I worked with Digital Green (from April to May 2022) as a book designer for the booklet: Pursuit of Happiness - Farmer Stories from Andhra Pradesh. My tasks included -
book layout and design
background illustrations
designing the covers
editing the images
Images from the printed book, sent by the author - B Praveen Kumar.
It was rewardoing to work on this project. Without particular knowledge, I got myself into what feels like a meaningful project.
B Praveen Kumar is an extremely humble, sweet and thoughtful person and I'm sure - author. I only read some pages and didn't really understand the technical part of things, but the stories seemed important.
Here is what I did understand:
1. Digital green (a global development organization) is trying to bring rather newer/modern solutions to the problems faced by farmers. I remember, I don't know from where, that agriculture is the source of employment for 70% of India's population, and I suppose super important for the wole world - considering it is literally step one to our lives - it's food. No one can skip it and many people have to be working on it. So, you got to be good and do right by farmers, right? (Basically) 2. I can only imagine the focussed, honest, long process the author and the photgrapher - the creator, must have gone through to make a safe space for farmers to share their stories and then bring out these to share with the world. The pictures in which farmers look at the camera, they are actually smiling. I think that says a lot about the relationship the cameraman has with the subjects of the images. I genuinely am awed by the idea of the creator's journey... and to work on this project was like paying respect to him and the stories and the farmers.
I don't understand much about the technical parts and don't actually resonate with the stories on a personal level, but I am grateful that I was a part of this project (in my max capacity). :)