Kalaigen

Kalaigen — World-class UX, taught right. Chennai.
Kalaigenகலை Est. 2026 · Chennai ↔ Campus ↔ Remote Chennai –:–:– IST

World-class UX, taught right

Built forstudents.
Book a call See the programmes

Everyone can drive a design tool now. Almost nobody can look at a screen and say precisely what’s wrong with it. That gap is the entire job — and it’s all we teach.

Scroll to explore
/ Who we are

Just another UX course. Nothing special. Unless you came here to become the designer everyone in the room turns to.

கலை (kalai) is the Tamil word for art. Gen is whoever comes next. Kalaigen is a Chennai design school that teaches interface design the way craft has always been taught — you make something, someone who can actually see looks at it with you, and you make it again.

We are not a tutorial library. There is no certificate you can sleep through. Every session ends with work on a wall and a room full of people asking why.

/ The eye test

Design is a seeing problem

Not a software problem. So before we tell you what we sell, take the test. Read down as far as you can — then hover the chart to see what you were missing.

Fig. 01 — Kalaigen visual acuity Hover to focus
SEE
MORE THAN
WHAT IS OBVIOUS
ASK WHY UNTIL IT HURTS
THE FIRST IDEA IS RARELY THE BEST ONE
TASTE IS NOT A GIFT, IT IS REPETITION UNDER SUPERVISION
IF YOU CAN READ THIS LINE YOU ARE ALREADY LOOKING CLOSER THAN MOST PEOPLE WHO CALL THEMSELVES DESIGNERS — COME AND STUDY WITH US

Most people stop at line three and assume they’ve read the whole thing. That is exactly what happens in design reviews.

/ 01 Programmes

One craft.
Three very
different rooms

A final-year student, a university department and a product team on a deadline do not need the same programme. They need the same discipline, delivered three ways.

For students & individuals

The Seeing
Practice

01

A live evening cohort for people who want a portfolio that survives a real interview — not a Behance carousel. Three briefs, weekly critique in front of the room, and a mock review with someone who actually hires designers.

  • Three end-to-end briefs, one of them from a paying client
  • Weekly live critique — your work, on screen, defended out loud
  • Portfolio and interview rehearsal in the final fortnight
  • Alumni critique channel that stays open after you finish
Format
Live online, 7–9pm IST
Length
12 weeks · Tue & Thu
Cohort size
24 seats
Next intake
6 October 2026
Fee
₹48,000 · 3 instalments
Apply to the cohort Get the syllabus
For colleges & universities

Semester &
faculty enablement

02

We bring the syllabus, the assignments and the critique panels — then train your faculty to run them after we leave. Built to sit inside your existing academic calendar and credit structure.

  • Semester-mapped syllabus with assignments and rubrics
  • Faculty development workshop so the programme outlives us
  • External critique panels with working industry designers
  • Capstone review and a placement-ready student showcase
Format
In-campus + remote
Length
One or two semesters
Batch
60–240 students
Includes
Faculty training · 2 days
Engagement
MoU or per semester
Request a proposal Talk to academics
For corporates & teams

Embedded team
upskilling

03

We don’t teach on sample apps. We work on your live product with designers, engineers and PMs in the same room — and the redesign at the end is one you can actually ship.

  • Audit of one live flow before day one, so nothing is theoretical
  • Critique rituals your team keeps running after we’re gone
  • Design-system and handoff hygiene for the whole squad
  • Executive read-out with the decisions and the reasoning
Format
Onsite or embedded
Length
2-day sprint or 6 weeks
Room
Design, eng & product
Output
A shippable redesign
From
₹1,80,000 per engagement
Book a scoping call See a sample plan
/ 02 Method

Four moves.
Always this order

The sequence is the whole method. Most people jump straight to making, which is exactly why they can’t explain what they made.

01 //

Look

Ten minutes with one real screen and no opinions. Just an inventory of what is actually there. Nobody does this, and it changes everything.

02 //

Question

State the problem in one sentence a stranger would understand. If you can’t, you don’t have the problem yet — you have a feeling.

03 //

Make

Three versions, never one. The first idea is the most obvious one, and obvious is what everybody else already shipped.

04 //

Defend

Stand beside your work and answer for it, out loud, to people who will push. This is the part nobody practises and every job demands.

/ 03 Proof

Taught in classrooms,
not comment sections

Live cohorts, campus programmes and embedded team engagements since 2026. The short version:

0Students taught
0Critique sessions run
0Teams upskilled
0Finish the programme they start
/ 04 Studio

What comes
out of the room

Student work, campus programmes and team engagements from the last four cohorts.

Drag to explore →
Cohort 01 · Student

Rewriting a bank’s KYC flow

Eleven screens down to four. Drop-off halved in a test with nine strangers.

Campus · Semester

A design studio inside a CS department

Sixty students, one semester, external critique panel at the capstone.

Team · Embedded

Six weeks with a fintech squad

Critique rituals installed. The redesign shipped in the next release train.

Cohort 02 · Student

Designing for a Tamil-first audience

What happens to your layout when the language is not English.

Faculty · Enablement

Teaching the teachers to critique

Two days that changed how a department grades design work.

Open · Community

Kalaigen Critique Nights

Free monthly session in Chennai. Bring one screen, take one honest review.

/ Voices

What the room says

I walked in able to use Figma. I walked out able to argue.
Divya RamanathanCohort 01 · now designing at a product company
Our students stopped decorating slides and started defending decisions. The faculty training is why it stuck.
Dr. S. VenkatesanHead of Department · Computer Science
Two days with Kalaigen settled an argument my team had been having for four months.
Nikhil MenonProduct lead · enterprise platform team
The critique is brutal in the best way. Nobody has ever looked at my work that carefully.
Aarthi KrishnanCohort 03 · career switcher from QA
01 / 04
/ 05 FAQ

Straight answers

No. We take self-taught people, engineers, marketers and career-switchers. What we screen for is whether you can take a critique without going quiet — that’s it. The application is one short brief, not a portfolio gate.

One call with the department, then a written proposal mapped to your semester calendar and credit structure. Most partners begin with a single elective or a two-day faculty development workshop before committing to a full semester.

Student cohorts run live online, 7–9pm IST on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Campus programmes are hybrid — we come to you for critique panels and reviews. Corporate work is onsite wherever possible, because the room matters more than the slides.

Most courses teach tools and hand out certificates. We teach judgement, and judgement only develops under supervision. Every single session ends with your work reviewed in front of other people. It’s uncomfortable, it’s the point, and it’s the thing you cannot get from a video library.

We don’t promise jobs — anyone who does is selling something. We do run mock interviews with people who hire, review your portfolio line by line, and introduce strong work to our network when it is genuinely ready.

The 12-week cohort is ₹48,000, payable in three instalments, with need-based seats each intake. Campus programmes are quoted per semester by batch size. Corporate engagements start at ₹1,80,000 for the two-day sprint.

/ Initiate

Book a call.
Twenty-five minutes

You tell us what your students or your team can’t do yet. We show you one thing they’d work on in week one. You get a straight answer on whether we’re the right fit — including when we’re not.

hello@kalaigen.com
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Kalaigenகலை

A Chennai design school training the eye — for students, campuses and product teams.

13.0827° N · 80.2707° E

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