*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Kathleen Illustrated:
Welcome back everybody to Adobe live here on Behance. Yes, Andrew. Let's go. Let's get started.
Alex Lazaris:
Hype up the chat. We want to hear your voices.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Get that Hype train going. I'm here with my new friend, Alex Lazaris. Welcome back. Thanks for coming back.
Alex Lazaris:
Thank you. I'm excited. Day two, woohoo hump day. It's Wednesday, so your week's almost done.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. Time to talk about some tequila.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Everybody knows that your Wednesday should start with tequila. Oh, obviously before you even get into the office.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Tell us more. You have 2 hours to convince us. Hi. Heidi, victoria. Tim. Jason. Albert. Really good to see you. If you're new to the chat oh, we got Anna Jean as well. Super cool. If you're new to the chat, say hi to us. You don't have to be super talkative, but we'd like to just give you a good hello if you're just joining us for the first time. Felix. Hello. I want to let you guys know that we are focusing on graphic design during this stream. So Alex is here with us today and tomorrow doing some cool branding for a tequila brand bottle all the good stuff.
Alex Lazaris:
Starting things off. Cough strong.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Super strong.
Alex Lazaris:
And has got the right idea. Just started off with a little bit of tequila on your breath.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Or just a little bit of kombucha.
Alex Lazaris:
Or is that tequila and ginger beer? Which I don't think actually works together, so never mind. Don't do that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's, Kombucha. I promise. Oh, yeah, for sure. Cool. So, Alex, do you want to introduce yourself super quick to people who weren't here yesterday?
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely. I'm Alex Lazaris. I run Lazaris out of Portland. It's a small little boutique brand shop. We have about four employees right now. It's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That is awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
And we work with a bunch of medium and large businesses for building their design systems and helping them rebrand and kind of rebuild whatever they have, which is super fun. Lots of really fun challenges. I like the meaty, thought provoking kind of work.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Do everything, do everything, do it all.
Alex Lazaris:
It's super fun.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. And if you want to check out more of Alex's work, go to Behance. Net slash alex Lazare So you can check it out here. It's got a lot of features. All these beautiful badges. Look at all those used to work at Twitch. So there's a lot of live stream crossover happening. Very cool. And you can also check out his portfolio if you just go over here to the info tab and click on his little face where he's choking himself.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, yeah, that's what I do. It's a thing I realize I do this motion a lot.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, it's like you're my I'm trying.
Alex Lazaris:
To channel the Steve Jobs thing. I just need to get a turtleneck.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And, like, stare into the camera to infinity.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. Do the Ashton Kutcher version of him.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally. Okay, we've got Cynthia first time here. Awesome. Ray's first time here as well. Really cool. Abdel, hello. Good to see you, my dahan. Awesome. And Chat, we're going to be doing a couple of things during the stream today before Alex jumps in. In 30 minutes, we're going to be doing our chat end win. So we're going to be giving away a beautiful hardcover notebook from Moo.com.
Alex Lazaris:
And I don't know if you can see how pretty it is, but it's absolutely stunning.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Got like some fabric right here. Beautiful lay flat technology, except for and the green screen.
Alex Lazaris:
I love that the grain is picked up like that. It's a nice, like, cool minty color. Yeah, it's really just so you don't know.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It looks like a shamrock shake from McDonald's, if you can't tell in a good way. So we're going to be giving away one of these in 30 minutes. Make sure you're logged in on chat. And then we're also going to be checking out your challenge submissions from the daily challenge today. So if you're hanging around with Val, just a couple of minutes ago, you were creating memes in photoshop by just adding text to a photo and making a joke out of it. We're going to be checking out discord and looking at the posts that you post in design feedback. So we've got some from Sarah coming in already. People making memes about the daily creative challenge, which I love. So cool. So we're going to take a peek at some of these. At 130, you have an hour and a half to get those in before you upload them on social media.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm excited to see the most what do they say for the crossover? Memes? The most influential crossover event of our time. The memes and Adobe happening all at the same time.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
That's great. It's so good.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool. So keep memeing away while we are designing these tequila bottles.
Alex Lazaris:
Totally.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Maybe we can chat about what, first of all, what your whole project is and then where you were yesterday and what we're going to do today.
Alex Lazaris:
Totally. So personal preference. I want to start working with a bunch of more liquor hospitality packaging kind of clients.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. In real life.
Alex Lazaris:
In real life. But I don't currently have a portfolio that really shows that to clients. So it's really hard to attract new clients and be like, yes, I could do packaging. They're like, show me some of the packaging work you've done, and you're like, I don't have any of my portfolio currently that I think you would like to see.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
But now with this behance little challenge, I wanted to start building a tequila brand that felt different in the marketplace, attracted a new customer, somebody who may have had a bad experience in college, who has sworn off tequila. But now they've let it rest for a couple of years. They're ready to start trying it again. And so now they have a little bit more money. They want to spend maybe like a mid market kind of tequila. So maybe around the $45 mark is probably where I want to be at. I don't want to be that, like, $25 brand plastic bottles. Nothing like that. Exactly. Something that you can sip on or like the idea of potentially sipping on it. Yes. So maybe a little bit more on the whiskey side of things, where you're like, I like whiskey, but I don't like tequila. Maybe you're coming from that angle. So on the shelves, I want this bottle to feel completely different from anything else in the marketplace. And yesterday we had a big case study on what the competitive landscape kind of looks like. So we kind of showed it a little bit really quickly. You have, like, three different categories, and I can full screen real quick by pressing F cycle through F, and it shows your artboard. Here tools a little bit better. Put over to the side. Thinking about it. Let me just cover myself up. So you've got, like, a more artisanal approach to a lot of them, a lot more bespoke, craft, hand feel aspect on the top row. Then you've got more, like filigree and ornateness and kind of like the type has a lot more things going on with it. You've got a little more details on ligatures and a little bit more spikiness black lettering and all that good stuff. And then you've got the really high end bottles are more of, like, an industrial design project where they're trying to differentiate in the marketplace with the bottle shapes so that the silhouette of the bottle is what attracts you to it, and it differentiates in the marketplace. Right. But because I don't have the props or the ability to make my own bottle, I decided to take somebody else's bottle and take off the label, and then we're going to kind of use that as the base for our actual project. So here's the tequila bottles that I have at home. There's three different ones. There is a blanco, a reposado, and an aniejo, and that will give you a good understanding of the colors that you're working with and the tequila brands and all that stuff. So I want to make a design system that translates across all three different bottles and then still pulls you in whenever you're looking at it on a shelf.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
Cool.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So you're kind of going for more of the top row of your inspiration.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. So something that stands out against that top row of the competitors. So instead of doing something that feels super textured and parchmenty and distressed, trying to do something that will compete against this. Because when I was in the aisle the other day, I saw so much just brown. It was one the brown from the liquor, but then also just the off white and the cream colored labels themselves.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, we're going for crisp, high contrast.
Alex Lazaris:
High contrast. Trying to go a little bit more. Just all those things you just said.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes.
Alex Lazaris:
Nailed it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool. And Chat helped us name the brand yesterday.
Alex Lazaris:
That's true. Sorbo and I keep typing SoBro SoBro right now. Turns out whenever you're doing these little block lettering and wood lettering type of things like this, it helps to double check your spelling. Totally.
Kathleen Illustrated:
But Sorbo means sip, so it's perfect for, like, sipping.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. It hints to what I want the people to do. I don't want them to have to go and be like, I want shots of this. I want people to take their time drinking this and enjoy it and really kind of get into the mindset of like, we made this for you to enjoy. Just like the rest of the packaging on it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Perfect.
Alex Lazaris:
So where we left off yesterday was we kind of had this blanco type. It started feeling really nice. I started messing around with how Sorbo would work. Went home and started really trying to finesse the type so you can kind of see how messy the artboards can get when you start messing with things. And that's all part of the process. And it's lovely. Pixels are free, so use them all up. You can see like, little micro iterations, maybe even like how do you lock up type and then showing that it's 100% blue agave, which is a huge deal.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, is it?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. So if you have the bad experience with tequila, it's typically because it's not 100% agave. Pro tip, if you're ever buying tequila, make sure it's 100% agave and you won't have as bad of a hangover.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Does it have to be blue?
Alex Lazaris:
It doesn't, but a blue agave is what they use to make the tequila.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Okay.
Alex Lazaris:
So I think the majority of high quality is blue agave.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I just didn't even know. Is there red agave? I don't know.
Alex Lazaris:
I don't know.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Probably not.
Alex Lazaris:
Somebody in here is probably way better of a tequila expert than we are, but we're learning together. Chat true. Somebody was in here yesterday and they were spouting off all the TETB regulation things and talking about how the type sizes and all that stuff, which is awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, really helpful.
Alex Lazaris:
So just goes to show, hang out with your friends and Chat, you can learn a lot from them. Hang out in discord, all that good stuff.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally. Blanca's even saying that you could use Dimension, which we were talking about the happy Hour yesterday.
Alex Lazaris:
I updated it last night.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, good.
Alex Lazaris:
So I have dimension now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. So if you don't know, Dimension is an awesome way to mock up your graphic designs on 3D models, and you can download free models on stock or you can license them to get really high end ones. So I think that maybe tomorrow when you're finishing up, I can have it running on my computer and be messing around and you can do your thing.
Alex Lazaris:
I don't know why that would pop up right now because I'm in a bunch of things.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes.
Alex Lazaris:
Fun.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally.
Alex Lazaris:
Now everybody has my email address.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Send me emails, please. Tell me how much you love the stream.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And if you don't drink, no worries. This could be any kind of sipping drink. It could be agave nectar.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. Somebody said discord. Absolutely.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Go to bit lycapital B, capital S. Discord. P s discord. That's how you're going to get to the Daily Creative challenge. Discord. It's free. You can also send invites, so you can invite your friends and FAM if you would like as well.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely.
Kathleen Illustrated:
What's up, miko? Adam. Jason.
Alex Lazaris:
I had beer at lunch. Perfect way to have lunch.
Kathleen Illustrated:
What kind of beer? Yeah, let us know.
Alex Lazaris:
And if you had a shot of tequila with that, that would be great too.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Albert says it should have been called Sober.
Alex Lazaris:
Sober.
Kathleen Illustrated:
S-O-B-R for the non drinker.
Alex Lazaris:
I probably will spell it like that in a second, so it's.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
So, yeah, we're just kind of messing around with type. I liked how the blanco felt and I knew that I kind of wanted to stay within the specs of a square lockup. And I just realized that blanco kind of fits really nicely in there.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's beautiful.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it works really nice.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It has nice. Like it's not totally hitting the edge of the entire square.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's well within it.
Alex Lazaris:
I say that. I'm just going to make it bigger. Look, it's never going to touch the edge.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wow. It's perfect.
