Lessons

Lesson Info

Sketching Your Ideas

then it's time to go through and developed what I call a thumbnail board. I'm gonna show you an example of this then I created and this is what it looks like. So I have these thumbnail sketches are the thumbnail sketch templates that I have. I have them stacked up in my office because I just I take one off the top and I use it. And I've kind of stylized this one a little bit so that it actually tells you what it is. But in real life, I just have pieces of paper with little squares on them. And what I do basically is I go through and I do an idea dump. It's just a complete, complete emptying of my brain. So I take everything that I found in the creative brief, and I might make some notes along the way while I'm reading the creative brief to kind of get my my brain moving. And then once I have those ideas flowing in my head, I just literally sit down and I empty those into a thumbnail template. Now here I limited the amount of thumbnails I did to just nine, but I would go through probabl...

y 2 to 3 pages of sketches. If I were doing this in an actual client facing project, because I'm going to need a lot of time to get everything out of my head, I'm also going to need to present them with my three very, very, very best ideas. And so, in order to do that, sometimes I need to do the initial emptying of my brain and then I might step away, go have a cup coffee, think about a little bit more, come back, do it again and do the same thing. I generally do that between 2 to 3 times just so I can get everything out of my head to figure out exactly what direction I think this should go. Then I'm going to go back in and I'm going to review all of those sketches that I did. So if we're looking at this, for instance, let's just let's zoom in on some of these and let's take a look. This is exactly what I would do if I were doing this it for real. So as I'm sketching out, I make all of these sketches as fast as I can. Their low Fidelity, obviously. And then I make notes along the way to tell me what I was thinking. Because sometimes these sketches don't make any sense until I get back and look at him and then read the notes. So, for instance, here a the top I have be I wanted to do this as film, essentially so it's like strips of film that were put together to form the logo form and then at the bottom. I just put the name. I don't ever try to draw out typography in these sketches. There's just not enough room and I'll have enough time. So I generally write notes to myself like use a san serif typeface or use serif typefaces. I can work out the typefaces later, but for the most part I just want a little note on what I was thinking at the time, because by the time I've sketched this out, I'm already moving over to the next one, and I've probably for gotten everything that I included in the 1st 1 So that's why I make these little notes so that when I come back to it, I can go and say OK, that was film and Ah, when you use a serif typeface there, so probably something like times or trash on. I worked that out in my head when I come back. So the 2nd 1 here, you can see this is a little bit crazy, a lot of stuff going on in here. But basically what I wanted to do was create almost like a ghosted camera over here on the left and have the I f. B productions leading into that so that everything just kind of flows together in one like a linear fashion, and then underneath that may be a slogan. So I added just a little scribble because they didn't give me a slogan. I don't I don't have one. So that way I know where that might go. And if I think that this is a viable option, I might ask them, Hey, guys, what? What might be a good you know, tagline to put underneath your logo here because it's obviously going to leave a lot of white space. If I don't have something like that, maybe it could be a simple is a website address. Who knows? Over here, I was thinking, in terms of the youthful and playful kind of scenario kind of got away from the professional side a little bit with this one because I went with, like, a little TV screen that, you know, you could watch movies on the TV. Obviously, these guys were young, and this is a fun, playful company so that aliens are fun. So I just drew a little alien guy and then, you know, work out the text later. But I was thinking maybe some like bubble text or maybe at least like a rounded sans serif typeface. And that's that's kind of what I went for there. Next down here, I thought about like, a ticket or a piece of film, And that's why I didn't write film here because I thought, well, ticket or felt like something could work. And then I f B is the main focal point of that in some sort of Sarah font. And then in the middle of it, maybe right towards the middle here would be like I have, like, productions would go across the middle and, like, kind of break the plane. I don't know. It was it was one of those ideas that I just kind of I didn't flush out a whole lot. I just kind of gave the basic exo skeleton of what I was thinking about time. Um, I thought this one was kind of cool because, you know, they're passionate about what they do. So they loved the business. They love what they're doing. And so I thought, OK, so we'll do, like, two rials, like on the top of a camera or something. And then we'll do two strips of film coming down and together they'll make out like a heart. So, you know, they really like what they do. They're passionate about it. Um, wouldn't ultimately go with this, probably because I think heart is it It kind of represents Ah, you know, Valentine's Day and a lot of other. So not necessarily, uh, well known as, ah, film icon of any sort. And so then we move over here to the right, or to the left. And another camera was really big on cameras this day. I'm not sure what, and that's something you get hung up on sometimes is a designer. You get something in your head and you can't let it go. As you can see, I worked in films. Almost every single thing that I did here. And that's why we do this, this ideation phase. It's to get all of that out of your head to break away because you're going to get all these ideas out with this same motif. And then eventually there's gonna be one that cracks through that you're like, Ah, that that's That's the That's the ticket right there because it's hard to get over your preconceived