If you have scrolled through this site, you have seen the same kind of drawing many times: a few dots, and one line that winds round them. It is a kolam, and it is here for a reason.
What is a kolam?
A kolam is drawn at the doorstep in Tamil Nadu: a grid of dots, and one line that loops around every dot without touching it and without the hand lifting. It is drawn in rice flour at dawn, and drawn again the next morning.
The dots are called pulli. A kolam drawn with one unbroken line is a sikku kolam, and that is the only kind used here.
What does a kolam have to do with technology?
Tech Made Simple is the line we work by. For most businesses, technology arrives as a tangle: a website from one vendor, ads from another, software from a third, and loose ends between them. Making it simple means drawing one line through all of it, so there is one team to ask when something needs to change.
A kolam is that idea, drawn. The dots are the fixed points a piece of work has to reach. The line is the work itself: it passes every point, never lifts, and closes where it began.
How does the drawing match the way we work?
The home page describes our way of working in four steps, and each one is a stage of drawing a kolam:
- Dots. Before anything is designed, we fix the points the work has to pass through, and agree them with you first.
- Line. Design and build run as one continuous line, drawn by the same team rather than handed between agencies.
- Close. Launch is where the loop closes: we check the work against the points fixed at the start.
- Redraw. A kolam is drawn again every morning. Support, search, ad campaigns and licence renewals work the same way, done again on a schedule.
Where does it appear on this site?
- On the home page, a tangle of grey strands over a grid of dots gives way to one orange line: the idea above, in a single drawing.
- Each of our service groups has its own kolam, so the groups can be told apart at a glance.
- Every client project has a signature kolam generated from its name, so the same project always gets the same drawing.
None of these are drawn by hand. Each one is generated by code from a grid of dots, using the mirror curves described by the mathematician Paulus Gerdes, which find a single line that rings every dot without touching it.
What are the rules for using it?
We keep to a few rules, so the kolam stays a drawing with a meaning rather than a decoration. It is always one line round dots, in white or orange on a dark page. It is never a background pattern, and it never carries figurative or religious motifs. Where a kolam glows, nothing else near it does.
It is also simply local. We are based in Chennai, and the kolam is part of the place we work from.