Design Basics: Working with Shapes

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to this course on using shapes in design. Shapes are one of the building blocks of design. And so it's really important to understand how we work with them and how we bring them in and make new designs out of shapes. And that can seem really basic, but it's really important to understand the basics. And that's why we're doing this design basics courses so that anyone can learn the basic principles that they need to know in order to become a designer. If you haven't already looked at my other design basics courses, we have two of them right now. The first one is all about the basic principles of design, which are the four core principles. And that really is the basic foundation that everybody needs to have before they start designing. And then the second one is all about sketching. And sketching is super important in designing. You need to sketch before you design. And so it would be great if human back and watch that one as well before you take this course, if you haven't already. Now in this course, we're going to first start out by learning how to see shaped in the designs around us because we are constantly surrounded by Designs. And those designs are made up of shapes. And one of the first steps on our own design journey is learning how to evaluate and break apart the designs that we see around us every day. So we'll start out doing that. Then we'll talk about some of the tools that we'll use. Design much shapes, and there's a variety of different tools that you can use. So we'll just talk about a few of them that would be good options for you as you're starting out. Then we'll go ahead and we'll actually do two projects. It really simple projects to get our feet wet and get started. And then a more complicated project where we'll learn more complicated things that we can do with shapes and we'll use to projects. And actually in the next video, we will talk more in depth about what those projects are. So let's go ahead and dive in and start learning about how to use shapes in design. 2. Project: The project for this course will be to create a design out of shapes. Were actually going to complete two tasks in this course. The first one being quite simple to get the idea of working with shapes, and the second one being more complicated. The second one is the official project for this course. But feel free to share your first task as well because I would love to see what you do with it and my project for this course, I am going to create a pop-up van sticker, the same one that I sketched out in this sketching course. So I'm just going to be picking up where I left off there. You should feel free to do any project that you want. But if you didn't sketch in course, you can use whatever you sketch for that course to create your shape-based project for this course, the only requirements are that the project uses at least two or more shapes. You'll probably need way more than two depending on what you are designing. And that you use Boolean operations to either add or subtract or get an intersection from those shapes. Now, that isn't making sense to you don't worry, because that's one of the major things that we're gonna cover in this course. And we'll also go over the programs that you can use, both paid and free programs that would allow you to complete the project for this course. Please do take the time to complete your project and then share it with us in the project section for this course. It really helps you to learn if you follow along as we do each step. And it also helps you to learn to share your project with others and get feedback from them. I know that it can be intimidating to share your design work, but to really progress as a designer, you need to have the ability to share that and receive feedback on it. So please do complete the project for this course. In the next video, we'll start out talking about the scene shifts. 3. Seeing Shapes: Shapes are everywhere. And one thing that you really need to develop as a designer is a sense of seeing the shapes in objects and graphics and anything that is designed around you. Once you start to see the shapes, then it will start to make sense how you can use shapes in your own design. So the first thing that we wanna do is go ahead and look at some things and see how shape is in there. Because even though shape is everywhere, we don't always recognize it all the time. We don't always see that three is a shape to this object or to this graphic, to this thing. So we're going to go ahead and we'll just go and look at some examples of where shapes are. And because it's always here with us, we're gonna go ahead and we're going to start by looking here at this van that hangs behind me all the time. If you've been watching for a while, you know that I'm a huge fan of Volkswagen bands. I have them all over the place. My wife and I run the yellow van travels blog and it's just such an iconic vehicle that it really speaks to I think a lot of people. So let's go ahead and let's look at what the shapes are inside of this fan. The first shape that you'll probably recognize right away is the circle. So the wheels are made up out of circles and they're actually ellipses because they're not quite completely round and it's actually several ellipses stacked inside of each other. So