Summers in most parts of India are hot, pretty damn hot. To top that, we have power cuts – and if recent statistics are to be believed, unplanned surprises far exceed planned power cuts.

To get a clearer picture of this situation and do something about it, a friend, Ajay Kumar, recently came up with a pretty thrilling idea… and executed it well. Thus, powercuts.in was born. Ajay requested me to help with the design task and I came up with the following homepage design for powercuts.in.

This post is a request-for-comments on that new design as we intend to keep this process fairly open and want everyone to collaborate in the development of the website which is built for the people of India dealing with torturous power cut situations in summers.

Please find the first draft of the homepage design below. If you find this to be an interesting idea, you are invited to make your voice heard – please post your constructive comments and criticism on this post.

powercuts.in homepage design

While I am yet to start publishing anything on Eficacy Blog; I thought I might as well start finishing the blog’s WP theme and also set things the way I wanted to. One of those being the permalink structure on this blog. It was previously http://www.eficacy.com/blog/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name which is recently replaced with the new structure: http://www.eficacy.com/blog/post-name/yyyy-mm-dd/

Why?

Well, firstly, its of similar value to the previous permalink structure as far as pretty URLs and search engines are concerned, so no loss of legibility and SE friendliness there.

Besides it also states the date clearly at the end of the URL, so the URL itself can be used to clearly identify the date of post in yyyy-mm-dd format too. Somehow this reminded me of my school days when we used to write date on top right of our little ruled notebooks before starting to make notes. :D

I think with some more changes to the theme for blog posts, navigation through the calendar widget and “Archive” sections, this blog should be ready to go.

It’s been a while since the new website went up, and there haven’t been any of those posts I planned for this blog yet.

Three simultaneous web engagements going on at the moment don’t allow enough time to think, reflect and write valuable content. But rest assured, this blog will sure add value to your web experience soon. More so if you are a graphic designer; and even more if you are a graphic designer working with open source tools :)

Thanks for your time.  I will be back soon!

A few days ago, I was pleasantly surprised by a mail from Prashanth stating the VCreate Logic website has been featured on xmarks.com under the section featuring sites related to 3D technologies and images. Here’s a screenshot with the site featured amongst the top three on xmarks.

Sightings - VCreate Logic Website designed by Eficacy

VCreate Logic Pvt Limited is a Bangalore based company who provide products and services to build large scale, extensible and maintainable cross-platform applications with one of their flagship products, GCF, being at the heart of such modular, extensible and very easily maintainable apps.

You can visit the VCreate Logic website here.

Finally! Eficacy.com goes live today in its beta state. “The cobbler whose kids play barefoot” has finally managed to give them a pair of slippers.

I, the designer here at Eficacy, strive to produce much more sleek, modern designs and most importantly designs that work! Contact kamal@eficacy.com for a direct conversation anytime.

Do let us know how you like the new design of eficacy.com which was completely done using Open Source tool-set on Ubuntu 8.10, which is a very popular GNU/Linux distribution ( Lovely even! : ) .

My toolset here includes the following (that i particularly used to create all content and design of eficacy.com as you see it):

• Inkscape (The incredible!)
• GIMP
• Imagemagick
• Blender
• Geany
• GIT
• Nano (oh I just love this baby ) Edit: Ok, i have moved on :P

edit: More tools added to my arsenal :)

The most loved ones being:

• Vim
• Emacs

(many thanks to friends Anurag and Aanjhan for getting me up to speed on these in just one short tutorial session :)

/edit.

And of course my Olympus digicam!

I would be posting a case-study on how the design of the site happened, as soon as I get some time and get my beloved camera repaired. Stay tuned…

Hello World!

Eficacy Designs is back, with the new look and feel. Hope it fulfills its purpose of giving you a painless browsing experience. It would be great to know how your experience surfing eficacy turned out to be. Please feel free to drop a comment right here.

This site is not just my online shop, but also a test-bed for me to play on and play with. And that is why, some parts of it will keep updating pretty frequently, now that I have it in place. Hoping to see you around often, stay tuned.

Thanks for coming.

/kamal`