[Music] [James Barnard] All right, designers.
Thank you. Thank you.
Tonight, we people get, why did I say that now? A lady came up to me last night at the Bash, was like, can I get a selfie video with you? And I was, like, yeah, sure. And I was like yay. And she went say designers. And I was like, designers. Good. Now do the face.
She's like, nice. Just walked off. Brutal. Okay. Thank you very much for showing up. We've had a long three days and I know we're all tired, so I appreciate you being here. Did you enjoy T-Pain last night? Was he good? I wouldn't know would I? I had to prepare for this speech. So super professional and definitely wasn't near the front.
Okay. If you don't know me, I say designers a lot on camera. My name is James Barnard. I turn 40 in a couple of months. And even as nearly 40 something, I still don't know how to introduce myself. My wife called me an influencer at a party once and I want to curl up into a ball and die. So here we go. I'm a logo designer and a designer educator. I spend 50% of my working day on my client work designing logos for brands all over the world. This is some of my work. We've got tech startups, day care centers, accountancy firms, bookstores, you name it. This is one of my personal favorites. It's called Metalama. It's a coding framework for the C-Sharp programming language, sexy. So it uses this hash symbol with an abstract Llama icon isolated in the middle. And I got an email last night around about the time T-Pain was asking for his free Adobe subscription, that this logo made the finalist for an AGDA Award, which is the Australian Graphic Design Association. Thank you. So double celebration last night and fingers crossed, this one gets a trophy this year. Okay. So half my time designing logos, the other half of my time teaching everything I've learned on my social channels via Adobe live streams and talking to absolute legends like you guys. I'm from the UK, but I currently live on the Gold Coast in Australia with my wife and two young children. Look at that flight. Woof. We live pretty near to a little suburb on the Gold Coast, which is called Miami. Looks like this. You have palm trees, we have palm trees, you have sharks, we have sharks, you have alligators, we have crocodiles. So they're a bit further north than where I live. So this isn't even a holiday for me. I traveled 9,000 miles to get here and I'm basically in the same place. And I said that last-- I said this last year, but it's important, so I'm going to repeat it. On the flight I crossed the international dateline. So I set off at 10 PM last Thursday and arrived in the States on the same day, two hours in the past. So if at any point during this talk you start to question the validity of anything that I'm saying, just remember that I'm from the bloody future.
Okay. We're going to wake you up a little bit. We're going to do a quick fire quiz just to get everybody warmed up. So just shout out if you know the answer. Should be relatively simple, but we'll see. Here we go. Which pathfinder tool do we need to cut the circle away from the square to leave this shape? Minus front. Very good audience participation, engage. Let's go. Question two. Which commander tool might I use to create this effect? Blend modes. Easy. Okay. Question three. What command might I do to turn live text into a vector outline? Create outlines. Very good. You guys are good. Command Shift and O. Okay. Question four. How do you create a new swatch group with a monochromatic harmony rule using this blue as a base color? Very good. I'm impressed. Skill level shot up a little bit there, didn't it? We can stop audience participation there. That's fine. Now you might be wondering when you ever might need to know how to do something like that. I guess it's like good for making something like a brand guidelines document and maybe you could use it to explore some ideas for color palettes in a piece of artwork. But personally I've never had to do that before until I took the Adobe Certified Professional exam. This was the Graphic Design and Illustration using Adobe Illustrator certification. And for the first time ever you can take these at Adobe MAX and it's a little late now and some of you may have already done it. Very good. Did we pass? [Man] Yeah. Excellent. It's easy then, isn't it? Okay. Fine.
I'm not sure what the experience was like here, but when you take the exam at home, it's pretty intense. You have to disconnect all external monitors. Take a selfie video of your surroundings to prove that there's nothing in the immediate facility that you can use to cheat. Your webcam is on during the exam. And you're monitored by a remote proctor just so that you don't leave the room. When I did it, there were 10 multiple choice questions followed by 20 small tasks in Adobe Illustrator, and you need to get 700 out of 1000 to pass. Now obviously when you take this exam, you want to prove you know your stuff in Adobe Illustrator, but at the same time you could fail it and that might be quite embarrassing. And for me, the whole reason for taking the exam was because for the past three years I've effectively been teaching people how to use Illustrator on Instagram and TikTok. And at some point some of the negativity of social media starts creeping in and inevitably got the better of me. I started asking myself the question, who are you to teach people? In my mind, having this accreditation will give people a little more trust in me. It shows I know my stuff. You get an actual certificate. And if I pass the exam, I get to put a little badge on my website and I can print off a little plaque to go up in my office. Fancy. And this monochromatic harmony rule question came up. Now there are two ways I know how to do it now. Select an object with your color. Go to edit, edit colors, recolor with preset color harmony. You select monochromatic from the dropdown menu and then click new color group or you can bring up your color guide from your window menu. Select the dropdown from monochromatic, save the color group. And with both ways you'll see your color group in your swatches panel.
