Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi guys. My name is Rich Armstrong. I design, I code, I animate, and I doodle. I've been doing all of this for over 10 years now, especially the doodling. A few years back, I had this massive wall as a designer. I lost the spark, I got bored, I became disillusioned with design. I kept on looking at other creators work and wishing I could create stuff at that awesome level. I began exploring new design styles, which always started out so well. But what happened though was that I got overwhelmed with exploration, I kept on making quick and short bursts before trying something new. I was hoping that I happened upon my staff. My thing my bud. In short, exploration for me was hard. Nothing really stuck and I didn't develop much of a style. I would quit exploring because I got really frustrated. This process happen over and over again during the next few years. But it wasn't all that, I would just learning and developing this new way. Then one day, by chance ready, I decided to start working within a set of heavy constraints. It was so rewarding and I began to see results fairly rapidly. The simple idea of adding constraints when exploring new styles, changed how I developed as a designer. It made exploit fun and easy, and a lot of new skills and styles I was exploring began to stick around in my work. Of course, I'm still on this journey and there's so much more to learn. But I believe using constraints as a tool for exploration will fast-track your creative development. In this class, I'm going to be developing my style through exploring a very simple and practical design style. I've been wanting to do this for ages and I thought it would help you if I created a class to round it. Because it's such a simple style, anyone can explore with me. The style lends itself to making use of design elements and principles in a rarely raw manner. Through working with this new style, I'll show you how I go about developing my style and specifically how to use exploration, constraints, and iterations to do so. This is the part where you get involved. I'll be working through a bunch of exercises and I want you to do them with me, not just watch me. Although I'll be working in Illustrator, you can say the class and apply the learnings in different apps and creative disciplines. I've created a class for intermediate level designers and I believe that what you'll learn will transform the way you design. You'll be able to develop your style and learn new skills much quicker than before. In a nutshell, this class we'll cover three things. The first thing we'll cover is, what explorative design is? Why you should use it and how to go about it? The second is, how and why to use constraints, especially when exploring a new design style or when you're learning new skills? The third thing that class would cover, which will take most of the classes time, is actually exploring a new style. This will include a bunch of very practical exercises where I'm going to get my hands dirty in Adobe Illustrator. Although the aim of the class isn't to teach you illustrator, I'm sure you'll pick up a few tips and tricks while I'm working. I'm hoping that by the end of the class, you'll have had a bunch of fun. You'll be excited about the exploration process and that you'll be better equipped for it's. What you learn will transform how you design in a good way and it'll also give you a massive boost to becoming a better designer. I'm super excited about this class. I'll see you in the next video. We'll be sharing more about what Explorative Design looks like.
2. Explorative Design: The Who: Maybe you're facing some of the same issues I've talked about. Maybe you're stuck. Maybe you don't know where to go next. Maybe you've been trying for years and it doesn't feel like you've got anywhere. Or maybe it feels like you don't even have a style or your stuff doesn't have a thing. It's not polished, it's unfinished, or it's boring, and it's been at the same level for a long time or it's just not as good as you want it to be. Or maybe you're a pro and it feels good to have a style, but you're bored and it feels like you've been painting the Mona Lisa again and again. It's awesome, but to be doing the same thing over and over, even for good money, is soul destroying. Perhaps you feel like bringing life, and uncertainty, and rawness, and something new back into your work. Or maybe had this feeling that you need to get your designs right the first time round, every single time, since you went to design school or you're a senior designer, or something like that. Or you may be scared of not matching up to other designers. The trap of comparison can cripple so many creators. You're certainly not alone. I struggled with this for many years and it's something that often creeps back when I least expect it. Whether you fit into one or more of these categories, practicing explorative design will benefit you massively. You may be asking, "Rich, how and why will it benefit me massively?" Let's get onto that in the next video.
3. Explorative Design: The Why: Whether you're a rookie designer or a seasoned pro or anyone in-between, explorative design is super helpful. When I say explorative design, you could replace the design part with anything you want. Illustration, art, animation, maybe even ceramics. Being creative in a digital realm certainly has its benefits, but you can still apply what we cover to your creative practice. Why should you practice explorative design? Well, for starters, explorative design is going to develop your style as well as your skills, and it's going to help prevent you from stagnating and getting bored. Whenever we design exploratively, we discover what does and doesn't work because often, only once we've tried something can we actually make fair judgment about it. I don't like peanuts by themselves and I don't like raisins by themselves either. When my mom offered me peanuts and raisins together, I thought, no, this is a terrible idea but I gave it a try and I really like them. With that in mind, when you know what does and doesn't work, you can keep on coming back to the stuff that does work and avoid the stuff that doesn't. It's like creating a map. Here's where the nuts and berries are, and here's where the good drinking water is, and here's where the sinking sand, tigers, and zombies are. As designers, it's not only about designing though. It's about communicating a message. If we know what works, we can focus on the communication without needing to figure out how the design works while we're crafting the message. One thing that designing exploratively promotes is producing more, which almost always leads to producing better quality designs. Everyone wants to make better work, but it's through constant and continual making that we finally get to the good stuff. Exploring is an easy way to rack up the design miles. There's this quote by the magician Raymond Teller that I really like. It goes like this. "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." That's what exploration is. It's spending time discovering things that no one else has before. It's as creating magic, and this leads to the development of our aesthetic intuition. The little voice from deep down starts to speak louder, and this leads to designing quicker, better, and with a more unique style. Finally, explorative design is fun. Well, when you do it right, anyway, and whatever's fun we do more of. It's pretty simple. Those are the reasons. We'll get into what it is in the next video.
4. Explorative Design: The What: What is this explorative design? Well, in its simplest form, explorative design is trying something new or something different when designing. You can apply explorative design from the broad style of your work, right down to the details of an individual piece. Perhaps the best way to understand it is to liken it to choosing a city to travel to and then actually exploring it. If you don't explore when you're designing, it's like thinking that your home town is the best place in the world without ever exploring anywhere else. Or perhaps you're on holiday and you don't want to go beyond the vicinity of your hotel because you're afraid. That's absurd. There are cities and cultures and clubs and bars and sites and experiences, and galleries and museums and people and all kinds of things that will enrich you and they're just waiting to be discovered. It's the same with explorative design. You've got to realize that there may be a better design, a quirkier version, a darker version, a more fun version, even a worse version, but a different version that's waiting to be discovered. It's you acknowledging that your style and the piece in front of you may not be the best that it could be. In some cases you know it's not. With that in mind you start creating new and different work, you start exploring. As digital designers, it's super easy to practice explorative design. It's not like we're chiseling a statue from a piece of marble and then saying, "I wonder if removing the arms would look good?" It's quite hard to come back from that. The worst-case scenario for a designer trying something different, an Illustrator, is that you'd waste a bit of time. But the benefits, let alone the best-case scenarios are way worth that risk. The power and luxury of being able to make copies, preview work and undo our mistakes should give us the freedom to try all kinds of things. But it seldom does. Sure, it can be risky. You can find things that don't work and things that look terrible. It could feel like you've wasted your time. But moments like these can teach you a lot. Then, there's the moments where it feels like you're breathing life into your work, where it's like you found a heavenly vegan bakery that also serves awesome flat whites with oat milk. This is the nature of exploration. There are going to be times when what you're trying doesn't work and there are going to be times when you're going to feel totally alive. Exploring opens your eyes, it excites us. It gives us ideas, it allows us to see the world from a different perspective. Now, I've painted a really romantic picture of exploration, which I'm hoping will get you excited to explore in your creative discipline. Next up is what it looks like in practice.
5. Explorative Design: The How: Now you may be asking, Okay, but how do I actually practice explorative design? What does it look like? What do I do? Good questions. What it looks like in practice, especially as a digital designer, is designing something and then duplicating it, changing it, tweaking it, comparing it to prior versions, and then repeating the process over and over until you're done. Doing this is like setting out to explore a city each time you creates a new or alternative version. It's like you're changing neighborhood, changing direction, going down a different street, stopping by different a shop. Greeting a stranger or tasting some local food. In Illustrator, we can make a copy of an i-pod. And then we can change a crazy amounts of things. You can add, remove, scale, rotate, move, overlap, extend, color, brighten, saturate, opacify, and a bunch more things. That's all great. But now you may be asking, how do I know what to change, and how do I know what to change it to? Again, these are great questions. The thing is, the possibilities are literally endless. What you should not do is attempt to try every single option you can think of. This would be a colossal waste of time. Although there's some benefit to trying a bunch of random things, you're not here to literally try every single different option. You're here to try find the good stuff. Ask yourself what parts of your design or your design style you like and don't like. Very importantly, ask yourself why you think that. This part requires a bit of self-reflection, but it's going to help you become a much better designer. This is my wife's self-reflection face. I know you may not like self-reflection. You want to be able to replicate what works in the future and not to have to hope to get to the same place through exploration each time. Even if they sound silly, let your reasons and answers come out. Let us whispers be heard. Based on the reasons you come up with, put forth some hypotheses that you think will make your design better, then try them out and repeat the process. Over time, this process will happen quicker and become a lot more intuitive. Some people look like they make decisions without thinking at all. But really, it's based on years of decision-making. But this especially for experienced designers, can also be a problem. If your little aesthetic voices subconsciously telling you to retreat to your tower of comfort, be conscious about it. Use a pen, use a piece of paper, and write down what's working and what's not, and why. While you're exploring, force your brain to make decisions rationally. Retrain your gut responses. When you're actively exploring, never judge an idea you've proposed until you've tried it. Don't just write it off unless it is actually truly terrible and someone might die in the process. Try the chili chocolates, try the fries dipped in ice cream, the bacon drizzled and [inaudible] the garlic snails, the frog's legs, the tiger nut milk, the smarties and popcorn. Or in the design world, try using a grid. Try making use of asymmetry. Try some form of repetition, or just try making that circle a little bit lighter. One of the crazy things about exploring is that you don't know what's going to happen along the way and you don't really know what the end result is going to look like. You may find a tiny bit that does work amongst all the stuff that doesn't, and find that little piece into a massively awesome design fire. You thought fries dipped in ice cream was disgusting, until you tried it, and then boom. Your life was never the same. But, and I'm sure you knew there was a but coming, we will go over the big but in the next video.
6. Explorative Design: The But: But, exploring can take its toll, especially when it's not done sustainably, and we want to explore sustainably. We don't want to burn out, we don't want to tire, we don't want to sprint, quits, and then lose all of the progress we made. We don't want to waste our time. We don't want to get overwhelmed. But these things happen, very often in fact. Imagine stopping by a city for one night before heading to another the following night, and the following night, and the following night, and carrying this on for hundreds and thousands of cities. Does may seem like a dream for you? But it will get tiring and you'd get overwhelmed. Compare this to spending a week or two in one city. We start to remember the roads, the landmarks, and which direction the train station is in, where you get to see the market that only opens on a Monday. When you start to meet the locals and perhaps where you could see yourself spending a few more weeks or months. Now imagine trying to explore a city without a map, without a guide, without knowing any other language. Imagine popping out of the underground network, somewhere random in the city. You'd feel lost, frustrated, tearful even. It would make you feel like never wanting to explore again. Contrast this to having a guide, a translator, and a map. It sounds more structured, but you'd feel safe, you'd understand more, you'd see more, you'd be able to mentally organize it better. You'd also be able to enjoy it, and do it for much longer. These two examples when related to design and what a lot of us try do. I know I have. We try a whole bunch of different things really quickly and expect to see results. We expect to master a new style by only spending a few hours or days exploring it, or we settle on a style to explore for a few weeks, begin lasting it, frustrated with it, and try a bunch of random things to get it to work. Then we quit and we go back to our more comfortable ways of working. I discovered there was a need for sustainable exploration. I've never changed my diet to lose weight but I'm pretty sure what I was doing was a yo-yo design diets. Sounds cool but it's really not. It wasn't working in the long run, I couldn't keep my exploration up, and so I needed a change. That's what the next section is all about.
7. Explorative Design: Conclusion: We've covered who explorative design is for, basically everyone. We've covered why it's awesome, the basics of how to design exploratively, and ended with the problems it creates. To cut this section off, here's a rundown of some common voices you'll hear when it comes to exploration, especially in design. You may have experienced some or all of them at different times. Where I am is totally fine. Actually, it's the best. I don't want to explore. I hear it's dangerous out there. I'll stay in a safe zone. Exploring is amazing. It's the best, it's terrific. Let's go. Exploring is rough, and I can't even remember most of the places I've been to. It's a waste of time. I'm exhausted and overwhelmed. I hate exploring. I always get lost, and there's a whole bunch of people that look and talk funny. It's frustrating and confusing. I explore slowly, rhythmically, and I enjoy myself. I've picked up some local phrases and I know my way around. I sometimes use a map, ask a translator what new words mean, and ask a guide ways best to get specific kinds of food. I've explored and now I'm such done set for life. I'm not budging. I found paradise, well, something as close to paradise as possible. The thing I want to emphasize here is sustainable exploration. What does it look like to explore on a regular basis? How can we keep up the practice of explorative design and not rush it and then quit, and then be excited for it and then get over it. In the next section of the class, we'll cover constraints when exploring and how they can help us become both rapid and sustainable explorative designers.