Alex Lazaris:
So then I started messing with the reposado, which gets really interesting from a design constraint, because if I know that I want the box to be kind of the bounding box, reposado has a lot more letters or many more letters. So still trying to keep it with a little bit more of that square lockup. You can kind of see how I started kind of going through this. I was like, oh, man, this would be great if I could figure out how to use the O twice through rep. O, sado.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Rep. The sad man.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Tequila.
Alex Lazaris:
I felt a little like, I'm so sad, but I'm drinking tequila.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I'm rep owing my shadowing yeah, exactly.
Alex Lazaris:
And then I also felt like it wasn't as playful. It didn't feel like blanco. So I wanted to unify it a little bit more. Started looking at black lettering. Not black lettering, wood block lettering and stuff like that. Pentagram did such a great job with Public, the Public Theater. I don't know if anybody's familiar with it. It's phenomenal work that they've done ages ago and they could just continue to kind of push the envelope with it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I love that scratchy pencil one.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, yeah, the sketch.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, I love that.
Alex Lazaris:
It's so nice.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Is that just a sketch or is that like a finished thing? Because I want that with pentagram.
Alex Lazaris:
You don't know, because that might as well be the finished thing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
They're pushing the label.
Alex Lazaris:
They're so good. But then even just like saying, yeah, I guess maybe that was a sketch for this guy.
Kathleen Illustrated:
What a good combo of colors like that really light green and the red.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. And the type works really well. It's dynamic. So there's a little bit of similarities with the typeface that we have where it's variable, it can expand and shrink depending on what we have.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. And people are very curious about the typeface that you're using.
Alex Lazaris:
The typeface that I'm using is called trials. TT. It's on my fonts. It's brand new. So if you want to get it, I would suggest getting it now. I think it's $30 compared to the typical $150. So if you want to play with it, highly recommend getting it now before it goes up in price. Typefaces, man, they cost so much money.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Unless you have a CC subscription, then you have thousands of Adobe fonts and.
Alex Lazaris:
Then you have thousands and it's awesome. Highly recommend Adobe Fonts.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You have to use it. It's great.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. The fact that I can download and work with my clients and all that stuff really quickly is so wonderful. But sometimes you really need that bespoke kind of feeling that not maybe everybody has it. What's the name of the type and the logo? Oh, yeah, I already got that. TT Trials.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes.
Alex Lazaris:
Perfect. So then kind of just seeing how they were laying out type and playing with the scale and size, they're super fun with how they do it and they can be a little bit more disrespectful with it or playful with it, I guess. This is super uncomfortable for me doing this style of work.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Really?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. So this is fun because I love doing things that are outside of my comfort zone because you learn so much and you can take this and use it for other things. But yeah, this for me very hard because I like to build out rules and constraints and things like that. And I know how to work within my realm. They break all these rules and lay out the type really nicely and it becomes more of a thing about the composition rather than just how did you lay out type. This bit right here in the middle is so nice. It's so fun. It fits in that negative space. Really nice. It's awesome as design. So just looking at this was like, okay, I don't have to be so worried about all the little micro details and things like that within it. I can start really focusing on the composition, play with things a little bit nicer, just experiment and see what works and what doesn't.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Especially the form that you're taking, which is a bottle label. Like you don't have to worry about how it's going to work across every single system that's ever going to exist.
Alex Lazaris:
But the fun thing is, as soon as I want to start doing marketing collateral with that. All I have to do is bring this in and any marketing message I do could have that same thing. It could just say drink, and it could be as playful and bouncy and start. It doesn't have to be limited to the square anymore. It could spin and bounce all the way through rectangles and other shapes, which is super. There's a lot of flexibility within that. It's super fun.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's so cool. Ashi says, oh, no. I feel a new project brewing.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, no. Poor thing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Stick with us.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely.
Kathleen Illustrated:
We're here to support you.
Alex Lazaris:
So these are a bunch of explorations I had with reposado. I think I'm liking this kind of version over here with a small o. It kind of creates a nice little diamond shape between the R and the O, but it's not so uniform. Yeah, I was trying to do uniform where I was, like, trying to build constraints again, where it's like, top and the bottoms of the R and the O have to be the same. But then I think playing with it and then letting the composition just be a little bit more weird. Also, the D and the O have very similar ligatures and structure. So taking that and then shrinking it and changing it up and things like that, the typeface, this typeface, a lot of typefaces don't translate well whenever you start distorting them. Right. So whenever you shrink them or pull them wider, sometimes the typefaces can get really wonky. But because this is a little bit more playful and we're changing weights and we're bouncing things around, I can shrink it and change things and not have to be so worried about. Readability it's. More about the composition.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Victor says it looks like a fish.
Alex Lazaris:
It does look like a fish a little bit. Yeah, I can see that. Make a little eye over there.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cute.
Alex Lazaris:
That's so funny. That's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So, you'll see, we were talking about doing the outline strokes yesterday or outlining the shapes. Some of these, because I was playing with a lot of line weights, I just did individual letters so that I could continue to just change the weights. Just see, you can kind of start seeing, oh, these are going to be a little bit fat. These are getting a little too thin.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wow.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's kind of fun. It came with a lot of eleven different character sets. Wow.
Kathleen Illustrated:
$30. Well worth it.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Seems so.
Alex Lazaris:
Highly recommend getting it. So yeah, we'll just playing with it. What we used to do back when we did a bunch of web design work was we used to blur things. Have you ever done the blur test? So when we did web design work, or a lot of web design work, and we wanted to see if the hierarchy of type was working, what we would do is we would just go in, go to effect, and then do a gaussian blur and then see how you can see if you were squinting at something? Can you still make out the letters if you're looking at it? First pass. Is there enough negative space in there so you can read it so you can kind of see how that would work.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's like, I don't want to squint. I'm just going to make my computer do it for me.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, exactly. Well, it's sometimes hard, like, doing the squint thing. I feel like I still don't get.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Enough not enough squint.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, Shauna and I were talking about it. Some people can actually do, like they can just unfocus their eyes really easily, which I'm trying. If you can do that in Chat, let us know. And try to type something while you're doing it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. How are you at squinting from a scale of one to ten? Let us know.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. Control shift. O is automatic outline. So if you have a bunch of things, if you are about to send files to a printer or something like that, just grab everything you want and then Control Shift O. And then I'll outline everything super easily instead of having to go in and be like, all right, now, right click. Create outlines. So much easier in that way.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. So for people who aren't used to printing things, why would you have to outline things when sending to a printer?
Alex Lazaris:
So outlining allows for the type to be kind of stuck in place rather than if somebody sometimes some people will send over Illustrator files or they won't have the typeface installed, and it can automatically change the type. So you want to outline it so that doesn't happen, and it just comes and just unfocus your eyes.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Easy, easy.
Alex Lazaris:
Thank you, Tim.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Take your eyes out.
Alex Lazaris:
Tim is a legend. So yeah. Always outline your type, especially when you're sending files off for final proofs and stuff so that nobody's having any issues with that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, like if you're sending something off for production, you want to make it as difficult as possible for them to mess it up.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Everything.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Jessica says her squint level is ten. Smiley face.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, amazing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. How do you attest that? I guess I'd say mine's, like, at four. Could do four level squint.
Alex Lazaris:
It's pretty impressive still.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, sure.
Alex Lazaris:
So I just want to kind of polish up all these and make sure that I'm going to bring them all together and just make sure that the spacing on the letters feels right and feels consistent. And then I've got aniejo over here, too, we talked about anyejo anyejo, so there's some bits of the typeface that I didn't really like. I didn't really like some of the lowercase letters, which is like, a weird thing to nitpick about. I like it when it's large scale, so I could see this if this was, like, on its own, and I just wanted to type in SoBro.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You can't even do it now.
Alex Lazaris:
I can't do it. I'm so conscious of it now, but see, some of it's really fun. I like kind of like how it digs into the letters.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, that's cool.
Alex Lazaris:
But then as you scale down, like, as soon as it starts getting smaller, it starts to feel a little bit there's just too much negative space within the arches. And I think it's great and it works for a lot of things, but for some reason it's not resonating with me. So the Niejo.
Kathleen Illustrated:
With the Y, I'm.
Alex Lazaris:
Just going to just make up my own language. So you can see the A starts to get really pinchy. And so I guess the reason why is because I'm using a lot of capital letters and the pinchiness only happens on round letters, like the N, the R's, the A's, but because I'm using a capital N, you don't see that. And so the A I wanted to bring into the family to feel a little bit more close to everything else. And you have some like there's a little bit of roundedness in the E and the O's. And so I want to just bring in that, make it less pinchy, less negative space. I dug it out and so essentially what you can do what I did.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Show us what you did. How'd you break this?
Alex Lazaris:
I broke it. So good.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Hi, Annel. Good to see you, everyone. Hello, Huxle. Stefan. Amar. Glad you're here.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Welcome. So I would just take it then control shift A. Let me see if that's not the right type.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Control shift a does that just select.
Alex Lazaris:
Everything I messed up? Control shift O is what I meant.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Okay, got you.
Alex Lazaris:
I was reading A and saying and then I just got lost.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Classic.
Alex Lazaris:
And then whenever you outline things, it's going to automatically group them. So just press command shift G and it will ungroup everything in the group for you. And sometimes if you have a bunch of different layers that are grouped, just hammer it a bunch of I was.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Going to say, does that ever happen to you where you just have to keep hitting?
Alex Lazaris:
I wonder how many times I do it, but it's like maybe three or four clicks. I'm just like, then see what happens.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, you don't even do it once. You're like I'm just going to assume.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. So then I'll bring out my pin tool with pin tool, actually just Oops. I'll just grab it with V and then I'll grab P. So I see all the points on there and really what I just did was like I dug it out, just delete the layer points. I also believe what I did was I took the A roundy bits. I think I didn't. Maybe I did I even know anymore. I've done so many different iterations of it now, but I wanted to make it a little bit more round instead of so much so narrow.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
And then I took the inside layer and you just double click into it by using your direct selection tool or whatever. This is a regular selection tool. And then you have this beautiful inside mask area that you can mess with. So you can kind of shorten it if you want. Has, like, a little graffiti feel with it now. Or you can make it as big as you want.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool.
Alex Lazaris:
I just made it a little bit rounder, then I took the corner tool. Oh, my God.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That Widget.
Alex Lazaris:
This is the best additional feature. Okay. There's a lot of really great features in Illustrator, but this one, it came out with the corner selection tool Life Saver.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I know. It's like 2014 or 15 when that happened.
Alex Lazaris:
Really? It still feels like yesterday because I'm so excited every time I use it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's so intuitive and awesome. Love it. So if you select a point with your direct selection tool, you should see a little corner widget. It's just a little circle. You can grab it and then round out your corners right there.