you can see there's different ellipses going through here. And then the next shape that you'll probably notice is the rounded rectangle. And it's easiest to see here in this window. But what you'll find is that when you start seeing shapes, rounded rectangles are everywhere. In fact, the entire van is really a rounded rectangle and each of the bumpers rounded rectangles as well. The windows rounded rectangle was famously Steve Jobs favorite shape because he thought it was the most pleasing. And at least that's what rumor say. And you notice this when you start to look at like Apple products, because you'll find that every Apple product, its shape is actually a rounded rectangle. And so it's just like every single thing ran a rectangle. And so when we are designing, we use rounded rectangles actually a lot because they're just a great shape to work with. So you can see that there's just shapes that make up this object, right? And it's not that many shapes calls rounded rectangles. There's kind of a triangular shape that makes up this door handle, but there's just not that many shade that you even need for design. Like something like this van got kind of a half circle here being the surfboard rectangles holding the surfboard. That's kinda the shape breakdown that goes into something like this band. Now let's go ahead and let's look at a map that I picked up on recent travel will look at some of the iconography that's involved in that, in the map design and how shape is used there. Okay. So here's the map that I got. And I got this at the Interstate State Park in Minnesota. So you can kinda see this here. And obviously the map itself is a rectangle, which is kind of the usual shape for a map. And then there are lots of shapes within this map. Now obviously, the Minnesota is actually an irregular shape based on kinda natural features and political boundaries. But then you can see we've got a rounded rectangle that goes around that contains this information. And then another rounded rectangle inside of that that contains a smaller portion of information. There's then a rectangle that makes up a line or a rule right here. And then when we get into the icons. We see this and this is a diamond shape, but it's actually a rounded square turned on its side, right? And then there's a little square down here. And then the kind of this rectangular but a little bit irregular shape right there to make it that exclamation point. Alright, let's keep going down here. Of course there are circles for the bullet points and you might not even think about that, but the way bullet points look matter and convey something a little bit different depending on what you do with them. So you make a choice based on how that's going to look. Then we have the continuing. Now of course, we know Repetition as one of the design principles from the first-class. And so we're using the same rounded square diamond shape here. And then we have a circle with little tiny rectangles around it that make up this clock. And then triangular rounded shapes and a circle in the middle of the last icon on this page. We can see here continues with the theme of the rounded square on its side as a diamond and then a circle and a rounded rectangle that comes off the bottom to form the magnifying glass. And then we open this up and we see more rounded rectangles throughout. They contain the information, more circles. So we're seeing the same things over and over. And then as we get here into some more icons, we see that we've now switched we now using a rounded square as a square instead of a diamond. And you can see when you start making a person icon like this, you start to get different shapes going on, but they're actually, they're circles. And then the rest of these shapes are actually rounded rectangles stacked and merged to create this person. So there's a lot of different things. And this campground one is a triangle. We haven't seen a lot of triangles so far. This is a triangle with another triangle inside it and rectangle along the bottom. And then you get these kind of irregular shapes for fire, these curves are actually, you know, they can be made out of circles where pieces of circles. And then we've got rectangles that are skewed, making the log Really there's just shape everywhere. And when you start to look for it, then these icons, there's more icons on the map which are rounded squares. And I liked this one because I actually had to make a new icon for this one because it's a pothole. I don't know if poles are marked on other maps, but potholes are geographic feature in this park, naturally formed by glacial water. And this is just a circle with a triangle through it. So they had to come up with something kind of abstract to represent it. But they just use two simple shapes which made it simple for people to understand. So you can see that there is shaped everywhere. Everywhere we look, we start to see shapes. And so we're gonna go ahead and in the next video we'll go over some programs that you can use in order to make shapes. And then we'll be moving on from there. 