Why Pakistani designers chase technique and skip the idea

A weird and wild path from Karachi to Pitaro

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Sarmad Ahsan as someone close to him — the production lead at One Eight Nine Media, the company that hosts Thought Behind Things, and in Muzamil’s framing, one of the best motion graphics designers in Pakistan. Sarmad immediately deflects the compliment. “I say I’m an aspiring motion designer,” he tells Muzamil. “I’m not there yet.”

The conversation then moves to the question Muzamil opens almost every interview with: what has the last twenty-something years looked like? Sarmad’s answer is honest. “It’s very weird and very wild.”

He grew up moving. His father was a CSS officer who had cleared the exam through the accounts and audit group, which meant the family rotated through Karachi, Lahore, Jamshoro, and Hyderabad before splitting up when his eldest sister started university. Sarmad ended up at Cadet College Petaro in eighth grade — a sharp culture shock after the Beaconhouse environment he had come from. “That military lifestyle was not for me at all,” he says. He stuck it out through matric, then left for Karachi to finish his intermediate at DA Degree College for Men.

Muzamil — himself born in Larkana, Sarmad’s ancestral hometown — uses the Sindhi connection as a way in. The two compare notes on how moving south within the country tends to disconnect people from the national narrative.

ACCA, an Avatar fan video, and the slow detour into design

Sarmad’s family wanted him in accountancy. His father, given his own background, found the ACCA pitch persuasive: clear CET, do ACCA, start earning. Sarmad enrolled and was, by his own account, good at it. He scored well on the CET papers.

The detour started with a cartoon. Sarmad was watching The Legend of Aang, hanging around the early Orkut anime communities, and stumbled into the world of AMVs — anime music videos. He decided he wanted to make one, except he wanted to make it from scratch, animating an Evanescence song without any background in the craft. “Like any graphic designer, they pirate the software first and just start fiddling with it,” he says. He pirated Adobe Flash, realised animation was nothing like he had imagined, and pivoted to Photoshop tutorials because there were more of them online. From there the trap was set. “I just got lured into this domain.”

By the time he was a year and a half into CET, the pull was strong enough that he wanted out of accountancy entirely. He looked at Indus Valley — closed admissions that year — considered Iqra, and eventually landed at PAF KIET in a Bachelor of Computer Arts programme that bundled design, photography, filmmaking, and 3D into one degree. Sarmad gives a note of caution to anyone tempted by the same breadth: “Definitely young people should explore. But give yourself a deadline. After this, I’m done exploring, and I’m going to pick one thing and continue with that path.”

His first paid gig came during the 2013 election cycle — a six-thousand-rupee animation for a TV channel showing vote counts. The channel ended up not using it because their hardware could not handle anything heavier than a barebones version. Sarmad still has the receipt.

The CSS year in Lahore, and what it actually taught him

After graduating in 2015 or 2016, Sarmad ran into the problem most Pakistani designers eventually hit: clients who did not value good design and would not pay for it. “They were like, kam paison mein gandi cheez de do,” he says. He could not manage the business side. His parents suggested CSS. He took them up on it and moved to Lahore in 2016.

The Lahore section of the conversation is one of the more interesting passages in the episode. Sarmad describes a “magnitude of difference” between how CSS is studied in Karachi versus Lahore. “Things that were considered basic in Lahore — yeh tou pata hona chahiye — were considered very advanced in Karachi.” He was not prepared for the level of preparation his peers had already done. He was not prepared, either, for teachers cracking jokes mid-class in thick Punjabi, a language he did not speak. “It felt like, okay, because Punjabi is a dominant language, it can be used interchangeably with Urdu. That was a weird cultural shock for me.”

He never sat the paper. A friend’s wedding pulled him back to Karachi at the worst possible time before the first attempt, and by the second cycle, the stress had manifested physically — anxiety severe enough to cause sustained digestive problems. He came home for treatment and never went back.

The interesting thing, Muzamil presses, is whether the year was wasted. Sarmad is firm that it was not. “I was very an idealist before CSS, and then I became more realistic. The world doesn’t work the way I think it should. The world works in a certain manner, and maybe it shouldn’t work like that, but that’s the way it is. So you should accept it and work around it.” He credits the international relations classes with giving him, for the first time, a model of how the world actually operates. That shift — from idealism to a workable realism — is what he carried back into his design career.

Choosing motion design, paying for the lesson

Back in Karachi, Sarmad made the decision that defines his current practice. He had already done graphic design, film, and photography during his undergraduate. He wanted to narrow down. Motion design — the place where graphic design meets animation — was the niche.

Muzamil asks the obvious question: what does that mean, exactly? Sarmad’s definition is careful. Animation, in most usage, is character or story-driven. Motion design sometimes has those elements but often does not — it can be boxes, shapes, colours, patterns. “It’s just graphic design animated.”

The problem in Pakistan at the time was that there were no real local resources to learn it from. Sarmad saved up and paid one thousand US dollars for an advanced course at the School of Motion. He could not finish the course — it was too dense for where he was — but it taught him something more valuable than technique. “I finally understood what is it about the Western designers and how they do things there so well. The only difference I found was the amount of effort.”

