Life and Work of Muhammad Nazimuddaula

Skills

It’s a lifestyle I’m leading for around 2 decades. I can imagine, I can see things before I draw or design them. Paper and pencil are my favorite tools, but I also use some gadgets and software to plan and design. For last 18 years, I’ve earned most of my livings by doing following 3 things.

Interaction Design

Currently I’m leading a company which I co-founded in 2009 as a designer. My daily job is to see how users are interacting with my products and design the interfaces that impact on business goals.

Print Design

In early days of my career, everything I designed went for printing, often on newspaper. I had to learn it in a hard way as print designs are tricky and impact directly on cost and experience.

Type Design

At the beginning I always wanted to be a full time type designer. But that day yet to come. Meanwhile I’ve designed and developed some Bangla fonts and one of them is quite popular.

Works

Starting from 2001, I’m designing visual elements for people known and unknown to me, for small and large organizations or often only for me. In this journey I’ve designed hundreds of elements and still keep millions of idea in my head.

G&R

I co-founded this company as a designer and served as it's CEO.

Color Talking

A startup I co-founded to try ideas with an aim to transform them to business.

Lekhok Keyboard

A brand new keyboard designed by me to type Bangla on smartphones.

Axiata Bangla, a Font Family

Co-designed and developed a unique Bangla type font for Robi Axiata.

JossWork

A cloud based business I've designed to make local business Digital

GoromCha

Website Design

Lekhok

A next generation blogging platform I've designed for Bangla writers

About

Before becoming a designer, I had many random thoughts about my future. Once I wanted to be a journalist or more precisely a writer. I’ve studied Zoology for one year and also tried to become a pilot after my college education. Below are some key events of my life. I love to recall my past as most of the time it pushes me to go ahead.

A rainy day in early 80s

Born in Rangpur

I came to this universe as the 3rd child of my parents. All I can remember about my early childhood are the changes of nature - rain and winter and the wide landscape where sky was only at the end.

When I try to drill down the memories, I can remember some peculiar noises, supernatural fragrances and surrealistic snapshots. I hope one day I can create a visual representation.
1987 ~ 1997

School education

I hardly can remember anything about my early days at school as I started bit early. My first school was at Rangpur which actually had no proper classrooms. In 1990 our family moved to Lakshmipur, a southern district of the country - to our ancestors’ native place.

In 1993 I was sent to Dhaka for better education and in next 4 years I’ve completed the school education from Tejgaon Govt. High School.
1997 ~ 2000

College education and the age of confusions

The most important but confusing part of my life. I made a very bad result in the final exam of college and it was the biggest turning point of my life.

I started learning the hardest lessons of my life - how to make money and how to take responsibilities of mine and my family. The finest experience of this time was to work as a radio reporter and voice artist for few months.
2001 ~ 2010

University of Dhaka

So far the best part of my life. The vast campus inspired me to think big about my life, take bigger risks and accept the failures. The sketchbooks of this time were full of ideas, fresh and spontaneous.

I’ve completed BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) and MFA (Master of Fine Arts) majoring Graphic Design from Faculty of Fine, University of Dhaka.
2002 ~ 2003

Animator at Globekids

The plan was to become a ‘world class animator’ though I didn’t know what that exactly means. The beginning of my formal career which unfortunately hadn’t a happy ending. Not too long but precious.

I’ve learnt the production lifecycle of an animated movie, got training for frame by frame drawing. I was really good at preparing storyboards and writing x-sheets.
2003 ~ 2005

Graphic Designer at Bull’s-Eye

The first step of becoming a professional designer. The starting was really challenging. I had very limited knowledge about Photoshop or Illustrator. Often I had to call my friends to get guidance how to draw a curve line on Illustrator. As I had a practice of preparing the design plan on paper with pencil, soon I started contributing the production.

Bull’s-Eye was a creative studio dedicated to print designs. I got chances to design simple button size newspaper ads to complex few hundreds page corporate annual reports.
2005 ~ 2010

UI Designer at eBizzSol

When I joined eBizzSol, I hardly have any idea about UI or the web technology. I treated my first UI design project just like a leaflet and somehow it changed my life.

The 5 years at eBizzSol was the most valuable time in building my career. I jumped into many things and learnt the internet business in different ways. I got connected to many great personalities who also helped me to move forward.
2009 ~ Present

Co-founded G&R

It was like a fairy tale but the journey was like a roller coaster ride - an unpredictable, frightening but exciting experience.

All through this journey I’ve played different roles at G&R. The starting was as the Art Director. In between I also acted as Product Director, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Product Officer and lastly since August 2015 as the Chief Executive Officer.

There is a story from 2014 where I describe how we started G&R.
2011 ~ Present

Co-founded Color Talking

As ideas keep popping in my head and after a certain period I gained the courage to develop few of them. To keep the motivation up, I with some like minded friends and family founded Color Talking.

Though now we know what we’re doing but the basic idea was not to set any goal for this company and keep it as a project to test a variety of online products with the aim to graduate them to real businesses.
Keep in touch

New Stories are Loading

Everything happens for a reason and we only realize after it becomes past. I love to remember my past to realize the purpose.

It’s a journey and new stories are adding to my life everyday. Sometime I used to write about those stories and you can find it here.