But there are probably 10 other ways to perform that same task in Adobe Illustrator and that's not an isolated incident. I've managed to bulldoze my way through this question to click in around menus until I think I got the answer right, because you don't actually get feedback on specific questions after the test. But there is something like 80 different tools in Adobe Illustrator, not to mention the hundreds of little old menus and keyboard shortcut tricks that you can use to speed yourself up in a software. Now I want to play you one of my videos just to give you an example of how ridiculous this is. [Music] All right. What we doing? Just resizing some type are ya? Yeah, I want the text to be exactly the same height as the icon, but there's stupid bounding boxes always causing problems. What even is this box anyway? Why is it so far outside the edges of my type? And that's called the EM Box. All that shows you is that this typeface has characters in it that reach as tall as the top of the box and as low as the bottom. So for this font, there's an A with a ring above accent for languages like Swedish and Danish. We also have this vertical bar which touches the descender. Sorry. I'm just going to outline my type with Command Shift and O and then I can snap it. You could do that, but that's a destructive edit, isn't it? What if you want to change your type layer and fix the spelling error? Fix the spelling error on two words. I think I can spell two words correctly. Yeah, but that's not a good workflow, is it? What if you want to come back to this later and use this font for something like a headline? You didn't even duplicate it before you converted it to an outline. At least do that. Yeah, but I could just go to Window Retype and there's that new tool that can match the original font I used and even replace it in my design with live text again. Yeah, fine, but you don't need to do that. Just go to effect path outline object and that'll tighten up the bounding box and they can resize your text. Yeah, but the bounding box isn't tight to the text again because of the overshoot on the letter C. So I still can't size the type to match the L correctly with the icon. The same thing would've happened if you'd outlined your type. Yes, but it would've been a vector, so I could have at least snapped the icon to the corner point of the L instead. You can do that with live type as well. What? Right. Pull up your character panel. You see that little button and the snap to glyph there, just hit the one that says anchor point. Now you can snap your icon to the corner of that L and the type is still live. Fine. But what does this even matter when I'm going to have to convert the whole thing to a vector anyway to export it as a logo. Look, I'm just trying to give you options, but just do what you want to do. You're going to do that anyway. Thank you. I will. Fine. Fine. Fine. Love you. Love you.
Okay, talking to myself. I'm not crazy, I promise.
Now how are you supposed to remember to do all of that? Your brain can only hold so many tidbits of information before they all start blending into one. And there's probably someone in this room-- Sorry, someone in this building that knows them all. But you and I are not Adobe Illustrator historians. We're not on the product team making software changes. We are mere mortals. Okay? We just want to know how to go a little bit faster in the software, so that we can do our jobs a little more quickly and do things like get more clients through the door. So in this session I'm going to talk about a method to not only help you learn all of these tips but also to help you build a community, foster the spread of information and win more business. Excited? All right. Let's go. So what is this method? What can we do to help us learn the miasma of complicated illustration efficiencies but also to actually retain that information, so that we can call upon it later on when we're on the battlefield under deadline and working under client pressure? To fully tell this story, I need to take you on my airplane time machine back to 29, London. Now my wife had just given birth to our first child.
My daughter Elidi. So typical new parents, we have no idea what we're doing. We are bumbling through, learning how to change nappies, making bottles, coming to terms with sleep deprivation, the whole shebang. And my wife and I had some big decisions to make. Now at the time we were living in the terrace house in South London. My wife was on her three month maternity leave from her very good job. And I was a struggling freelance designer, meaning that if I take time off from work, it means zero money. So at the end of the three months we had to decide what we're going to do. Does Laura try and work part-time? Do I work part-time? And we spit the care 50-50? And bear in mind we have no relatives nearby and after maternity leave, the baby will be three months old, which is a bit young for childhood care. And also bear in mind that Laura earns way more than I do. So this being the 21st century, I was very comfortable with my life as a kept man and not at all embarrassed or emasculated. So when the subject came up that I might be a stay at home dad, I quite honestly jumped at the chance and made complete financial sense. I would stay at home, take care of Elidi, do the nappy changes, do the laundry, do the bottles, and Laura would go back to work. I could do a little bit of upkeep on my business, while our daughter slept and maybe pull in the odd job for a little bit of beer money. So that's what I did for something like 10 or 11 months before we started childcare. I was a full-time stay at home dad and quite honestly I loved it. I got some wonderful one-on-one time with Elidi. I got to watch her turn into a one-year-old and I even got the occasional bit of spending money like the housewife in the 50s standing at the door with my handout.
The thing is, there's only so many trips to the park with the girls or coffees that I could do. So in between baby sensory classes and swimming lessons, I got in to daytime TV in a big way. Quiz shows, soaps, reruns of sitcoms, you name it. But my favorite stretch of all was when I watched all 15 seasons of E.R. on Demand back to back for something like two months. Now some of you here might be a little young for E.R. It was George Clooney's first major role set in a hospital in Chicago following the lives of nurses and doctors trying to stay afloat in an emergency room. And there's something about the theme tune that just sends me back to my childhood, that-- It just cuts through me. It's brilliant. Anyway, I'm watching one day, while Elidi is learning to walk around the living room just completely missing her childhood. It's early on in the show, something like Seasons 1 or 2. A young fresh faced Dr. Carter is being shown the ropes by Dr. Greene. Now I can't show the actual scene 'cause of copyright reasons. I've got it on my phone. So if you want to see it, come up and see me later and I'll show it to you. Dr. Carter diagnoses a patient with meningitis. Dr. Greene, he's the one who played Goose in Top Gun. He agrees with his diagnosis and says, we're going to have to do a lumbar puncture, ever done one. A lumbar puncture involves inserting a needle into the lower part of the spine to access the fluid around the spinal cord. There are all sorts of risks involved with it, paralysis being one of them. So a nervous Dr. Carter says, no, no, but I've seen it done. And then Dr. Greene says something that stuck with me ever since. He looks at Dr. Carter and says, see one, do one, teach one. And Dr. Carter nods nervously like, okay, end scene. See one. Do one. Teach one. I want to let that sink in a little bit. See a procedure being done by a medical professional, do one yourself and then as soon as possible teach it to somebody else. And it turns out, for the longest time this was an actual medical practice. Now I can't find the definitive origins of this saying, but as far as I've been able to research the see one, do one, teach one methodology goes back as far as the 1800s. It looks to have been coined by William Halsted, one of the founders of Johns Hopkins, Chief of Surgery there. Is an actual teaching method used to ingrain training into medical students by forcing them to implement their learning's immediately and then teaching what they had learned to more junior students.