Alex Lazaris:
So you see that right there? It's a little bit hard to see because it scales with your you try to zoom in. It's like but yeah, so it's running away. But if you just grab it, you can get some really nice curves automatically without having to go in and make your own curves. It's so nice.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Love that.
Alex Lazaris:
So, you see, that's how I kind of came about and sharpened up this little bottom edge here in this corner and then built out that little area in there, too. So then I don't even know anymore. Anyways, that's kind of how I got to the A.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's awesome. And we were talking about this yesterday about how as a designer, it's really fun when you get to break a typeface apart and make it customized.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Everybody, I think just doing that is so fun because you can see how other people built their typefaces and just going in and then being like, okay, the client, maybe geometric is really what we need to do. So then you're pulling out parts of the typeface. Like, maybe the T has this really nice curve, and you're like, okay, maybe I apply that same T to the A's and the B's and C's and all that stuff. And so that you're continuing that nice consistency across the letters.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right. And you said that you did that a lot with your atticus project.
Alex Lazaris:
The atticus one was like, I don't remember the original typeface, but yeah, you can see on the atticus project maybe.
Kathleen Illustrated:
We can pop over to my screen real quick. Perfect.
Alex Lazaris:
So, yeah, within there, you can see the T's have the same curvature that's carried through with the star as well. And then the negative space with the crossbars goes into the I. And then that spacing is Equidistant on all those points. And then the bottom serifs on all of them match. Through the A's, the T's, the I, and then the U, then bringing that in and then doing the custom S as well. And then the top bar again on the U and then the C's. Just making everything super polished. Not having to completely make a typeface from scratch, but really honing in the aesthetic, making sure that everything feels consistent, feels bespoke, and it feels just what the client could ever want from it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, that really speaks to how a lot of graphic design isn't just having a typeface and typing. It like here's your logo. It's like, no, there's a lot of care that goes into it.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely.
Kathleen Illustrated:
For sure. The Hood sisters do a really good job of customizing typefaces as well.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm so happy that Amy came in to help yesterday.
Kathleen Illustrated:
She descended upon us a sweet angel.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely. That was amazing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Maybe we can summon someone again today. Maybe Leon. Leon's listening.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, no. He texted me saying he'll listen me. Chat and win. Yes, we have chat and win in 40 seconds.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Victoria is like, Are you ready? Are you? Awesome. We'll let you know more about that in 35 seconds.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, go get a water or something real quick.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Run.
Alex Lazaris:
But the Atticus logo is on point. Thank you. I appreciate it. That was actually the logo that got rejected. I know. That whole case study is essentially just an initial work that got rejected. Wow. There's, like, a final case study also on Behance that kind of shows it, but they didn't like the idea of the lowercase A. But I liked it the lowercase A because it felt more approachable. And the whole point of the brand was to feel approachable and welcoming and feel like an older law firm where you could walk in and just see somebody and get your problem solved. So the secondary one became more it's like Adobe Kazlon Pro iteration. So I took Kazlon and then again, tweaked it, made sure that Kazlon has a lot of what's it called? Kazlon has a lot of it's less like it looks like somebody hand did it. So it has a lot of imperfections. So I went in and cleaned all that up and made it a little bit more geometric to make it feel, again, a little bit more high tech. Gotcha. So, yeah, it's fun.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Perfect segue into giving away free stuff. So, chat. We're going to do our chat and win right now. If you have no idea what that is, all you have to do is answer Alex's question that he's going to ask in a minute. And then when you answer, we're going to play a short little video and you will be entered to win a free notebook. So what are we going to ask today?
Alex Lazaris:
Which is better, cats or dogs?
Kathleen Illustrated:
We'll be right back. All right, everyone, make your decisions.
Alex Lazaris:
Dogs. Dogs. Dogs. Dogs.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Tim says oh, no.
Alex Lazaris:
Twitch reference.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Dogs. Is that a trick question? I don't know. Is it?
Alex Lazaris:
Man, there's a lot of cat dog. OOH, that's a good one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Would you rather have a cat with a human face or a dog with human hands?
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, man. I was waiting for somebody to say centaurus, but that's not really either one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
But someone says really neither.
Alex Lazaris:
Wow.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Get out.
Alex Lazaris:
Fair.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It is fair.
Alex Lazaris:
Man, the cats are coming back. I don't think they like dogs taking the leader.
Kathleen Illustrated:
No. So whoever wins the giveaway is going to be able to decide. So whatever they voted for is officially the best. So whoever it is, make sure you.
Alex Lazaris:
Stay waiting for the DMs of hate.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Okay, Madeline Becker, you are the winner.
Alex Lazaris:
Congratulations.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So let us know, Madeline, cats or dogs? Tell us the right answer, or else we're not going to send you the notebook. Oh, my gosh. But yeah. Madeline, congrats. You are the proud new owner of this beautiful well, not this one, but moo hardcover notebook. They're really nice. It's lined paper and it has a little middle section that's just blank paper. They're beautiful. And if you did not win, no worries. We have a little gift for you. So go to moo.com adobe live to get 15% off your purchase there's. Awesome stationery. All the good marketing stuff.
Alex Lazaris:
I love Pedro's comment of cats. And then his next message was, cats, obviously.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cats, obviously.
Alex Lazaris:
Guys, come on. Why are you so wrong sometimes? Guys. No, it's true.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So what do you think?
Alex Lazaris:
I don't have a preference, actually. So I have an idea. I want to see if everybody agrees.
Kathleen Illustrated:
With me or not about this or about cats and dogs.
Alex Lazaris:
Cats and dogs.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Okay, cool.
Alex Lazaris:
I've got a theory. So I think people like to see cats more on collateral than they do like seeing dogs. I think dogs are very specific to the type of dog you like, but if you see somebody wearing a cat t shirt or cat skateboards, those are cooler or easier to sell to more people than somebody being like, okay, that's a doberman t shirt. That's a very specific, totally looking animal. And I think a lot of people like I like huskies a lot but can't have them in my tiny, tiny apartment.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I thought Portland was nice about huskies.
Alex Lazaris:
They're so nice with dogs, and there's so many. I think the official dog of Portland is the Aussie.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I have an Aussie. Maybe we need to move there.
Alex Lazaris:
You should. Yeah. I've got a good budy who's got an Aussie.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wow. They are kind of the flavor of the week. They're really beautiful dogs.
Alex Lazaris:
That and the Portland lifestyle is very outdoorsy and active, and the Aussie is a perfect dog if you want to go on hikes.
Kathleen Illustrated:
True.
Alex Lazaris:
Things like that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Check out my dogs on instagram kokashi the Aussie hashtag sponsored. I wish. Jeez, he needs to pay his rent for sure.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, absolutely. And those vet bills aren't going to pay for himself.
Kathleen Illustrated:
He doesn't do anything because I have to eat and look cute sometimes.
Alex Lazaris:
That's enough.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's enough for me, for sure. I'll take it that's why we got him.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Not really. That's not really why we got them. Everybody's like, oh, wow, you're really that, huh? Someone says they creep me out.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, cats creep me out.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Meowt, meowt. Debbie. My dog's name is Kakashi, but we call him Kashi or K Dogger.
Alex Lazaris:
Have you gotten a Kashi Nut sponsorship yet?
Kathleen Illustrated:
We need to kokashi go lean crunch.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. There you go.
Kathleen Illustrated:
He'll eat it, I'm sure.
Alex Lazaris:
So the other option so I was talking to Sean about this, and she's like, another option you could show people is whenever you start messing with these ligatures and letters, if you're wanting to check out the spacing, you could just make blocks.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally.
Alex Lazaris:
And that should help you kind of understand what's happening with the spacing of things.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And then it just becomes the Black flag logo.
Alex Lazaris:
God, that logo is one of my favorite.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's so good, right?
Alex Lazaris:
It's so iconic. I think you have a great logo when everybody gets a tattoo of it, right?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. It's like that in the Joy Division logo as well. So good. Oh, Huxle says my dog's name is Mishima.
Alex Lazaris:
OOH, reminds me of the Isle of Dogs.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Is that a thing?
Alex Lazaris:
The movie?
Kathleen Illustrated:
I mean, Wes Anderson. Is that a character?
Alex Lazaris:
No, but it just has the name.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Sounds very much you know, I've never seen I love dogs. I love Wes Anderson. I love dogs.
Alex Lazaris:
We're gonna have to end this right now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
We're gonna watch it. Yeah, exactly.
Alex Lazaris:
So good. The amount of work that went into setting, like, it's all animated and it's all puppeted.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I was going to ask, is it CGI or is it sock animation?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, so they had to move every single bit, and every single time that they move the hair, it all gets kind of handy.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Incredible. I need to watch it. Need to watch it. It's so rude to call your dog Kakashi. Why? Kakashi's awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
It's rude to call your dog by its name.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, Kakashi's an anime character that he's named after.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, nice.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. But I think they have similar personalities. And Katashi's one of my favorite characters. How dare you? Slim on.
Alex Lazaris:
I would call mine Vash the Stampede. OOH, getting old school.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's awesome. Put little tiny sunglasses and, like, a red trench coat on them.
Alex Lazaris:
That'd be so good.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Vash is pretty cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Vash is my favorite.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Andre says my dog's name is Fandango.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, that's a good one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's an amazing name. Wow. Everyone, let us know your pet's names and the stories behind them. I love dogs that have human names, like Larry, fred. Fred? Yes. Billy.
Alex Lazaris:
Did you ever read Hank the Cow Dog as a.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, I see. Okay, okay. Oh, maybe I did. I kind of remember this illustration style. He looks like a BA.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, like the Chuck Norris of dogs.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. Oh, my gosh. That's terrifying. Wow. Oh, Ryan's dog is tintin. That's cute. The Adventures of Tintin.
Alex Lazaris:
So I didn't like what I was.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Doing there, but Ashi said it's a great tip.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it is a great tip. I think it works really well. I think the issue that I was having and the reason why I just killed it was it's great for blocking out where you're going and what's happening and then trying to, like if I had a more square typeface I think it would be perfect because then I can see where the spacing is and how everything should stack, but because everything's so round and there's not really a consistent kind of curvature of each one, you kind of have to do a little bit of, like, eyeballing it and do the eyeball spacing trick rather than having to completely rely on Math. Because sometimes, like, the twitch logo very hard to vertically or horizontally align things to it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Wait, are these differing.
Alex Lazaris:
James? Oh, there's a you can watch a time lapse video of James making that, I think. Let's watch it while you talk. Yeah. James white signal noise. Incredible artist. He used to stream all this work and just seeing the amount of work that goes into it. Yes, you can buy like an 80s synth wave pack somewhere, but just seeing the amount of detail that goes into everything. Yes, he does everything in Illustrator first and then brings it into Photoshop. Classic workflow, but like, the amount of gradients and stuff. He does pin tooling for every single chrome aspect of that. So, like, the mountain range and everything is like one off bespoke. It's incredible, Dang, but yeah, this is.