4. Program Options: So now we know that designs all around us are made up of shapes. And we're going to start applying that into our own design. But first, let's talk about some of the tools that you can use to do the projects for this course. Because I know that that can be kind of a hindrance to send people to get started. And the truth is, it doesn't really matter what tool you use. There are lots of good tools out. There is really only two requirements for tool for this course. The first one is that it needs to have shapes. So different tools have a different variety of shapes available in them. But it really needs to have just the basic shapes available. It needs to have squares or rectangles, circles or ellipses, triangles or polygons. If you can do something like habit rounded rectangle or rounded triangle, that can be very useful as well. So let's just talk about some of the tools that are available. The first one and the most popular design tool probably in the world is Adobe Illustrator. That one's very popular and it's very powerful. It's also very complicated and very expensive. Another option which is my personal favorite is Affinity Designer. And if a designer is cross platform, it's available on Windows, Mac, and iPad. It's a lot less expensive, but it's still quite complicated. It's very professional level tool, so it can be quite complicated. Energy use. So if you have Illustrator or famous designer, that's great, you can go ahead and use those programs. They will work perfectly for the things that we're going to do in this course. But you don't need to have one of those. There are lots of other options available to you, including an option that most people have, which is Microsoft PowerPoint. Powerpoint has a ton of shapes available to it, and it also has our second requirement for this tool, which is being able to perform what are called Boolean operations or clap or pathfinder operations. If you don't know what that means right now, don't worry about, we will talk a lot more about that in this course, but you really need to do that and something like Google Slides what has shaped doesn't have that option by Microsoft PowerPoint, actually just have it. So if you do have Microsoft PowerPoint available to you, That's a perfectly fine tool to do the projects in this course width. And then there are also free tools, like the tools on iPad or iOS assembly or vector Nader. Those also have shaped available to them. Assemblies are very simple editor, it's very easy to pick up and use and has lots of shapes available. Vector data is a little bit more complicated. There are also free tools on the computer side like Inkscape. Inkscape is an open source program, but it can be a little bit more difficult to use because it is open source, but it definitely had shapes and Pathfinder operations and could totally be used for this course. Another option is a web-based option called graphic designer. There is a free version and a paid version of that application, but you just need the free version for the types of things that we're doing in this course. So there's a myriad of different option, but I don't care which one you use for this course. A doesn't matter at all. What tool you use. You just need to be able to perform the shape operations that we need to do. So go ahead and decide which tool you have available to you, which tool you want to use. In the next video, we'll go over how we are going to complete the first test. 5. Basic Shapes Task: The idea that everything is made up of shapes can really change your whole perspective as designer and open up new ways of seeing the world and of designing. But it can be a lot to wrap your mind around it first, it is one thing to look at the icons on a map and see what shapes are being used. It is another to actually put it into practice, making something of your own. So I like to start off with a really simple task for new designers when they're just beginning to start out using shapes. For this task, we're going to create a set of media control icons, like you can see here on this PowerPoint slide. The reason this is a great exercise is because it is so familiar that it is easy to grasp. We interact with media controls all the time. In fact, you can probably see them right now as you're watching this video, the MediaController, so simple, we would triangle two rectangles, square two triangles to more triangles, circle inside a circle, triangle on top of a rectangle. These are just super simple shapes, but they mean something to ask because the design has brought meaning to them and they've become virtually universally understood by everybody. You see this and you know, that means even though this is just one shape, it's just a triangle. You know that, that means play, especially if it's framed in the context of these other symbols. And because these symbols are so simple, super easy to make. So this is a task that anyone can take on. In fact, if you've taken the design basic sketching course, you will probably recognize that everything involved in creating the media controls eye contact is from the visual alphabet. So you're already familiar with doing this with your hands. Now we just have to do them on the computer. So in the next video, we'll go about completing this task of creating the icon sets. And we'll even take it to the next level where we customize these icons to be personally. 