Explorative Design: Develop Your Style Rapidly and Sustainably

As designers (plus illustrators, artists and other creatives) we often get to a stage where we're not satisfied with our work any longer. Our work begins to stagnate, or our work never really gets to an exciting place. To notice this is one thing, and it's a great first step. The next step in levelling-up your work and developing your style is to explore!

But exploration can be really difficult, time consuming, confusing and humbling. These things are perfectly normal, but there's another way (a much better way) of exploring. This is where the use of constraints comes in – it's a crazy-good exploration tool. Exploring within the bounds of constraints is primarily what we're going to cover in this class. And it will make developing your style much quicker, more rewarding and much more fun.

And we're not just going to talk about it. I'm going to show you how I actually go about developing my style by exploring a new style and creating some posters. I've been wanting to explore this style for a while, and thought it would be a perfect opportunity to show you how I go about doing it. The style is super simple, which means it will be easy for you to work with me in the class (and not just watch me). It also means the class will be practical – I'm going to be going through a bunch of constraint-based exercises, which I'd like you to do with me. And through this process, I'm going to teach you how to use exploration, iteration and constraints to develop your style and become a better designer.

Although the concepts I teach in the class are app-agnostic, I do everything during the class in Adobe Illustrator. But you can use a similar app like Photoshop or Sketch; or you could use apps or materials you're more comfortable with (paint, pencil, clay, etc.). If you do use Illustrator, you'll probably pick up some tips and tricks and a few new ways of working.

So, If you're keen on learning how to rapidly develop your style, then come take the class. Here are a few key skills we'll explore in this class:

• How to design exploratively.
• How to use constraints as a tool for exploration.
• How to create your own constraints and explore at your own pace.
• How to use Adobe Illustrator to create some awesome shape-based posters.

I expect you'll get the most out of this class if you're an intermediate designer (or other kind of creative) looking to develop your own style and learn new ways of working.

Also, check out these similar classes:

• Introduction
• Explorative Design: The Who
• Explorative Design: The Why
• Explorative Design: The What
• Explorative Design: The How
• Explorative Design: The But
• Explorative Design: Conclusion
• Exploring With Constraints: The Why
• Exploring With Constraints: The What
• The Simple Style
• Doing It Together
• Doing It Together: Simple Simple
• Doing It Together: Sneaky Square
• Doing It Together: Double Trouble
• Doing It Together: Odd One Out
• Doing It Together: The Stretch
• Doing It Together: A Herd Of Shapes
• Doing It Together: Rectangle Rigidity
• Doing It Together: The Cheater
• Doing It Together: The Piano
• Doing It Together: An Abstract Movie Poster
• When Am I Done?
• Do It Yourself
• Conclusion