8. Exploring With Constraints: The Why: So what we've established so far, is that explorative design is awesome. But it can be really difficult to keep it going because it gets overwhelming, it gets frustrating, you can get lost, you can get fed up, you can even get bored. So, we need something to help us practice explorative design in a sustainable way. We want to develop our skills and style rapidly. So that's what this section is all about. We're going to cover constraints and how they help us explore sustainably. Let's cover the reason why we impose rules, boundaries and constraints on our creative and learning processes. The first reason is because it's fun and when anything is fun, we want to do it more. Constraints are like rules in a game. They give it form and meaning and make it challenging and fun. If it's not fun, you need to change the game. The second reason is so that, we don't worry about getting better at everything all at once. This would be like trying to explore seven different cities on neighborhoods all at once, pinging from one area to the other. It would be super confusing. With constraints, you don't have to do this. With constraints in place, you get to focus on just one thing. Which means you get a lot better at it really quickly. When you spend a lot of time working in a particular way or with a particular tool, you gain confidence with it. It starts become natural, comfortable and maybe even habitual. When this begins to happen, you consolidate your learning. You create these things called pillars, which you can use to build on top of or you can use to explore something else with them. Imagine learning to use the tram system in a new city or where to hire bikes. You'll now be able to get to places a lot quicker. When we use constraints it reduces the pressure to create perfect stuff. Constraints make creativity blossom because you're not worried about creating the perfect item. Why? Because there's not as much pressure. Imagine having years of time, a massive studio and loads of tools to create an artwork. There would be a bunch of pressure to create something beautiful, something awesome. In contrast, if you've got five minutes to create a piece of art using only a twig green paint in your left hand, there's not much pressure at all. Constraints can switch our creative muscle from auto-pilot mode onto menu mode. When our brains are in this state, we get to be intentional and really consider what we're wanting to achieve. We get to ask why we're doing it and how we're going to get there. We also become hyper aware of where we are and what we're doing, which helps us identify inefficient and detrimental ways of working, it helps make sense of all the choices. Without much horizontal space to move in, the only space to cover is vertical. So you can end up exploring further than you normally would have. You can get really far, really quickly. You don't worry about where you cannot go, you just look ahead. It helps you push past the first base ideas and default styles. It helps you go beyond the norm, go beyond the stuff that everybody else comes up with. Constraints help you stop fretting around at the surface thinking that, those designs and those ideas will be the good ones. It helps you go deep. Constraints are basically going to help you explore further, better and more often. Great, you may be saying. But what are constraints? What do they actually look like? We'll cover that in the next video.
9. Exploring With Constraints: The What: What are constraints? At a high level, constraints can be divided into those that block and those that enable. A blocking constraint prevents certain pathways leaving you to find other solutions. An example of a blocking constraints would be telling you to design without using the pen tool. An enabling constraints on the other hand, presents a single pathway which delivers you from making a choice in that area. An example of an enabling constraint would be telling you that you can only use a color palette with these three specific colors. You'd often use an enabler to focus on using a certain tool or process and a blocker to stop relying on specific tools and specific processes. If you're thinking constraints are boring man, I'm creative and I don't need them. I'm just going to explore. Well, the thing is you're probably using constraints without realizing it. Using an App is a constraint, working on a computer is a constraint. Designing a business card at a certain size is also a constraint. So is working from nine until five, so is working as a freelancer and so is working on a laptop. There is may be broader constraints but they are constraints nonetheless. Those may seem trivial to you but they are good things to consider when you start thinking of ways to explore better. Let's get on to some other constraints ideas. The first is time. It's a great constraints. With less time you can actually get a lot done, and when you get a lot done, you eventually get quality done. Try setting a time limit on a design, five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. You'll be surprised how this focuses your brain, makes you create an astounding level really quickly. Your intuition and quick decision-making ability goes into overdrive. The second is tools. Do you want to get better at the pen tool? Create a project for yourself where you could only use the pen tool. In this class, we're only going to be using the rectangle and ellipse tools. You could also limit your tools to the ones that you're comfortable with so that you can focus on something new, like a new process, rather than learning new tools and a new process at the same time. Constraint that's related to tools but may seem slightly different is abilities. Some abilities are related to tools and some are not. An ability could be changing colors, undoing, changing opacity, resizing, moving, duplicating, rotating. It could also be using your dominant hand, using a mouse, having your eyes open while you design using the toolbar. Try constrain these and see what happens. No undoing changes how you design as as having no toolbar, all of a sudden you become a keyboard shortcut nerd. When very important constraint that's rarely seen as a constraint, is a goal. Having an end destination in mind will help you explore a lot easier, and will naturally block and enable certain things. If your intention is to become a typography master, your exploration will be filtered through that goal. Just like if your goal is to see the Eiffel Tower up-close, every decision you make when in Paris will take that into account. You don't necessarily have to have a goal, but it makes exploring and creating other constraints a lot easier. One goal is always going to serve you better than having two or more. Remember, you don't want to be jumping around from neighborhood to neighborhood. You want to create pillars, things that are almost habitual. One thing that's related to goals are references and inspiration. These can serve as guides and starting points when you're exploring. I think having pieces and people to reference is really good. It's a great process for getting into a new style. It's a shortcut, but it shouldn't be where you stop. You should keep on exploring, turning it into one of your pillars and adding more of you into it, which leads us on to a new point. You are your biggest constraint. What you do and don't do or revolve around, what makes you you. What do you like? Where have you been? What other pillars do you have? What other skills? Where's your head at? What's your sense of humor? What topics do you like talking about? What clothing do you gravitate towards? When you start embracing what you like, you'll find certain styles and ways of working unattractive and others really attractive. Do some self-reflecting here and see what things you want to embrace and what things you want to let go off. For me, I want to embrace more characters and fun in my work. What I want to let go of is perfectionism. See even though we sometimes take the same road, we all do it differently and our work will be different because we are all different. A broader constraint is the context of your exploring. When do you explore? At what time of day? At a table? In the train? At home? At work? With other people? With distractions all around? If you were to create a set of constraints from this, how would your work differ? I like the idea of exploring daily or weekly in short exercises or experiments sitting at my desk in my studio. You may decide to explore in the train or outside during your lunch break. The last category of constraints that I can think of anyway, is related to abilities, but it's bigger than that, its process and it's often forgotten about. How do you approach a new design? Do you write about it? Do you plan at all? Sketch some ideas, create a quick wire frame, and how long do you go about doing it for? Perhaps you've never considered this before, but your process plays a big role in your design. So consider how you use it when creating your constraints. How I make use of these constraints, most of the time is to combine them into an exercise ranging from 5-30 minutes and then I create within the constraints producing as many versions as I can, always comparing, duplicating and seeing what does and doesn't work. You can make use of a mixture of any number of constraints at anytime for a day, a week, a month or even for a 10-minute exploration. You're probably going to keep some constraints the same for longer, like your references and selection of tools. Others like the number of items on an art board, the use of scale or the use of color may change more frequently. Take a minute to write down some constraints you could work with within your creative discipline. Then note what category they fit into and whether there are blocker or an enabler. Think about constraints from abroad all the way down to a specific level. Pause the video and jot some constraints ideas down. I'm going to cover some of my constraints. My first is create beautiful shape-based posters for my house and office. Its a goal and it's an enabler. Pin up your references. Well, this is reference and it's an enabler. The third is create the posters live on camera or on a screencast. This is the context and again, it's an enabler. Sitting, standing at my desk on a MacBook Pro, in Illustrator CC 2019, without music, this is context and it's an enabler. Spend 10 or less minutes exploring, this is in the time category and it's a blocker. Use only the rectangle an ellipse tool for primary element creation, these are tools and they're a set of enablers. Set a standard size for your posters 1260 by 1782 pixels. This is part of the process and it's an enabler. Create at least three different versions for each poster. This is part of the process and it's an enabler. Start with a set color palette based on reference, this goes into the abilities category and it's an enabler. You can't use opacities, gradients, the Pathfinder tool or the shape builder tool this is part of abilities and they are blockers. The thing you want to keep in mind is that when you're exploratively redesigning, you're creating pillars. If you're a new designer, creating a pillar may take longer than someone who's been designing for decades and sometimes, the only way to get to your desired goal is to build a few other pillars first. You may need to learn about typography, color, and Soviet poster history before you create your dream political poster. So keep this in mind and remember to take a one step at a time. Some pillars will also be quicker to erect and others because of their similarity to other pillars you've already built. Like if you know how to use Illustrator, perhaps using Photoshop or Sketch won't be as hard to grasp as someone who's never used them before. If you're an experienced designer, it might be a good idea to do some pillar repairs. Because if there's a lot of stuff leaning on it, if you strengthen it in a whole bunch of other stuff will get better to. To end the section off, I want to remind you that we put constraints in place to help us explore. So at times, breaking the rules and deviating from the constraints you put in place is a good thing to do, make it an exception and not the norm though. Along the way we come across unexpected things, new tools, new ways of working, ideas and shortcuts and insights. Perhaps even a new style. Who knows? Break the rules, be intuitive, get into the hidden and incidental findings of exploration. Follow your consciences, it may or may not lead to something. What I love about being open to the unexpected is that you find valuable things you weren't looking for. You win back being intentional and you get the incidental thrown in for free. But remember, constraints are here to help you explore sustainably. Okay, in the next video, we're going to get onto the style we're going to explore in the rest of the class.
10. The Simple Style: Now that we know all the theory behind explorative design and working with constraints, we can discuss the style I'm wanting to explore. Perhaps, this will help get you excited to explore with me, or perhaps you'll get excited about your own area of exploration. I'm wanting to explore a super simple, shape-based style. Here are a couple of pieces of reference that inspire me. It's what I'll be constantly referring to. They'll be my guide throughout the process. The style is minimal. It's a bit futuristic at times, a bit rough and handmade at others, and it conveys emotion through color and design principles, which brings us to the reasons for choosing a style to explore. Why do you want to explore this style or that style, any other style? I'll tell you my reasons for choosing this style. The first reason is I want to get better at describing my designs with design principles, rather than doing things intuitively and not being able to tell anyone why it works, or why it doesn't work. I want to get better at talking about things like balance and emphasis and rhythm. When we work with basic shapes, it exposes design elements and principles in a royal manner, which I'm hoping will make it easier for me to see and discuss. The second point is that I don't want to rely on and I certainly don't want you to rely on complex tools and effects to produce good-looking designs. I want to be able to work with less, and make it look awesome. The third is that I actually really like the style, and I think that if I apply some Plato technique to it and add some hand-drawn elements in the future, that it could be an interesting combination. I'd like to try put a couple of these prints into my house and studio, and maybe frame and gift him. Because I'm teaching explorative design, I wanted to use something and a lot of designers could try out, and not get freaked out by. Not everyone can draw and paint like da Vinci or James Jean, but everyone can make shapes. The last reason is that it's probably really easy to play around with this style and animation, and code and also in other apps. If you're not a designer, the style may work well for you to try out too. What style are you going to explore? Are going to develop your style by adding you already know or are you going to try something new? Or are you going to explore this basic shapes style with me? Design styles are like weapons. If you already know how to use another weapon, you'll be more able to learn a new one. What you learn when using one weapon, will come in handy when mastering another. If you're worried about creating a bunch of worked as the same as everybody else, all you need to do is explore more and bring your personality and who you are into what you do. Your interests, your styles, your inspiration, your heroes, your stories and your struggles. Perhaps even your issues and definitely your sense of humor. All of that, bring it in. If you find a simple style impractical for your creative discipline and you're struggling to think of an area to explore, think of the most basic form of what you do and try hone in on that. Next step is as exploring a new design style together. You'll get to see how I work.