So let's go specifically into how the see one, do one, teach one method should be applied and why it works so well. Now in 2014, The Economic Society published the results of a study. A bunch of undergrads were thrown into a room at UCLA and were given a passage to read as part of a test. Among a load of other material, the students would be given 10 minutes to read a specific passage. They could read the passage at their own pace and once they finished, if they had time left, they were allowed to go back over the material and reread whatever they wanted. Now before the test, half the students were told that later they would be tested on the material that they had just read. So just learn this as best as you can because we're going to test you at the end. So off they go and they do their best to commit to memory what they're reading. The other half of the students, they were told that they'll be teaching the material in the passage to another participant and then that participant will then take the test. So at the end, someone's going to come in, you're going to have to explain to them as best as possible what you've learned about the material, then that student is going to be tested.
Okay, so two groups, both trying to learn the same material but with different objectives at the end. Here's the snaky part. When that second group was ready to teach what they just learned, the organizers told them, whoops, sorry your student didn't show up for their exam. Would you mind taking the test instead? And the students were all like, whoa, heavy man. It's California, right? Okay, cool, I guess.
Shut up. All right. And then they took the test. So in reality everyone in the group was tested on how well they retained the information they had just read in exactly the same way. Guess what? The would-be teachers will just look how they performed against their counterparts. On average, the would-be teachers massively outperformed them. Teaching helps you learn. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the protégé effect. The students had more motivation to engage deeply with the material and when they thought they were going to have to teach it to somebody else, they were more invested in the material because now they had to comprehend it well enough to explain it. Now why does this help you retain information? Well, there are all sorts of theories and one of them refers to something called enhanced encoding, which is the process of improving the way information is organized and stored in the brain. To teach someone effectively, you've got to really understand the material. We do this by reorganizing what we've just learned in a way that we can relate to our previous knowledge. When we reorganize what we've learned in order to communicate it to someone else, our brains make connections between what we already know and this new information which helps us store information in a more meaningful way to us and helps us remember it better. So it gets hardwired into your brain. You have to clarify your own understanding of the material in order to relay it. Now I was very lucky to be interviewed on Chris Do's Podcast earlier in the year and we talked about this phenomenon. And obviously Chris being Chris, he's a master of disseminating complex problems into a way we can understand. And he dropped on me this wonderful brandable slogan that basically summed up everything I just said in four words. You ready? One teaches to learn or 1 teaches 2 learn. How good is that? I'm going to put on a bloody T-shirt. So if you know a printer, well, call me, we'll go 50-50. Now hopefully by this point, I've done just enough to convince you that by teaching others what you've learned, you in turn will retain that information better. So how can we take this see one, do one, teach one approach and work it into our lives to become better at a program like Adobe Illustrator? Now it's the short answer, just teaching everything I know to somebody else. So tapping your co-worker on the shoulder and going, mate, mate, look at this tip. Look, this is brilliant. Did you know if you hold down Alt or Option with the Pathfinder tool, you can make a compound path, which is a non-destructive edit. No. As good as that tip was, you're going to get lynched out of your office as the most annoying person ever. We need to work this methodology into our lives that benefits us, but doesn't force information down people's throats. Yes, teaching helps you learn, but it needs to be done appropriately. Now I'm going to talk about three ways we can implement the SODOTO method into your life. And this first approach will depend on where you work, but it's the one that I found most helpful early on in my career. Now in my second ever professional graphic design position, this is me. I worked on a small team, managed by a creative director. I did all my job interviews with the creative director, but on the very first day-- Sorry, the creative director was the one that hired me. But on the very first day when I walked into the building, I found myself sitting at reception twiddling my thumbs, waiting for someone to come down for quite a long time, like an uncomfortable amount of time.
Eventually one of the developers came down to meet me, introduced himself little flustered, shows me to my desk. Pretty unceremonious, not quite the glorious intro that I'd pictured. After about half an hour of settling in, I still hadn't seen the creative director yet. So I asked the designer next to me, where he was. Apparently, he was no longer in the company, the guy that hired me. In fact, he had left in a pretty spectacular fashion. And there were rumors everywhere. Some people said he was just completely burnt out and he left. Some people said he was fired. Rumors are bound. And bear in mind, this is my first day. So I've gone immediately from the glorious new hire to feeling like I have to justify my position in the company. But this just so happened to turn out to be one of the pivotal moments in my career. Because of that mindset change, I found myself working harder and more hungry to learn. And the creative director that was hired to replace him, ended up being a mentor and a friend, someone who helped shape my career. Her name was Zoe. And Zoe started implementing all kinds of practices that I would learn from and eventually used in my own business years later. I talked about Zoe last year. She was the one who made us start sending out our designs with a one paragraph rationale to preemptively answer any feedback we might get. But one of the best things Zoe implemented was Knowledge Share. Every week a team of six would meet for half an hour in a meeting room with a big screen. She would set this early in the week, maybe on Monday after lunch, just enough time to settle in to get your admin out of the way. But before things get too chaotic and weekly deadlines start looming. In our Knowledge Share sessions, every person will get five minutes to present. Six people presenting for five minutes makes for a half hour session. And in each session you would have the opportunity to share something cool you'd seen or learned about that week.