6. Making the Media Icons: So let's go ahead and start making these media control icons. And like I said, it's very simple. Whatever program you're using, you just need to go ahead and go find the shapes and shapes and PowerPoint happened to be right here. And all I need to create a play icon is a triangle. So I'll just grab the triangle, drag it out. I'm holding down shift just to keep it in proportion. The play icon is normally an in proportion isosceles triangle over here. Then I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees so that it's pointing to the right, as legend has it, these controls began with real to real players. The real would run from left to right, and so the arrow pointed in that direction. I wasn't able to confirm that with any actual sources, but that's what seems to be. So we have that. I'm going to change the color just for simplicity sake. I'm gonna make it black and give it no outline. All right, so we've got that and that is the basics of it we've just used to shape, to create an icon. Now of course, we can go lots of different ways with customizing this and we'll do that in a minute. But let's just go ahead and make them all first. Let's grab our rectangle tool. Go ahead and fill it, give it no stroke. And we're just going to duplicate it, but we have two identical ones. Let's go ahead and grab that rectangle tool again. And I'll make a perfect square for the stop icon. And now we can just grab our triangle, duplicate that control drag is duplicated in PowerPoint and shrink it down a little holding down shift keeps it in proportion. That's true in most programs. Will duplicate it again. And we'll just grab these, duplicate them over. And we're going to flip them so that we have our rewind. Or I guess it's called reverse these days since we're not actually winding anything. Next we're going to need a circle for a record button. In this case, we want no fill and we do want an outline and just go and give it a weight. About six. Looks good. Then we need to make another circle. Will then shift to keep it perfect circle. We're going to go ahead and make this one read. Mostly because the record by E1 is always red. And if it's not, that would be extra confusing. So even though we might decide on a different color scheme for the rest of our icons, Records always going need that red circle button. Okay, and then the last one, I'm just going to grab this triangle again and duplicate it. That's one thing. When you start working with shapes, you can do so much with just one shape just by duplicating it over and over again, it will duplicate that. And then we'll grab one of these rectangles. I'll duplicate that. And we just want to line these up. And we have our eject symbol. So now we've created all of the media control icon. So hopefully you've been able to follow along with me or pause this and go ahead and do it as well. And hopefully that's making sense of how you make these icons using shapes. I know that this is very simple once it's all done, but we can then take this even further by customizing these. So I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this. That's one thing when you're working with shapes, you always want to duplicate your work so that you can get back to your original if you want to, you, there's a whole lot that we can do with these even very simple shapes to customize them and to make them our own as designers and some of that involves using other shapes, changing up what we have here. So first thing that I want to try is to go ahead and put these all inside a rounded rectangles. So we're gonna grab the rounded rectangle shape, which as you know, is a favorite. Weren't put it here. And I'm just gonna move it behind, send it to the back. And immediately this starts to take on kind of a different field, even though it's the same icon, we now have another shape. We can now change this fill. And we started to create something that's a little bit different, right? Something that we could use in an application. Someplace else. Magnitude, just these guys. Just keep duplicating that same shape over and over again. So you can see that we can make some customizations to make this fit. If we were working for a specific application or something that would be specific colors that we would want to use. So even though these are just very basic shapes, which different ways that we can make it our own should go ahead and shrink these guys down. I'm actually going to go ahead and just duplicate those again so that they're exactly the same size. And I'm not talking a whole lot about how PowerPoint works because that's not really the point of this. The point is you could use whatever program you want, like we talked about before. But the point is that where you're using shapes to do this. Okay, so now we've got an icon set drawn these blue backgrounds. And so now they might kind of look more like by ins here. There's a lot that we could do there. Let's just say we duplicate that again, particularly stuff that black. And we make a complementary color to the blue, like this, yellow. Ok, so that's starts to feel different right away. Ha, and now we've got something that is more unique. We are still using exactly the same shapes. It's exactly the same thing going on here, but it's a little bit different. We can continue to play with this. We can t to try different ways of doing these things. So one thing we could do is we could take all of these yellow shapes. And we could say no fail. We can make an outline. Three is that outline up? Things six was what we used before. Okay, and that has a different feel