Kathleen Illustrated:
A very kind of long it's so long logo, even though it's not that many letters. But the W is so wide.
Alex Lazaris:
The w is super wide. We had an issue with the T and the H, so the perspective was a little bit off. So you couldn't align type to the center because your vision with the perspective would pull off.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So aligning things there and then trying to lock up type to the side of it. Also, because it's such a big clunky, heavy logo, makes it very difficult.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Interesting.
Alex Lazaris:
So things to think about whenever you're building logos and trying to do lockups for people.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wow, cool.
Alex Lazaris:
I think I've got represado. Pretty much done it's a little bit Whimsical, a little fun. I think the then Yeho is done as well. So I think what we're going to do is see how it looks on the actual bottle. So I have a mockup and we can do dimension tomorrow.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Let's see. Airport finder.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And while you all are talking about your dogs, if you want to go into discord and go into the Chat channel and just like, upload pictures, that would be fine. We might look at them at the end of the stream.
Alex Lazaris:
We might bonus points for huskies and aussies.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally. Dogs are so good. I'm actually a cat person though.
Alex Lazaris:
Are you?
Kathleen Illustrated:
They're my favorite animal.
Alex Lazaris:
Did you get tricked into getting the dog?
Kathleen Illustrated:
No, my husband's allergic. We can't have cats, but we can't have dogs. I know. I'm like, oh, I'll never have my favorite animal again. This is what I'm getting into. It's worth it.
Alex Lazaris:
You can have a side foster cat.
Kathleen Illustrated:
My side boo.
Alex Lazaris:
It's just a cat. So I got this mockup off of yellow images.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool.
Alex Lazaris:
And I liked it because it was close enough to my original bottle.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So you can kind of see it's pretty close. So it should give me a pretty good understanding of what the bottle is going to do with the type and stuff like that. Cool. So lots of smart objects in here. Pretty big file actually. Yes, but that's always fun. So you can kind of see there's.
Kathleen Illustrated:
What'S that I was just going to say for people who might not know, can you real quickly just talk about why smart objects are cool?
Alex Lazaris:
Smart objects are cool because they are. No, smart objects are great because you can essentially wrap them around things, you can mesh them. It's really great if you want to do like a perspective warp on things. So if you have an object, maybe it's a business card and it's laying down flat and you want to design around the business card. You take the rectangle and then you make the rectangle a smart object. Whatever is in there will stay that size. But then as you're editing the smart object and you lay it down on something, it's going to adapt. The shape and the perspectives will be as you laid them out rather than breaking and rasterizing whatever files you're working with. So I'll kind of show you how that works right now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes, take us through.
Alex Lazaris:
So let's see. I don't want to do the shrink cap because that's not what I'm going to do.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right. We're going for all natural.
Alex Lazaris:
All natural. So they got this gold texture. Oh, that's kind of interesting. Just like I haven't opened this file up, so I don't really know what they have yet.
Kathleen Illustrated:
What options do we have? Yeah, look at our menu.
Alex Lazaris:
So this is the opening up of the smart object itself. Yeah, you just double click yes, just double click on it and it'll see you got this man can't zoom in in the bottom right corner right there. That's how you know it's a smart object right there. So that's the smart object. You just double click it and then anything you throw in here will wrap around that object. So what I'll do is come back doc, come back. I took working files, photos, yay. Actually just stock photos I grabbed. But I also have my somewhere library video window. Library.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, it looks like it's already showing up. I think that's where that pop up this thing here let me help you.
Alex Lazaris:
Thank you, Adobe. Let's see here. So I got my library. So I've already got some Adobe stock images, and I've got some old yoga ones for an old client. But it's kind of fun. So you can like, okay, but if I wanted to here's these two guys in an agave field.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wonder what they're talking about.
Alex Lazaris:
Probably how good this blanco tequila is going to be. So you can see it's going to wrap around it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Whoa. Amazing.
Alex Lazaris:
Which at its current state isn't that cool looking. I think it's pretty cool, but it's pretty fun. It's like, here's one. If you guys ever need good stock photos that are free, unsplash has a bunch as well. But I think the Adobe stock account is pretty good for that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, you can always download the previews and then license them directly in Photoshop if you really like it.
Alex Lazaris:
So if I really wanted to and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to build a couple of different versions of this. So what I'm going to do is actually duplicate the layer. So I like the idea of, like, having so as I was thinking about this project yesterday, originally what I wanted to do was I'll show you was do a solid color scoot this way.
Kathleen Illustrated:
A little bit so they can see the dock. See you.
Alex Lazaris:
I can just snap it to this side. Can't be narrow. All right. So I really wanted to do a white label this. So as soon as you change that, you can see it real time. Take the Blanco cross program workflow.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Excuse me.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, guys. Man, Adobe has gotten so good about it, especially with Dimension and Photoshop 3D, which I always get confused on sometimes where I'm like, why? Is this the gradient 3D tool? I think yeah, it's like, no, I just want the regular gradient tool. But you can kind of start seeing how the blanco might look. Boom.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool. Leave it like that, it's done.
Alex Lazaris:
Done. Ship it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Let's go watch. I love dogs.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. So right now it works because it's kind of interesting. It's a little bit too there's a couple of things we need to have on the label to make sure it's legally responsible, I guess. So you always need to have the amount of alcohol and the contents in there.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So contents is just the ingredients?
Alex Lazaris:
No, you don't have to list ingredients, I don't believe.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, you mean contents.
Alex Lazaris:
Like how much it is, how much fluid is in there, and then the alcohol by contents.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I see.
Alex Lazaris:
I do it as a smart object because I don't like laying out type in Photoshop.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's not really what it's built for.
Alex Lazaris:
It's not meant for that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Brian's, like, is this moonshine?
Alex Lazaris:
It could be. I was thinking about getting a different color one as well, but it'll work for right now. And if we wanted to, we could always bring in the bottles that I actually shot and then do this. But I felt like this was a little bit easier. It's a little bit cleaner. But now you're starting to see. Now it's got the alcohol by content in there and the proof.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. I think Justin was the one yesterday who was giving us all of the info about what needs to be on.
Alex Lazaris:
The label volume and alcohol by. Yeah, Justin's a legend.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And then produced and bottled by Adobe Live.
Alex Lazaris:
There you go. Boom. So, yeah, that's fallen in there nicely. Snap to middle, but I want the label to be a little bit smaller.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Gotcha. What's up, Marianne? Hi. From Poland.
Alex Lazaris:
Hello.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Isn't that where you live? From Poland?
Alex Lazaris:
So close. Vodka. I labeled vodka TIFF.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's not.
Alex Lazaris:
Happening right now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yuck.
Alex Lazaris:
Not a vodka fan.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Not a liquor fan. In general. It's all good, though. Everyone else can have it.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's fine. I mean, tequila has to be made in Mexico, unlike vodka.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Didn't know that.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it has to be regulated by the governing body of Mexico. Whereas vodka, as several people know, several, can be made anywhere.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You and you right in your bathtub, as we talked about yesterday. Huxle wants to buy this.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Where's the buy tab?
Alex Lazaris:
Bye bye. Bye. Bye. Bye bye, now. So what I just did was I grabbed my selection tool with D, and then I went over to the sidebar right here. And then I did let me just undo that. So then I clicked. You don't have to move, Alt. Yeah, I guess I don't. Hello, alt. Right. Which means it just duplicates and moves it over one pixel, and then I press left again just to get it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Back where it was.
Alex Lazaris:
So then that's a group duplication. I mean, you can also just right click in there and then duplicate. But I don't like doing that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, my gosh.
Alex Lazaris:
Oregon and Odigan.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's all right. They sound similar.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, they're pretty much the same. So I was thinking yesterday that I might want to do something a little bit more less label focused and maybe do a decal. So I was originally thinking, I'm going to letter press this and do it really bold, and I'll do a version in black and white just to see real quick. So if you do a color overlay, you can change the color of it really quickly rather than having to input another thing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes, I always do this, which I.
Alex Lazaris:
Did, black on black. So then change the color. Change it to a different color that you don't currently have. And then change the color fill. Boom.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Really quick ways to change colors in Photoshop.
Alex Lazaris:
It's awesome. Super easy. And then it's still a vector smart object. So if I want to, I can change it in Illustrator and change all the actual finessing of it, and it'll automatically sync into Photoshop.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right.
Alex Lazaris:
So that's another great thing about smart objects and just keeping files linked together. You want to always have your most recent changes happening in your working files.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. Yes. Paco is not currently with us, which is why we can't change where I'm sitting. But I don't mind just sitting over here for a little while. He has to eat sometimes.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Poor guy.
Alex Lazaris:
I know. So it's kind of interesting that it's black because a lot of tequila companies don't really embrace the black aesthetic. I saw a mezcal bottle that was the actual bottle glass was black, and it was incredible.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Was it a matte finish or could you see through it?
Alex Lazaris:
You could see through it still, but it was so dark and it was great.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Smoky.
Alex Lazaris:
It was super smoky. And then the label was black and it had a really lovely silver foil on it. Whoa. And a really nice wolf wolf illustration. But so this feels like pretty generic to me right now. Don't really like the idea of just like printing a label and throwing it on there after spending so much time on the type.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So I'm thinking cool texture. Now I want to I'll open back up the smart object and then remove the background.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Bless you.
Alex Lazaris:
So even you can start seeing how the type might look for other collateral as well.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, it's almost like a social post.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, exactly. Start thinking about the social media or marketing collateral and how it might live. Super fun to do. So I'm just going to make all the backgrounds transparent, change it out, and then I'm going to remove I'm just going to click the toggle for the eyeball for color overlay and remove that. Well, it helps if the layer is actually visible. The eyeballs. Make sure you're clicking the eyeballs.
Kathleen Illustrated:
The right eyeballs.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. And I'm going to just see how it looks. If I had a transparent smart object click.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Got to make sure you save save.
Alex Lazaris:
Those smart objects so it updates real time. Oh, I'm on the wrong one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Ha t. Just Joshua.
Alex Lazaris:
Here we go. What? Let's see what happens here. Does it have to be I really hope not. That's going to hurt my soul. Label shadows sometimes. So that's sometimes the issue with getting mockups. There you go.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Close enough.
Alex Lazaris:
I think that's it. If you turn that off.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Back label.
Alex Lazaris:
There's a black back.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, I thought that was back there.
Alex Lazaris:
Kind of is.
Kathleen Illustrated:
NVM.
Alex Lazaris:
Nice.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I'm trying to read what the labels say from yeah, yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Not really very small. We need to get Val or somebody needs to make the hovering art directors. Meme. If you ever saw the Tumblr back.