It wasn't always design related. We worked in the advertising industry. So sometimes we might share a cool campaign we'd seen or something that had incorporated a bit of tech that we as a team might be able to incorporate into our workflow. But we would always leave the session feeling just that little bit more invigorated about our jobs and looking for new ways to further the team. It also brought some of the more introverted members out of their shell 'cause you actually had to practice presenting something.
I took this thinking into my next role at National newspaper, where I had my first opportunity to manage people and it really helped. We would share tricks we'd learned in Photoshop. Our designers and developers were always struggling to find the source files for different departmental logos. I didn't work at The Daily Bugle, this is just an example. So in some of our sessions I shared how to create custom brushes in Photoshop and made a set of brushes for each of the logos and shared it with the team. And this was before the days of CC libraries or and for the people who were designing emails and microsites. And, yes, we still used Photoshop for that. This was a huge time saver and meant they no longer had to leave the software. Another benefit was that people became better at public speaking and presenting and each week the team will come more and more out of their shell and get better and better at being heard. And you can do this too, you just need a meeting room with a screen to present, set some time limits so you don't run over. And your first session in particular, maybe you go first or let people volunteer who wants to go first. You might be surprised who puts their hand up and you can even theme your sessions around different topics, but you've got to be strict about it because it's the first thing to get canned if you get busy. So set it early in the week before it becomes a mad house. All right. Next one to implement is writing articles. So when I first started out as a freelancer, I started a blog, Full Disclosure. In another life I was a pacer for the London Marathon and I worked at Runner's World Magazine and I basically blacked that job. It's like my first graphic design position because of my passion for running, not so much these days. But when I first started out, I ran a blog called Sir Jog A Lot. And blogs were all the rage back in 2010. I got into it in a big way. I documented my training and talked about the trials and tribulations you face when tackling your first marathon. Now obviously, nobody gave two shits about my stories about leg chafing and nipple protectors, but the writing really helped when it came to making my own articles later about design. My design blog is still actually up on my site and it's mostly filled with little updates and the occasional tutorial. But before any of my success on social media, writing articles and blog posts, I got my name out there. And I can't begin to explain how much writing helped my business. Here's an example of some of the exciting articles I write. Restoring My Grandma's Photo in Photoshop. I Made a Font From Scratch In One Day, Batch Editing in Lightroom My Japan Trip, and How I Launched a Website in a Day with Adobe Muse.
Remember Adobe Muse? Gone but not forgotten. And that's the point. I'd have completely forgotten about how I did that website if I hadn't have written it up and documented my process. So while you're learning to do something, start thinking about documenting your process. Take screenshots while you work. Drop these into a folder with a file name that is ordered and labeled. My website is designed to bring in clients, but making tutorials about software shows to those clients that I know my stuff and they're also great for SEO. The more popular those articles became, the higher my website started showing up in the rankings. For instance, that article about making a font from scratch was so nerdy and so detailed, talking about letter proportions, how I set up my Illustrator document and move from Illustrator to a software called Glyphs. Then the process of submitting it to Google fonts. The font is crap, right? I made it in a day, but it took two and a half years to make it onto Google fonts. That article then got seeded to something like 13 other websites. It was featured on the typography podcast. Adobe tweeted about it and bear in mind that was 2017, six years before my first MAX. So that was a big deal for me. So the process of making tutorials while learning not only helped me retain the information, it became a resource for me to look back on to recount specific details within the software. And as the content grew, Google recognized that this is a website that is being updated regularly and I started doing better in search. The more frequently I posted and the more my articles were shared and other websites back linked to me, the higher up the rankings I went. And once I eventually niched down into logo design, pretty soon this happened. Number one in organic listing for the term freelance logo designer, London. And right after that happened, I moved to Australia and wrecked it all. But seriously for a freelancer that kept me fed. I pull in something like five or six leads a week from this, and that's not to be sniffed at. Pretty soon my content went up a notch. I started-- I figured out how to screen record and I started making posts like this. Now this is Barnabas. He is the doodle from my mind, from the mind of my wife Laura. Is he a rabbit? Is he a chipmunk? Why do his arms protrude from the bottom of his neck? Honestly, at this point I'm too afraid to ask. But Barnabas is famous in our house. My wife doodles this little guy all the time. And when Laura and I found out that she was pregnant with our first child, I decided to commemorate Barnabas with a digital version that I'll print up and put in the baby's room. Now the eagle eye among you will notice that this is not Illustrator, this is Photoshop. And this is because I was teaching myself to learn about how to use noise and grain textures to add a bit of depth to the illustration. I watched a tutorial by Dan Gartman, which I referenced in the post and used this as a basis for setting up this composition. Now thanks to the process it took to make this. I'll never forget again how to do this. And for those interested, you just make a new layer above your shape, hold down Alt or Option in between the layers to add a clipping mass to that layer and then paint in with a grainy airbrush of your choice. Very cool. Plus, I always have this post as a reference for me if I ever forget anything specific. By the way, if you want to achieve something similar to this Adobe Illustrator, this is how you do it. Designers, adding a bit of grain to your vectors is a bloody cool way of adding some texture and shading to your designs. And there are a ton of ways to do it in Adobe Illustrator. Here's a way that'll allow you to tweak your results to perfection. All right. We need our gradient and transparency panels. So go to your window menu, bring them both up. Firstly, duplicate your shape over the top by pressing Command L, Ctrl C and F, and make the top shape the color that you want your grain to be. Now in our transparency window with the top shape selected, we're going to press make mask, then press clip and select the right box to go into mask mode. Take your rectangle tool and draw a box across the top of your shape. And with this selected, make your box a black and white linear gradient. The mask works by showing the white portions and hiding the dark portions. So we get this gradient effect as the dark color underneath shows through. Now keeping that masked gradient selected, we're going to go to effect texture grain. You can play around with these settings, but stifled is a nice effect and bring the intensity and contrast down to a point where it's subtle. Press okay. Now for the fun part, press G for the gradient tool and you can tweak to your liking with the sliders or even change it to a radial gradient, which will give your spherical objects a sexy 3D effect. Nice.
