Process: Digital sketching

I’ve been teaching illustrator this past few weeks and even though I’m pretty sure my students are still scrambling on the learning curve with bitter thoughts, Illustrator is my favorite tool (like it is for most designers, I imagine). I have been working on sketches for a diagram and wanted to transfer them to illustrator to see how the bits and pieces of my idea look together. While I was working I was thinking about my woe-full students and decided that it might be interesting to record my screen to see how long it takes me and kind of reflect back on my own struggles through the process.

First, I should mention that I already had an idea of what I wanted to do for each of the illustrations:

Then I just dove into illustrator. If I record stuff like this again in the future, I probably won’t use such a long session. Never fear, I’ve sped it up about 20x the normal speed. It even features me troubleshooting a circle that keeps aligning to the pixel grid.

Fun? Boring?

It was a lot of fun and pretty neat to look back on! This is the entire process. None of the design work is cut out. The only think I excluded was a part where someone called me to schedule something and I had to pull up my calendar.

Anyway, the final design verdict for me is that I probably won’t move forward with this diagram and will probably only keep some of the icons, but it was really fun to take a break from grad school readings and design some stuff!