Kathleen Illustrated:
In the day, we have an action figure that's the hovering art director really is. He in here sometimes he creeps in here and he's like a bobblehead, and you hit him and he tells you, like, make it blue.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, my gosh, that's so funny. So that was the issue that I was seeing was this like it looked like a label was still happening. Don't want that. So I just took off that layer.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Which starts getting really interesting. So if you start to look at this and start thinking about how this might look on the other colors of tequila we have. Yeah, originally I really wanted to just keep it black and white. I think having a clear silver tequila blanco with a black label like that is really cool. And then I can just do a die cut sticker on there and then throw it on there easy. The wonky part that comes in is this little bit here when needing to photograph it and things like that. Like I said, it's kind of a pain to mask it. So imagine if I was like shooting the bottle and it's on its side. Then I need to warp it perfectly to make it look realistic or else it's going to kind of break.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You do it in dimension.
Alex Lazaris:
Unless I did it in dimension. Moral of the story dimension.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So Tim has an actual hovering art director doll and he just did it. And it says the 90s called and they want their drop shadows back. True.
Alex Lazaris:
Not wrong.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Not wrong.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome. Jason I got this mockup off of yellowimages.com. They have a lot of variations of these and lots of bottle mockups, too. So if you ever need like, packaging mockups, they have a pretty good source.
Kathleen Illustrated:
There you go.
Alex Lazaris:
And it seems like people have a hard time finding it, which I don't like using mockups that everybody has because then it feels like it's a mockup all the time.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally.
Alex Lazaris:
But even just thinking like, maybe we start bringing some color in. I'm going to duplicate the background image just so I have one that's white so I can just toggle it really quickly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
Thinking about doing maybe a little bit more like a vibrant color. Everybody's doing this. Blue reminds me of absolute does now. Dang it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Darn it. Bunko.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, but even like a red. And there was like a project that I saw yesterday that's pretty new on Behance, which is super fun. So great thing about Behance is any appreciations you have, just go into the appreciations tab so you can always go back and see the ones that you have appreciated.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, I use it all the time.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's so good. Maybe I collected it, I don't know. I did it on my phone, I think.
Kathleen Illustrated:
No, see all of your favorites. Now I know secret.
Alex Lazaris:
You can also see other people's, like packaging favorites.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
No, never mind. This one's really cool though. I love the illustration.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So much detail and that cool.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Vignette, how it breaks the edge. That's awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, lots of really goodies what is that?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Gin? Nice. Blissful hints of elder flour.
Alex Lazaris:
The secret recipe. Yeah, it's sweet. Anyways, so I don't have it, but I have it on my phone. So I'll bring it in for tomorrow. But they did such a good job of having like a pretty simple, clean label and then using pops of colors in the collateral. So if you're shooting, you're like, okay, this is a brand for tequila. Here's the bottle. And then here's some print offs. And I can just print them off on my printer, throw them in there, make a business card or two, and then shoot it all together. That way everybody kind of can see it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's awesome. Oh, people are saying like, a coral orange, that's cool too.
Alex Lazaris:
There's a lot of things you can do with it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Stefan says, now I love it.
Alex Lazaris:
Now I love it. Yeah, it's just cool to see sometimes not on a white background, you can really get a better sense of what the brand is doing. And you can kind of see like, it kind of works with everything the way it is right now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally.
Alex Lazaris:
But then as soon as you start incorporating a different color tequila, it's going to get a little more interesting.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right. And the labels are going to look a little different because it's going to have the different names not just be blanco.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. So now I need to figure out how I am going to do the back label because we have to have the government warning on there.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes.
Alex Lazaris:
And so the weird part, so I'm just going to mock up really quickly inside of here what might be in the background, like what you might be seeing. So if I imagine just taking a square if I imagine taking a square instead of taking a square, just imagine.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It in your brain. Imagine it and then just let it go.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. Just throw this below the type and see what's happening. I'm wondering if I just want the bottle to be super minimal. And I don't like the idea of it just being like because you're going to see the bottle, because you're going to see the back label. Because it's clear.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right.
Alex Lazaris:
What I'm going to actually do is going to start incorporating some of these design elements in the background.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Heck yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this smart object and then I'm going to actually just going to apply oops, sorry. No, you're good. Gradient maps.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's down there, everybody's things.
Alex Lazaris:
So just even like simple thing like that. And then I'm going to take a solid color and then do a pass over. That where I change the opacity to normal, whatever. And then just change the opacity down.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool.
Alex Lazaris:
So what I did there with a gradient map isn't very much really, it just made the image black and white. But what you can do is you can start bringing the color into it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, interesting.
Alex Lazaris:
So double click the gradient stripes, whatever the light colors are on, the image will start adapting that. So if I wanted that light coral kind of concept. Could bring that in. Okay. Click okay up here.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Okay.
Alex Lazaris:
And then if I wanted to, all the darks in there could also go down into a darker blue, potentially. And then this is like what everybody's kind of started adapting after Spotify did a lot of it, but it still has so many great uses, and I might even want to texture this later. So then maybe it's half toned instead of distressed feeling, but you can kind of start imagining how the colors would live.
Kathleen Illustrated:
There you go. I'm going to post a link in Chat for a really easy duo tone process. It's basically what you brilliant just showed, but for later.
Alex Lazaris:
But I kind of like just like maybe a washed out version of the actual image itself. It's kind of interesting.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, I like that a lot. And it has that deserty feel because.
Alex Lazaris:
It still has the don't forget that the bottle have labeled panels for sizing. And you can do a single label and hide the government warning on the side if you're doing clear label the government warning on the side. Yeah. So, like, we were looking at the hiatus. Beautiful work that I think Lloyd and Lloyd did. Day one inspiration. Oh, here's the so this was the kind of the concept I had. I was like, this is really interesting how they use just a splash of color on top of a label that's pretty minimal. So you can kind of see that it's letter pressed or just pressed. It's, like embossed with this background pattern. And then it's got the small little size on the side with the type that talks about the agave and then boom, government warning, all kind of just keeping the bottle there. So that's really minimal. Really nicely done.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes.
Alex Lazaris:
But this hiatus bottle where they took the government label and the barcode and then just made little slivers of it and then bounced it around, I love that concept. I love the framing that they did. A lot of people in Chat yesterday on the critique were doing that kind of framing idea with just laying out everything. Now you can kind of see how that might incorporate into your next project. Yeah, but man, the gifts on this are just gorgeous. This bottle is so nice. Yeah, like all that good stuff.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally. Someone was wondering again where'd you get the mockup yellow?
Alex Lazaris:
Yellowimages.com.
Kathleen Illustrated:
There you go.
Alex Lazaris:
Yes. That's the mockup place.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Check it out. And Chat, that's a good reminder that we're going to be doing feedback in 28 minutes. So if you're watching the Daily Creative Challenge earlier with Val, we are making memes today. So adding yes. Maymaith we're adding text to images to make some sort of joke or meme. Check it out on Discord if you want to see some inspiration. Bit Lypsdiscord, capital P, capital S. And we're going to be checking out your mimis in 27 minutes, so go get those uploaded. Yeah. People are really loving the inspo that you're showing.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, the mockups are fun. Or, like, those inspiration pieces are gorgeous. I'm a big fan of showing collateral pieces working together so that just that bottle mockup that they did with this. Just so lovely. You're starting to see the whole system working together and not just like one off pieces, which I think is a great way to sell a concept to a client. Really, the goal is to always make it as tangible as possible so that they can see it in an environment.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Studio. You can check out tons of websites to get good mockups. Adobe stock does have a lot of mockups. You can search by template. That's what they're called on there. Some of them are free, some of them you can license with credits. You can go check it out there. But I'm sure other people have good recommendations for mockup sites as well. I would also recommend making your own mockups since you now know about smart objects.
Alex Lazaris:
Smart objects are amazing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You can make your own, and no one else will have it.
Alex Lazaris:
That's the best way to do it. Right. Especially contextualize things. Right. Like if I was, say, presenting a skateboard project to a client, I might go to the skate park and photograph somebody skating or holding a skateboard. And then I could go back home and then build out my masks and cover the skateboard and photograph it, edit it, put my graphics in there and make it look as real as possible.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Suddenly it's real.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. I had a client who started tearing up on our call because he could finally see whenever you can place their branding on a building or see the signage, he's like, this makes sense. Now my business is coming to fruition. Which is awesome. That's such a wonderful feeling you can have as a designer. It's like you're empowering people and making everybody feel good.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. And you have to keep in mind that the people you're working with don't think the same way that you do a lot of the time. So they might actually need to see that visual before things really start clicking and moving in their minds.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely. Oh, no. Got stuck.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yikes.
Alex Lazaris:
Cool. So we're starting to see how that could work. Not sold on it yet, but it's potential.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. And we're still going with the impression that the images you see would be printed on the backside of the back label or would they be right behind us?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, so the idea and I could separate the layers out a little bit more so it doesn't feel like it's right now. The mockup feels one directional where you're seeing it flat, and they're both kind of curving the same way. I can essentially reverse that where it goes behind the bottle a little bit more. You see a little bit more of the contrast in there, rather than just like very flat, very on top. Of each OOH.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Justin's saying that what he's discovered with working with clients in wine, beer and spirits is that texture is a very key element to show when designing a label and a concept.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, that I mean, it makes it feel more real. Right. I just did a vodka project and I went to do some test prints to photograph it for the client and stuff, but then I got a really just flat print because it was digital and it was fine for a print shop, but it wasn't that really nice textured, premium feel that everybody has in the liquor business. So if you spend the time and effort up front, it'll really help kind of sell the concept. Why is the shadow still weird?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Get out of here.
Alex Lazaris:
Get out of here. Shadows. I don't like that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, some mockups have so many options.
Alex Lazaris:
And it's like I don't even know.
Kathleen Illustrated:
What to turn off.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. But we could almost just say it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
People are saying that they liked the simple black background with the white type, or the white type with the black, or the black type with the white background, too.
Alex Lazaris:
Interesting.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Keep it real simple.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. I almost like the idea of not having anything else going on. Justin our resident expert. Do you know if I could just do the government warning sticker in transparent sticker? Because if I could do that, then just kind of hide it in the barcode on the side and then have it feel a little bit less invasive. I don't like the idea of having to force a background. Plus I just did a background like that for the vodka project.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So I don't really want to repeat and be like a one trick pony where I was doing the same thing over and over and over.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right. Ryan says there's some really great papers out there for labeling.
Alex Lazaris:
That's true.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Albert's saying, where's the SoBro brand?
Alex Lazaris:
SoBro?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, no. Sorbo, sorry. Sorbo, yeah, this is missing the Sorbo name.