11. Doing It Together: What I normally do when exploring a design style is to generate a bunch of possible topics or subject matter ideas, either by brainstorming or with a random word generator. I do this before getting into any design each day and possibly even before I start exploring that style altogether. I do this so that I can focus on the actual designing when I'm exploring and not get distracted by coming up with what to design. It can be a little bit stressful at times. The next thing I do is set some ground rules or base constraints for the entire style exploration. I've already done this in the constraints section of the class. I'll bring them up here again. As you explore more and more, we'll see how these constraints hold up. We can always change them as we go to better help us explore. We can add more temporary constraints before working on each piece, but these constraints will be the base we'll start with. The next thing to do is to create many briefs or exercises for yourself so that it's manageable and so that you can stay on track. The following few videos contain these exercises. We'll go through them together, see how they build on top of each other, and also see how I respond to them. I encourage you to do the exercises with me. One or two a day is probably best, but you should know yourself better than I do. Now that we have our ground rules, what we need to do is to make it easy to explore. I suggest choosing and then committing to a time of day and putting it in your calendar, then make sure you've got coffee, warm socks, and a full stomach. Whatever helps you focus on exploring when it's exploring time. Turn off your notifications, close your browser, put on some good music. I want to pause the video now and list a few ways you can make exploring easy. What I'm going to do now is set up a template that it's quick and easy to get into exploration mode and then I'm going to create a custom toolbar in Illustrator because it's illustrator CC 2019 and I'm working with and so that I can have only the tools that I want to use in the Toolbar. Let's create a new document. I'm going to go with a width of 1,260 and a height of 1,782 and the reason I'm doing this is so that it matches the ratio of an A4 size of paper. It's really great for poster design. Because we are going to be designing in vector, means I can scale it up or scale it down as I want. I don't have any advanced options, I've got a color mode of RGB and PPI of 72. Yeah, let's create this. Boom. The first thing I want to do is I want to go to my Layers panel, rename Layer one to BG, which is short for background. Let's create a new layer and name this one foreground. I'm doing this so that I can have a background rectangle on my background layer and then lock it so that when I play around with the foreground elements, I don't accidentally select my background layer. Let's add a rectangle onto the background layer, which is going to create a normal rectangle. But instead it's exposition to zero, its y position to zero, and it's width to 1,260, and then it's height to 1,782. I can then take off the stroke because I don't really want the stroke on that. Then we've got our background rectangle. The next thing I want to do is I want to add some colors into the document. What I've done is in Coolors.co, I've created a two color palettes and you'll see that this is color palette number one and this is color pellet number two. You'll see that this gun metal color is the same in both color pallets. What I've done here is I've gone through my reference and selected a couple of colors that I would like to use. Then I've used coolors.co to generate a few other colors that would be really helpful to work with. Coolors.co is awesome, but I wouldn't rely on it a too much. That's why I've done a bit of mix and match of me choosing some colors and using its functionality to generate a couple more. What we're going to do here is we're going to go to Exports and I'm going to save an SVG. Let's go to the other pallets. Export SVG. Fantastic. It's going to Finder take these two files and it's drag them into Illustrator. There we go. I'm Zoom out here a little bit. Let's just select all of these colors, copy them, and paste them into this document and then do the same in this other color palette. Let's copy those, paste them here already. Now I want to add all of these colors to my document. Let's is going to Window and onto swatches like so. Then I'm going to select all of these and make sure that I'm not selecting my background rectangle. I've actually just copied and pasted all of these onto the background rectangle. Let's just Shift press that background rectangle. Then to add them all to the swatches, you press the swatches menu and you go add selected colors and it adds them all as global colors, which is really cool. I just want to unclick them. If you go into a global color, just by double-clicking it, you can check it and uncheck it at well, a global color is really cool because if you start changing your color values in this swatch options panel, then all of those elements will change color throughout your document. That's pretty cool. Now, I can remove all of these rectangles, not my background rectangle. Thank you very much. Then we can remove all of these rainbow colors. I'm just going to select all of them. Delete them. Delete these red ones and delete all of these black to white ones. There we go. We have a bunch of swatches. Now, I have my rectangle and I can choose this greeny color, and by making it this greeny color, I now know that when I open up my template, hey there's something here. It's not just a white background. I'm then going to unlock this background, select my foreground, and there's my template. How do I save this as a template now. I go to File and I go to Save As Template and by default it will open up this template folder. I can name this basic-shapes.ait, which has an Adobe Illustrator templates. But for me, when I press Save, I get this error, can't save the illustration, you do not have enough access privileges. I'm not sure if this is the case for everybody. For me to work around this, I go to File, Save as templates, and then I go to my Downloads folder and I save it as basic-shapes.ait. There we go and works. Now I can actually close this and I'll close these two pallets. Then I can go File and New From Template instead of just new. We go to New from Template and it goes and tries to look in the templates folder. We go to the Downloads folder again and open up our basic shapes template. There we go. What I really like about this is that it names it as untitled-2. It's not like we're copying and pasting different files and then having to Save As this is really cool. I know I've got all my colors that I'm going to work with, and I've got my luck background layer and my foreground layer and I can start adding shapes to, really, really cool. What I want to do now is I want to add a custom toolbar with only the tools that I need to use during this class. If you have Adobe Illustrator CC 2019, you're at luck. It's possible to do it with this version. Go to Window, go to Toolbars and here you can select the Toolbars that you already have access to or you've already made, or you go to new toolbar. Let's do that. Let's call this basic shapes. Then here is a little Toolbar with nothing in it, which is like a blank Canvas, fantastic. You press these three dots to access all of the tools. Then you just drag your tools from the right-hand side to the left-hand side. Pretty easy. I'm going to go for my selection tools perhaps my Artbord Tool. What's really great about this is that you can still use your keyboard shortcuts to access to tools that aren't on the Toolbar. But for visual people, having all your tools in the Toolbar is fantastic. We don't want to use the Pen Tool or any of its cousins or family members. Thank you very much. None of this stuff. Rectangle Tool not you. Rounded Rectangle tool no, Ellipse Tool. Yep. Let's carry on going. There's just a lot, a lot. Type Tools nope. All of this stuff. Nope. How about the Rotate Tool? Yeah. Reflect Tool maybe not. Scale Tool can add it there. What's really cool here is that if you want to add your ellipse tool to rectangle tool for your shape group, you can then access those just by holding down and then changing it to the rectangle tool. You can also ungroup these pretty easily by just dragging them out of the group. You can just remove it by dragging it to the right, just like that. But we actually want our rectangle back this. Lets go get it again. There we go. Then we've got our rotate and scale. All of these things. Eyedropper tool can be quite useful. Measure Tool, Pan tool, I don't think I've ever actually uses this as a tool. I always use it as Spacebar, Zoom tool, same case there. Then we have these at the bottom which are like hover over them. There we go. The full and Stroke Controls, the Coloring Controls, the Draw mode Controls, Screen Mode controls. You can't really drag these, but you can just press them and they'll appear on your toolbar. Let's just add these Draw Mode Control I don't think we'll need those and then our Screen Mode controls. Yeah, we can add that. This is our Toolbar, we can just close the assortment of tools and here we go, we have our nice simple Toolbar. We can just drag this one over here and close them and then drag this one to the left so that it goes blue and then it'll stick to the left hand side, and just like that, we have a really super, sexy, simple, basic shape Toolbar. We're ready to take on the rest of the class. We've got our template setup, we've got our Toolbar setup. We're ready to rock and roll.
12. Doing It Together: Simple Simple: This is our first exercise. Let me explain how each one is going to roll. For each exercise, I'm going to list a few extra constraints to work within just for the specific exercise. Then I'm going to explore. I'll talk through what I'm doing and why I'm doing it so if you're following along with the exercise, pause the video after the rules are read out or after you've watched me explore and do your own exploring. The extra rules for this exercise are one, the only other shape you can add besides the background layer, which is technically a rectangle, is a single rectangle. You can only add one more rectangle to the art board. This constraint is an enabler. Then the second rule, and this is the only blocker, is that this rectangle cannot go beyond the bounds of the art board. Those are the two rules. Pause the video here if you want to give the exercises a go before you see me do it. Let's get going. Let's use the rectangle tool and let's start with one of these pink colors. I'm going to just remove my stroke very quickly. What layer am I on? The foreground layer, fantastic. Lets just start creating a rectangle, there we go. I'm going to use the toolbar and keyboard shortcuts at different times depending on which mood I'm in. Now, let's just try rotate it. This is starting to look a little bit more interesting. Lets creates a duplicate of the art board. Duplicate art board and you'll see that I unlock the background to do that. Let's change this color. Let's see what other colors we can play with. That's looking pretty interesting. It's a bit offsetting, I'm going to use my art board tool shift O to see, stimulate on. That looks pretty interesting like there's like this weird gap at the bottom here. What happens if we move this down here? It's almost like a container. Let's create a duplicate of this. What I'm doing now is I'm just getting a sense of what's possible. Perhaps we can make this another light color. Lets go and change this to a dark purple color. I can use my aligned to align this to the middle. Like so. It's really cool. Let's create another duplicates. What I really like about this is that always adds these like [inaudible] 1,1 pixels I just press done. Just do the same thing over here just to get them all to be round values. I guess what I could do is I say "View" then "Snap to Pixel" let's see if that actually helps. That helped quite a bit. Now, I've got a few more to work with. Let's just lock the backgrounds. Now, when I drag like this, it doesn't actually select the background. Let's just maybe make this really small, something like that. Starts to look like a big slash and it's aligned, it's like so. Perhaps I can just get this guy over here. I quite like that for a poster design, that looks really, really nice. What happens if we copy this? Then I'm going to paste in place all. Let's go to this art board, copy this. Let's go to this art board, paste in place, there we go and change it to this color. They may or may not work well with this. What happens if we go for this color? What about this color? That looks pretty interesting. Let's go back to our layers. Let's go "Shift O" and let's drag this one down. Let's drag this one down, even let's drag this one down. This was my first real exploration with the shapes so I'm just trying to get an understanding of whether these things are working or not. Let's change this to a green color already. Let's remove that, let's lock our background, create a new rectangle. Let's align them? I've [inaudible] align [inaudible] down here. That looks pretty boring, maybe interesting. What happens if we unlock this? Just drag this down here again, rotate this by 45 degrees. Maybe made him slightly smaller, something like that. That's really interesting. I mean, these are all just rectangles within an art board that maybe looks like a playing card, the ace of diamonds or something. "Shift O" scroll here. What happens if we put this at the bottom right-hand side? That's pretty interesting, if we went all the way to the right-hand bottom. Kind of weird. Let's change this to that color. It's pretty strong. How about that? Well, what happens if we made this a really light color? That looks pretty good or maybe a brown color, that looks really good. Let's just carry on duplicating here. What happens if we put this here and rotate it just slightly. That looks really interesting. It has this really simplistic, minimalistic feel, the colors are really nice. Feels like this guys on a journey like, "Why aren't you in the middle of the page, Square" I don't know. Let's go back to this guy over here that was a duplicate. Let's work with them. I really like these colors, I could use my eyedropper tool for this, and lock my background layer and then I select this guy. That looks pretty cool as well. Got this one here. Let's do the same for him. Work could these lighter background colors like so. What happens if we made this white? [inaudible] in a bit. Not so long. What about that? Looks pretty interesting. Let's just move this along. It may looks like a truck or a lorry now. Let's see if we can change the color. See what it looks like. Let's rotates it a little bits. That looks pretty interesting, I think. I still think this one's got a lot of potential. Let's go to our art board tool. Lets move them down here. What happens if we have to make this one whites and this one redy? Dark color. No, I don't think I'm a big fan of whites. What about this pink colors, I think that's really nice. That pink color works really nicely. I like that? I think I like that a lot as a background color. Let's lock out background color. Perhaps we can make this a little bit bigger. Like so. What about that? What happens if we align him in the middle? Pretty interesting. I still quite like that. This one is also a really nice, but let's go for the colors. Let's unlock that. Let's go for the colors of this art board here. I drop a tool and I drop a tool. What about this color? Looks pretty warm, I think. Something like that. What about this one over here? Lets go for this background color? That's a pretty interesting set of colors. I quite like that. Maybe we can come back to that a bit later. That looks really nice. I'm going to press Tab, just get rid of all the tools. Have a look at what I've created here, have I learned anything? Well, what I've learned is that these colors work really nicely. This is an interesting really simple symmetric design. These are not symmetric at all, but they tell a story there. They're really interesting. This thin, slanting rectangle is really cool. I think he can work really well as a poster, but these ones are ready playful. I think I might like to explore more with these colors. These colors are really similar. Not really something that I like, but they're really interesting. That's about 10 minutes. I've created a lot more than three posters. I've stuck to the additional rules. If you haven't already pause the video now and do some of your own exploring.
