Design a Beautiful Stationery Set in Procreate and Adobe Photoshop

1. Intro: I have loved stationery ever since I was a child and it was this passion for all things paper, notebooks, glitter pens, stickers, and bookmarks, you name it, that led me to become a graphic designer. I am Agatha Vieira and I'm a Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator based in the UK. I have seven years of experience in the creative field and I have worked as an in-house designer for brands in Brazil and England. I have experience in branding, print, and digital design, and I am now exploring more of the illustration world and creating digital portraits where I show the beauty and power of Latin American and mixed-race women. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to design and plan your own stationery collection. The collection is basically a set of coordinated motifs which can be used on items that you would like to mix and match. I will be showing you my process and some tips and tricks to help you achieve a great result. Creating a well-balanced collection is an important skill to learn as you can apply the concepts you will learn in this class to many other projects like surface pattern design and visual identities, for example. This class is for anyone interested in stationery and learning how to create a cohesive and interesting collection to add to your portfolio. You will need a basic understanding of Photoshop and Procreate to follow along with this class. I can't wait to get started and see your final projects. See you in the first lesson. 2. Your Class Project: Your project in this class is to build your own stationery collection, where you will use the power of design to answer question, "What does the world needs more of?" You will design a stationary sets inspired by your wish for the future as your creative concept. I'd like you to create a collection with three or more products of your choice and upload it to the project's gallery. For that, we will be using mockups to bring our designs to life. I attach the links to download the mockups in the Projects and Resources area. I use my stationary to brighten up my day and help me to achieve my goals, make notes, and organize my schedules in a creative way. So I chose this project to inspire you to create your own stationery collection with the purpose to represent your positive wishes for the future. To take this class, you need an iPad with Procreate and a computer with Photo shop. It's great if you're familiar with both Procreate and Photoshop, but if you're not familiar with it, you can still follow along as I will explain all my actions and choices. I encourage you to upload your moodboards and work in progress too, so you don't even need to have a finished project to be able to share your ideas with the Skillshare community. Remember that our aim here is to learn and have fun in the process. I'm super excited to see what you come up with. Let's get started. 3. Introduction to The World of Stationery: Welcome to the first lesson. I'm super happy you're here. Before we jump into our project, I want to introduce you to the world of stationery. Since the Victorian Era, stationery has been an important part of proper social etiquette. Handwritten notes and letters reached peak popularity during the second half of the 19th century. It was truly an art form, and common practice for many middle and upper class men and women. It's still present in our lives. Stationery design consists of paper, office supplies, letterheads, writing equipment, business cards, notebooks, and so on, and it can be applied to creative product lines for retail, or as part of a company's corporate branding. There are many amazing creative stationery brands in the market now, and I will share with you a few of my inspirations. Moglea is a letterpress studio that focuses on handcrafted stationery. The production processes are done entirely by hand. It's super interesting. If you love stationery, you certainly know them. Rifle paper Co. is super famous by their unique florals, and it's a brand loved by stationery fans around the world. They started as a stationery company, but nowadays, their portfolio goes from home decor to fashion preference. Papier has a premium personalized stationery line and collaborates with various artists and brands to design curated and original collections. I hope this class inspired you, and you are now more excited to create your own collection. 4. Creating a Concept: To create a successful collection, you need to start with a concept. The concept is an idea that will define your collection and give you a creative direction. It is essential that you establish all the aspects of the creative work before you start designing it. For my project, I will create a stationary collection for the next year, and it will be based on a simple concept, a wish for the future, what the world needs more of. I will choose the word "kindness" because in my opinion, that's what we need more nowadays, and little acts of kindness can definitely change the world we live in. I will target my kindness collection to young girls between 12 and 24 years old. It is important that you also think about your persona or ideal customer, so this will help you to create the look and feel of your designs based on your target. Here are some ideas of words that you can use: love, peace, happiness, positivity, hope. Feel free to choose any words that you desire, and we are now ready for the next lesson where I will show you how to get the inspiration for your project. See you there. 