The cleaner screen that had cut words from the story

The cropped page looked better in the approval presentation than the whole page did. The pictures filled the phone, and the sequence appeared easier to follow. I approved it in 2019 before we had adequately examined what the crop removed. In a selected review of twenty-four pages, nine lost part of a speech balloon. The words were not decorative material around the image; they were part of the story the product was supposed to help someone read.

I grew up in Pune and completed a Bachelor of Design at the fictional Kelravi Institute of Visual Design in May 1999. I joined Dervani Design Studio the following month in a seven-person assistant group. We prepared layouts and visual assets for senior designers. I had no budget or authority to approve a client’s publication. The work taught me that an image’s surroundings can carry meaning, and that a visually tidy arrangement is not necessarily a faithful one.

In April 2005 I became a digital designer leading twelve colleagues within ₹1.5 crore annual studio-function expense. We adapted visual material for screens with different sizes and uses. I learned to ask what the reader needed to retain when the presentation changed. Client creators and editors kept their approvals. Those boundaries mattered because our design choices could alter emphasis even without changing a word. The later crop error was a failure to apply a lesson already present in this work, rather than a surprising problem no designer could have anticipated.

I joined Ravneshi Illustrated Stories in April 2012 as a product manager with sixteen colleagues and ₹2.8 crore annual function expense. Moving from studio assignments to a continuing reader product meant living with the choices after release. A screen that looked effective in a presentation could become tiring or confusing over an entire story. I worked with research, design, engineering and publisher colleagues to understand the reader’s movement between detail and the page as a composition. A product decision needed to preserve both the creator’s work and the reader’s ability to choose how to approach it.

I became product director in April 2017, leading nineteen colleagues within ₹4.2 crore annual function expense. Two years later I approved the crop that removed speech-balloon content in nine of the twenty-four pages reviewed. Nazia’s research and creator feedback made the issue concrete. We spent ₹29 lakh over seven weeks restoring a full-page fallback and adding creator preview before adapted views were released. All nine affected pages in that selected set were corrected. The repair did not certify the entire catalogue or every accessibility requirement, and I did not describe it as a measured increase in reader completion.

I became CPO in April 2022. Twenty-one colleagues now work through three leads within ₹5.6 crore annual function expense, including ₹1.9 crore discovery and design. Rohan owns enterprise commitments, and publishers and creators retain their rights and editorial decisions. In 2023 an eighteen-person adult study showed two useful preferences: ten wanted guided panels and eight preferred the whole page. We spent ₹46 lakh over twelve weeks releasing optional guidance with page context for seventeen pilot titles after creator review. The result was a supported choice, not evidence that one mode should replace the other for everyone.

In 2025 we changed offline preparation so a reader could select a chapter rather than download a whole volume first. The selected fictional volume contained six 20 MB chapter payloads, total 120 MB. One chosen chapter could therefore be prepared with 20 MB of content while the other chapters remained clearly unavailable offline. The ₹54 lakh, fourteen-week product effort changed download granularity, not compression quality or publisher permission. Readers could still choose the complete title. We did not claim the same network performance or payload size for every work.

My role carries no statutory directorship or personal equity. A first outside contribution would require additional governance learning and a specific assessment. I would bring a product perspective that treats convenience as something to design with the reader and creator, rather than a reason to remove a choice they may value. The early crop approval remains useful because it reminds me to examine what a cleaner screen has made harder to see.

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