13. Doing It Together: Sneaky Square: The extra rules for this exercise are, one, add a single square to your composition and nothing else. The second rule is that, that square must go beyond the bounds of the artboard, it has to. Pause the video here if you want to explore before seeing me do it. Already, let's create a new document from a template, new from template. Let's go to our downloads, basic shapes templates. Perhaps we can just move these little bit to the left. I remember last time we had some pretty sweet colors. I like this one a lot. Then our foreground, we can add a square. Let's hold down Shift to make it a square and I quite like that color. That color also works pretty nicely so does that one and so does that one. Pretty nice. Perhaps let's try this gun metal green. Now we have to make it go beyond the bounds of the art-board. Let's make it even bigger, something like that. But what's quite weird about this, you still see your rectangle beyond the bounds of the art-board. How do you preview what your post is going to look like while you can actually still see your shapes off of the art-board. I find this really weird. Again with Illustrator CC 2019, what we can do here is to go view and we can go to Trim View. Tara. Which is really cool, I like this a lot. So let's zoom out a little bit. Already this looks weird, interesting. Let's just duplicate this and then I'm going to press V. The Trim View has gone away so let's go back to Trim View and let's lock our background. Here we can start rotating this quite a bit. Then this stops being a square which I really like. You can still see that that's a square. What about if we just make it a little bit bigger? Wow, this looks really interesting. This looks like a valley or something quite unsquare-like. Let's unlock this and let's go back to our art-board tool. It's moving on a bit, let's change the color, let's see what happens now. Let's go back to our Trim View. Let's move this down and up a bit perhaps we can just align it to the bottom. Now we've got these two triangles that appear, which I find really, really cool. Then this big space, it feels like there should be something there like a circle, the sun, some birds, a plane. I don't know. I really like that. Perhaps we can try that inverter now. Let's go down here. What happens if we make this color and the background, this color? Something like that? Let's trim our view. Maybe it's not quite right when it's all the way at the bottom so let's lift it up a bit something like that looks pretty cool. Maybe we can just make this a little bit smaller. This is still a square. I like this because it's almost like a window into the scene rather than a container like we had in the previous exercise. Let's try some other things here, let's go to our art-board tool. Let's move this up a little bit to the side, maybe like that. Let's go back to these colors. Let's go back to our Trim View. View, Trim View. This almost looks like a bit of Pac-Man. It's pretty interesting. I just want to start adding a couple more rectangles. That's starting to look really cool, I know we're breaking the rules here, but this is part of exploration, something like that looks like Z or perhaps like a bit of a maze in a game l like that so I'm going to keep it there. As our rule-breaker maybe I can just rotate that a little bit to create a bit of interest. My eye goes like that maybe there would be a ball bouncing to and fro. I don't know, but that looks really nice, I like that a lot. Let's create a duplicate of this. Let's remove one of our squares, let's go back to our Trim View. How about we make this a bit of a blue color and this the dark green color. Let's work with a much smaller square now, perhaps we can change the rotation to something like 45 degrees. Don't know why that went into the middle, that was weird. Let's go towards the bottom, something like that. What happens if we just make it a little bit smaller? Something like that, reminds me a little bit of a penguin for some reason. Lets create a new one. Not so happy with this one lets try and see if we can get it to look a little bit more interesting. What happens if we moved it up here, made it a little bit bigger? Something like that. Lets go to Trim View. That looks like a page turning or something like that. While I'm here, I want to show you something that if you don't have Illustrator CC 2019 and you want to do this Trim View. What you can do is to create a new layer, let's cut off background, let's copy that let's go to layer 3 and paste on top. Then we set this to nothing. Then we swap that and then what we can do is you just perhaps select a color. Let's double-click, or let's select our eye dropper. What color is this? Let's copy that and then let's swap, fill and stroke and then we put our stroke to something like 40. Then go to stroke options and then make sure it's on the outside, like so. Then when we take out Trim View off, you'll see that, hey, this guy over here if we make this 600. Wow, it's got a really big stroke. It almost acts like a mask or a border and to see what's actually going on here, perhaps we can change it to red or something like that. If you don't have CC 2019, that's a way around it to create your Trim View, but we do so, let's just delete that. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm not really happy with what's going on here. That's weird. This is way more exciting, stuff like this is also pretty exciting. I'm going to work with this again so let's go here, create the duplicate and maybe let's go view and we go snap to pixel again so it doesn't come up with these decimal places. Go back to our Trim View and perhaps we can make this even bigger, something like that and that looks really nice. I really like that. Let's move this a little bit down so our square doesn't appear on some other art-boards and this looks really cool, I like this a lot. It's like you could have information on the left and something else on the right, or it's just like these two colors and you could put it up on a wall. But now, what happens if we move this a along and slightly rotated this like that. How would that change things? Maybe if we moved it the other way around, something like that. That's starting to look pretty interesting maybe not so much in terms of rotation, something like that and I'll press Tab to get my colors back. What happens? We just did that the stroke. No I don't want the stroke. What happens if we made this a yellow color? Yeah, that looks pretty cool. We have to move this down here again. Why don't we try a dark green on a gun metal. Let's trim the view here. That looks really interesting and almost looks like a notebook cover now, I really like that. That's starting to look pretty cool. Let's move this up here why don't we try the yellow like that. Trim view. Weird, I really like these colors so why don't we try that? But let's go back to our original colors that we liked from the previous exercise. Trim View there I like that a lot, I rarely like those colors so let's duplicate this one. Let's try the same colors here. View, Trim View. That looks really cool. I mean, it's super simple, but man, I really like that. I quite like this one, this one, perhaps this one. Yeah, but these colors are really cool. Let's duplicate the one that we cheated on and let's change the colors a little bit. Let's go for these colors here and let's trim our view. Yeah, I really like that, that's cool. That one's my favorite, but hey, that's us cheating. No more cheating. Something to do with this valley looks really nice perhaps I can create a mountain and valley series. Let's move this up here and maybe we can move it up a little bit more so we can create a bit of a mountain. Then what color can we use for in mountain. I'm going to try this brown, that looks pretty nice, yeah. Let's go a little bit further and let's go for this light blue. Also quite interesting. What about an even lighter color. What happens if we change this to pink on pink? That looks pretty interesting too. Trim View, let's see what this looks like. It's very subtle. I think that works quite nicely. This one's not, maybe for like a chocolate wrapper or something like that, yeah. That's roughly 10 minutes of playing. Created a bunch of different versions. I really like this version over here and this version over here. Not really happy with these ones over here and then I quite like this one and this one, and this one. Then this one over here are the colors are working really nicely for me. We're getting somewhere here we're progressing we did a bit of cheating in this one, looking good. If you haven't already or if you want to do it again, pause the video here and do some of your own exploring.
14. Doing It Together: Double Trouble: I really liked our cheat from the previous exercise. The rules for this exercise are one, add two rectangles to the composition. Nothing more, nothing less. These rectangles cannot touch each other. Three, they must be the same color, and four they cannot be square on. This means that they must look like they've been rotated. You can see how I'm adding more elements to my composition now, and we're basing our exercises on previous findings. I'm making it slightly more complex but, the constraints make the point of the exercise to explore how these two shapes are going to interact with each other without touching of course. Pause the video here to get your exploration on and come back when you're done. Let's go. New from Template and let's good to our Downloads folder. Open up basic-shapes template. Now I've got two rectangles that I need to add to this composition. Let's add the rectangles. They need to be rotated, but they don't need to be squares and they can't go off the edge of the artboard. Let's add some rectangles. What I really liked about my last exercises rectangles was something like this, which I quite enjoyed. I made a quite game-like. Quite beautiful at the same time. Something like that maybe a bit more rotation there. How about we start there with our rectangle exploration? Let's unlock this. Let's start a duplicating. What would be helpful is just to go and say Snap to Pixel. There's no weird decimal places in our pixel values. Let's go for Trim View. A sign to look really good already. I really like this. Man, I don't want these edges or strokes so let's just take these off. Fantastic. That's starting to look pretty cool. What happens if we change this to a really light color? Something like that. That looks really cool. All I've done a lot. Let's just keep on playing around with these colors then. Let's bring this in. Now, what happens if we start playing around with the big rectangle and the small rectangle? Something like that. It looks like this guy's been running down a hole and he's not going to bounce over the cliff. You make him a little bit smaller. Something like that. My eyes moving from the top right following this rectangle and then is going, where is this rectangle going? I really like that. This is tension between the small rectangle and this big rectangle. Let's carry on exploring. Let's use our artboard tool again. Let's move this up. How about we change some colors here? Got to make them the same color. Something like that. What happens if it's like that? How about that? Not really sure if that's working. How about something like that? No I think I quite like having light backgrounds. It's good to know that. Still really like that. How about we try this? Let's go for Trim View already. How about we try go with two rectangles that are exactly the same? Let's go for a square. How about a square? Let's remove these and then just duplicate this and slightly rotate this and slightly rotate that. I really like that too. Looks like a character's face like, "What are you doing?" Let's group these and let's put it on the middle. Maybe not. Maybe up there is pretty nice. I do like that. Let's put them in the middle over here. Let's compare them. I think this one it looks a bit more like a character than maybe I just see faces in everything. This one is in the middle. But I like this one better. Don't know really why, is there more like a balance? Doesn't really make sense in my head why they would be more balance, but feels better. This one over here. Maybe there's more space for them to fall into. I don't know. Let's duplicate this one. Let's see if we can change them colors. Let's go for a brown. Maybe let's go for a darker pink. That also works really well. I like that a lot. Let's go for shift O for our artboard tool instead of just moving layers around. Instead of these guys perhaps I can make some longer rectangles. Something like that. Remember this touch. How about something like that? Looks pretty interesting. They don't have to be the exact same height, do they? Don't think so. What happens if this one was already fed on? Something like that and then this one was a really thin one. Let's go and mark our background layer. Then let's make it that color. We take this a little bit more. Looks pretty interesting. What happens if we unlock our background? Then let's create a duplicate of this. Not really happy with what's going on here. But I just want to compare it to something like that. Something like this looks a little bit more random. Perhaps this looks 245-degreeish. Something like that. Looks like it's just being plot down there. I could create a whole series of these. I think these work quite nicely. Don't want it to overlap. When you start adding two different colors that also looks pretty interesting. But let's try stick with the one color rule here. What happens if these guys were red color like so? Let's try and move these around a little bit more. That's quite random. I doesn't really know where it's going compared to these ones. I always just shooting off the page a little bit up and then down and then up again. Here more random. Then perhaps not. Let's delete that. Then let's create a duplicate of this one and rotate it a little bit. This looks quite a bit like my reference. Just with two colors. But this is still pretty cool. Let's create the duplicate of this. I'm liking where this is going and perhaps we can create some uniformity here. I'm going to set my rotation to be zero through this, and it has to rotate a little bit. What happens if we rotate this a little bit this way? Just like so. This looks like footprints in the sand or maybe a post sign or a post icon that's fallen apart a little bit. Or maybe it just logs lying on the road or something like that. I guess if you added a bit of peddle technique to this with the Warp tool, it could be pretty fun. Let's zoom out a bit let's see what we've done so far. We've had a play around with this perhaps we can play more with that. Really like these colors. I really like these two over here. This one over here too. This one is really nice I quite like that, especially as opposed to that's going to go in a house somewhere. Colors are working really well with this style. Let's go for this. Let's do some eye dropping here. Those colors are really weird. Let's keep those around. It's pretty strong. Let's do some trimming like so. Perhaps we can create a square. Let's move him up there. Let's move him down here. Make it a bit bigger. No, don't want rounded corners, something like that. What about something like that? It's interesting. Maybe this create a duplicate over here, and then we bring this guy down a little bit and we rotate him. But maybe I want to rotate him from a particular point over here. Something like that. This may look like a sun or something similar. That looks pretty cool. Mountain plus square sun. What about these colors? These are almost a little bit spooky, a little bit cold. Weird. Let's move these on a little bit, and then let's delete these colors and create some clay stock standard ones that we can work with. That looks pretty cool. Let's move that over. Maybe decrease the width of these a little bit. Somehow rotating. Then what happens if we actually have to make these go off the page? Like really long. Swimming a little bit really long. Something like that. Let's trim the view. That almost looks like a really abstract twig and leaf or something. Perhaps let's leave that, let's create a duplicate, and then this can be our single leaf over there. How does that look? That looks pretty interesting. I can imagine some hands-on effects on top of that, perhaps a bit of Plato technique and look pretty interesting. You can see with just two rectangles how many different options there are. We've explored quite nicely in this one. Really like where this is going. It's actually starting to look like something that's being simplified. Then these two rectangles as with these ones and these two over here, looking really nice for a typical poster. These colors are surprisingly interesting. They're working really well together. This is fairly typical. This is interesting. Perhaps I can play a bit more with that in the future. I think I really like these two colors together. There's something interesting going on here. I'm having a lot of fun but time's up for now. If you haven't done any exploring it, you're up. Pause the video and resume when you're done.
