Arleta owes its creative direction to many but none more important than our very own creative director, Saiful Ariff.
Graduating from UiTM with a Computer Science Diploma, Saiful has been interested in game development and anything technology for as long as he remembers.
Saiful Ariff joined Arleta after he was introduced by none other than the CEO himself. He was attracted to Augmented Reality technology and decided he wants to explore the topic deeper. To him, Arleta was his chance and he took it with no regrets.
Of course, nothing in life is easy. Saiful was there when the company didn’t have much be it in employees or faculties. He had to learn to wear many hats ranging from customer service to graphic design all the way to programmer to keep projects moving. Now, he has been appointed Creative Director. To him, all those previous experiences helped him out a lot in covering his current job scope. He is forever grateful for the experiences.
Talking about creative endeavours, to Saiful, one of the biggest hurdles he has to get over is art block. He says he usually gets art block when deciding what AR content to create.
“There are three important aspects that I will look at to decide the creative direction of a project: Target Audience, Current Trend and Culture. These aspects are important to not only get attention but to get the right attention.”
Because of these specific aspects, Saiful has to do all kinds of reading and researching to make sure the content he creates is something he can be satisfied with. As great as it sounds, it is only human to feel stressed out.
For Saiful, the best way to deal with stress is by doing things he loves. Some days, he would play games, others he would draw. Once in a while, he chooses to take a short walk outside to breathe in fresh air to calm himself down. Stress is no small matter and Saiful has ways to tackle it head-on.
Augmented Reality is no doubt a fascinating topic and Saiful agrees. In Malaysia, the usage of AR is growing, ranging from food packaging to advertising. They are far and few in between but it is slowly making its appearance in our beloved country. Saiful believes that one of the challenges in using AR is the devices to view AR contents. Nowadays, almost everyone owns a smartphone, but even then, those smartphones are still unable to fully support AR technology. Saiful still has hopes that there will be a day where this no longer be a problem and from how we see technology developed over the years, that future may be closer than you think.
“With Allah (SWT)’s permission, Arleta will become the number one platform for Malaysians to create AR especially in Education, Advertising, Interactive Game and Architecture.”
Saiful Ariff