The designer who deleted Pinterest to find originality

Born outside, building inside

The episode opens with Muzamil noting that he had been watching Areeb Tariq’s work from a distance and was struck not just by the quality of the output but by the fact that a team member — Khayam, a previous podcast guest — was actively taking a course from him. That combination, a practitioner willing to teach, was what made Muzamil want to sit down with him.

Areeb’s biography is unusual for a Karachi-based creative. He was born in Dubai, spent sixteen years in Saudi Arabia, went to North Cyprus for a bachelor’s in Visual Arts and Communication Design, and only then moved to Pakistan for professional life. He arrived with no network, no mentor, and no inherited blueprint for how a design career was supposed to work. “I didn’t know any kind of blueprint,” he says. “So that way I was like, okay, this is also an experiment, this is also an experiment.”

He started university in computer engineering — not because he wanted to, but because no one had told him anything else existed. Within a semester he switched to design, and for the first time in his academic life he was genuinely good at school. He finished in three and a half years, taking extra courses every semester, and posted a 3.9 GPA in his design semesters. The difference, he explains, was structural: design had a practical approach from day one. You did not need four years of theory before you could make something real. “You don’t need a four-year degree to call yourself a video editor. You just need a few months and some good videos.”

The agency circuit and the COVID exit

Back in Pakistan, Areeb tried the conventional path. His first job was at T2F, the Karachi arts and culture space, which he describes as a genuinely good experience — but one that ended when the organisation ran out of money. He moved to a commercial agency, lasted about a month, and left. Then another. The pattern repeated. “I can’t see myself spending more than six months,” he says. “I was working with big brands — top fashion brands, food brands — but I was like, the work is not something I can put on my Instagram.”

The exit came when COVID arrived and the agency let him go. He had been freelancing alongside the agency work the whole time, so the transition was less a leap than a final acknowledgement of what was already true. He has not applied for a job since.

The five-dollar logo problem

Muzamil raises the issue directly: Pakistan has the third-largest freelancer market in the world, and a significant portion of it is stuck producing commodity graphic design — five-dollar logos, Canva-adjacent social media posts, work that is already being automated. What does the path out of that look like?

Areeb’s diagnosis is precise. The problem is not that people learned Photoshop. The problem is that they were taught Photoshop as a factory tool rather than as a communication instrument. “Design is visual communication design,” he says. “The communication factor needs to exist — otherwise you can go to any print market and find six kids sitting in a row at keyboards. They are faster than any designer. They do triple the work. But they don’t have any design sense because they weren’t taught it that way.”

The result is a market full of people who can execute but cannot think. When a client asks for something original, “haath paon phool jaate hain” — they freeze. They need a reference to copy. And because they copy from the same first page of Pinterest search results, everything looks the same.

Areeb’s own Fiverr account sat at zero orders for three years. Once he rebuilt his profile — the communication, the positioning, the portfolio — he had an order within a month and has been running it as a studio-level operation since. The lesson he draws is not that Fiverr is broken. It is that most people show up with a bad storefront and then blame the platform.

RadicalX and the education gap

Muzamil asks about RadicalX, the e-learning platform Areeb co-founded with his partner Talha. The concept is straightforward in theory and difficult in practice: not just courses, but mentorship, apprenticeship, community, and real client projects done alongside students.

“We are taking the project that is coming into our agency and doing it with the students,” Areeb explains. The gap between education and industry is not a secret — everyone knows it exists — but almost no one closes it. RadicalX’s attempt is to bring actual briefs, actual feedback, and actual industry contacts into the learning environment. They have brought in designers from Poland, a Microsoft employee from India, and others, giving students access to a world that most of them have never been able to see.

The courses so far have covered graphic design, freelancing, UX design, and After Effects animation. Pricing is kept low — around six thousand rupees for a full course of eight to ten live sessions — because Areeb is clear-eyed about buying power. “Six thousand is a lot for some people. We can’t say they don’t know the value of our product.”

The platform also has a community app where students post work-in-progress, give and receive critique, and build relationships with each other. Areeb’s reasoning is direct: “People learn best in communities. If your friends are doing the assignment, you would kind of regret not doing it.” With three hundred users and no marketing yet, the community is already self-sustaining.

One of the most important things RadicalX tries to address is what Areeb calls creative security — the confidence to experiment, to fail, and to try again. “Self-belief is the biggest problem. The kid thinks he can’t do it.” He describes a fourteen-year-old student who memorised an entire UX philosophy module just to win a Kahoot game in class. Gamification, leaderboards, mock interviews, weekly webinars — all of it is designed around one problem: people do not finish courses because their dopamine systems have been trained by YouTube and Netflix to find structured learning boring.

