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Concept Development

Lesson 6 from: Adobe Illustrator: From Shapes to Complex & Beautiful Illustrations

Junichi Tsuneoka

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Lesson Info

6. Concept Development

Lessons

Class Trailer

Course Introduction

1

Introduction

01:44
2

Basic Concept of the Course

00:58
3

Examples and Applications

00:39
4

Process Overview

01:44
5

Quiz - Introduction

Getting Started

6

Concept Development

09:12
7

Tips for Pencil Sketch

18:12
8

Shape Tool Basics

06:58
9

Shape Tool Advance

08:36
10

How to Control Shapes by Different Movements

04:49
11

How to Control Shapes By Reflect Skew and Rotate Tools to Create Complex Shapes

05:45
12

Combine Multiple Shapes with Pathfinder Tool

04:19
13

Create Complex Shapes with Pathfinder Tool

06:51
14

Quiz - Getting Started

Case Study 1: Stand Alone Graphic

15

Case Study 1 Overview (Stand Alone Design)

02:04
16

Creating an Environment for Converting the Pencil Sketch into Editable Vector Graphic

03:29
17

Create a Group of Shapes to be Used as a Base of the Illustration

13:03
18

How to Introduce Large Medium and Small Design Elements to the Overall Design to Achieve Depth and More Detailed Result

05:43
19

Adding Colors

11:12
20

How to Fine Tune the Design and Finalize It

03:27
21

Exercise

00:51
22

Quiz - Case Study 1: Stand Alone Graphic

Case Study 2: Illustrative Pattern

23

Case Study 2 Overview (Illustrative Pattern)

01:41
24

Creating an Environment for Converting the Pencil Sketch into Editable Vector Graphic

01:37
25

Create a Small Unit of Complex Shapes to Use as a Base of the Whole Illustration

14:01
26

How to Introduce Large Medium and Small Design Elements to the Overall Design to Achieve Depth and More Detailed Result

01:48
27

How to Introduce Foreground Middle and Background Elements to the Overall Design to Achieve More Depth

09:56
28

Adding Colors

07:27
29

How to Fine Tune the Design and Finalize It

06:38
30

Quiz - Case Study 2: Illustrative Pattern

Conclusion

31

Conclusion

00:59

Final Quiz

32

Final Quiz

Lesson Info

Concept Development

let's look at how concept development works and understand how to sketch for this part of the process. You should have a subject for the project. If this is work for a client, it may be a logo that you're designing for them. Or maybe this is a self initiated project, but you have to have one solid subject to start with. If you're not familiar with the subject, the first necessary step is to research the subject. This research includes asking questions to your client. What is the direction from the client? Do they want you to design something complex or simple and strong or what is your client trying to achieve? Maybe they want to educate teens how tobacco is bad for them? Who is the target audience? What type of atmosphere do you want to create? Is it serious or humorous? Where does this project apply to meaning that this might be a logo design that is visible everywhere or it is a poster so that you want to think about good readability in the design. How do you want to do this project...

? This could be understanding the requirements of the project. Do you date? How many revisions are required and so on? What, when, which who and how a good place to start. Also, there are some facts that you need to be familiar with depending on the subject. If your client wants you to create a poster about educating a younger audience, how harmful tobacco is. Then you need to know the facts about all the side effects of tobacco. The more information you have, the better. Once you have a good understanding about the subject, it is helpful to come up with a series of key words to describe the subject. Keep it nice and simple, but try to have good variety of keywords. Let's think about anti tobacco campaign poster as your project based on your research. Start writing down what you know about the project. The obvious keyword here would be tobacco. So you write it down and you want to come up with the words that associated with the world, tobacco could be a cancer. And this would again leads to another keyword. It could be lung, it's a habit and also it's it's an addiction anything to associate with any of the world that could become your keyword. So there are side effects and you also want to think about what, where, which who and how if you uh stuck with the world that you can't come up with any more. Then here I don't have any who as a keyword. So I will think about who is this project targeted towards two which is younger audience teens. So I add that to the mix and so on and so forth. And you can also arrange and organize these keywords for example. Um, yeah, maybe it's not just cancer but it's more of the lung cancer and it's the side effects of tobacco. And I put addiction habit somewhat closer because these are very connected to each other or sometimes one particular keyword doesn't make any sense or you come up with better keyword then you can switch to the new keyword. This way you can mix and match, arrange, organize the keyword, you can come up with a good set of keywords, a good set of keywords eventually leads to come up with something image for your next step. There is no wrong answer to this, It is just a serious words. In other words it's a water list that can inspire you to come up with an image once you have enough keywords some of the combination of the words, some of the group of the world's might give you an idea of an image. Then you want to start sketch. A few things are important here. First you don't want to take too much time sketching one image. It should be rough and done rather quickly. We will use victor shapes to make your idea clean and crisp eventually so don't worry about the quality but let's walk on quantity and variety. It is a good idea to invest your time here to have lots of ideas. The more ideas you have here is better and second the size of each sketch should be rather small. It is sometimes called thumbnail. Another example here, I designed a concert poster for the band wrapped er here's the subject chapter concert poster and these are the keywords that I came up with based on this subject and let's take these two for example the key word dinosaur and also cartoon character. I got this keyword because the name wrapped er the band name was named after a dinosaur cartoon character. So maybe for one direction of my design decision I can come up with new dinosaur character design for this poster. So based on this keyword, I will translate this into an image and this doesn't have to be clean or anything beautiful, You just have to visualize okay your idea in your head and then you keep looking at this keywords and now I'm looking at these two keywords then what gives me is a new character design idea which is more of a robot type of character. That was I was inspired by these two key words. Okay again here I'm not worried too much about the quality of my drawing. What's important is I need to come up with variety. I need to visualize what I am thinking. I need to visualize what my inspirations are. Mhm. So if you keep doing this different keywords will give you different inspiration. So you can come up with different image. So this particular keyword may become this image and this particular one keyword can give me another image which is something like this. Maybe for this one, I was inspired to do more of a typographic approach or I can focus on some of the aspect of the keyword which could be the sound, then this could be the translation for that. Okay, so you look at the keywords or it could be a pair of keywords or it could be a group of keyword that will give you inspiration to come up with an image and we will repeat this process and then you want to come up with a variety of image and once you have a variety of ideas we can select a few and go into the next step. I usually use three x three sides sticky notes. So I would suggest you would do this stumbling around that size this way you don't have to pay too much attention to detail and it will speed up the process. The size of your sketch also helps the quantity and variety. We will then select a few ideas from the bunch and this will go to the next step.

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