15. Doing It Together: Odd One Out: In this exercise, you'll get to use another app's. Here are the rules. One, add a single rectangle in your composition, so only one. Two, add as many ellipses as you like. Three, all the ellipses need to be the exact same color. Four, nothing can touch each other. What this exercise is doing is giving us a bit of freedom after being heavily constrained in the last few exercises. We'll learn in this exercise that there is no way to randomly design every single variation in just ten minutes. Now, we have to make conscious choices about what we're adding to our composition. Let's get exploring. Pause here to do your own. We can add some circles. Let's go crazy. We need to be selective about what circles we add and where. We need to think about where we add them, why we add them and try to make something look good and not just overcrowded with circles. Let's go for it. I don't want this. We can actually start with white. Let's see what that looks like. They don't have to be circles. They can actually be ellipses. I'm not a big fan of ellipses to be honest, but let's give it a go. There's four ellipses. Lets add a rectangle, and let's put them over there. They cannot touch. We need to be the same color as that, and that's already looking fairly interesting. It was actually looking more interesting like that. Let's unlock our background there and let's move it over. What happens if we change it to a really dark color and change these to something like that? This one to something like that. It's the same color. No, but it does look like it. That's like a cheat, I guess. What happens if we remove these and just have these items? Something like that. What happens if it's just all the circles on the right hand side, and the squares on the left hand side? What happens if this is a bit bigger? Looks like there's a shark or something like that, and these guys are cornering him. I like quite like that. What happens if this is just a slightly smaller in size and this one's slightly bigger? I already like this. It feels like wildlife program. Something like that. Let's create a duplicate of this. The colors aren't necessarily working. A couple of questions that we can ask here, like, what if I remove something? What would happen if I removed these three? Then what would it look like? What happens if I added some more different size ellipses? Let's add this ellipse over here. What happens if it was really small? I don't know if that would really help anything. Perhaps, we can just add a couple of them here and there. Zoom in, so we can rotate. What is the shortcut for rotate? It must be R. Something like that. Let's press "R" again. I don't really know what these are, but they can be pretty interesting, I guess. Let's create a duplicate of this off-board again, and let's switch up the colors. Let's go for really light colors, and then the sky, maybe something like that. Let's remove all of these. Perhaps, let's remove this for now, and then we can just select all of these and move them around. What happens if we select all of these? I did something like that. I selected them all again, and then I went to Edit or Objects, and then transform each. What we can do here is we can preview. Let's scale them. Maybe, two hundred and fifty, a hundred and fifty. Move them, in horizontal of a 100 pixels, vertical of 100 pixels. Rotate them up to something like 200. Then, we put a random bit, that means that as we change things here, they'll move around in random positions, and a scale will also change a bit. They're touching. I don't want them to touch, that's against the rules. This looks like grass or maybe a herd of something, but this looks really nice. I guess, if we added some hand-drawn elements in there, it could look magical. Let's go for shift. Create a duplicate of the off-board. We forgot to do our backgrounds. Let's just copy and paste that. What are we going to do here? Let's keep the color the same, then change all of our foreground elements. Something like that looks really nice too. We also need to add a square back in here. Let's go to four square, hopefully the shortcut for square is M, like m-square, m-rectangle. I don't know. It's already weird. What's happening here is that this color, and the background color all look like the same hue. Maybe, just different saturation and brightness values. I really like that That's looking really nice. Let's bring the square down here. Perhaps, we can make it a darker color like that. What happens if we brought this out here a little bit and this one over there. Then we trimmed out view, something like that. I like that. Then if we have to move this up a little bit, let's just bring it in and then trim our view again. I like that and we can even add a couple more bigger ellipsis here. Let's go for our ellipsis tool, which is, [inaudible] makes sense more so than m. We can make it the same color as that and just give it a bit of rotation. Let's trim that, let's see what that looks like. Yeah, I quite like that. Looks really cool. Maybe that looks like an egg. This is working for me a lot. I think this is probably my favorite one, perhaps we can take this and let's move it down a little bit again. Let's just do that, and let's go on, snap to pixel. Cool. Then I'm going to just copy and paste this background layer again. Let's lock the background and remove that for now, and then copy and paste that on top of each other, it's like that. Then select all of these and go for transform and transform each. and perhaps we can move this something like 200 and 200, and then we can scale this down to something like 25 and 25. That looks pretty good. If we just move that up and down, get the couple of different values. Let's see if there's any that are touching. Looks like there are. Let's just move them. Something like that is looking really, really good. We could play around a lot with this style. It's really cool now let's add a rectangle back in here. Something like that. Just looks really weird, doesn't it? Is like. All of this random chaotic movement and then plop, there's a square like what are you doing there. Let's have some more fun here. Let's move this on again, background is still locked. Let's lock that up again let's select all of these. Let's make them a green color. Let's make this a yellow color. Something like that works really nicely. But I reckon if we just unlocked this again, I reckon having this guy right at the back and underneath everything might look really good. I think that looks really cool, it look like I don't know pumpkin seeds now. That looks interesting. I think we can actually work more and more with that and that could even become a style. Let's just do quick duplicates. Let's work with these colors again.No, no let's do this, unlock our background something like that. Trim our view, what happens if this goes all the way across the page? I think we might be cheating now because these things are overlapping, but let's just see. Something like that and trim the view. Looks pretty interesting. Last one before our time's up and just pull this down a little bit more and perhaps we can change the color. Let's trim view that. That looks really cool. What we can do here is we can like create a series out of these, select all of these elements except for our background, and then we can transform each again. We can keep the scale the same and then move it about. This almost looks like rice krispies or something. How about we just put that one over there? I was going to say like where's our square? But we actually have a square is just outside of the bounds of the art-board. Then view, let's just go to our outline view. Double check that nothing is actually overlapping, doesn't look like it. There we go, let's have a quick look at what we've actually managed to achieve in this 10 minutes of exploration. Looks quite average in terms of what we've discovered. But something like this reminds me of playing cards. This was all like pack mentality ,we started to say what happens if we made some really small ellipsis appear and then we rotated them a bit and then we just went ahead with a small ellipsis and look where we've come to. Some really interesting compositions here. I think this is probably my favorites and this one. Then we did some rule-breaking over here. So that's a really cool piece of exploration. Yeah, have some fun with this one. Now you can upload a few of your pieces you've made so far if you want, don't be shy, I'll give you some feedback and hopefully some other students will too.
16. Doing It Together: The Stretch: I realized I'm not a big fan of these non perfect ellipses, but I was pleasantly surprised by the results of the last exercise. This exercise aims to challenge my feelings about these stretched ellipses. The rules are, no rectangles are allowed, you can use a maximum of five ellipses, the ellipses cannot touch, the ellipses cannot be perfect circles, and the ellipses must all have the same hue, but they can vary in brightness and saturation. After about five or ten minutes, why not take some of your best pieces that you produce in this exercise and show to someone who's close by or post it as a story on Instagram and then ask people how it makes them feel. Not what they think, what they feel, see what people say. You don't have to do anything with a feedback, merely observe. Pause the video here and do some explorative poster making, and then do some feedback gathering. Let's start adding some ellipses to our Artboard, let's go for this one, remove the stroke. I want to try and maybe make something like a bunch of stones on top of each other. I'm just going to duplicate this, something like that. Then I can select all of these, and then I'm going to select this [inaudible] over here again, and then I'm going to distribute the spacing by 30 pixels, did that do anything? Doesn't look like it, this one? There we go. Then I'm going to group that's, and then align to the middle of the Artboard. This is my base for now. It's rarely simplistic, futuristic, minimalistic. It's got a lot of repetition going on, maybe it's even a bit boring. But I reckon if we start to vary the sizes and the color of these stones or ellipses it could be pretty interesting. Let's give it a go. Let's turn on our snap to pixel and then move it across. Want to ungroup this, you're going to hold shift down already. Let's move these up a little bit, these down a little bit. Let's make this small again. What size is this? It's 314. Let's go for 314 here. Let's make it locked 314. Going to look on background and select discuss the key object and then go for 30 pixels again. Something like that, looking fairly interesting. Let's carry on duplicating. What I want to do here is start working with a bit of color. Let's go. What color? Perhaps we can change this from the global into just the normal color. Like so. I don't like working with RGBs, I'm going to work with hue saturation and brightness. Then here we can start increasing our hue a little bit, something like that. It's interesting, I didn't realize that this was in the same color range. Something like that. How about that? Starts to lose some of its cool awesomeness. Looks pretty average right now. Let's move this on a little bit. Perhaps there's too many colors now. Take these make it all the same color, like so. Yeah, but maybe we can just go back to the colors that we did have. Just careful this color here, and maybe we make this one like so. That's really interesting, another breaks our rules. Perhaps we can make it like this [inaudible] and then decrease the brightness a little bit and increases saturation. Something like that even maybe it looks like a Christmas tree. I don't know. Let's carry on going. I really enjoyed the mustard color. Let's go for mustard. Looks pretty interesting. What about the color of this? I guess the greener was cool. Something like that, I think it's just to green. See, yeah, that's pretty interesting. What happens if we remove the Global aspect of this color, change the saturation a little bit. Something like that. Yeah. Increase the saturation here, decrease the brightness. Too many colors I think. What about that? Yeah, pretty interesting. It's a couple of posters designed on that aspect. There's one still really interesting I think. Let's continue with this one. Let's change up the colors a little bit. Let's go for an orange, let's change these to whitish color. Then what we can do, we can select one of these and then we can say Start Global edit, and you can actually select items that you want to not edit. You can see all of these items that are actually being edited. It may not be a good idea to do this, but let's try it out. Scroll and lock all, background, I'm going to shift and select all of these. That's not working at all. What happens if we just select these [inaudible] , cut them, bring them onto a new layer, and then paste them. You can lock all foreground. Then we can select this one and go start Global edit, and then we can shift and select these. That means that when I decrease this in size, they all decrease in size. It's not like a smart object. It's more like Illustrator recognizes these as similar objects which is really cool. Something like that might be pretty cool. If we go for Stock Global Edit again and we just rotate it a little bit. Yeah, that starts looking really interesting. It's a bit of movement here, perhaps it looks like a dice. What I'm going to do here is duplicate the Artboard. But what I need to do is just unlock the background. Let's go here. Then let's try this. Let's rotate this. I'll rotate too. Let's double-click this, and let's rotate it by I don't know 15, perhaps negative 15. Let's go for negative 15. Then it's like this one and rotate by negative 30. Rotate this one by negative 45. How's that looking? Weird. Let's rotate this one by negative 60. Okay, so that's not looking so good. Though maybe I can say I can move this one to the right by Shift and to the right, and this one Shift into the right. Then this one Shift and right. Maybe something like that, That's starting to look at all good. Not so sure. Yeah, I didn't like that. Let's go and copy this one again and let's change the color a little bit. Perhaps to something like that. That might be quite interesting. Let's change the rotation to zero again or perhaps we can go to 90 degrees. Then you can just take all of them and delete them and then let's start putting these on the show. We don't even have to keep them the same size so maybe let's just move them about a little bit and rotate them a little bit. Something like that. Let's go to our layers. Let's lock our background and we'll select all of these and go to object and then transform each. Then here we can set the scale and the vertical to different amounts, and then the move, that's fine, and that's fine, and then it's random. Then it's just going to be put in different places. Okay, so let's unlock the background and let's go Shift O and now perhaps we can change the color of this to purple and then do the exact same thing here. Transform each and let's click somewhere over here, changes to 300 pixels already. Okay, so if we preview something like that. I think this could look pretty cool and so you start to just get this randomly generates it look and feel of your objects rather than a hand-crafted look and feel. That's starting to look fairly interesting. I like that. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to ask some of my family members what they think about these pieces. Okay, so what I did was I went to three family members and I had these five pieces, so 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and what I did was for different family members, I went in different orders because I realized that a lot of their feelings were based not upon just seeing one piece, but they were relative to another piece that they had just seen so I changed the order a bit. I'm going to go through three family members feedback in the order that I showed them. The first family member, this was the first piece that I showed them. They said, "Calm, it makes me feel calm, symmetrical, and it's because everything is in its place. The colors are gentle and yeah, it's calm because it reminds me of pebbles and ripples.'' I thought that was really interesting. Then showed her this one next, and she said, "Less calm. A little bit trippy, a bit confusing because you didn't really know how many shapes there are it's not as rhythmic." You can see how it's beginning to be relational. We're relating to the previous example. Okay, then I showed her this one. She said, "Not much, just looks like a hipster poster." Then this one, she said, "Cold on the outside." Which I really liked as a descriptive feeling. It's gray, but it's still pretty and reminds her of Antarctica. Then I showed her this one, and she said, "Not much." That was pretty interesting. What's really important here is that these questions are actually hard to answer and sometimes the people you're asking, they don't really know what to say or how to answer, so there's no wrong answers and that's what you've got to convey to them. You're not trying to judge them. You're not going to take offense. You're not going to hug them if they say anything, just see what they say. But try not to make them judge your design and start telling you to move things about. Okay, so the next family member, I went backwards, so from this piece towards the front piece again. This family member said, "Neutral. It represents nothing. It evokes nothing." There's some commonalities between the first and second family member. The next one, he said, ''Calm and soft,'' and he liked the colors. Then third one he said,"Yeah,'' and got really pumped up about this one; organization, power, brand structure. Then he was like, "An airplane going vertical. Check this out.'' A bunch of plane windows." That was a bit of a creativity from him, points to him for seeing that. Then number two, he said, "Relaxed and structure but it's softer." This he was relating to the previous design, but he still said that it felt organized. Then the final one he said, "Calm, peaceful because of the shapes and the colors more relaxed." The final family member, I started in the middle and she said, "I can't quite answer but seems structured." Then after seeing a couple of others she said, "Actually that first one, it made me feel fun, happy." She really liked the color and she would happily hang this on her wall. Then I went to number four. She said it was minimal, but she wanted color. She wanted something in it. She wanted it to be more happy, but it made her feel calm and cold. Then for this one, she said, ''Quite arty.'' I guess that relates to the other feedback in regards to this one. Then I couldn't go down anymore, which is sucky. Then I had to go back up. Then I showed her this one, and she said, "Serious. " Which is pretty interesting and nothing more. Then the final one she said, ''Looks creative but that's my least favorite, not my colors at all. I like the design, but it doesn't make me feel anything positive." That was my feedback from my family members. You don't have to do five different pieces and you don't even have to ask three different people, you can go more or less. Have some fun here and remember, there are no wrong answers. See what they say and sometimes profile some more emotions, some more feelings and depending on your design, yeah, you'll get some really interesting answers.