as well. So we're using the same shapes were creating these media icons, but we're getting these different fields based on what we have going on here, add depending on what program you're in and can do a lot of different things with this, right? So let's just go ahead and let's say duplicate that again. You see I just keep duplicating so they can see my iterations here. Iteration is another really important principle, InDesign. And let's select all of these. And you just keep trying out new things with the shapes that you have, different styles. And there's literally an infinite number of things that you could do here. So this is kind of a unique and more abstract way to go about it. Powerpoint is not the most sophisticated design program in the world, so it doesn't have as many line controls some other programs do. So you can open up the more lines and change things around a little. But there's just not that much that you can do with them in a program like PowerPoint, but it's something you can try out. And the point is, there's a bunch of things that you can try out working with shapes inside of this very simple contexts, right? You can try different colors, you can try different styles of line and fill. And we could do something like we could even put a gradient on one of these measures. So many things that you could do. I want you to experiment. I want you to try out some new ideas, work with the shapes that we have created. You can just keep duplicating them and making new ones and trying out something different and seeing how it works. And this just gives you a great exercise to work with shapes in, and then in the next video we're going to start talking about the Boolean or pathfinder operations, which will really help us to take our shapes to the next level and will help us with the final project for this course, which is creating a more complex. 7. Boolean Operations: So at this point you might be like, well, that's all well and good Ben, I've made my media icons, but the things that I actually want to design our a lot more complex than Media Control icons, which are just these basic shapes. And it doesn't look like I can make the things I want to make out of just simple shapes. Well, there are really two parts to this. The first part is that many icons and logos and symbols involve layering basic shapes on top of each other, like we saw with the wheel on the fan, with multiple ellipses layered on top of each other to create a more complex looking circle. And then the second is that many designs involve creating new shapes out of the basic shapes. This is done through what are sometimes called Boolean operations or pathfinder operations or geometry operations or merging operations. I don't know why we can't all get together on a standard term that all programs use for this. But it comes down to the basic idea that the easiest way to make a new shape is to use existing shapes to create that. And you merge them together or you subtract them from one another or you take just pieces of them in. This can be a little bit abstract when you're first hearing about it. But once we start looking at this, it will start making a lot more sense. Most design programs have these operations, although they might call them something different, or they might have different versions of them. But let's take a look at these circles which will help to make sense. So here in PowerPoint, I have all these overlapping circles so that we can see them. Okay? So let's say we've got these two. I've just selected them in PowerPoint. We'd go to Shape Format, and PowerPoint calls it merged shapes will come here and we just want to do a union on this one. And so now we have one shape, which is these two overlapping circles. So we have this almost figure-eight like shape that we could use now, but we didn't have that shaped like that before. Let's take the next one. Merge shapes and we're going to do a combine on them. What that does is it combines the ships together but eliminates where the overlap is, right? So there's no fill here, but these are tao2 crescent moon shapes. Let's grab the next one. This one is called Fragment. When we fragment, what actually happens is instead becoming one shape, it becomes three separate shapes. So we have this one, this one, and we have this one. So we've now fragmented where they're overlapping. Next, we're gonna go ahead and we'll go to intersect, which now just gives us this. So if you've ever wondered where the leaf comes from in the Apple logo, to actually just two overlapping circles. Now for the last one, this is subtract and this is how you get that crescent moon shape on its own. So just with two circles, we've done five operations on them, and we've created all of these new and different shapes. So let's kind of take this to the next level because this is still pretty abstract. So let's go, I'm gonna go ahead and make a new slide. And let's think about that van that we saw on the flag earlier. Going grab this. We know that it's a rounded rectangle. But it also is not just a rounded rectangle because it's got like wheel wells where you can see the wheels. