- [Instructor] As you proceed
throughout the creative process,
you always want to be aware of any improvements
you can make on your designs.
Don't fall in love with them so much
you can't be critical about the art.
In this movie, I want to show you
how I recognized an issue and fixed it,
and it improved the whole design
along with other areas in the motif as well.
So let me show you what I mean.
On this specific design direction
I created for elevated culture.
This was my thumbnail sketch
that captured that essence of an idea.
I then proceeded to rough it out using a pen
to create the actual panther motif in his pose
as you see here
and then refine that in a more finished way
that I could use in illustrator to build from.
And that's what you can see here.
And it's a proud panther boldly moving forward
and the wings imply the whole elevated aspect
of the concept as a whole.
Now we're going to select this
and I'm going to go to transparency
and we'll go ahead and set the opacity locked the layer,
and as I've shown you in previous movies,
these were all the base vector artwork
that I created to formulate the design of this panther.
Now I had moved it from this stage,
created the final black and white artwork.
I think this looks really good.
But then as I started moving forward
in figuring out the type I was going to use,
I came back to this
and something was bugging me about it
and I couldn't put my finger on it.
And then after looking at it for a while, it dawned on me.
I took tracing paper,
put it over a black and white printout
and I started repositioning the back leg
and I got you know what?
This is actually how a panther walks.
And if I look back at the reference
that I use to look at panthers and the pose and their shapes
and what makes a panther a panther,
I realized that I had drawn the back leg,
the leg furthest away from the viewer,
kind of in the wrong position.
It's almost as if he was standing still
and he just started to move is kind of the way I drew it
but naturality, I want him to be in motion.
And so I had to redraw this leg.
This was the rough sketch,
and then I polished it in a more finalized way
and I'm going to use this now to build the final art.
Now, one thing I'll point out is the final art
look like this.
But there's a few things I want to point out.
So I'm going to zoom in so you can see this even, even more.
This was the final way,
but let's look at the original black and white artwork
and compare.
New,
old.
New,
old.
Not only did I change the leg,
I realized other details could be improved on.
Look at the gaps in between the body and the back leg
and the front leg and these gaps
and cut-ins on the shape of the body itself.
I'd beef those up,
so they had work better at a smaller size.
So if you would look at those,
you can see how those progressively get a little thicker.
I adjusted his back leg,
the new leg we put in
but I also adjusted his other back legs.
So pay attention now,
that shape improves and look at his hindquarters
as it goes down his back into his tail,
this is how it was
and I improved that curve as well to make it more elegant.
One other design I'll point out.
This top little free-floating shape on his wing originally,
I decided it wasn't needed,
so I removed it to simplify the overall motif.
Not only that, the cut in I had on his wing
kind of abruptly comes to a flat.
I didn't like that.
So I adjusted that as well
and improve that so it tapers.
And I think all of these changes
along with the rounding I added,
if you notice that the tip of his wings is round,
all of these details change now.
And so I think the new mark definitely is a lot stronger
and it's going to communicate better.
And in the final design,
I think it looks really, really nice.
So this is going to work well.
So when it comes to design,
never get in the habit of saying to yourself,
it's good enough.
If you notice a problem, you need to fix it.
If something bugs you
and you can't figure out what exactly it is,
then set it aside, stop looking at it
and re-approach it with fresh eyes later
and more than likely you'll figure out what the problem is.
This type of self art direction
is a skill you will improve over time.
If you have a trusted creative friend
you can run a design by
and ask for their opinion on something
that might concern you.
That is another way to isolate
and improve areas of design as well.
But bottom line, you want to show clients
what I call, close to final comps
to prevent them from reading into it,
detail that isn't dialed in.