Alex Lazaris:
So I kind of like the idea of not making it about the Sorbo brand, but more of just like maybe. This is a company that has several different tequila brands. It's like a house, but they are the ones distilling it. And you have to represent who is bottling and distilling it. And you also have to have for tequila, you have to have a Nom number, which is I don't know what it stands for, but it's the government appointed Mexican approval thing for who's batching it and everything gotcha. So you have to have a lot of that stuff already in there and you can do that in the back label. So I found out in Wine and Justin, you can correct me if I'm wrong. Readable. Readable is fine.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Make it readable. Yeah, make it work.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. So the wine labels, a lot of the times you have to have all the information about the vineyard and the wine type but the front label can often be the back. But the graphic can be on the back. But shops are always going to turn it for the really cool graphic. There's like a front and a back of a bottle. But what it is can be very up to interpretation.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's fun.
Alex Lazaris:
Fact.
Kathleen Illustrated:
P Morley says wait, what? I finally get to watch Adobe live. Live? But it's 04:00 a.m In Indonesia.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You need to go to sleep. P Morley, thank you for hanging out with us live, though. That's awesome. Hello.
Alex Lazaris:
So I've got the blanco in here. Now I've got the reposado.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Let's see how it goes.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, man. I'm doing that whole thing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Where do you hold shift? Do you not? I don't know.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm just like, okay, hold alt and be good. And then I'm going to start messing with the color on it. Sweet.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Because it's going to be a different color liquid.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's a different color liquid. I want to see what the color actually does, so I want to actually just bring in the actual photo.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Your mockup.
Alex Lazaris:
My mockup working files. It's always good whenever you are so organized, but you don't know where you're putting yikes. Here. I'm just going to just do an auto adjustment. There we go. Make the whites a little bit more white on a contrast. Do all of them. There we go. I'm not photographing I'm not shooting light into it or anything right now, so it's fine. But it should give me a good understanding of the liquid color. Maybe go for the lighter edge of it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
All right, let's see how this looks.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, no. Wrong button.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Tim says that he's very proud of his meme, and he's going to post it in a few minutes.
Alex Lazaris:
Yes. I can't wait to see it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Can't wait. You got 19 minutes, everybody. Get those posted. We're going to be looking at your submissions in the design feedback channel on Discord. Get them uploaded. I'm seeing some good dogs.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. Two cute dogs so far in the chat.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Woohoo. Yeah. Tim, he's encouraging everyone to post. Post your memes?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, post them. This is probably, like, one of the least scary ways of getting involved. So if you've never been involved with posting your work or showing it, I think this is a perfect opportunity to show what you're capable of or just have fun with it. Right?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Memes are nobody's judging an aesthetic of a meme. It's fun. It's good to use the tools and just learn how to lay out. Type impact font is your best friend.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally.
Alex Lazaris:
So yeah, just work with it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
White font with a black background or a black stroke. Boom. Dusty blue.
Alex Lazaris:
Dusty blue. I mean, there's going to be a lot of variables within that, so I could probably even just what I could do is take the layer and then add a gradient. Whoop.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Whoop.
Alex Lazaris:
I don't know why my Layers tab got all weird.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, it really decided to do something.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Did I press something to change? Oh, my goodness.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wow. Okay.
Alex Lazaris:
Photoshop. You're getting weird.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Now. It's like, let me flex.
Alex Lazaris:
Weird.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Flex. Okay, Photoshop.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, whatever. I was actually just trying to get it between us more. Thanks, Photoshop.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. I'll move this. We're good to go.
Alex Lazaris:
Perfect. So then I'm going to grab that bottle. Actually, maybe let's just see if I can grab this guy, throw it in just to see what the colors are doing in a little bit more live environment.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I'm excited to see how you do this, mocking up on your own image.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, I'm not going to mock it up fully, but I just want to.
Kathleen Illustrated:
See how it looks on the color.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, like the colors, if we're going to stay a little bit more dusty, but there's a lot of variations. When you're looking at a not clear liquor, there's, like, more browns and cream colors than just, like, what a solid color would look like.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right.
Alex Lazaris:
Transform. Enhance, enhance. So good. Did you watch that whole enhanced video? There's a great video, I think it's like, eight minutes long of people just being like, enhance, and they're like, security cameras zooming in all the way across streets and stuff.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I love it.
Alex Lazaris:
I can bring it into Photoshop and enhance, enhance, enhance.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Fireball.
Alex Lazaris:
To do live preview of what's happening. See kind of what it seems like a darker color might work the best.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right.
Alex Lazaris:
Especially for this medium kind of color.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, it's almost, like, perfectly 50% yellow.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Brown.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Let's see. Let's just try a couple of different versions, see which ones we like the most.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool. That quick. Cover over color overlay technique to get those live previews.
Alex Lazaris:
Like you said, it's awesome that way. Feels really nice. Especially with the smart objects because you're not having alias issues or anything like that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Interesting chat. What do you think? What colors are you thinking? That would go well with this kind of, like, tawny mustardy color.
Alex Lazaris:
The red idea is kind of nice, too.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Like highly saturated, but darker value.
Alex Lazaris:
Blood red.
Kathleen Illustrated:
The blood of our agave. What?
Alex Lazaris:
That got aggressive quick.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, says the person who doesn't know what color agave is.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Is there red agave?
Alex Lazaris:
I mean, it's blue agave. Why is it giving us this beautiful golden color? Makes no sense.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Tim says hot pink. Always hot pink.
Alex Lazaris:
This almost has, like, a tita's vodka feel right now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Which is kind of fun. Yeah. I'm wondering I want the marketing collateral to be much more like, who. Came a long way since yesterday. I love it. Thank you, Sam. Yeah, there's a lot of I mean, with any good creative project or start of any project, there's going to be, like, moments of just trying things and lots of different options and explorations and things to work through. You just got to kind of push through it and keep plugging away at it. And sometimes you got to take a little break.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
No. Sorbo's still alive. It's just not like the primary brand. I knew that I didn't want to focus on the brand name because especially being a new tequila company, nobody's going to be invested to it unless we're going to do a bunch of stuff. Mezcal sangria.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Sounds interesting.
Alex Lazaris:
Sounds smoky and fruity and refreshing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Kind of like a Bloody Mary, but different. Ariana says, I like the red tones. Blanca says, a metallic gold foil on the kind of brown liquid. That'd be interesting.
Alex Lazaris:
That would be interesting. I feel like there might not be enough contrast on that, though. But I could see the metallic gold working really well on the clear one, the clear version of it. I kind of want to try a version that gets to be a little bit more, like maybe feels a little bit more.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Maybe not, but maybe. Who's to say?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. I don't know. The more vibrant pastely stuff isn't really working on this kind of color.
Kathleen Illustrated:
No, that color is really tough because it automatically has that kind of aged feel.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
But maybe you can make it just totally different. Like the bright yellow. That's cool.
Alex Lazaris:
The yellow kind of is starting to.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Work because they're similar. Color family.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. Get a nice little banana feel going.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. We magically moved to the other side of the screen. The wizard is back. Cactus green. Cactus green can be a thing or a sandy highlight.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, no, I lost my yellow.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Dang it. Don't worry, you got this.
Alex Lazaris:
No pressure, Chat. No pressure. Yeah. Like this kind of nice that way.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Interesting. What do we think, Chat? Do we like the yellow?
Alex Lazaris:
Do you? Do you?
Kathleen Illustrated:
I do.
Alex Lazaris:
It's like Tim, your meme is perfect. I cannot wait to see Tim's meme.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I'm going to take a sneak peek. But you're not allowed to look.
Alex Lazaris:
Okay, I'm not looking. Let's see here. So then even I'm going to move to the darker color. Whiskey or tequila now I keep wanting to call it whiskey. OOH, that's really nice. It looks like a honey.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Almost like a what's that? Meh. Honey beer. What's that called? Honey wine.
Alex Lazaris:
I mean oh, the mead. Mead. Yep. Beat me.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I was like, mezcal. No, mezcal. Hey, Tim, where's your meme? I'm missing it. Darn it. I feel like I'm getting trolled. Oh, it's a meme of me.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, no.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yay. Gold star. Oh, interesting.
Alex Lazaris:
I just made a quick group. I'm going to make another group for the niejo, which is this color. Now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
People are like, mead, mead.
Alex Lazaris:
Everything's fine.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Quick eyeball break. Yeah, this kind of looks like there you go.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Not it is grapefruit kombucha, I promise. Chat, you have eleven and a half minutes.
Alex Lazaris:
No pressure.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I'm really excited to look at memes for like, 20 minutes straight.
Alex Lazaris:
Just wanted to see it for scale, but.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You got it.
Alex Lazaris:
Photoshop always being set on colors in RGB, and it changes the time. Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I mean, that looks cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, I really like the sizing of it now. It feels really nice. And I think this would work really well as, like, the decal or not decal. But die cut stickers will work really well with that. Easy for me to place on there and again, if I'm awful a little bit when I'm building the bottle itself, it's going to be fine. Yeah, totally. And the great thing about Die Cut Stickers is I can just order a bunch of different colors and see what actually looks good with the bottle, and then as soon as I start shooting, it can color adjust if I need to cheat a little bit.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So Photoshop's for Photoshop and lightroom and all those magical tricks.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So true. So if you want to see Tim's meme, it is in the design feedback channel on Discord, which is where we're going to be looking when we do the design feedback in ten and a half minutes. So you are making memes you're adding text to an image to make some sort of joke. Be a funny person. Make us laugh. Whoever makes us laugh the hardest oh, my goodness. Wins. No pressure. They're all going to be funny, though, I'm sure.
Alex Lazaris:
I cannot wait. I've never been so excited to critique anything but memes. I love helping mentor people and working with people on whatever project they have, but I've never had the opportunity to give feedback on a meme.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, it's like, do you troll them when you're giving feedback? I don't know.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm excited to see people make this their professional career.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Defend their meme craftsmanship.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's awesome. Yeah. Everyone come join us on Discord. It's bit ly slash PS discord. And that's where we're going to be doing the Daily Challenges every day. So Val is running the Daily Creative Challenge for the next week and a half. Yes. Join us here so there'll be a new challenge every day. You can check that out in the Daily Challenge tab or the channel.
Alex Lazaris:
I can't. Look, I'm sorry.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I'm not.
Alex Lazaris:
This is my issue with the laptop and big mockups slow if you don't save them and then refresh your photoshop. If you have a laptop with very little Ram, you're going to have to shut things down or else it doesn't want to save.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Chugga, chugga, chugga, chugger.
Alex Lazaris:
So we'll see how this goes.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Okay, we get the picture.
Alex Lazaris:
If not, we'll just jazz hands everything. Actually, it works. So let's bring back in the niejo color.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Start seeing how we can adapt.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So many layers.
Alex Lazaris:
So many layers. I didn't label any of them.
Kathleen Illustrated:
TADA, would you recommend labeling your layers?
Alex Lazaris:
Professionally, of course, label your layers, but realistically, I don't. I do. However, if I'm going to hand off the files, I go back through and I label everything.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Good.
