My first client project: STEM for Society

The first real client I ever worked with was a test. I just did not know it yet. STEM for Society needed a website built around course bookings, and I was handed the brief to see how I would actually handle a client, not just a design tool. Working from home, coordinating everything directly with Anand sir, one of the people behind the Ramachandra Incubation Centre in Porur, Chennai. STEM for Society runs STEM education and incubation programs, connecting students with industry and institution partners across sectors like climate change, life sciences, and technology. I never finished the full site. What I actually delivered was the larger screen size version, since that was what I was asked to prove I could do first. Before touching a single screen, I built a custom design system. Colours, components, the pieces meant to get reused across every page instead of designed once and forgotten. That habit was not common for someone this early into the work, and it is one I have kept on every project since. This was about a year and a half ago, before AI played any real part in how I designed. Every screen, every component, came out of Figma by hand, nothing generated, nothing assisted. Anand sir had a bigger vision for the platform than the brief itself asked for, and getting trusted with that this early stuck with me more than the actual screens did. The design system was never really about the components. It was the first proof, to a client and to myself, that I could think past one screen. #uiuxdesign #liveprojects