Okay, that video leads me nicely onto implementation method three. You guessed it. Video Content and Social Media. So as soon as I started delving into video to make my tutorials, things really changed for me. Some of you here might be active Reddit users, and Reddit is a community for learning. It's actually pretty unbelievable. In particular, the graphic design threads. And for me, the logo design threads. And I went through a bit of a phase with my tutorial videos. They weren't really tutorials I guess because at that point I wasn't brave enough to get my face on camera. So largely there would be screen recorded content of me taking a sketch of something like a logo or a slogan and turning it into a vector. This one was when everyone was panic buying toilet roll in the UK before the pandemic.
And that's basically all I did. I just sped out the video a bit and cut out the sections where I'd gone to Google to remember how to do something. Like in this example, how to change the size of all of those circles at once while keeping their position fixed. By the way, there's two ways to do that in Illustrator now. The original way was to go to Object, Transform. Sorry, Object, Transform, Transform each and then you can change the scale and rotation to each object while keeping their positions.
Pretty cool. These days you can just select one item and use the new Start Global Edit under the Select menu. Then as you resize one, it resizes the others along with it, which is very cool. So after about a year of doing this, I discovered this little app called TikTok and it was, at this point in 2020 that my midlife crisis truly began. I'm going to do the short version of this. So fasten your seat belts. I discovered that TikTok is all about video. So I post every single one of my logo concepts to TikTok one by one. One of those concept logos along with a couple of rejected designs ends up getting published in a book called the Logo Lounge. I make an innocuous video bragging about getting in the book. The video gets three million views and my TikTok blows up. I get more logo design leads in a single day than I did in the previous six months. I start making video content regularly to keep this hype train going. The content is mainly based on answering the questions that come in the comments. A few months later I have another viral moment, this time on Instagram, a video about the pencil tool in Illustrator, it's 15 million views. My Instagram explodes. I get more than 100,000 followers in two weeks. I'm booked out three months solid now. So the pressure is on, the production value goes up, I get a new camera, I get a new microphone, I get some fancy lights, and now I need regular content ideas. So I dig into the weeds a bit and start making videos about things that I don't even know about. Videos like this. Designers, if our computer screens use little red, green and blue LEDs to display color, why can't we just use red, green and blue ink in our printer? It's these questions that keep me up at night, mainly because if a client asked me that and I didn't know the answer, I would look like a squirrelly amateur. The reason we use scion, magenta, yellow and black in printing is because of something called subtractive color. Stick with me. Your screen transmits light, but white paper only reflects it. So on paper the ink is masking or blocking the light that would've been reflected. That's why when we mix all our CMYK colors together, we get rich black because the ink is blocking all light from being reflected off that paper. On screen we are adding light to represent color. If your little red, green and blue LEDs all fire at full power at the same time, you get white. You can see this when you use blend modes in Illustrator. Put RGB circles on top of each other and use an exclusion blend mode and you get white in the middle, plus cyan, magenta and yellow where they overlap. Do the reverse of this with CMY colors using a multiply blend mode and you don't quite get full black, which is why we add black ink in printing to fully block out any light.
Now some of those facts I didn't actually know before I made that video. I knew that if red, green and blue LEDs fire all at the same time, we get white. But I certainly didn't know about the terminology, additive or subtractive color. I didn't know it was called that, which is a bit embarrassing considering I worked in print for something like six years. So now I'm actively going out and learning new material in an effort to create content. As the follower account grows, I start getting invited to things to speak on podcasts. I go on Australian TV. I'm featured on the cover of a design magazine. Flyn Tracy from Adobe gets in touch. And the next thing I know, I'm running hour long two part live streams on the Adobe live stream channel where I'm basically a TV presenter. And it's during one of these live streams that I had a bit of a realization. I was actually in the Adobe Sydney office with Chris Hansen who was hosting. Flyn, who normally hosts this show with me was in the room at the back producing the show and managing the chat. And Flyn posed a question to me. Check it out. [Chris Hansen] Flyn had a question. Can you explain optically aligned versus technically aligned? All right. So there are-- Let's say you create a-- Thanks for throwing me off track, Flyn. Okay, let's say you drew a square or draw a circle exactly the same height and width. Center them to the outboard. Yeah. Now take a look at those. Which one looks bigger to you? - The square. Yeah. - Square. And they're exactly the same height. - Yeah. - Okay. But they're not because your bloody eyes don't work properly and you have to technically correct that visually by adding little bit overshoot to make the circle look as the same, probably you come across typography all the time. - Yeah. - Eyeballing it. It's just a massive part of design. I like it when things are really neat and uniform and the exact height, width, this stuff annoys me because you have to like use your eye. There's no-- So if you didn't do that just now and you saw that, you'd be like, that's not aligned. Yeah. And your eye will be like, what's wrong? Something's wrong here. And this is a big part of like logo design. If something's not right with this thing, I don't know what it is. Somewhere in that an illusion has taken place. There's loads of illusions logo designers have to account for the Poggendorff illusion, the irradiation illusion, all sorts of stuff you have to account for.