Alex Lazaris:
Because there's nothing worse than seeing, like, what I have right now. If I handed this off to Kathleen, she's like, vector, smart object, vector, smart object, vector smart object. And then layer four, five. Like, it doesn't help.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool. Cool. Thanks, Alex.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Really nice working with you.
Alex Lazaris:
Never working with you again.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oopsies, jazzy.
Alex Lazaris:
Jazzy.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. Man, that banana.
Alex Lazaris:
The bananas feel so good. It just feels really nice.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Somebody was saying that this would definitely stand out on the shelf.
Alex Lazaris:
That's the goal. Yeah, that is the absolute goal.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally. Yeah, Albert. It is PS with capital P, capital S. Lowercase discord. I know it's case sensitive. It kind of stinks, but you got it. Thank you, Tim. Oh, that like minty color.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Maybe I might bring it a little bit more into the yellow again.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, it's like almost white.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, just that maybe. I was always bashing the parchment color paper. We're not going to do the parchment paper thing, the off white color. But I feel like it's kind of the injejo is a little bit more smoky than the rest of the tequilas. And I feel like if I went the whole sorority neon color stuff, it's going to feel way too just off. You're not going to be like, oh, that makes sense. That doesn't feel like a good continuation of the flavors profile that's going to be in the actual drink.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And it's going to feel very branded towards a specific group.
Alex Lazaris:
Correct.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. And that's not really what you're targeting right now.
Alex Lazaris:
No, not at all. I want it to be friendly to everybody. So then maybe just having it where the middle ground has that more so you go from like, darker to lighter with the type as the bottle itself becomes a little bit more dark and rich. Honey colored.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Honey colored, christina says. Did he design that type?
Alex Lazaris:
Parts of it, yeah, I would say.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You designed that not the type.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Yeah, we did the whole type and we started with TT trailers, which is kind of imagine just this. This is the default typeface.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wow. It's come so far.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's changed a lot and then started messing with it and pulling it into a bunch of different iterations. Just seeing how everything would kind of fit. I wish reposado didn't have so many letters. I'm going to have to talk to someone. Everybody in Spanish and change the letters so we can have a little bit more balance in the type.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Maybe you just take out like three of the vowels.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. So the other earlier I had oh, did you? I forgot another o. And I was like, oh, man, this is cool. This is starting to work. And then I realized I didn't have and then I had to reconfigure everything. But that's fine. That's part of the process. Yay. He uploaded it. Alexandra uploaded a meme.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
It's great.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Can't wait to there's a lot for us to scroll through right now.
Alex Lazaris:
There's so much yeesh. I should bring in the, like, 100% agave bit, though, to the brand of the label so that everybody knows.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. It's a good stuff.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Otherwise they're going to have a hard time wanting to buy it. Like, oh, this is cool, but I really don't want to hang over.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Right. So to go over again quickly, like, who you're kind of marketing towards it's to the people that might have had a bad experience with cheap tequila.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
As a younger human.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. They don't want to have a hangover again. They don't want to get sick like they might have been in the past. So making sure that the blue agave is in there to let them know that they're safe.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's a good stuff. Yeah. And it's for sipping.
Alex Lazaris:
It's for sipping.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Sipping.
Alex Lazaris:
Ideally, in a perfect world, they'll be fine.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Unless they're sipping for a very long time.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. One prolonged sip. People are still talking about Kevin Sorbo, the 90s Hercules.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I mean, he could be the backer of the brand. Kevin Sorbo. Sorbo tequila. There you go. Four minutes chat. Our timer has turned red, so it's time to rush and worry.
Alex Lazaris:
Lots of worrying, lots of stress.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Worry about your memes.
Alex Lazaris:
Start at the middle of your week with lots of stress.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's important. I'm trying to figure out where Val left off on her feedback, and I think, I don't know. Going to try and figure that out right now. So I don't want to relook at ones that she's already looked at because there's so many good.
Alex Lazaris:
Just oh, wow. Ashley just said she Adobe captured the type and found some somewhat similar fonts.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, cool.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome. Do you know capture the app, the mobile phone app? Once upon a time, I used it, I think, way back in the day, but I haven't used that was when they only focused on.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Color.
Alex Lazaris:
Can you capture type now, I'm assuming? Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So you can look at a signpost and hold it up, and it'll pull up a bunch of fonts that are available on Adobe, fonts that are similar, or if that literal one is available.
Alex Lazaris:
That's cool.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. It does a million other things too. You can create brushes in there. You can create patterns, like material patterns for 3D objects.
Alex Lazaris:
Wow.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Do vector shapes. It's very cool.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm baffled right now. That's incredible.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. You can make brushes for Photoshop sketch and draw, like, Illustrator brushes. It's awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Crazy. I didn't even think about that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And it's free.
Alex Lazaris:
And it's free, which is the best.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. How much is it? Nothing.
Alex Lazaris:
Even if you don't have a Creative.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cloud account, it's free. But if you have Creative Cloud, then you can have it talk to your library. Yeah. So you could capture, say, open an Illustrator, and Illustrator will just pop open on your computer.
Alex Lazaris:
Wow. That's incredible.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's very cool.
Alex Lazaris:
We're kind of here with the 100% blue agave. I don't know if I really love that. I feel like it does need to be in there a bit somewhere, but then I feel like it's competing with the actual logo. So.
Kathleen Illustrated:
We'Ll see. We'll see. Samantha says so much good type going on this week.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. Distribute.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, man. The distribute buttons are my favorite thing ever.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's like instant gratification.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's fantastic.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, yeah. Ryan totally. You can pull color combinations from real life scenes.
Alex Lazaris:
I used to. Not used to. When I did use Capture, I was on the plane and we were passing over an incredible sunset, and it was like, boom. Clicked it. And then it pulled the like you could kind of tap and then add the three bubbles. The three bubbles on there. And that was brilliant. Such a good feature.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It balances it for you so it picks, like, the good values, good saturations. It's awesome. Yeah. Ryan you can image trace anything. It does a really good job, too. Pretty powerful.
Alex Lazaris:
Did capture take over? They had that Illustrator app, too, for a while.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Illustrator Draw. It's a drawing.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, the drawing app. But then a drawing app. They also had the ability to capture and, like, vector trace things. Right.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Maybe that's capture.
Alex Lazaris:
Here we go.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Scientifically speaking.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. You know you know what's up. 30 seconds, everybody.
Alex Lazaris:
30 seconds.
Kathleen Illustrated:
We'll hop over to discord. We will look at some memes.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm furiously clicking just like you guys are at home.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Click your memes.
Alex Lazaris:
Click your memes.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I think I'm probably going to start the review from when Val's stream ended. So after 12:00 P.m.. Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
Man. The type looks so nice when it's the numbers in this typeface are so nice.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I like the blue, the B in the blue.
Alex Lazaris:
The blues, the B, and the blue. I'm just going to make up my own words.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Blue.
Alex Lazaris:
Ivan Castro's lettering. Interesting.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. Okay, so how do we feel? We got two things mocked up.
Alex Lazaris:
We got two things mocked up. We have a good kind of concept. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to get a darker alcohol set as well, so you can see that tomorrow. And I'll have that shown up. And then tomorrow we'll do more collateral and start showing how I would probably present this stuff to a client.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Awesome. Cool. So that's going to happen tomorrow. So we're done with designing for now, and we're going to jump over to the feedback portion of this. So if you don't know, we're going to be reviewing the daily creative challenges from today, which is to create a meme. Just putting text on an image, doing a little bit of graphic designing in a fun way. So I'm looking at the design feedback channel on Discord. That's where you're going to need to post your work. And if we don't get to it, still post it because people are obviously in here giving feedback as. Well. All right, so we have the meme challenge complete when everything seems to get in your way. Is this person going to trip over this log? Is that the joke?
Alex Lazaris:
I don't know. I don't know. He's powered off of vape juice, right?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Does look like he's really hitting the vape. Cool. All right, so here's the Avengers meme from DC gal need to get away.
Alex Lazaris:
That's pretty good.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. Are you an Avengers fan?
Alex Lazaris:
Yes. I'm excited to see the final endgame. I haven't seen it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Is it.
Alex Lazaris:
Released, like, this week or something? Endgame? Somebody knows that I don't. Not the person I would have loved to see the need to get away. Meme with the dissolve effect from oh, the Greek. And me saying thanos. Thanos. Whatever. It's fine.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It can be whatever you want.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
All right. Madeline says waiting for all the memes.
Alex Lazaris:
I love just pulling the Adobe stock image and not paying for it. Part of it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's great.
Alex Lazaris:
That makes the memes so much better, because to me memes are they're not supposed to be $400 photo with text over?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right? This adds to the memeness.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
For sure. Philip says get some me. Life crushing it.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, my God. You just made me really want s'mores.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. You made me want to be really successful in life and eat a s'more.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's awesome. Is that really you, Philip?
Alex Lazaris:
That's funny.
Kathleen Illustrated:
All right. Trixie says doing nothing is hard. You never know when you're aww. It's like an inspirational poster, but just.
Alex Lazaris:
The hang in there, cat.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So cute. You get an emoji. I'm adding my little emoji to all the ones that we look at. All right. Adobe meme day. Me. Show me the way. Oh, my gosh.
Alex Lazaris:
Yes.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I was going to say, you know that one? That's awesome. From Zdon.
Alex Lazaris:
What is the oh, that's the Winnie the Pooh high definition meme thing. So good. The high definition meme train is so good. I love the pikachu one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. All right. I hate love it. I love this one the most so far. Use photoshop to draw. Use Photoshop to edit, Photos to create an event promo to create memes.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, there you go.
Kathleen Illustrated:
The true meaning of photoshop.
Alex Lazaris:
And if you level up and use the Photoshop app on your phone, is that still a thing?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Photoshop for iPads coming in 2019 this.
Alex Lazaris:
Year, so, like, there needs to be a dab at the end of that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And fireworks coming out of my hand. This actually happened to me. Let's take an engagement pic. I'm a fart.
Alex Lazaris:
Real poor Gus Gus.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Excuse me. No, that's okay. Anyways, Cindy says do it for the people who want you to see you fail. This isn't much of a meme and.
Alex Lazaris:
More of a I'm a boss a motivational poster.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Heck yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
It's even got the script font and the drop shadow. Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. Cindy giving you an emoji. All right, mondo me before Photoshop. Now after photoshop.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, my God.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
Reminds me of those. Never mind. Yes. Great. That's what I do to all my photos, too.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Same six pack filter.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
When only the human will do. Oh, my. Look at that.
Alex Lazaris:
I know.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wow. Oh, yeah. In the way of the cute paws. All right, Madeline, join the PS daily challenge. Learn some epic new skills. Then make memes.
Alex Lazaris:
Then make memes.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So, if you couldn't tell, this challenge is a little bit of a meme in itself.
Alex Lazaris:
That's pretty good. Yes.
Kathleen Illustrated:
The favorite. Extra points.