The point lands hard. He explains that in Western shops, a three to five minute video is given three to six months, often with multiple people on it. In Pakistan, a client expects the same thing in a week. The output gap, Sarmad argues, is not a skill gap. “We as Pakistanis are just as skilled. If we are given the chance and the conducive environment to actually do a project well, we’ll do it well.”

The Pakistani creative problem: thoughtless execution

This is the section of the episode that runs the longest, and the most useful one. Muzamil walks Sarmad through the diagnosis he has been working through across multiple TBT episodes — that low-value graphic design in Pakistan is essentially copy-paste, that it is automation-bait, and that it represents tens of thousands of freelancers whose entire workflow is exposed.

Sarmad agrees but reframes the problem at a higher altitude. “The problem you have identified is bigger than design. It goes to most creative fields in Pakistan.”

His model is that every creative field has two halves: the core idea and the execution. Pakistani creators, almost universally, focus on execution. The reason is structural. “It’s more technical. You learn certain techniques and you can easily replicate it. With the core idea, the problem is it’s more creative and more difficult. You have to think a lot. You have to identify what the brand stands for, what their core values are, what insight there is in the market, and how do you connect these two.”

He then runs a comparison between Karachi’s design schools that is unusually direct. IVS, in his read, over-weights idea and under-weights execution. Iqra and PAF KIET, including his own alma mater, do the opposite — heavy on software, light on theory. Both approaches are broken. “Without good education, your idea won’t be fleshed out. Without a good idea, your execution is hollow.”

What this looks like in practice, Sarmad says, is a designer who can run the software and replicate a look but who, when asked to design a logo for a real brand, gives generic options. The first step — sitting with a brand and asking what their story is, what they stand for — gets skipped.

How freelancers actually survive the next decade

Muzamil pushes Sarmad on the question that brought a lot of people to the episode. There are freelancers right now charging a thousand dollars a month doing the kind of design work that is most clearly in the path of automation. What do they actually need to learn?

Sarmad’s answer is, in his words, “very easy.” Go back to basics. Learn the principles and elements of design — colour theory, composition, pacing, timing, insight. He gives a concrete example. There is a motion design technique for revealing a logo that used to take eight to sixteen hours to do properly. A plugin now does it in one click. The plugin is not the threat — the threat is that designers who never learned why the original technique worked will not be able to direct the plugin to produce anything good.

“Color theory is one of the principles of design. You Google them, you’ll find a couple of lists. Start focusing on each element and each principle and go deep in it. That’s all you need to know to secure yourself for the future.”

It is a deliberately low-tech answer. No new software. No tooling. Books, lists, time. The leverage is in the part of the work that does not get easier when the tools get better.

Muzamil layers on his own version of the same argument — that demand for better creative work in Pakistan is now visibly rising, and pointing to PSL music videos and the new ISPR-backed drama Sinf-e-Aahan as evidence. The supply side, he argues, is not being upgraded to meet that demand. The same handful of talents who delivered something good two or three years ago are being asked to deliver everything new, and the result is half-built college projects in expensive packaging. Sarmad agrees: the demand is now there. It is the pipeline that is missing.

On organisation, workflow, and managing yourself

Toward the latter half of the conversation, Muzamil turns the lens onto something Sarmad has quietly done at One Eight Nine Media: brought structure into how the team works.

Sarmad pushes back on the framing. “A lot of people in the office think I’m very organised, and that is not true. I’m the most disorganised person in Pakistan.” The system, he says, is not personality. It is a forced response to having lost too many clients to disorganisation early in his freelance career. He had no idea how long a logo took him to make because he had never tracked it. He could not give a client a timeline. He could not separate the creative work from the business of running the work.

The fix was almost mechanical. Put things on paper. “When you put things on paper, you see the bigger picture. You realise you are either overcommitting, or the task is impossible, or it’s beyond the scope of what you agreed with.”

Muzamil presses on whether this has actually changed the team’s productivity. Sarmad’s answer is matter-of-fact. The people who pushed back hardest at the start are now the ones who tell him the system is helping them. The proof is in the comparison: working without the system versus working with it. Once people have both, they choose the system.

Pakistan Now, and the talent the country is missing

The conversation closes on Pakistan Now, the digital-first journalism initiative Sarmad has been helping build. He describes it plainly: a platform for young people who have walked away from television news and need political and social narratives in a format that is native to the internet.

The bottleneck, he tells Muzamil, is talent. “We literally want people from two different worlds. Somebody who knows the societal, political aspect of things, and somebody who understands the internet.” Traditionally smart people are too academic — they cannot communicate in a register the internet accepts. Internet-fluent people often do not understand the substance.

Muzamil adds a third axis — the creative or technical layer, the ability to actually produce video. Sarmad disagrees, gently. The technical layer, in his experience, is the easiest to teach. The team at One Eight Nine has trained people with zero technical background up to a working standard. What is not teachable, in his view, is genuine curiosity about the world. If someone has never been interested in what is happening around them, no amount of newspaper subscriptions will change that.

By the end of the conversation, the through-line is clear. Whether Sarmad is talking about motion design, freelancing, CSS, or building a newsroom, he is making the same argument in different forms: technique is cheap, principles are scarce, and the people who survive the next wave will be the ones who put the boring work in on the parts that do not show up in a portfolio.