Happy, Flyn? Okay. We can go into illusion in another session. Okay? So after I was done ranting about optical illusions and logo design, another question came through on the live stream. Someone asked, where did you learn all of this? And on the stream I said something about experience. But later on I realized that it was because I've made umpteen bloody videos about optical illusions that you find in logo design. Two years ago I didn't know what the irradiation illusion was. I only knew that because I taught it to my audience in the past. So hold on a minute. Making content and teaching others online is actually making me a better designer or at least a designer with more knowledge and tools at my disposal. Teaching is actively helping me learn. So if that's true, what other personal benefits might there be? Because there's no denying that my circumstances have improved since I started teaching people.
Firstly, I'm better at articulating with clients. Every time I learn a new piece of design terminology or something like one of those illusions, it makes me lethal at rationalizing my designs. There's nothing quite like a bit of overcomplicated fancy design terminology to put a client in their place, right? Well, you see Gestalt principles tell us that while proximity to other objects can have its benefits. In this essence the logo's intimacy to the perimeter of the design is affecting the figure/ground, and prohibiting us from processing the negative space. And of course the irradiation illusion of this inverted design is already causing a bloating effect. So I'm sorry, but we can't make your logo any bigger.
Also, teaching all of these Illustrator software hacks means that I'm lightning quick in the software, which is handy, not only for getting more clients through the door, but it means I can design on the fly and iterate quickly, which is great because I suck at sketching and I need to work in the software as quickly as I can. But it's also helped me on client feedback calls because sometimes a client has had an idea for something in a design and I've been known to knock something up quickly over a zoom call to test its legs. And usually that ends up rolling out that design. But sometimes it's led to a breakthrough on a project, which is great. And here's another benefit. I'm having more fun in my work. It turns out, teaching people is fulfilling as hell. There's nothing quite like the feeling of someone telling you that you've helped them or that you've made their life better in some small way. I live for messages like that. When I get a really nice comment, I take a screenshot and drop it into a folder called positive stuff. And I totally encourage this because there's another reason to do it, which I'll come into a bit later. And the fourth and final benefit, this is a big one, Social Proof. Do you think I'd be standing on this stage invite to speak at Adobe MAX for the second year running if I didn't have half a million Instagram followers? Why fucking worry. I'd still be in London screaming. Does anybody want a logo out the window? Okay. Some of you going to be skeptical about all this. Making video content and teaching others helps you learn. There's going to be some haters out there, just lurking, waiting to debunk everything that I've just said. So what I'm going to do now is attempt to preemptively answer all of the reasons not to use those steps to your advantage. Okay. Myth one. How does teaching designers help you win business? Great question. If your aim is to bring in more business from your social content, how is making content for designers supposed to bring in more clients? The main reason is, that it sets you as an expert in your field. If you are the one seen to be to teaching, then it lends credibility, which makes you more appealing to prospective clients. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of small businesses are trying to do the graphic design side of things themselves. Maybe they have a copy of Illustrator and they're trying to make their own logo and they get stuck. So what do they do? They could turn to search engines to help them and there you are. And then they realize that maybe making a logo is a little more involved than they first thought. Maybe I should just hire this guy who made this video I just saw and save myself some bother. I've won so much business this way and something like 85% of my leads now come from social media. All of my content is Illustrator specific, but it's mostly about how to use the program to make a new logo. And I'll occasionally share a case study. So younger designers are learning from me and clients are seeing what the process might look like for them. It's so self-serving, it's brilliant. Here's a bonus tip. Every time you use an example in a post to illustrate an Illustrator feature or software feature, use your own work in the example. Every example of a tip or trick in my videos, every logo or illustration was done by me. So I'm showing the high standards to which I work in my videos and it's like a massive portfolio piece. Number two. My skill level is pretty basic. People will already know what I know. All I'll say to this is, I wouldn't be so sure. Everyone is at different levels of skill when it comes to software. And no two designers are the same. Your content might seem basic, but to someone starting out what you share could be absolute gold dust. Also, here's what I found about generational gaps with designers. People like me who are on the older side, most likely learn from a co-worker or even an actual tutor. So I was taught the fundamentals of InDesign at work in person with a teacher in a lesson that was put on by my company. And this was before online learning wasn't as prevalent as it is today. So designers of my generation learn to do things a certain way. Since then, a lot has changed in the software. And if a more experienced designer doesn't like to keep up with the changes and constant updates to Adobe Illustrator, their workflow is going to be old fashioned. I get messages all the time from graphic designers with a little seasoning, telling me they've been working a certain way for years. And when I show them something like Trim view that hides the edges of their artboards, their minds are blown.