17. Doing It Together: A Herd Of Shapes: I want you to have some fun in this exercise just in case you weren't having fun in the other exercises. The extra rules for this exercise are; One, you must use the same ratio for all rectangles and the same ratio for all ellipses. You can make them smaller or bigger, but they should always be the same ratio. The second rule is that the ellipses and then rectangles must be different colors. Then the third rule is that the rectangles must all be the same color and the ellipsis must all be the same color, so you can have them to separate colors, but all the rectangles are the same color, all the ellipses another different color. Then fourth ruler is, the shapes cannot overlap. What I want to explore and play around with in this exercise is a sense of movement and focus. Let me give that a go. Pause the video and have some fun, or watch me have some fun and then pause the video and have some of your own fun. Let's get some rectangles go in here. The need this. Thank you very much. Let's just do some snapping to pixel. It's not really necessary when you're working with print stuff, but too many times I've exported and there's just been the slight weird line on the right or the left, top or bottom, the image is slightly bigger than the actual artboard. When I'm working with multiple artboards, I really like to put that snap to pixels thing on. Let's create a couple of rectangles. I'm going to work with something like this initially. Let's change my background color to something quite light. Something like that, or maybe that. Let's try that. Let's see if we can get some movement and some focus going here. Every time I resize, I need to remember to hold Shift. You'll find that as your design get more and more complex and they have more and more elements in them that it'll take longer to create a duplicate and to explore more. The amount of artboards and the amount of different versions will probably not be as much as when we first started. But that's okay. Keep on exploring. Perhaps we can just move all these guys over here. I'm just going to keep on rotating these and scanning them down a little bit like so. Let's zoom in to scale this. How's this looking now? Perhaps we can just keep that the same, or maybe we just scale it from here. I'm going to scale it from here. Let's go for a trim view. Something like that. My eye does grow from the bottom all the way to the top. Perhaps we can just change this a little bit. Something like that and make it a little bit bigger. Now align this little bit. Perhaps this one needs to come up a little bit and must be rotated just slightly. I think this is the whole synaptic pixel thing, maybe. That's looking fairly interesting. It looks like a Jenga game. All the pieces falling down, or perhaps some railway sleepers. Let's bring back everything and let's creates a duplicate. See if changing color makes any difference. Maybe make this fairy light. Then if we take this make this a different color, something like that. It becomes fairly interesting. That's really nice. Could we add an ellipse in. Let's create a new one. Let's duplicate this. Again over here we just bring this down. There's no decimal places, we can turn off. Snap to pixel back on. What I'm going to do is I'm going to remove one of these items and just start with this one again. Let's introduce a circle. Let's make it this color. Already that feels quite playful. I really like that. We don't have to add a lot of different shapes but perhaps we can just add a couple here. Just a little bit bigger for this guy. Now that's looking quite nice. It doesn't really have much movement or focus in at the moment, but perhaps we can work with the shapes now. I really like that. I know there's four pieces or four elements. Perhaps we can add another one. Perhaps we can have a couple of these pieces up here. What about this guy down here? Could he be a focus element? Maybe not. Let's maybe make this one a little bit smaller. How about that? Something like that. This one still looks quite interesting. I'm not sure about this one. Let's make a duplicate of this one. I don't really know why this one is working no more. Maybe because it's all in the middle. There's too much space around here. What is this little guy doing here? My focus is really there on him, but I don't think it's right. What happens if we work with this guy? Let's take this guy over here. Let's bring back our layer panel, just lock that. Then perhaps let's make this our focus. Let's remove this. Let's bring this into the middle like so. Then perhaps we can bring a bunch of these around. Let's go and create a duplicate here. Then we can create another duplicate, so I'm just going to paste and place and then rotate. Something like that. Then you want to select all of these rectangles and duplicate them again and then rotate so that may look like a sun. But perhaps if we select all of these and go for Object, Transform, Transform Each, we're not going to do any of this. 100 percent-100 percent. This is not going to move at all.Then our rotation, something like 10 degrees maybe. If we preview it's just like a slight rotation. Something like that. Then maybe it's a little bit bigger, and that feels like a paper cut out. We could add some Plato technique to this and I reckon it would look pretty good. Maybe make this one a little bit smaller, and maybe we just make it all slightly to the left, just so it's not perfect. Then that looks really nice. I know it looks like a Sun. Maybe let's just move that over there. Move this one over here. Just so it's not super perfect. Something like that looks really cool I think. Let's create a duplicate of that. Let's bring it down so that's lock the background, and maybe let's bring it up a little bit so it's in the sky. If we change the color to something like that, does it work a little bit better? Yeah, that could work quite nicely. What happens if we move it across? Yeah, I don't really like the white background. Let's copy and paste the background, and let's change it to a darker, kind of pink, change this to a dark green. What happens if we made all of these rectangles, that gun metal green? Pretty interesting. Here we're exploring a little bit. Still acquire like this one. I think I like it being a little bit higher up. Let's unlock the background. Let's bring this one down and make this one, the gun metal green. There we're, I think that's probably my first prize at the moment. I really like that. Then this one still pretty interesting. Why don't we try something with rectangle, a single rectangle, and then a bunch of circles. Let's duplicate this, and let's lock the background, let's delete all of these. We just got this guy, and move him over there. Then let's try work with some browns. Maybe let's change this color too, and see if that works. I'm not a big fan of the non perfect circles. The last exercise showed me so, definitely showed me so, in fact. How's this looking? Not quite sure at the moment, but it can be pretty fun. Just trying a couple of things here. Just makes me think of a weight or a scale. You've got this one big guy on this side, you've got a divider or a fence, and then a couple of different items on this side. Something like that. It's pretty interesting. Not quite sure about this brown color. Let's create a duplicate of this, and let's change our brown colors. Let's change it to yellow or what about this dark green. Yeah, that looks really cool. That means if we move some of these, and let's work with that, quite like that. Let's bring this down, bring this up. What happens if we had to make this zero or 90? Then just put it straight in the middle, like so. Then these guys on either side, something like that creates a little bit of balance. I really like this. Perhaps let's go 92, so it's not quite perfect. Well, maybe let's balance it the other way, so 88. Yeah, that looks pretty interesting. I like that. That's pretty cool. We've got some goodies, some winners. That one's really cool. This one's pretty cool. I still really like this one, it's really playful. Let's create a duplicate of this one. I don't know what happened there. Let's do that again. Let's just remove these. Something like this looks quite a bit like the patron logo. It's not much movements, but perhaps there was some focus here. Just like so, you can have some fun with this, maybe with some different colors even. Why don't we try a really dark background here. Let's try some lighter colors over here. You know, this might be a light color. Yeah, that's looking pretty interesting. I Don't think I'm a biggest fun of this dark green background. Let's change it to the gun metal one. That looks really nice. It reminds me of pine tree. See what happens here. What happens if we make this dark. Yeah, that's starting to look really interesting, I like that. Let's now create a duplicate of here. Let's not do that. Let's move this around, that pinky color. Perhaps this one can be the lighter color. Let's do some rotating. What happens if we added another little ball in here, to maybe look a little bit like a character. But that's okay. It's looking pretty good. Let's maybe create one or two more. Let's move this around, make it a little bit bigger. Perhaps it can come off the side, scarf our Trim View. What happens if we have to add a whole bunch of these things? What happens if we have to do this? Let's add a couple of more on top of a spoon or something like that. Starts to become pretty interesting I think. Let's maybe make this a little bit smaller. You have your big ones at the bottom. How about that? Now it looks pretty interesting. I think we could have some fun with that in the future. But yeah, there's some really interesting posts here. This one down here is pretty cool. Maybe we can try these colors down here. Let's try it quickly, so and we go for our gun metal. These ones are going to be pink color. How about that blue color? Dark? I don't know. Let's work our background. How about that? Looks pretty interesting. Maybe if we add another one up here, I'm just giving you a bit of rotation. Maybe a little bit too random. How about that? Time's up here. That was pretty fun. We did quite a few posters, not quite sure if I got the movements and the focus quite right. But hey, there's a couple of posters that I'm happy with. Really like this one. I'm a big fan of this one over here. These ones I think I could work with a little bit more. But yeah, this sun one, I like it.
18. Doing It Together: Rectangle Rigidity: The rules for this exercise are, 1, use 12 rectangles and no ellipsis. Rule 2, the rectangles can be any color you like. This isn't really a constraint. It's more of a notice that something's changed. The third rule is that the rectangles cannot be rotated at all, and 4, there's no overlapping. This is probably a really good exercise to make use of snapping, guides, or a grid. Pause the video now and create your own really rigid piece of artwork. The first thing that I want to do is go to my view, scroll down, and I want to say snap to grid, and I also want to say snap to pixel, and then we can go again and say show grid. We could use keyboard shortcuts for this. You'll see that my grid is actually on top of all of my artwork, which is fantastic. If you want to do this, you go to Illustrator CC, preferences. You go to your guides and grid, and then you uncheck grids in back. If we had to check that, you will see that it's just behind all of our artwork, which is not very helpful when you have a big background rectangle as your first elements in your artboard. Let's go and change that again. Let's uncheck that. You see that I have a grid line every 300 pixels, and then I have 10 subdivisions, which means that I have grid lines every 30 pixels. The thing is I didn't really like designing with all these grid lines showing, so I turn them off, so hide grid, but I know that they're still here. Let's change the background color to this light pinky white color, and then we can start adding some rectangles, we need it at 12. But you'll see that when I add a rectangle, it snaps really nicely. It's really helpful to use a grid in situations like these. Let's see where this sits. Something like that, maybe a little bit wider. There we go. Let's add 12 of these. Perhaps I can start with just a couple of lines or something like that. I'm just going to duplicate these, got three of them. Let's just duplicate them again, got six of them. Then there we go. Got 12. This is looking pretty minimalistic and can work really nicely as a poster. But we do have a bunch of space at the bottom, but still I really like it. Let's play around with some of these, and let's go a little bit more over. There we go. I think it's snapping to the grid now. Yeah, it's going every 30 or so pixels. Fantastic, let's lock that, and then we can start changing a couple of colors. Let's go for some oranges, let's go for some yellows, and let's go for some dark greens, something like that. That looks really African in a way,. Very simple, very minimal, but African. I'm from South Africa. Let's duplicate that again. Let's move it across, and then let's see if we can change this up a little bit. What happens if we move it on its side? What happens if we made all of these, perhaps the darker one like that, then took a few of these and put them at the bottom over here, something like that. It's looking pretty interesting. Move these up a little bit. There we go. We make this one a bunch bigger. They look like a flag or something like that. What happens if we have to take these, move them down a little bit like so? I'm going to use my direct selection tool, and move these all down a little bit. Yeah, something like that. That looks pretty interesting. Let's duplicate this, and let's start playing with the colors. Let's change this to a white. Let's lock our background. Maybe we can change our background color to a darker one. Yeah. Then we change all of these to the slightly lighter one like that, and then we can start adding some more whites in here, some darker colors. What happens if we have to make this one white? Put a blue one in here. I don't think that looks so good. Let's put another one in here. No, I can't do that. What about a brown? No, that's not looking too good. Let's undo until we get back to white. Yeah, that's cool. Let's change this up a little bit. Let's go for white here. Let's go for some darker colors. Something like that. Change these to some dark colors too. Maybe that's too uniform, so let's change this one to white. What happens if we change this one to the dark one too? All ready. I don't really know if that's working. That looks so weird. This looks way more uniform. I really like that. Again, let's do something different now. Let's go back to this artboard over here. Let's move them down. Align to the grid. Perhaps we can change this color to the dark green, or maybe we can start with this blue. That looks really nice actually. It's like the background. Then let's start changing the size or the width and height of these guys. No, don't want to do any rotating. Let's zoom in a bit. Let's move these guys, and make it a bit longer. What's going on here? Well, perhaps things aren't really aligned to the grid properly, so let's go a bit down. I reckon it could be align now, 2100 pixels? Yeah. Let's lock the background again. When I resize this, it's going to stay the same height. Cool, fantastic. What happens if we move this one over here? Almost looks like a paragraph or some paragraph icon. If we move this a little bit in, a little bit to the right, and it stops looking so much like a paragraph. What happens if we start making things a little bit wider? Want to move things down a little bit, like so. Make this quite wide. I don't know. It depends which way you're looking at it. Something like that. Then let's create duplicates, put them over here, like so. All ready. That means we can delete one of these. Then we can rotate these. Something like that. Looks pretty weird I think. What happens if we make that a bit bigger? Perhaps we can group these and slick this guy, and make him the key object and then align him. Something like that. Maybe, maybe not. Let's do some duplicating again 1380, 1410, 1410, is that divide by 30? Not quite sure. Let's see what happens. I really liked what we had going on here with just the lines. Let's delete all of these. Then I can just duplicate these. Maybe make these a little bit higher. Just duplicate it again. Keep on making it a little bit wider. I've got four here. I've got my fifth one. I've got my sixth one, maybe a little bit wider. Then seven, perhaps we can make him a 30 pixels. Then we can duplicate him. All ready. We've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. I need three more. Let's duplicate these. That's looking pretty interesting. Let's perhaps align these all to this guy. How does that look? I'm not quite sure. What happens if we have to select all of these endpoints and align them, and then just bring them back? It's where we started really. Maybe let's align them to the top left and then take all of these endpoints put them over there. Something like that could be pretty cool. What happens if we took all these and stretch them? Well, let's create a new artboard to do that. Unlock the background layer, and let's stretch all of these guys just to see what it would look like. Yeah, not too bad. We've got a couple of pretty boring, pretty static things going on here. Probably not the best 10 minutes of exploration. Let's try one more. I really like this background color., so let's duplicate this, move it across. Let's lock the background color and perhaps let's create some squares or something like that. Couple of these squares. This is already really uniform I guess. Do this and then create some more rectangles. Then on squares, let's move it down a little bit. Just duplicating it. We've got eight here, we need another four. Let's try one over here. Make it a little bit longer. Something like that. Yeah, that looks pretty interesting. What happens if we put one over here? Something like that. Now I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Six plus 4, so you need two more. Maybe we can duplicate this one and move him across. Let's duplicate him again. All ready. Perhaps we can take this one, make him really small and put him somewhere up here. Let's delete this guy, and move another one down here. That looks interesting, thinking that. What happens if we start to change some of these colors? Make this one dark, and make this one yellow. We can do the same thing over here and over here, perhaps this one too. Yeah, and I think that looks pretty good. But now we're out of time, so let's stop it here. If you haven't done so already, get your explorative design on.