5. Finding Inspiration: It's time to find the inspiration to create your collection. You will not always have ideas ready, so finding a way to get the inspiration is super-helpful to assist you in the creative process. Creativity is a personal process and everyone does it differently. Do you need to be alone? In a public setting? Brainstorming in a group? Doodling things down? Give yourself everything you need before you start creating. Here are some of the things I do when looking for inspiration. I write everything now as a mind-map or as a list. Focus on quantity over quality. You can sort out and refine the good ones later. This will help you brainstorm and eventually come up with your ideas. I look for inspiration in books, magazines, and online. I love the work of William Morris and this little book is one of my favorites to get inspiration for colors, shapes, and beautiful patterns. When online, I like Pinterest and Instagram for visual inspiration and transient work. But always make sure you have your inspiration from different sources as you don't want to end up copying someone or being too predictable. I take everything I found in my research and my list and put together as a mood board. As you can see, my mood board reflects my choice of subject and I found really nice videos that helped me to come up with my final style. I love the idea of giving someone a flower as a symbol of kindness. So I will try to illustrate that with this photo as my inspiration, and have stylized flowers as one of my motifs. I also like to think about my target as strong, young woman who care about being the best version. So I selected these girls that represent empowerment. In this one, I love this color she's using to send the message. I will also be using that in my illustrations. For the color palate, I'm thinking of red as a strong hue representing love. A shade of pink that brings that softness, the feminine, and the delicate feeling. Maybe some yellow that brings energy and positivity. I am now ready to start creating. In the next lesson, we will start developing our collection. I see you there. 6. Developing Your Collection: Now that you have all your ideas in place, it's time to get hands on the project creation. I divided this class into two topics. One is sketching and I'll show you how I bring it to life on Procreate and the second one is pattern creation and I'll teach you how to quickly create a repeated pattern in Procreate. I'll start sketching ideas for our notebook cover, agenda cover, and I will create a pattern that can be added to our other products. Feel free to choose what products you want to create and how many. Remember, that you can find many mockups to use in the project and resources area. Choose at least one mockup now, so it's easier for you to create the visuals that you need according to the product that you are showing in the mockup. Let's start sketching. I have added a sketching templates for download in the projects and resources area. Save that template image to your iPad and you can add it to Procreate just by selecting the photo option and finding it in your photo gallery. Once you open it, you now need to create a new layer and you can start sketching. When I'm sketching, I use a brush called Procreate pencil to achieve a similar look to a real pencil. It comes with Procreate and you can find it in your brushes library under sketching. For the creation process, I always start designing a main creative that once finished, will define my entire collection. I will get the elements and build the rest of the collection based on this image. My main creative will be my agenda cover design. I chose to illustrate a girl with the kindness necklace, and she will have a top with a flower pattern. Now that we have the agenda cover, the second creative will be a notebook cover. I will illustrate hands that will symbolize someone giving a flower and now we'll add a quote, "There is power in kindness," that I found in my research phase and my mood board. Now, let's create a quick repeated pattern with Procreate. Let's open a new document, a square format, add your background, and the open a new layer. Now, on your new layers, you can create any motifs they you want. I'll be using the same style as flower that I used for the girls top, feel free to draw anything. Just make sure you don't go near the borders of the page. I'll explain you why in a minute. Now this is super, super helpful. Procreate has this tool that's called the drawing guide and you can find it under "Actions", then you click on "Canvas" and make sure you turn drawing guide on. Now click "Edit Drawing Guide" and we will increase the grid size until you have only two guides. Your canvas will be like that, divided in four equal pieces. This will help us define the center of the page and will help you in the next steps of creating a pattern. Now that I have my motif ready, I will duplicate it and rename this one as original. It's important to keep your original element or elements safe because we might need to reuse it when we finish our pattern. You can place your elements as you want, just make sure that they are in the middle of the page somewhere not touching the borders. Because we will make it work as a repeated pattern and we need the borders to match, so leave it free for now. I'm happy with how it looks now and I will flatten it and start the cropping. To make a pattern repeat seamlessly, we need to crop our image into four sections. To do this, follow me in the next step. Create a new layer behind your element and add a color, it can be any color, it's just a background that will help us to place the motifs correctly. It can be helpful to decrease the opacity if you prefer so it's easy to see and group them together and name it as group 1. Duplicate the group and name it as group 2 so you don't mix them. Now we'll start cropping. Hold group 1 and place it down until you reach the middle of the canvas. Now the drawing guides will be your best friend. Let's do the same with group 2 but this time we'll go up until the middle of that page, make sure it's snapping in the middle. You can now open each group and delete the color base as we don't need it anymore. We can flatten the groups