Graphic design is our trade, right? But the tools in other trades change the same way that ours do. My buddy's at the Angry Designer Podcast raised this point on their show. Shout out to Massimo and Shawn. Now this is a little reductive and I promise no shade to plumbers because their job is hard and we couldn't live without them. But a pipe wrench doesn't get updated every two months. The adjustable mechanism doesn't change each time and you don't have to learn a new skill to be able to use it at the same speed you once did. When Adobe Illustrator updates, sometimes there's a ton of stuff released that gets buried under something fancy, like the intertwined tool. My God, the intertwined tool. And while everyone is going nuts for a new software like this, sometimes a new feature might completely go under the radar. What is this? What is this magic? Designers, I have a confession to make. I have never noticed this button before in Adobe Illustrator. Apparently it's been sitting there for something like 10 years and because it looks a little bit like the pen tool and the lasso tool combined and I always just press P or Q for those tools, I've never actually noticed this button hiding in between them. Quite embarrassing. And I've just found out this is the curvature tool. It came out in 2014 and it works a little differently to the pen tool. And that as you start clicking path points, it draws out beautifully smooth curves between them. You can add more points in or move your points to adjust your curves without changing tool. And if you double click, it'll convert your join into a point and then double click to convert it back. Now previously, if I wanted to convert a corner into a curve, I'd press P for the Pen tool and hold down Alt or Option and try and position it correctly. It's a little fiddly and often leads to these kinks in your curves, which are really noticeable and particularly annoying for type designers. Now all I have to do is select the Curvature tool, which I've now assigned to keyboard shortcut C because I never used the Scissors tool and just double click on that point.
Game changer.
Okay. Yes. I got called out because I didn't know about the Curvature tool. And when the comments get a little toxic and that negativity starts to creep in, maybe now it's the time to dip into that positive comments folder we talked about. Have yourself a little read, pick yourself back up again. Because when someone has no sympathy for not knowing a basic fact, it happens for a reason. It's sometimes referred to as the curse of knowledge. This happens when more experienced professionals can't remember what it was like to not know the thing they learned. Hindsight bias tells us, well, no one ever taught me that. And as a result, the other person looks dumb or inexperienced. We use design jargon all day long. So it can be easy to forget that not everyone understands at your level. And so there's many of us, especially freelancers, no longer work side by side. It's really easy to miss features our tools that we can use to improve our working lives. So relying on other sharing what they know and raising our industry up as a whole is hugely important.
Number three. What if I get my facts wrong? All right. It's that fear of looking dumb again, isn't it? You post a tutorial of something you've learned and dear, there's a better way to do it and you look silly. So devil's advocate, you posted this video about the irradiation illusion. I'm sorry the intro of this video is really loud. What the heck's going on here? Okay, so you've designed a logo and you're ready to start rolling it out to your client, but you need a version that works on a dark background. No problem. You just drag it onto a dark background, change the color to white and what the heck's going on here? In white your logo now looks all bloated and horrible. This is because of something called the irradiation illusion. Apparently it happens because of the scattering of light in your eye. But whatever the reason, it is a pain in the butt for logo designers. So here's a quick fix. Add a dark centered stroke to your design, side by side with your dark version until they visually appear the same weight. Now expand your design, press Shift and M for the shape builder tool. And with Alt or Option held down, click away that extra edge.
Now some of you probably want to scream at me right now that there's a better way to do that. Anyone have a guess? Offset Path. Morgan, very good. Offset Path under the Appearance panel. And just look at my comments littered with references to Offset Path. And here's the thing, they're absolutely right. That is by far the better way to do it because then you can just expand appearance and your vector is done. No need to use the Shape Builder tool to shave away that extra edge. And I didn't know that, my audience corrected me. Now what? Took it on the chin, made a follow up video saying thank you. Just be honest and transparent and own it. If your audience corrects you in the comments, then you've learned something. So share it. That transparency goes a really long way with your audience and they'll respect you more. Look, if you get something drastically wrong and you feel that it's genuinely misleading to share your wrongness with the world, then you can just delete the video. It's your content. You don't have to leave it there. Number four. I'm crap on camera. There's no way. Same, I waffle, "I say um and uh all the time. I tut needlessly after sentences." Trying to get your point across succinctly without stumbling over your words or saying filler words is for comedians and professional public speakers. And, look, yeah, I'm getting paid for this, but that technically makes me professional public speaker, but I'm nervous as hell. I'm blagging this. I'm reading from my show notes. We aren't the immortals. We can't be expected to pull off that level of suavity without making mistakes. Now I have two free live streams of how I make my videos on the Adobe Live channel, which goes into full detail of the tech side of things. So you can find those here. This will give you all the software and hardware that you'll need to use. And it'll show you step by step as to how I do my screen recordings and how to speed up the edit of your videos.
But when it comes to formatting the framework of your content, so you don't ramble on camera is what you do. Write a bloody script. If I could give you one piece of advice for creating video content for social media, it's write a script. I just use the Notes app on my Mac and I followed this format. Number one, the Hook, some engaging line that captures the audience and stops the scroll. So you won't believe how much time I've saved using this simple tip.
