Engine. The whole project taught me how to learn and try out from community resources, work with one developer and understand tech feasibility while designing, do different kinds of design: Product, Graphics, Gameplay, Storyboard, Asset, Sound and Visual effects and video editing
This was also the first time I started freelancing and I earned around 23$ for my work. I picked up motion design to aid my graphics and digital design passion. I started looking into few game loading videos and tried to mimic the same for the game I built. Little I know that the basic keyframe animation and tracking would help me on a long run in building prototypes for applications
Building my first product (Game)
Year
2001-2007
Year
2007-2013
This was the peak period of my interest quadrupling towards design. I met my first mentors, inspirational Senior designers and Design Managers, and worked with amazing user-focused products and delivered value to millions of users.
This is also the period, I learned to start writing, start taking photos and started taking life more preciously. I learned the art of sweating on details and designing functional+beautiful products at Cleartrip. See what I worked on there
In 2016, I finally stepped out of my comfort zone and moved to Southeast Asia. I joined Carousell, an incredible mission-focused startup in Southeast Asia. I worked with the selling and buyer experience teams during my time there as the first full-time designer and helped build a robust platform for the users. The best part of my work at Carousell was that I got to design for the majority of users who had a completely different culture from my background. See what I worked on there
In 2018, I joined Canva, Sydney. The key inspiration for me is to make designing super easy for the all the users. Around this time I was also forming my own principles on what kind of productsI want to work for. I learned that if I work for a company where the effort I put in maximises the user value directly, it’s a win for win. Canva is a great embodiment of this - the better the product is, more people will pay for it. No ads, no data mining.
Fast forward, it’s 2025 and I spent 7 good years here. It’s incredible journey and I have learned to be a better person, better designer and better photographer in the past decade. More stories to come
Embracing Product Design and it's responsibilities.
This is a live page that I try to update as frequent as I can.
Year