Ajeeb Collective and the narrative behind the object

Areeb’s fashion label, Ajeeb Collective, began as his university thesis. The name means “weird” in both Urdu and Arabic, and that was deliberate. When he started university, he felt the pressure of impostor syndrome — someone who had abandoned engineering for design, competing against people who seemed more certain of themselves. His solution was to make things so strange that a teacher could not simply call them good or bad. “It’s just weird. It’s just really different.”

He launched the collective in February 2020 at the last Lahore Music Meet before COVID, arriving with a suitcase full of denim pieces and art objects. The label operates on a drop model — exclusive, limited, intimate. The first collection was called Hum Ek Hain, made entirely during COVID, and every piece connected to a question rather than a statement. A shirt with a window box that said “maybe.” Another referencing Bollywood. A doodle-line rickshaw talking about motion. “To a normal person it’s just a nice shirt. But someone who looks closer — everything is connected.”

Muzamil asks whether high-street, thought-driven fashion can work in Pakistan at a price point that reflects the craft. Areeb’s answer is honest: not yet at scale, and not without a shift in buying power. He held back a planned 2022 collection because the financial return did not justify the operational cost. “Even if your product is really good, you are going to market it, you are going to try to sell it, and there will come a point — maybe five or six years from now — where it can work organically.” The path, he suggests, is fewer pieces at a higher price rather than mass volume at a low margin.

Why design got dirty: dopamine, anti-establishment codes, and Pepsi

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises a question that had been building throughout: why has the aesthetic shifted so sharply from clean minimalism to grungy, glitchy, maximalist design? He references a designer on his own team who traced the pattern back to the 1920s — the dadaist anti-establishment response to the ruling elite, the way resentment toward the status quo always produces a visual language that signals “this is from the little man.” The cycle peaked in 2000 with the Apple-ification of everything, and then around 2015 a new anti-establishment wave began — Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders, the burn-the-rich sentiment — and the design followed.

Areeb’s explanation for the mechanism is neurological. “We are really bombarded with so much content that anything that is intensely hitting our dopamine — that’s where we stop while scrolling.” More colours, more glitches, more elements means more dopamine centres activated simultaneously. The intensity will keep escalating because we habituate to each level. “Next year it’s going to get a bit more intense than this. That’s not a prediction. That’s how it works.”

The irony Muzamil points out is that Pepsi — the establishment — has now absorbed the anti-establishment code. Why Not Meri Jaan ticked every box: the rap, the glow lights, the rawness. “People don’t even realise the establishment has taken your anti-establishment code.” The next generation will look at that Pepsi ad and see it as the establishment, and will begin evolving toward something else entirely.

Areeb adds a practical corollary for designers: the moment a technique becomes commercially available and widely replicated, it loses its power. “I don’t even feel like using a glitch now. It’s been overused.” The answer is not to chase the next trend but to keep experimenting — and specifically, to combine two existing references in a way that carries your own story. “I’m not asking you to come up with something from scratch. Try to experiment with what happens when you combine A and B. That’s the easiest way to begin.”

He illustrates this with a story from university. In a history of design class, every student was asked to make an art deco poster. Every single poster looked identical — because everyone had searched “art deco” on Pinterest and looked at the first page. “Then I realised: everyone’s search process was the same.” His response was to delete Pinterest from his workflow entirely for an extended period. Removing the shared reference pool forced him to find different inputs.

Thirty years from now

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Areeb — twenty-three years old at the time of recording — where he sees Pakistan in thirty years. The answer is neither cynical nor naively optimistic. “If people start talking to each other more, sharing more, and being more sensitive to what’s going around, I feel like it could go in a really good direction.”

He is impatient with the genre of Pakistani podcast that catalogues problems without attempting solutions. “That’s what literally 80% of the podcasts in our country do — yeh masle hain, yeh masle hain. Okay, you read an article and you told us the problems. But what have you done to solve it?” His own answer is RadicalX: if he can contribute even one percent to one person’s success, that is the work worth doing.

Muzamil closes by saying he has not felt this genuinely excited about a guest’s trajectory in some time — particularly about where RadicalX goes in five, eight, ten years. “It’s a radical idea. I haven’t seen e-learning done in a manner that feels complete.”