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to duplicate this rounded rectangle. Okay, all the way down on its curve. Oops, too big. And when scale that down. And hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. Duplicate this guy. Okay? And then, and each one works a little bit different in each program. And sometimes PowerPoint can be a little bit funny with how it does things. Yeah. Okay. So PowerPoint will always subtract the last item that is selected. And so you want to select this last, so they will be subtracted. And you see now we have a new shape, is still a rounded rectangle, but we've cut out these other rounded rectangles from IT to create these wheel wells. Now and one thing you might remember also is that there's kind of this windshield here. And for that we need another rounded rectangle. And we just barely one overlap it there. Then we subtract, whoops, click the wrong order again. And then we get that cut out for the windshield. Then we can overlap or under lap in another shape in there to be the windshield. So let's grab another one of these guys. Put that there, change its color so that we can see it. And then we'll just move it behind. And there we have our windshield outline on that. So then we have our windshield there, right? Same thing with the circles. So you can see that this is really just a matter of layering shapes together and cutting them out from each other. And this is how we do the Boolean operations. And so that's an example of subtracting. And the apple little leaf here was an example of overlapping. So as you look at the shapes around you, you want to say, well, how can I make that shape out of the shapes that I already have? And different programs will have different numbers of shapes available to them. Everything is going to have your basic polygon, your square or rectangle and your circle or ellipse, everything's going to have that and you can form pretty much everything out of those. With some like PowerPoint will have a lot more shapes already premade and available to you. And some will have less. Just kinda depends on what you're working with. You go ahead and start thinking about what shapes are involved in the design that you want to make. In the next video, I'm going to show you how I take all of these concepts that we've been talking about with shapes, including these Boolean operations, into creating icon. 8. Making the Complex Icon: Now it's time for us to move on to the project for the course. We're going to create a complex icon using shapes. For me, it's going to be the pop top fan that I sketched during the course on sketching. You can use what you've sketched in that course if you've taken it or any new design that you want to make, just makes sure that you do, do your sketching before you start working with shapes in the digital program you choose, I have switched and I am now working in assembly on the iPad. I'm getting used up for this just because I've done the other stickers in this pack in assembling. And I want them all to have a cohesive feel. Assembly also has an advantage of having many shapes available to start out with. So you don't have to do as much of the Pathfinder operations to get some of these other shapes. For example, like we've got a rounded triangle and we've got a leaf shape. And so there's a whole bunch of shapes here that are just available right out of the box and assembling. So that's not a big deal. Ages makes it a little bit easier and a little bit faster to work with. So we're gonna go ahead and get started here. I'm going to start with the basic structure of the van, which we've talked about. This, it's going to be, you know, a rounded rectangle. And this is where you kind of have to know your program, but assembly is not the best or tool in the world. So these rounded areas can be a little bit tricky to work with, but I think I'm probably going to actually replace that with another shape. So I'm not sure I have to worry about that, but you can see here, it kinda gets oddly stretched out in the corners when you stretch the shape. So what I actually might do is start with just a rectangle, basic rectangle here. Then I actually take a rounded rectangle. Append that onto the back there. And I'll take this quarter circle here. Okay, so now we're going to have to work on some merging here. And this is where it can get pretty complicated. So you always want to have your shapes save so that you can use them again later. So I just duplicate them. That might need a couple of, let's see here. So if I take this and delete these points here, and we were in, duplicate this shape back in. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to duplicate all of this again from Looks like we do have a couple bad points. Over here. I'm just going to leave that to get back to normal here. Okay, perfect. So we've got these shapes and what we've done is we've worked out the basic shape of the van here and now we should be able to do a merge on all of these. Need to do them one at a time. Okay, so now we have the basic shape of the van't. So that can seem like a lot, but you have to identify the different shapes that are involved and then cut them in, merge them appropriately. So you can see how we can have just got the shape without being able to combine those other shapes together. We've got the basic shape of the van now and that's really going to be the hardest part for this particular one. Remember, I'm working off my sketch here. So I just have this set off to the side and I'm looking at it and I know that I need to put in some windows and some