into one and we will do the same process over again. Now that we have two more groups, we'll move it again but this time we'll go to the left side of the canvas and the group 2 will go to the right side of the canvas. Perfect, let's delete the black background again and we can flatten the groups again. You have your repeated pattern or almost. We just need to fill the gaps. So we will bring back the original drawing that was hidden and just rearrange the pattern and basically play around with it until we're happy. Again, here's the same rule, we can rearrange anything that is in the middle of the canvas, the elements touching the borders, they'll just stay where they are and the elements you move or add cannot touch the borders. My pattern is done and now I will merge all layers together and I'll name it as size 1. We can scale down our pattern to test it and to have three different samples. To scale it down, I will select it and I'll duplicate image size 1 and select it and reduce it until it snaps to one-quarter of my canvas. Duplicate it three times until you cover the page. It's super important to make sure it's properly aligned with the guideline. To check, you can hold the selection too and zoom in until you can see the line is perfectly placed in the middle. Now I finish size 2 and I merge that image again and I'll do the same process to create an even smaller size. I've finished my designs and now I will send my files to my computer and finish them on Photoshop. For that, you can select your work in your Procreate gallery, click "Share", and save as PSD. You can use AirDrop, email it to yourself or add to Google Drive or Dropbox, whatever is easier for you. I see you in the next lesson. In the next lesson we'll be making the final touches and creating mockups on Photoshop, I see you there. 7. Making the Final Touches and Creating Mockups: In this video, I will show you how to finalize your files, how to work with Adobe libraries, and how to add your designs to various mockups. I'll have all my PSD files in the computer. I decided to also draw this extra element to add to my collection. It can be useful for any detail. I will now open each file on Photoshop. You can see that Procreate PSD saves it with all my layers. It's perfect. I don't need to change anything in this image. For now, I will merge all the layers together and add my images to my Adobe library. The library is a fantastic way to streamline your workflow and have all your assets in one place. Once you create a library, you can access it from any Adobe program. So it's easy to work across multiple softwares too. If your workspace is different than mine and you can't see your library window, you can find it under the Window menu and library, then you activate it. To add an asset, you just need to drag it and drop it inside the library. I selected some mockups to use, and I will open the first one and show you how you can modify your mockups and merge your designs to it. Some mockups come with this top layer that helps them to reduce the file size when sharing it. You can just delete it to access the mockup. You can read the descriptions or turn on and off the visibility of the layers to understand what is what. Usually, you have a clear indication like for your design here, kind of thing. You then open this match object by double-clicking. Once you're inside this match object, you can now add your design to it. You can place your design, or in our case, as we are using the library, I will just drag and drop my designs to the page. I will finalize my agenda cover and add some text and the final details. I will also use the color drop tool to add my color palette to my library. Select the colors from the image and click the "Plus" icon and then click "Foreground Color" to save. Once you are done, you just need to close this match object tab and hit "Save" and it will be replaced in the mockup file. I will keep working on my other pieces following the same process. One important thing to have in mind when working on a collection is consistency. As you can see, I'm adding text to my covers and I am using the same typography, same colors, and same style on both to achieve the same look and feel. I choose a Washi Tape mockup to display my pattern. I ended up selecting a mockup with two tapes. So I will create an extra design here on Photoshop. I went for an easy irregular striped pattern. So I selected a dry brush in my brushes gallery and drew the stripes for an organic look. Now I will finalize my collection with a wrapping paper and give to tag design. 8. Conclusion : Congratulations for completing this class. I am really happy you made it, and here is a quick recap of what we have created. This is my final collection. As you can see, I used the necklace idea from my inspiration board and I illustrated a young girl full of attitude for the agenda cover. For the second notebook, I went for the idea of giving someone a flower. I used the same stylized flower from the girl's top. This way, I made this element a strong motif for my collection. For the other products, I played with my motifs and used them as patterns and varied the colors to give a nice balance. Depending on the size of your collection, you can have many more elements, but with my project, I just want to show you how simple and effective it can be to use a few elements, and the restricted color palate to create a nice and coordinated collection. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope you are now inspired to create your own collection and share it with the Skillshare community. I'm super curious and excited to see what you come up with. Follow me here on Skillshare for more classes in the future. You can see more of my work on Instagram @agathavieiradesign. If you're posting your projects there, please make sure that you add the hashtag avdesignskillshare so I can easily find your work. Bye.