she designs retail sites for businesses in Baltimore and Washington. Photo provided by Chauhan.
By Liz Doyle
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
From doodling in her notebook as a child to designing retail sites for businesses in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., area, Deepika Chauhan has always been passionate about graphic design.
“Graphic design allows me to express my thoughts visually,” Chauhan said. “I really enjoy having the ability to get my message across without using words.”
Chauhan grew up in Chandigarh, India, and was fascinated by the patterns that street artists would draw on people’s hands and feet with henna paste. She began drawing these patterns in her notebook with the hopes to one day create her own unique designs.
After moving to White Marsh with her family in 2014, art was all she had.
“I didn’t have friends when I first moved here, so I used to carry my art file everywhere I went,” the 21-year-old recalled.
Although she was a computer science major when she started at Stevenson University in 2016, one of her first classes was a course titled Foundation of Arts where she got to draw portraits for the first time. She was excited when her classmates told her that they liked her style.
After one semester, she decided that she wanted more time to draw. She switched her major to fine arts against her parents’ wishes. Not long after that, she became interested in the digital realm of art.
“I wanted to add my hand-drawn patterns into the digital world and make something really unique that hadn’t been done,” Chauhan said.
She began majoring in graphic design and transferred to Towson University in the spring of 2018.
Chauhan said that classes at Towson like RuSean Myer’s web design course fueled her passion for coding. She liked how open his class was and enjoyed having the freedom to create what she loved.
During her last semester at Towson, she started her internship as a student designer at Creative Services within the Division of University Marketing & Communication at Towson. During this internship she was able to design flyers, banners, brochures and apparel for Towson. She also got a lot of hands-on practice with basic HTML and CSS through coding Towson’s emails.
“Deepika is one of the most creative and versatile student designers we’ve ever had,” said Rick Pallansch, the assistant vice president of Creative Services.
Pallansch, who was Chauhan’s creative director at Creative Services, said that when the COVID-19 quarantine began, he reached out and asked her to draw coloring pages for the Towson community.
After being assigned this task, Chauhan went straight to Towson’s Cook Library and selected the pictures that she was most interested in drawing. She chose the Towson tiger, Stephens Hall, and a dog sitting in front of a Towson University sign. She then put her unique spin on each photo.
The tiger was drawn completely by hand and scanned into the computer. She created Stephens Hall in Adobe Illustrator and incorporated hand-drawn patterns digitally. The dog was drawn on an iPad.
“I wanted to show people how I viewed Towson,” Chauhan said. “I wanted to keep it super unique and different while helping the community in whatever way I could.”
The coding skills she learned while interning at Creative Services helped her land a job at Tray, Inc., a print and digital communication company where she now works as a front-end developer.
“Deepika is a strong, beautiful, and intelligent soul, and she is not afraid to be herself,” said Jessica Wentling, a fellow front-end developer at Tray. “I’m so grateful to be able to work with her.”
“Deepika has been an amazing person to work with,” said Cameran Dailey, a web project coordinator at Tray. “She has such positive energy and a great work ethic.”
At the company, Chauhan designs retail websites for businesses such as Under Armour and The Orioles. She enjoys being able to make her designs personal while also keeping them professional.
“I want to draw people’s attention to the topics that I really care about,” Chauhan said. “While it may seem like a very restrictive field, you can literally be yourself and also stay within the limits of the branding you’re doing for the company.”