Hiran Venugopalan is a technology entrepreneur based out of Kochi. He is a supporter of usability-wise development of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects and has excellent expertise in the areas of Usability engineering, Interface designing, Typeface designing, Brand development and Web technologies. A free software enthusiast since 2005, he works on Typeface & Interface design and development,and in brand development in the wider design domains as well.

Hailing from Palakkad, Kerala and with rather simple schooling origins at the Basel Evangelical Mission Higher Secondary School and Kannadi HSS there, he has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science engineering from Vidya Academy of Science and Technology, Thrissur. As his interest in free software peaked, he turned into an enthusiastic lover, supporter, contributor and promoter to free software technologies. This led him to becoming a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student in 2007 and eventually into making amazing contributions to a range of fields.

As a typeface designer, he has always believed in putting his unique abilities to work into developing fonts. He has had the opportunity to develop Dyuthi – an ornamental Malayalam Unicode font as part of  Google Summer of Code. Later, he designed Perizia, an asymmetric Latin font, as well as a handwriting font Rufscript, all of which have been released under GNU GPL. He has also worked on font projects like Raghu, Kalyani, Lohit, Samyak, Freefont and is currently working on some Indic-specific font projects.

Being an ace freelance Web designer, he has designed and developed nearly 30 websites. Having been provided with the opportunity to work on the project Malayal.am, he has put to use his capabilities as a Usability engineer, proving himself an ace in the field. He has also designed brand identities for a number of organizations, projects, products, start-ups and numerous events. He currently provides Usability consultancy through his firm Ubiqurio Consultancy and identity branding through its subsidiary project named Logobake. With an avid and passionate interest for web technologies, media and social media, he is a part of the venture Vibes Media, the team behind Indiavibes – the web TV and SaltMangoTree, the social media service providers.

When not involved in any of this, you can catch him traveling and taking photographs and searching for new cuisines with him being a foodie to the core. Being a film buff, he easily gets into discussions of classic films and great directors.

In his blog, he writes about everything – his life, thoughts, experiences, travelogues, photography, technology, typography, social media and more.

What can he do for you? He offers consultancy and service through his venture. He can also talk/conduct workshops on these topics.