About
About Rudra Ahmedabadi.
Rudra Ahmedabadi is a product designer and creative developer based in Vadodara, Gujarat, India. He takes a project from the first rough question through research, interface design and the front-end build to the version that ships — interactive websites, long-form digital experiences, UI/UX and experimental interfaces.
What I do
Design and build, not one or the other.
I'd rather make three things I stand behind than thirty I don't.
I'm a product designer and creative developer. In practice that means I take a thing from the first rough question to the version that ships — research, interface design, the front-end build, the motion, the last round of details nobody asks for.
Working across both sides removes the hand-off, which is usually where the idea gets diluted. What I draw on day one is what goes live, because I'm the one building it. The details most people never consciously notice are the ones that make something feel considered.
Most of my work ends up in a browser: interactive sites, long-form interactive pieces, design systems, and interfaces that carry a bit more character than a template allows.
- Product & interaction design
- UI/UX and design systems
- Front-end & creative development
- Prototyping & motion
- Identity and art direction
- WebGL and experimental interfaces
Selected work
Things I designed and built.
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Mugger City
A digital field guide to the wild mugger crocodiles of the Vishwamitri River — roughly three hundred of them, sharing twenty-four kilometres of Vadodara with two and a half million people. Researched, written, designed and built by Rudra Ahmedabadi.
Read the case study → -
Tribal Traces
A long-form interactive archive of Indian craft, city by city — 123 researched chapters reached through a map of the country, with a bilingual audio tour and a 3D artefact gallery. Designed and developed by Rudra Ahmedabadi.
Read the case study → -
Food Origin
Search a dish and travel backwards through its history — a fixed collection of 17 researched exhibits, each era sourced and dated. Designed and developed by Rudra Ahmedabadi.
Read the case study →
The full set, including what's still in progress, sits on the work section of the homepage.
Interests
What I keep circling back to
Interfaces that behave like objects rather than documents — where motion carries meaning instead of decorating it, and a page has some weight and material to it.
Craft and pattern, which is how Tribal Traces started: a research habit that turned into a piece. I'm drawn to work that has something underneath it, where the structure is doing real thinking.
On the build side: WebGL and shaders, typography on screen, design systems that stay coherent as they grow, and the performance work that lets an ambitious interface still load quickly.
And the things with no client and no brief: a driving game with synthesised audio, a world simulation that has been running since before you opened this page. They are in Experiments, where they belong.
I'm based in Vadodara, Gujarat, and work with people wherever they are.
How I work
Six things that happen every time
Not a methodology. Just what the work has needed.
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Find the actual question
Not “make a site about crocodiles” but “why does everything anyone knows about these animals arrive as an incident?” The brief is usually one layer down from the request.
Mugger City — the whole structure came out of writing down the questions a visitor actually arrives with, in order. -
Research before layout
The content decides the shape, not the other way round. Research also decides what can honestly be claimed, which is the part that usually gets skipped.
Tribal Traces — 123 researched chapters across 26 states came first; the map became the index because the material was geographic. -
Design it, then build that
A designed reference exists before the code does, and the build is measured against it rather than drifting away from it. Where the two differ at the end, the difference was a decision.
Food Origin — built against an approved design; every colour, font, shadow and measurement lives in one config file taken from it. -
Say how sure it is
If a number is an estimate, the interface says so where the number is, not in a footnote. This is the habit I would most want a collaborator to notice.
All three — a sources page that admits to rounding, a confidence label on every one of 133 timeline versions, an empty state that lists what is actually there. -
Make the motion mean something
Animation earns its place by explaining something a static layout could not. Everything that moves also has to switch off properly for anyone who asks it to.
Tribal Traces — a narrated tour that drives the real interface, keyed to the audio’s own clock so it stays in sync at any playback speed. -
Ship it, and keep the receipts
Live, on a real domain, with the unfinished parts named rather than hidden. A thing that is 90% done and honest about the last 10% is more useful than one that pretends.
This site — every case study ends with what is still missing.
Technical range
What I've actually built with
- Hand-written HTML, CSS, vanilla JS
- React, Next.js, TypeScript
- Design tokens & theme systems
- Responsive and reduced-motion work
- Three.js & WebGL
- Custom GLSL shaders
- glTF models and 3D scenes
- Canvas and SVG systems
- Node.js, SQLite
- Simulation & procedural generation
- Collision, physics, WebAudio
- LLM research pipelines
- Typography on screen
- Motion & interaction design
- Identity and art direction
- Accessibility and performance
Every line above is something in the work on this site, not a list of things I have read about. The two projects that are nothing but systems — a driving game and a world simulation — are in Experiments.
Contact
Start a conversation.
If you're working on something that needs design and build in the same pair of hands, write to me — a sentence about the project is enough to start.