19. Doing It Together: The Cheater: We haven't allowed ourselves to do any overlaying or overlapping of shapes so far, this is going to change in this exercise. The point is going to be to combine rectangles and circles or rectangles and ellipses together, using a combination of positive and negative space to create different shapes and forms. The extra rules of this exercise are one, you can only use two colors, one for the background and negative space, and one for the positive space. The second rule, at least two shapes must overlap in the composition. So this is quite a blocker and I'm hoping that you'll encourage me to create some interesting workarounds and then I'll be able to use what I learned in this exercise in the future, without having to rely on the Pen tool. I believe we don't need to use complex tools and techniques to create some awesome stuff. If you don't know what to make, have a look around you, and see if you can make that. I can see a camera, a lamp, a desk, a plug, a mug, a pen, a mouse, a chair, and I know that if I get up and walk outside, I'll find cars and trees and boats and windmills and tall buildings and church steeples. So why don't you try the same and see what you can make from your surroundings. Pause the video and get exploring within the constraints, when you're ready. Let's get going here. So perhaps we can turn on our synaptic pixel. I need to choose a background color and a foreground color. I want you to go with something like this as my background color, and then my foreground color, what happens if I add and this one? This colors work pretty nicely together. Let's create, let's start creating. I have some ideas about what I would like to create. This one in the middle, then I'm going to create a new layer and put a rectangle over the top of it, like so, and make it this pink color. look at that. Then create a duplicate like so, and then make it the same color like this. I thought we have a rainbow. Let's create a duplicate gain, something like that. Then let's make this green that's pretty cool and let's do this one more. So something like that looks like a rainbow. You could unlock this layer and just move it down a little bit or perhaps increase the size a little bit, and I don't think it's ready all in the middle, so let's align it to the middle. That looks pretty cool, let's move it down a little bit more, quite like that. Perhaps you can do it even a little bit more and put a circle or an ellipse or something there we go, to line it, and then we can start overlapping some pieces. What happens if this is sliding off? Oh, that's nice. Let's try this. Let's align all background, that background's aligned, this is big square isn't. There we go. So let's create a duplicate of this. Let's lock the background and then let's roll this bowl off, to the side, something like that. I really like that and what happens if we have to do this over here, is to make some kind of a balance. Well, let's credit duplicate again, to the right-hand side, and then lets remove this one from over here. So starting to make you saw of positive and negative shapes. But if overlaying is helping quite a bit, what happens if we have to do even one more circular over here? Let's duplicate that parallel to the side. Something like that. Looks pretty interesting. What about something like chairs and things like that? So let's create a new art board or perhaps we just duplicate this art board, like so. Then let's change the background color to this color, and then we can remove all of these guys. Still quite like this as my foreground color. So let's go for a foreground color, let's make something like a camera. You can align him, in the middle and then make use of the ellipse for a circle, like this. This might look quite iconic to you. Moment this looks like a flag. That's really cool. We can align them in the middle too, and then duplicate him when small like so. That looks pretty cool, we can duplicate this, like so. Something like that as a really simple a camera and I guess if we just group all of these and then the line that's again in the middle. If you want it to be like that, or if you want the main shape to be in the middle, just undo. So quite, where we're going with these, ready like these colors. Let's just move on, let's create a duplicate of this for f to unlock our background. What about something like a chair? Let's go for this, and perhaps you can make an interesting chair. So somebody like that, with some big feet and then back maybe a little bit in some stylish chair, maybe these guys can align, like so. Select the background and then at the bottom here, we do some feet or chair feet like that. Then still align it. That looks pretty interesting. What happens if we duplicate this now and just work on this chair a little bit more? I find it quite a nice shape, quite a weird chair. Let's see if we can creates one of these and then rotate 45 degrees or perhaps something like that. Maybe we can make this a little bit longer. So that starts to become an interesting chair like that.. Then you can take this and then we just rotate it. Let's go for 30 degrees and then we can rotate this, 30 degrees as well and we can move them to the top. It looks pretty interesting, let's move it on. And again, if we add some embellishes here. So let's go for foreground color and background color. Let's duplicate this little bit. If we select these and group them in, duplicate them, distribute them across here. It looks like sachs, I like that. What happens if we take this? Perhaps let's create duplicates of this because it's looking pretty cool. Let's go into here, take this, and this, and let's group them. Let's rotate them from this points. That's a reclining chair, maybe, like that. What happens if we put a couple little stripes and jump? So let's create a duplicate here already. Let's create some stripe piece over here, and this is rotated at. I have no idea. Let's just rotate it a little bit. Perhaps this is going to look a little bit like a calf or something. What happens if we put that over there? If we have to sake this way, what happens then? I'm not so sure about that. Let's try, let's just make this a bunch center, like so. Perhaps we can make this bunch center too, something like that. It doesn't have to be perfect while we're exploring, that's pretty close. Something like that. What happens if we move it a little bit this way, increase the size a little bit, so it matches this part over here. So we have a couple of these chairs, now they're definitely looking like dinosaurs or dogs with sacks on. Problematic? Maybe. I don't know. But I think I quite like it really interesting chair would work really well as a post-doc. Perhaps we can make something pretty similar. Let's take this one over here, which changed the background color to pink and then we can remove these, we can actually remove everything. Then let's go for a darker color on top and let's put out some weird shaped legs, maybe this can be a table like that. Then what happens if we have to use something like this for a mug or a jur? Then again, what we have to just duplicate this, in a little bit and obviously looks like a stroke or something like that and then we bring out these ellipses. Don't want my brush tool. No, thanks. Then rotated from here, and then let's decrease the width too, let go for 80. Something like that. Let's duplicate that, let's rotate it. It looks like a pineapple here. Maybe we can just adjust some of these. Like that. I think we could explore more of that, that's been really fun. Screwed these just put them in the middle and let's put this guy in the middle too, already what happens if we just set to reduce the size of this a little bit. I like that a lot. That's cool. So then a fair amount of exploring share, just with a couple of shapes is a quite geometric, got a camera, pretty boring I think, but hey, could make a good poster, and then this chair that takes on a life of a Dinosol with socks or something. Then this one that we ended with, I think has a lot of potential for a really nice poster, sits at a desk with something on it. Perhaps we could create some more with more objects on it. But we're out of time for now. How was that for you? Did you enjoy it? Didn't feel quite rewarding and freeing, being able to overlap shapes and make objects, yet not with a pencil. If you're upward, post your work in the project gallery.
20. Doing It Together: The Piano: There once was a piano with 14 white keys and 10 black keys and then something happened. For this exercise, I want you to arrange and manipulate the keys of the piano to tell a story of what happened. You can download the styling file in the project resources. The rules are, there must be 14 white keys and 10 black keys. Two, you can't change the ratio of the keys, so that means you can make them smaller or bigger, but ratio must stay the same, so pause the video and give the exercise a go. Have fun exploring. What I've got here as my piano start Illustrator file, you can download it in the resource section of the class. I'm going to go in New from Template, let's go to my Downloads folder and open up my basic shapes again, then I'm going to just copy and paste all of these shapes into here, onto my foreground, that way I can make use of the background colors that I've already got in my template. Thanks very much, piano start, I'm going to close you now. Then I can rearrange and play with these guys quite easily. I'm going to keep this as my starting place and create a duplicate. Let's just Snap to Pixel and zoom in here, we can start to change a few things. What can I do? Well, perhaps I can start with a background color that sets the tone for what's happened. Maybe based on some family feedback, we can go for some power or some happiness or emotion share. Let's lock this and what's happened? Has it maybe be in a massive explosion? Well, let's try that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select all these colors and maybe I can just change my foreground color so that I can see what's going on, medium blue, there we go. Then we can go to Object and transform each and then horizontal scale. I'm not sure if I want to do the scale, but let's give it a go 200 percent. Let's move it quite a bit, let me just go 200 and 200, and let's go for 359 and let's turn on Random. That looks pretty good, I think. Well, let's do that, and then I can start rearranging these guys. Let's turn on our Trim View. That looks pretty good. This already, the colors are really cool, black and white with a big strong black round, this is fantastic. This is looking pretty chaotic, no real focus at the moment, perhaps in another version of this poster, we can't actually do some rhythm or movement, quite like this, this is great, just moving that, just did something. I didn't quite enjoy that. That looks pretty cool, I like that a lot. Let's create a duplicate of this one, and I want to try something here and just bring all of these shapes in, so it's really small. Something like that. As a poster, I think that looks really cool. Let's duplicate this again, I want to change that background color. Let's change the background color to something like this. That changes a lot, it looks a lot coma, boring. It's amazing what the difference in color does. Let's change this to green, and then let's do one more color change. Let's change it to purple, blue, blue looks pretty good or a yellow. I think yellow works really nicely as well, and a dark one, can't really see the black ones there, so let's go with that. Right now it looks quite nasty when you bring it all in, compared to the one on the left, it feels a lot more structured, it feels like an artwork, not like a really cropped inversion of this art work. Now let's start with this one up here again, and then what we can do here is, get some movement going. How the heck are we actually going to do this? Let's lock the background and let's rotate these, and then maybe we can rotate them all the way like this and treats it like a zipper or somebody like that. These guys are all moving outwards, and then these guys are moving outwards too. Maybe some magical being or wizard or enchantress just came along and it started to make these keys do her will. Actually, it looks a bit like a computer game. Then what we can do here is we can just select them all and change the rotation a little bit, so we Transform and Transform Each. Let's go 100 percent, 100 percent. Let's change this to zero and zero, and let's change this to something like 10 or above 30, that looks pretty good. I just changed it a little bit. What happens if we add one of these up here? Let's bring this in here. Doesn't really have much movement, perhaps we can make these a little bit bigger, feels like they're flying closer to our face. Maybe make these a little bit smaller. Now I don't want to rotate it, I want to make it smaller. I guess if we use our Scale tool, it would be a little bit easier, but that also skews it. Now I just want to scale it, thanks very much, so making a few of them a little bit smaller is helping quite a bits, starting from the bottom here, working our way to the top, maybe let's make these a little bit bigger. Let's bring this one down, make it smaller too and then this one over here we can make it a little bit bigger. This one a little bit bigger too. If we go for our Trim View, see what that looks like, it looks like it starts over here, branches outwards. There is movements, where they're going they're flying upwards. How about we do some heavy rotation here? Kind of like stands out saying like, 'Hey, I'm the odd one out here'. I think that looks really cool, like there was a big explosion or something just happened there and they're all just bursting outwards, that's really cool. Let's have some more fun with the background color here. Let's duplicate this guy, and let me go down. Let's change the background color, purple is not too bad. What happens if we change it to the orange or burnt orange again? Pretty cool. Then let's try this, just making everything smaller again. Let's do this. Let's put it like so. I think that's really cool, for some reason that makes a lot more sense, I think it's because there's a lot more space around the artwork. Let's bring it up into the middle, something like that. I'm going to group it and just center it, I like that. Let's duplicate this and let's press tab and make sure our background comes worth, Ready, there we go. Then let's change this to the gunmetal. Let's go for this again, perhaps you can change this to this color. What about this color? That doesn't look too bad. It looks kind of expressionist, looks really minimal, which is really cool, like it. We don't have much time here for another one, so let's do some rigid stuff, maybe these guys are rounding these white ones up, so let's lock the background layer and then position these here and there, much like they're taking control, something like that. Let's put it in the middle, so resize it down a little bit, since everything else worked really well like that. Then let's change the background color, that works really well. What I'm going to do here, is I'm going to lock this and then I'm going to select all these colors, so maybe let's group these, let's go into here, say Select, Same Fill Color. Let's group these, I'm going to create a duplicate and then I'm going to align it in the middle and in the middle, and then I'm going to cut that and paste it out here, change the color to something like this, move it to the back and then I'm going to align these up. Almost, there we go. Then when I cut this and then remove this and paste this again. The white guys are in the middle and then you have these black guys who are not quite in the middle. Now look better when I was overlapping, I really like that. This is looking really nice, this one looks really nice. With a different colors, kind of conveys different emotions. What I learnt a lot is that we need a bunch of space around our artworks to create some interest. Well, it looks better on a poster I think. Perhaps if this had some information like a gig poster, that could work really well, but just by itself, these ones work really nicely if I'm going to be hanging them up in my studio or my home. If you haven't done so already, it's your turn to tell the piano a story, or a piano story or multiple piano stories. Give it a go.
