Suppose you are scrolling through the bottomless pit that is your Instagram feed and you see a bright pop of colour in between the not-so-funny-anymore memes, glossy celebrity pictures, gorgeous foodgrams and #travelgoals pictures. It calls for your attention with its minimalistic design and straight-to-the-point headlines, like 'Why Telegram is getting popular in India'. Chances are you have come across one of Bharat Apat's carousel posts, the kind of IG posts that have up to ten photos or videos. And if you haven't and are tired of over-explained explainers and too-good-to-be-true pictures, you should surely check out @apat.bharat.
UX Designer Bharat Apat designs and writes the content for these posts himself and has been doing so since March 2019. His third post, which was a condensed version of an 80-page document on Indian design education, went viral! This was enough impetus for the 26-year-old to move forward with his mission and his modus operandi was to first and foremost, treat this as a personal project via which he gets to work on his own design skills as well as talk about topics of interest. And though this is a passion project, as a UX Designer, he cannot help but think about the end-consumer, in this case, the Instagrammer who stumbles upon his post. And it's not just news, he covers helpful topics like 'How to create a hovering asset of any mock up', 'How to prepare for NID' and so much more! But what really prompted Bharat to start these posts was his own voracious note-taking. "I have always taken notes of what I find most interesting, so I decided to put my designing skills to good use too by creating these posts," says the Puri-born.
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And what a lesson this has been! "I have certainly become more politically-correct at least, as much as I can," chuckles Bharat as he shares. Of course, the lesson was learnt the hard way. Like the time when he interpreted National Award-winning lyricist Varun Grover's poem Hum Kagaz Nahi Dikhayenge (written in the light of anti-CAA protests) in a different way, to depict how it is only the finished product of an artist or designer that is on the table, not the multiple drafts and the mistakes that go behind it. Needless to say, many of his readers were up in arms, alleging that he was mocking the poem. Since then, he has steered clear from anything political. "When something like this happens, I tell my readers that just like an app has a 1.1 and 1.2 version, this is my current version. And I will definitely have better versions of myself in the future," says the youngster who pursued his BTech in Industrial Design from NIT Rourkela.
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Whatever said and done, the posts of this UX Designer, who works at Zeta India, Bengaluru, and is back home for now, are brief and informative. "I cannot be politically-correct in templates, there are just not enough words. A YouTube channel is underway and I might be able to do more justice through it," he says.
What makes Bharat's posts click?
- Using colour blocking and colours that appeals — mustard, lavender, orange and more
- Not using a picture in the first image of the post because then it would drown among the other pictures on Instagram
- The first picture itself highlights, clearly and concisely, what the post is about
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For more on him, check out instagram.com/apat.bharat