Act 1, the setup. Sometimes you need to do a thing. Act 2, the conflict. But that thing takes me so much time. Act 3, the resolution. Instead do this thing. And finally, the call to action. Follow me or share this with a friend. That's a little simplified, what I've just given you the basic framework for every explainer video ever made, say what you want to say on paper and edit this down until it's as tight as you can make it. Film everything all in one long take to the camera, just read sentence by sentence. And then use Premiere Pro to cut away the bad takes and pauses. Then you can add in a few screen recordings and you're away. Research by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner has found that we are 22 times more likely to remember a fact when it has been wrapped in a story. And this is the art of storytelling. And by the way, I discovered that story art from a content creator called Bea Chu. Shout out to Bea. And that shout out brings me on to my next point.
This is a big one. You learn about a cool new illustrator tip from another content creator and you want to share it with the world, but you don't want to plagiarize the person that made that video by making your own video or tutorial. And you can obviously just share the video on your socials by sharing it in your stories or saving it to your favorites or something. And that's cool and all because it helps that creator. But it probably won't help you retain information, or at least it won't stick in your mind until you've digested it and made it your own. Now it's important to know that there's a way to do this. I didn't invent the Shape Builder tool. So as a content creator, I have absolutely zero ownership of that tool tip. I learned it from someone myself. I've just explained it in my own way. And as soon as I've posted it, you are more than welcome to share it. In fact, I'll encourage you to spread the word because we as graphic designers will all rise together. What you don't do is take the format of a video and make your own word for word carbon copy. And there are some very big creators out there with significant followings that have done this to me. And it's shitty. If your goal is to simply gain likes, then yes, this will work. And there are Instagram accounts that have grown to millions of followers by simply downloading videos from content creators and reposting them as their own. But it's just not cricket. And frankly it's pointless. You don't grow a community, you don't learn anything and you don't grow as a designer. And if you're using social media as a tool to land clients, you're going to get immediately exposed when you can't deliver on the job to the standards of the content that you are posting. What is okay is to take that information and to make a piece of content that is relevant to you. How would you use the Shape Builder tool in your day-to-day life? How is this going to save you time? Your audience will appreciate the storytelling and you'll actually gain from passing on the knowledge because you have disseminated the content in your own way and made connections with what you already know. Also, if you did learn this tip from someone else, be honest and give them a shout out. They will love it. And as long as you've made the content your own by reframing it in a way that will help you, your audience will once again appreciate the transparency, which makes you look genuine. And people will trust what you have to say because you're a nice person and your credibility factor goes up, which leads me nicely onto my final points. Who are you to teach me? And there it is. Self-doubt starts creeping in, doesn't it? Forget for a minute the crippling fear of getting on camera or putting yourself out there in a meeting room and presenting in front of your colleagues. Those little niggling questions start popping up in the back of your mind. Who are you to teach? What experience do you have that makes you think you can teach me something? I don't know. I'm more senior to you. I've been doing this for years. How dare you deem yourself better than me and suggest I might need your help and I feel your pain. It took me the longest time to get over my own insecurities and finally get myself on camera. But the instant I did almost immediate success. It takes a bit of a mindset change to push past your fear of presenting and teaching others. So here's something that might help you. You're providing this service absolutely free of charge. It always blows my mind when people to stop to leave a comment on one of my videos to dis me or to question my skill as a designer. And it does happen. And I have a line that I like to use when it does. I'm sorry that this free video didn't meet your expectations.
We've already talked about what happens if you get something wrong or there's a better way to do something. The audience corrects you. If anyone questions your experience, just be transparent about the fact that you are learning. Put it in your bio, newbie graphic designer, sharing what I learn as I learn. Unless you are flagrantly spreading disinformation, you'll be surprised about who you'll help. And as I said before, there are swathes of people who don't know what you know or a generation who learned before social media was the thing. Look, just by making the content you've already won by helping the information stick in your brain. And if just one person learns something from what you've taught than one teaches to learn. But if your insecurities get the better of you, like they did with me, you can always throw a bit of credibility away by taking the Adobe certified exam for your software. And then you can do what I did and print off your certificate at home and frame it on your wall. And by the way, just look at this question, which I swear on my mother's life genuinely showed up on my exam. When Adobe Illustrator has set to color mode CMYK, which color model was being used? How amazing is that? I posted that video about additive and subtractive color on the 16th of June, 2023. The date I received my certificate, six days later. Thank you me, and thanks for that little bit of serendipity. I managed to pass the exam with a score of 950 out of a 1,000. Thank you. Stop it. Stop it.
All right. Do you know what I'm doing? Key takeaways. One teaches two learn. Thank you, Chris Do. Share what you learn with the world. Why? Because of enhanced encoding. Every time we reframe a piece of knowledge to explain in the way that others can understand, we have to clarify our own understanding of that subject. And we do this by forming connections with what we already know. How can we work this into our daily lives? By writing articles or basic tutorials for others or by implementing knowledge share sessions at our place of work, which might just help us, help morale and bring a team together. But if we're comfortable getting on camera, the best way to implement this SODOTO methodology, making video content to share with people. And what does this do? It not only fosters the spirit of information, which leads to new innovations and elevates the design community as a whole. It also lends you credibility, which sets you as an expert in your field, which might just lead to more business. It's a complete win-win. Although I do need to caveat this methodology with a little warning, you might end up like me and have a full blown identity crisis. At some point last year, I officially started making more money as an educator. So what do I call myself now? And if you figure out something better than this, please let me know. Thanks very much.
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