Year 2021 in Review, Design. Products. Spiderman

6 min readJan 14, 2022

Writing this review was one of the toughest things I had to do in recent time, It’s been a year. I don’t need to tell you that. 2020 was the first time I wrote my Year in Review and it made me understand what I did in a whole year and how important it is to look back on what you do. So here I am writing 2021 Year in Review

It’s been a difficult and simultaneously rewarding year both personally and professionally. That made me think, “Why wouldn’t I write that? Why wouldn’t I want a record of the highs and lows I experienced during this rollercoaster of a year?”

Let’s Jump in it.

2021 Started on a Good note for me on the Profession front, I have been working amazingly with my Day Job and Freelance Business.

But in Feb I made a decision that changed The whole trajectory of my Career and How I thought of my Work-life, You might remember from 2020 that I used to work with a Delhi-based No-code Studio called EPYC.

After Covid, I made the first decision to go to Manali to freshen up my mind and get out of my home after a full 2020 lockdown year, and that’s when an amazing thing happened.

While was traveling to Manali, I planned to meet EPYC founder Mayank, We have been working together for the last two years, I thought it would be good to meet him in person.

When I met Mayank, we talked for hours and when I was leaving he made me an offer to join EPYC, I was surprised 😮 but also intrigued, As a person, I like to explore and try new stuff.

I have been working with A design Agency for the last 5 years, and I felt it was the right time to move on and take a new Challenge, And this offer came at the perfect time.

So, I Joined EPYC as a Lead Visual Designer, I was excited as I was going to work with new people and also going to relocate to Delhi. Being in Ahmedabad my whole life, I felt that this change was necessary, But Life had planned something different for me. I went to Delhi in April and unfortunately, the second wave of Covid hit at the same time, so I had to come back from Delhi in 5 days.

There goes the experience of a new city, But I still didn’t lose hope and started working with EPYC.

One of the benefits of working with EPYC was that I joined the company as a Part-time consultant, I made the decision based on that I wanted to do freelance with more time and also build my products.

So As soon I joined EPYC, I also joined Upwork — A Freelancer Platform.

While working on a Freelance platform is tough but I had my niche of designing Pitch decks and you can see the numbers below

$8k | 21 Projects | 200 Hours | Top Rated | 30+ Clients

Made this from 6 Months of Freelancing on Upwork

here are some of the testimonials…

This all was possible because I had extra time to learn and work on new things. With this newfound extra time, I also joined Twitter. I already was a part of it but never thought of using it daily.

1130 Followers | 100K+ Impressions | 2000+ tweets

(This is the analytics for December 2021)

One another benefit of having this extra time and the amazing team was that I learned about many new tools and skills,

- Learned these No-code and Design Tools

Now that I had learned about these tools, It was time to put them to test with building side projects. And here I took the second decision of this year, It was to join the Build Cohort by STL, What is build you ask?

It’s a Cohort based course that helps you in building and launching products in a month. I was part of 76 students who joined, including developers, Marketers, and Designers.

Launched 5 Side products in the last 6 months, I know it might sound a little exaggerated but believe me it happened.

1. Doodlicon — Carelessly designed doodle icons for your next project

198 Upvotes 1000+ Downloads and shared by Industry experts

Also, a funny story happed with this, Check this article to read more

2. Notionsites.design — The all-in-one library for Notion Website Templates, With these Templates, you will be able to create your own Website/Portfolio quickly and easily with Notion.

423 Upvotes and 4th Product of the day,

This product also got me on a No-code talk a speaker, Check the Video here. (link)

3. NSFWLogos.XYZ — For any Brand Identity Designers, Bad logos are fun and if they are dirty, it’s a Lottery. Find a collection of these funny logos in one place.

271 Upvotes and 2nd Product of the day,

This was a fun one for me to make, check if you are like to see funny Logos

4. SuperDMs — Send bulk DMs to all Twitter replies in just 2 clicks

Remember the Cohort I joined earlier, This product was made in that cohort with collaboration with Kshitj and Balaji – www.SuperDMs.app

600 Upvotes and 1st Product of the day

5. Wagmi Cards — Gift $MATIC to your loved ones through WAGMI gift cards

In the Cohort, I also met amazing builders and developers and got into web3, worked with them on this together

185 Upvotes and 1st Product of the day,

Now coming back to EPYC, Epyc has an amazing culture, They every year arrange an Office trip, This year I joined them and went to Spiti, you can see how happy we were in the picture below