21. Doing It Together: An Abstract Movie Poster: The last exercise's goal is to design movie poster, and yes, primarily using our two favorite tools, the Rectangle and the Ellipse tool. There are no further constraints besides the goal for this exercise. If films aren't your thing, you can also design a book cover. Now, instead of just jumping in, spend at least two minutes thinking of what movie you're going to design a poster for and how it's going to look. Think minimally, think simply, think cleverly. I want to make a poster for either Wreck-It Ralph, The Lord of The Rings or Inception. Perhaps I'll have time to do more than one. Pause the video and start with some planning before jumping into exploration mode. I'm going to do Lord of The Rings first and see how much time we have and see if I can get some other posters done too. Lord of The Rings, Fellowship of The Ring maybe. Let's go for a circle because that's a ring. I can just remove the stroke on this guy and gold I think would be a really good color, and let's create a ring. Perhaps that's a little bit too big, something like that. Let's create a duplicate and put it in the middle, something like that. Looks pretty good. I guess we could just go with that. Well, maybe, let's not be so lazy. Although, you don't really have to be lazy. Let's put all Pixel, grid on or Snap to Pixel on. There we go. I don't think it's lazy, I just think sometimes we think we have to do a lot more than we actually need to. But perhaps here we can start adding some characters, nine characters. So let's create a rectangle, not R for rotate but M. Well, let's put one over here, let's make it this color already or we could just paste it in the middle and move it up and paste it in the middle and move it down. Now we've got two of these, so let's make one of these the main one and let's group these. Then there's going to be nine. I think 360 divided by nine is 40. Yeah, let's duplicate this and then we're going to rotate it by and let's go for 40 degrees like so and then we create a duplicate and then let's rotate by 40 degrees. Let's create the duplicate and rotate by 40, let's rotate 40. Let's rotate by 40, then again. Now you have to do one more. So now what we can do is we can select all of these except for our background and ungroup them. Then we can just remove these guys. Now it looks like a Sun. Kind of weird. What happens if we select all of these except for this middle one? Make it the same color. Definitely looks like a son. But let's try some things and let's create a duplicate. Oh, yeah, like Sun, and then perhaps what we can do is let's lock this up. Let's select all of these, now press A and put the corner size like maximum maybe, 55 so they'd turn into circles. That looks a little less like a sun. Yeah, that looks like a sun too. Let's create a duplicate of this, and maybe what we need to do is we need to not make this so yellow, so let's creates something like that or maybe we need to change it up a bit, something like that. So this guy can be the Wizard, maybe he can be a little bit bigger. We have four Hubert's, which are a little bit smaller so I'm going to use the Scale Tool. Let's go for something like 80 percent. Cool, same thing here. Okay, 80 percent. Maybe they can be brown as well because they're living in holes, something like that. Maybe this needs to be a light kind of a color. Maybe these guys, or maybe the Wizard, he can be purple guy and the two men, they can be yellow. No, they can be green. Then we've got an auth, what color can the auth be? Maybe something like that. Yeah, and then the dwarf like that. But I think he's going to be a little bit bigger too. Fellowship of the Ring. I'm not quite sure how that looks. [inaudible] , it's too colorful. So let's go back here. I do like the background color though. So let's change that. Let's change all of these guys to something like that. Yeah, perhaps that looks pretty cool, a ring like that. Not quite sure. So that is the Fellowship of the Ring. Not quite sure if I like that too much. Let's maybe have one more go, this super simple one, and that maybe looks pretty cool. Let's make it a bit darker. If we wanted to add text in here, you can, but I'm not going to, because this is more of an abstract kind of poster. I don't want to give it away by saying, The Fellowship of the Ring, it's Lord of the Rings so whatever. Let's move on to the two towers. Let's duplicate this. Maybe let's go down below, and two towers, let's make it dark. Here we can start with two towers, I guess. Looks a little bit like a pause sign, something like that. Maybe make this one a little bit lower. Let's group that and put it in the middle and let's make that color. Now let's make them a little bit smaller. Something like that. If we go ahead and really close here, perhaps we can start adding some negative shapes, like so. Let's maybe cut that and put onto a new layer. Color the background layer again. So maybe let's undo that. Let's create a duplicate of this, group this and let's align it to these guys. Well, let's aligned to this guy. That looks pretty interesting, let's duplicate this. That's looks great. I'm going to take this guy, maybe make him a little bit smaller and he can be like so. Let's get duplicate of him. Let's group them and then let's align it to this tower. Salt and pepper shaker maybe? Yeah, maybe. Let's duplicate this, put it up here, and then perhaps we can create another rectangle, like so. Maybe this guy can be the eye. If you are not the Lord of the Rings fan, I'm sorry but I am. Now quite like that, that's looking good. Perhaps we can use one more negative shape over here, something like that, and then maybe another one over here. Very good. Let's align him. That's looking pretty interesting. What happens if we had to and duplicate this? Keep the background color. Yeah, and then let's take these guys down here. Now the circle as well, like so, and then do something like that. Yeah, I think that looks really cool. Have two movie posters, probably not the best. But it's a really cool way to explore shape and actually create something with meaning. A really good exercise that you can do now would be to show people your poster and say, what movie or what book do you think this represents? If they guess it, then good job. It means you don't actually have to put a lot of effort and a lot of complexity into your designs, into your posters. What I've liked about this process is that I've begun to realize that you can convey a lot with size, shape and color alone. How did your posters turn out? Did you have fun? Why not upload them to your project gallery or share them with me? If you haven't created anything yet, go for it now.
22. When Am I Done?: That's the ten exercises. It's not a turn of exploring, but you can see that I've progressed really rapidly. I think my pieces are looking good or they're hanging on the wall already? I think some of them are. What's great about working in vector is that we can make them super big if we want to. But this is only the beginning of this styles exploration. It's always day one when it comes to exploration. This could go on for days and weeks and hey, maybe even months. I'm I just found my thing. I'll probably integrate some more characters and hands-on stuff into the mix, stuff that I really like and enjoy. But that's exactly what exports of designing enables us to do. How do you know when you're done? It's a good question. The truth is, no design is ever done and neither is any style. You're just done exploring and working on it. The designers simply leftward is like a street you haven't walked up yet. You get to decide when you want to stop exploring and if, and when you want to come back. That being said, there are a few good indicators of when to stop. The first indicator is a matter of mastery. Can you get back here again? Have you explored well enough and long enough that you could find your way again? Can you guide somebody else there? Can you teach what you know? The second indicator is that you really happy with what you've explored, simply created and exploring more doesn't add much more to that happy feeling. If you've ever heard of the law of diminishing returns, you'll know what I mean. The amount of effort being put in isn't yielding that much anymore. But remember our quotes on magic. The next indicator is whether you've learned something while you've been exploratively creating, you don't need to. But part of exploring is learning and seeing and understanding. It's making sense of the design world and intuitive way. If you're no longer learning or taking anything in, its a good sign to take a break and reconsider what you're doing The next is related to the last. If you explore for too long or too intensively, you may get tired and starts forget some of the things you learned. It's probably time to stop when this starts to happen. The next indicator is that you're getting bored. Who likes walking around the museum you have no interest in? No one. Don't feel bad about stopping when you get bored. Explore things that interest you. Remember, when something is fun, we do more of it. A great thing to do every so often is to take a break from exploring, reconsider where you're going, why you're going. Readjust some goals, readjust your constraints. Rest, get some perspective and then come back or change tack. Now let's talk about when you're working on a specific piece. Sometimes when you're working on your design, it feels like you are amazed. You feel like you don't actually know if you're any closer to where you want to be and you don't know what to do to get there. How do you know how your design is doing? There are two things that are going to help you. Fresh eyes and asking the right questions. When it comes to fresh eyes, you can either borrow somebody else's or try give your eyes a break from your design. Sometimes taking a break and then coming back to it is the best thing that you can do. Break can range from ten minutes to a few days even. I've often come back to design after break and instantly being able to identify while was off about it. Other times, you don't have their luxury. You have like a client deadline right now. What you can do is ask a friend or a family member for their opinion. They don't have to be a designer to give their opinion and you don't have to listen to what they say. Sometimes just talking to somebody else about your design helps. When it comes to getting feedback either from yourself or from somebody else. You want to make sure you ask the right questions. Otherwise, feedback can become a yes, no. I like it. I don't like it thing. That's not very helpful. Here are some probing questions to ask yourself and anybody you kindly asked to help you out. What are your intentions or what do you want to achieve with this design? If anything, this one you should only ask yourself. Other ones you ask yourself is, what if i? You fill in the blank? What if I added? What if I removed or changed? What if I rotated, duplicated, scaled? What if I introduced? Formal blanks with words or sentences and then try a few of these options and a given time frame and have another look at them in comparison to your previous versions. Question three is one you can ask yourself and others, how do you feel when you look at this design and why do you think it makes you feel this way? Another the question is, where does your focus start and where does it go to? Why do you think that happens? What stands out and why do you think it stands out? What do you like an why do you like it? Notice I didn't ask for what they didn't like. When you start getting feedback compared to the intentions of the design, if you have any, and then creates a new versions based on what was said and compare them to the original versions. You can also discuss the design with the person you're speaking to. Try not to get defensive about your design. Feedback is important because it's revealing and helpful for producing better designs. Take all the comments in the still then. Once you start getting the responses you want and comparisons to your goals in may be time to stop. But remember that the design is never done. It's only you who's done exploring.
23. Do It Yourself: I could go on making up exercises for days, but that's not actually the point of this class. Exercises are a combination of constraints and exploration, and they form part of an action plan. For any plan of action, you've got to know what you want to learn or what you want to achieve. How do you make a plan to learn or grow, or get better at something, unless you know where you want to end up. Once you know where you wanna go, you can distill it into manageable chunks or steps, and then you can approach it step by step, focusing on one thing at a time. What's great about these kinds of exercises is that you can make up your own rules, determine your own adventures and learn and experiment however you want. Why not try create your own exercise or set of exercises? You can use the exercises in this class as a reference, but here are a few things to consider; what do you want the focus or the outcome of the exercise to be? This could be the use of a tool, a creative way around something, or to try achieve a certain style or approach. What are your enabling constraints going to be? What tools and techniques are you going to remove the choice from and make mandatory? What are you blocking constraints going to be? What tools and techniques are you going to prohibit? What is a time constraint? The shorter it is, the less pressure we put on ourselves to make it perfect. How these exercises going to build on each other? Keep it fun, keep it challenging. If you're up for it, share an exercise you made up in the comment section of the class. If you're up for it, send me a message and tell me of an exercise you made up.
24. Conclusion: I hope you've learned a lot about constraints and exploration during this class, as well as a little bit about Illustrator and designing with simple shapes. The thing I hope you leave this class with is the ability to add constraints and explore in numerous different contexts and not just in this simple design style. I hope you'll start to build pillars, have fun exploring your design styles, or whatever your practices, and rapidly get better at what you do. What's next? Well, for me, I'm excited to see how you respond to this class. I love to see your explorative pieces, so please upload. From my side, it's been an explorative and experimental way of class making. Please let me know what you thought. Let me know how you found the process, and leave a review so that other students will know if it's the right class for them. If you like the way I teach, you can follow me here on Skillshare. I've made a bunch of different classes and have plenty more on the way. You can also join my fan club on taptapkaboom.com and follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Ello. Guys, that's it for this class. Have fun exploring. Keep on making amazing things and keep in touch. Bye for now.
Rich From TapTapKaboom, Multi-hyphenate Artist