wheels. Now before we did the wheels kind of visible, we cut it out a bit there. But I think I'm just going to put the wheels on the outside because that's kind of been the style so far with so let's go ahead and we'll make this wheel. I'm just going to pop over to my color real quick. And normally don't do color til the end. But for a, we'll probably going to be black. So I'm just gonna make it black so that I have that because I'm going to need to duplicate it to make a white one or the middle and scale it down. So that's pretty simple, right? There's no merging. This is just overlapping the shapes and making the wheel. And the reason I want to do that right now is because I need another one. So then I'll duplicate that. Remember, I'm not going into a lot of the details of how everything works in assembly because I do have several courses on assembly that you can take to learn kind of the ins and outs of that. So then we're going to need some windows. So we'll grab this guy for our front windscreen. Come back and work on him a little bit more later. Okay. So we've just put the rectangles there to create the windows. And the next kind of major piece to this is going to be the popped up here for the PopCap, we're really going to need. And if a angled piece or several different kinds of popups for these guys. This is one of the shapes that have been to have because I'm working here in assembly, but you can make it from other pieces of shapes. And I'm not sure that it's the right shape for this task and I think not. We're going to need more of a triangle shape. Okay. So we've got the van basically down here and we need to you or you just save that so that we don't lose anything. If we start cutting things up. And then we can start adding in some details and stuff. So let's go ahead and determine what color this guy's going to be. For a palette that we like here. It's true that give it kind of this vintage green color on there. This is where it gets a little tricky when you have a curve like this and you need to match it. Now we can do that by just subtracting that shape from the other one. But I remember something now, a lot of these old Volkswagens had the air cool in the back there. So they had kind of these air vents on the back so you can really see the window there from the side. So I'm actually going to delete this one and I'm going to add in some little lines to be the air cooling. I think that actually looks better there and more accurate if we've got the little air cool going on, and I'm still not in love with this windshield. So let's take a moment to look at that guy. Probably just need to cut part of that off. So measure him. We're just going to line up the top here and will change his killer briefly so that we can see what we're doing. And then we're just going to cut off the bottom with another one of these rectangles. So you can always use the same shapes to just kind of do what you need to do. And we should be a little line these up exactly the root of this one. Okay, that looks better. So then we're going to add in a couple of little details here, which are going to be the circle on the front where the logo would be. So you can see you'd only have about half of that logo showing here. So duplicate this circle so that we have a free later. And we're going to duplicate the van shape, select the circle. And then we're actually going to use this intersect option. So we just get this little part of the circle showing that's pretty good. Now, let's make that our green color just so we have kind of the accent. And I know these colors are kind of ugly here, but that's just the reality of the time period in which these fans were coming out is, you know, they came out with these, what we now think of as vintage colors. So I think it's a pretty good palate for this. We could make this man to tone and want to at least try and see what that would look like. We'll try and making this one white, but we need to copy this van shape. And then we need to wrap a rectangle so we can cut it in half. Or approximately. And I've got that this is not perfect, but it gives us an idea of whether we'd like this or not and I'm not sold on it. Yeah, I think we're going to leave that over there for now. But you wanna try out lots of different iterations so that you can get the best design that you can write. So let's just go ahead and let's wrap. One of these guys is going to give it a red color here. I'm just gonna put it on the back is a little break laid there. Take one of these little circles who and give it a brighter yellow color and put them on the front. Okay, so that gives it a little personality flavor. And I think that there's popped up here actually needs yellow to show that it came from the roof here and grab a bar here. Describe the same yellow. Then we just need to angle this same angle as the roof. That makes it look more like there's canvas being stretched across. And that looks very similar to what I had in my sketch. So this is pretty great here and we've got a pretty good van pop top there. I think this'll make a nice sticker. Love in the white there. See if those are green. So we can eliminate the colors a little bit more. So I like that. You'd see we used a ton of different shapes. We merged them, we cut them, we use the intersect of them. There's so much you can do. One thing that assembly can't do is