notions of what things were supposed to look like. So initially, I I thought film and cameras the whole way. I mean, look at these. I have it literally everywhere and so that that could be problematic in the long run down towards the bottom. Here I thought, You know what? In today's day and age, most of the things that we do now it's for in terms of media consumption is all digital. And so one of the big things you see all the time on video players is a play button. So what if we did just some sort of stylized play button and then the words I have be productions underneath it, and so that's kind of what I was going for here, And I took that a little further over here and incorporated the play button and the film. And so the film is just one strip here indicate, you know, Hey, we make movies, and then the rest of this is just another piece of the play button with I have be kind of following the contour of it in some way. And so again, just an idea. And then this last one here was, quite frankly, one of my favorites. When I was first drew it out. After I looked at it, I wasn't quite sure. But basically, you know, I've seen a lot of people when they're talking about filming, you know, they do like this or this kind of frame things up. And so I thought, you know, that might be something kind of cool, maybe to ah, like stylized hands or something put together and then in the middle, like some sort of lens or an eye or some sort of symbol that indicates what it is. Or maybe just the letters I have be in the middle, I don't know. So that was just another idea that I that I came up with their And so once you do that, what you can do then is you take these ideas and you convert your favorite ones. I usually pick between three or four, and I convert them into a rudimentary digital format. Now go through how I do this in Illustrator a little bit later on. But just basically, I take the three or four that I like the best and I transfer those into a digital form in Illustrator. And then I go in and I pitched those ideas to the client. And so the initial presentation that I sent to, uh, Jake in the guys looked something. And here's my sketches again, by the way, look, something like this. So I took several of the ideas that I liked. I refined him a little bit, and I came up with some type choices and came up with some icon choices. And this is what I did. So the initial presentation there's the hands again that this is not meant to look realistic. These air just like basically digital sketches. That's why the hands kind of look like, you know, Mittens, Uh and then over here, to the right there is my camera the two things a film I thought that was one of the things that film in it that I thought might be worth including. And then here's the stylized play button. This is actually one of my favorites from this. So the style of play button looks really cool, especially with the film. I probably refined that film look a little bit to look a little bit more realistic. And then, of course, your five be down there at the bottom. And then if we wanted to go in a more playful direction, I did create the alien just because that was one of my favorite things that I drew in the initial sketches, and I thought that that looked kind of neat in a digital form. And so once you do that, once you have your ideas fleshed out 3 to 4 ideas that you think are going to be really good it doesn't matter if the client, like Summer, hates him. These air these of what came out of your head. This will and at least give the client an idea of where you're headed, and it will also allow them to sort of riff off of you so they might say, Well, I like the type on the 1st 1 but I like the icon on the 2nd 1 and let's say you did these in color, they might say. And I like the color on the 3rd 1 Well, you can take all of those elements and mix them together, and you can come up with another revision that maybe suits their needs a little better. So when I submitted these initially, here's some of the feedback that I got and some of the things that I'm gonna take going forward as we actually start to create this in Illustrator a little bit later on. So the thoughts here this came from Chris. Chris is the upper left. Um, he likes the playful amateur feel, but the hand framing is passe. Yeah, upper right looks dated. He's not a fan of the film aspects. Totally fine. Understood. Bottom left. He doesn't like the fought shading, but the logo is cool, but it's too professional and sharp. So what I might do there is change the typeface choice underneath there, which is fine. And then I might maybe sort of soften up that play, but make it a little bit more. Ah, a little bit more playful, you know, just kind of round off the corners a little bit. And the bottom right. He likes the logo, but the font reminds him of untold logo that he's seen. So what I might do there is keep that icon for a second pass and then use a different typeface for them. Ah, he also gives a little comment here that says it might be cool to have some sort of audio aspect incorporated into it. Since I F. B is an audio thing, that's very good feedback right there. So what I'm thinking initially right here. Is that right here on this guy? What if we ditch the antennas and we gave my man some headphones? That might be something to think about. We gave him some headphones and then we change the typeface. I think we might be onto something there. And so that's little notes that I would make to myself as we go. So Jake, he's an agreement with Chris. He thinks the bottom right is the closest, and he think it would be great to incorporate something with audio. Given the history of the company name. And he said, Maybe throwing over the ear headphones on the little eyeball, dude, Exactly. That's kind of what I was thinking initially when I read the comments from Chris. So, um yeah, and that's That's pretty much the main feedback that we got from that, and that's actually super helpful. So the two ideas that I'm keeping out of this or the bottom two, I think I have a little bit more work to do on the play button version than I do on the alien version. But both of these are gonna be pretty cool, I think. And so when we get into Illustrator, I'm gonna go in and I'm going to do another pass at this and then we'll get Jake out here and we'll see what he thinks and then we'll finish it off.