do that break apart thing, which would have been useful on a couple of these steps. So some can do that break part thing that we saw in PowerPoint. So it can't do everything. It makes up for some things with its big shaped library, but it also doesn't have quite as many features. And this is a nice sticker. I'm happy with it. Go ahead and create your own complex icon or logo or a sticker using shapes, and then share that with us in the project section for this course. In the next video, we're just going to go and we're going to take a look at some other examples of how we use shapes to build everything out here. And we're going to take a look at some other examples of how I view shapes in some other design projects so that you can get just kind of a better idea for the way shapes come together to form different complex shapes. 9. More Examples: So let's take a look. Here's another sticker from this pack that I've been working on and this is the truck campers sticker. And you can see it's a little bit irregular. So let's look at the shapes that are involved in this. If I saved the different pieces of shapes and things. So look at this when we're making the truck, where we come from, you know, we've got this rounded rectangle and cup polygons and rectangles. We merge those together. And then we end up doing some work here, which is just rounding those out by using the points. And let's take a look over here at the camper because this one was one where you had to be kind of massage, right? So there's this piece here which is a rounded rectangle. And then there's a rectangle and a rectangle. And then our old friend, the quarter circle, we take those altogether and we combine them to make this camper shape right here. Then we put the square and another quarter circle, and then we put those on its windows. We have a little oval that we put on as a headlight over here. And of course, circles for the wheels. And then these quarter circles again form the bumper for a little detail. And we have the very rounded rectangle for a little door handle anyway. So you can just see the way these shapes come together to form the icon. So this one is a fairly simple icon here. It's just a fridge, right? And really it's almost all rectangles like rectangle, rectangle, rectangle, rectangle, rectangle, square, rectangle, polygon, rectangle for the water. But the way that we arrange these together, there really isn't much in the way of needing to merge shapes or anything like that because this is a very rectangular fridge, so we just have no polygons and rectangles and you put that together, overlay them and you get a fridge. Okay. Next, we're just going to look at this turkey. So this would be, you know, like holiday for things given you something, this is a circle. This is a circle with a point at the end of it. Oval, oval, oval, oval, circles, circle, another one of these circles with points, rectangle, triangles for the feet. You can see they just simple shapes here. We're not even really combining thing together. We could merge these together to create the turkey shape if we wanted to. And so just simple shapes. You combine those together and you can create a design. Okay, and one last one here, this is just a little Mario character that I did. And see we've got circles, circles, circles, circles, circles. In fact, I started this entire thing as a challenge to do it all with one circle. And you can actually watch a video of this timelapse on my YouTube channel, but we just use one circle and then just duplicate that color at different things and manipulate it. So we turn the circle until I get these long oval shapes for his overalls. But we just keep duplicating that circle. And so there really aren't any emerges on here. We could merge these mustache together, but it's really just three circles sit on top of each other. And so you can do a lot of creative things while limiting yourself to, you know, just like one specific shape or something like that. There's a lot of creative design work that can be done with shapes. So I hope that you started to see these shapes. I hope that you've been able to complete your project with this. In the next video, we're just going to go ahead and wrap up the course. 10. Wrap Up: I hope you've enjoyed coming along with me on this course on how to use shapes InDesign. And I hope by now you're starting to recognize the shapes in the designs that are all around you. And that now you'll be able to figure out which shapes you need to use in your designs. You are now ready to start taking the next steps into doing specific design projects. Now willing go into the specifics of the programs we were using in this course because we want you to be able to use whatever program you wanted. But I do have many courses on how to use specific programs, things like green designer, assembly on iPad, affinity publisher. And I do have a course on Microsoft PowerPoint as well. If you want to go ahead and keep taking your design skills to the next level, go head and look into those other courses that I have available to you. And remember that in addition to my courses, I also have my ben design to-to channel that you can check out for weekly videos on different design topics and different tutorials and things. So go ahead and check that out as well. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next course.