Alex Lazaris:
Well done. That was my favorite one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You win, Deanne.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Just one last change. Pretty much.
Alex Lazaris:
We almost there.
Kathleen Illustrated:
In your working with your studio, do you designate how many changes the client can do?
Alex Lazaris:
No, I stopped doing fixed fee rates for projects. Typically, we have such ongoing big projects with clients, we pretty much work with them from anywhere from three to eight months.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Whoa.
Alex Lazaris:
So we have ongoing relationships. So it's always time based. And we're there to empower our clients, not to dictate what you can and cannot get. So just knowing that they're, like, if they want changes, they know up front that it's going to cost them more. So it's great. We're happy to make those changes and help them. A lot of copy changes. Right. So get them to get closer to their final.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right? Right. Cool. It's a very diplomatic way of describing it. All right, here we go. Star Wars Episode episode Nine directed by William Shatner What?
Alex Lazaris:
Where is Val? I can hear the force being disturbed already.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Feel her energy in the other room.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Clients.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. That's a good one. I was going to cry, but it's fine.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Why cry when you can do a thumbs up?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, exactly.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, boy.
Alex Lazaris:
Look at that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's real high up. Hope you survived.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Diavo.
Alex Lazaris:
The next photo needs to be like an oxygen tank.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. Right. Photoshopped on Kelsey. When you successfully follow voodoo Val's online class and suddenly have a photoshop skills you always wanted but never thought you would have time to learn, wow.
Alex Lazaris:
Like making memes. Always wanted to know how to do that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
My life dream completes. All right, CME. Thinking about looking at what others make and watching the live streams without actually participating should be enough. Shia, just do it.
Alex Lazaris:
Do it. Did you do the vectoring yourself on that or was it somebody else's?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Looks like a live trace.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, like you take that and live trace in illustrator.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nicely done. Please participate. We're glad to have you. Cool. We have one from yesterday. I've had enough of the dark side. Take me to the light.
Alex Lazaris:
That's so great. Lol I remember seeing a bunch of photographers making super realistic photos with the action figures and lighting firecrackers in the background and shooting it to make it look like lasers are coming in.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool. But it's just an action figure.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, just a series of action figures. Just like running in the mud.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
Super cool.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Very cool. Nice job. Seatbeck. Let's see.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, my gosh. This is such an old meme. I love it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. What movie was this even from?
Alex Lazaris:
It was the Sugar Mountain or Candy Mountain or something. Right? Something with mountain. And he was an alien, right?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Escape from whatever mountain.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, that thing, I think, right?
Kathleen Illustrated:
I think you're right.
Alex Lazaris:
Chat will know.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, Chat always knows me every day. So excited about the live stream.
Alex Lazaris:
More huskies.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Is this a little you got us extra points.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
All right, James.
Alex Lazaris:
Which mountain? There you go. Thank you, Samantha.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Okay, let's scroll on.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, so many memes. Yeah, on it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. So we already looked at that one.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nicely done. Thanks for posting your Behance link so we can check out your profile. This meme is dear to my heart. Yep. Save the climate, save the world.
Alex Lazaris:
There you go.
Kathleen Illustrated:
There you go. Not quite a meme.
Alex Lazaris:
More of just a call to action.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I should say fur real.
Alex Lazaris:
Fur Real would be a really good one. That's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Looks like a little bear.
Alex Lazaris:
I know.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Fuck you. Oh, I forgot to give an emoji on the line.
Alex Lazaris:
I like that. This has become like a dog rating and meme rating.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. I really like exercise would date this dog.
Alex Lazaris:
It's like, tender for dogs.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Hello, darkness.
Alex Lazaris:
My old friend, the broody cat. So good.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Very melancholic. True. Madeline. Nice. I have to make what? Oh, my gosh.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, my goodness.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Spooky. Who are your mentors? Some nightmare fuel?
Alex Lazaris:
Ryan, I'm not even mad. I'm just intrigued.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes, accurate. Saving the last file. Version three ultimate times two. Real final version. Edit Trogdor Luya I know. Trogdor.
Alex Lazaris:
My goodness.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I wish it said Trogdor.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, I think the site's still live. You can play the game real time now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
My kind of dates.
Alex Lazaris:
Wow. Don't forget to save the dates.
Kathleen Illustrated:
All right. Timothy already has a ton of axolotl memes.
Alex Lazaris:
Holy smokes.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Everyone go check these out. There's multiple batches of them.
Alex Lazaris:
Holy smokes. Wow. This is incredible. Did you do a batch export with some CSV of content and just throw them in there? That'd be incredible.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Like a spreadsheet.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. This is how you do business cards.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Amazing.
Alex Lazaris:
You should be teaching. This is incredible.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, wait, so they're for or created by their daughter Naomi.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, wow.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Using photoshop's variables and data set features. You're amazing, Timothy.
Alex Lazaris:
Look at that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's very all right. Oh, here's the one for me. Railway comic sand. I'm so pleased with myself.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Do I really make these faces? I'm not surprised.
Alex Lazaris:
That's all from today's. So good.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, Tim, that's amazing.
Alex Lazaris:
I would love to see what you were looking at on the screen. That honey mustard color you had, Alex, is awful.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I think people were talking about they didn't like cats. How dare you?
Alex Lazaris:
That makes sense.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Nice unit. Order.
Alex Lazaris:
Order. Nice. That brings in all the things that Val was teaching.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes. Let's see. Me, social conditioning, living in authenticity.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Check it out. No mind, no problem. Cool. You have a bunch of them.
Alex Lazaris:
Can I have cheeseburger? The cheeseburger meme, man, I miss it.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes, I eat it. A butters. Where do we park again? Nice. Lots of superhero fans out here.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, super relevant. With all the things happening in the superwoman just world right now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I have to refine my designs, learn drawing, and make 3D design. Don't be stupid. Make memes.
Alex Lazaris:
There you go.
Kathleen Illustrated:
This is Val. We have decided that she is evil. Kermit.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. I was telling her that she needs to have that in the meme thing.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, our favorite guy buying your first image on Val's.
Alex Lazaris:
Laughing alongside of us right now, too. It's awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
She's just like, in the other room, just laughing by herself.
Alex Lazaris:
Buying your first image on Adobe stock and using it for a meme. Oh, my God. So good. Well done.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's like a very nuanced meme.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
It's amazing how's the last name of a major city are you from Egypt? Is your last name like, Cairo or something?
Alex Lazaris:
That's a good one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. That look you get when you ask a designer to make a meme. You know she wants to.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. And you did a great job, too.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Very true. But traft One was my favorite. Love it. Got a question with this one. Is there an easy way to make a grid in Photoshop? What is this?
Alex Lazaris:
Awesome.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So many good cats.
Alex Lazaris:
Do you have a tutorial link for that? For the framing thing? Because we saw a lot of framing bits yesterday.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, totally. You can watch the replays if you check out the replay tab from Jackie. I don't know what it is. I just put ketchup on it. Same.
Alex Lazaris:
What is that?
Kathleen Illustrated:
I don't know.
Alex Lazaris:
Which makes sense because he's putting ketchup on it like a cabbage with, like, meat on know?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Anyways, what's he watching? Some YouTube.
Alex Lazaris:
There's so much to dissect in that.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. What are you smiling about back there?
Alex Lazaris:
It's actually a sugar.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Right? Just subconscious just a bowl of sugar spinning around. All right. Oh, no. Do you like my cat Steam?
Alex Lazaris:
That's a good one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I don't like it. I'm a little freaked out by it.
Alex Lazaris:
It's a mask.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Who is this?
Alex Lazaris:
If you know where I can buy that outfit, let me know.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Like these little pod gloves. Oh, my gosh. Amazing. Why does not simply use Photoshop for graphic design? True. You should have made his face really tiny, too.
Alex Lazaris:
There you go.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, I love this one. Is this a meme software? Just Adobe in general. It's like acrobat. Sometimes I tell people I work at Adobe. They're like, oh, PDFs. Yeah, that's the one. When your CC student subscription is about to expire. Oh, no.
Alex Lazaris:
I wish I had student prices again.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. Are you still a student? I hope you can get another one.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, just keep that student email address for as long as you can.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So true. I still use mine.
Alex Lazaris:
I lost my password many, many years ago.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Mini moon.
Alex Lazaris:
I know.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Darn. This is a lie. Tomorrow at work. Doink. I did a design challenge today.
Alex Lazaris:
Woo.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Good. What was the subject? A meme challenge.
Alex Lazaris:
I'd be stoked if you were my employee. I would ask you to show me all of them so I can giggle with you.
Kathleen Illustrated:
We can hear Val cackling in the other room.
Alex Lazaris:
It's pretty epic.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, this is a nice take on a ha ha. It's like a pun. Just a visual pun. Is that what a meme?
Alex Lazaris:
It's like a dad joke incorporated. It's so good.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So true.
Alex Lazaris:
Misas. What?
Kathleen Illustrated:
I love the spin blur.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, the spin blur on that's perfect. Like you're playing into Vel's hands right now.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You're pandering for sure. Jean. What do you mean no treats?
Alex Lazaris:
I'm crying.
Kathleen Illustrated:
What do you mean? She's still laughing at the meme software before yoga. After yoga? Yes. Oh, do we just dab?
Alex Lazaris:
Okay, the next screenshot you got to.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Really just stretch it.
Alex Lazaris:
Got to hold it up. You can do the wind up too.
Kathleen Illustrated:
I've never wound up. Which way do you wind?
Alex Lazaris:
However you want. Whatever's comfortable, clockwise. Typically.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Do you do this?
Alex Lazaris:
You can do that. Or you're just dabbing on both sides? Since we're meming and everything?
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yes, since we are meme lords right now. All right, Scott Pelsky right there. I was just presenting this project.
Alex Lazaris:
There you go. That's awesome. That's a quick one.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Literally just spun that up. That's incredible.
Kathleen Illustrated:
That's awesome. It's hard to appreciate how OD some people can be, especially when you're OD. Aren't we all?
Alex Lazaris:
Samantha doesn't like the dabbing. Sorry, but we're meaning which one are.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You out of these?
Alex Lazaris:
Which 01:00 a.m. I yeah, I like the mustache guy on the right. He just looks confused while he's there and the rest look like they're about to eat the kid.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, this looks like his, like, third grade school post portrait.
Alex Lazaris:
And if I could grow mustache like that absolutely.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Would definitely shave your head and just have the mustache.
Alex Lazaris:
There's a twitch streamer named Sequisha who has the most luscious square mustache ever.
Kathleen Illustrated:
And a bald head.
Alex Lazaris:
No, he's got a really nice head too.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Got a whole nice head.
Alex Lazaris:
Nice head. It's going to be a weird thing to send him. You have a nice head, sir.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Do you know the guy? Oh, because your name is Zidan. Got you.
Alex Lazaris:
Nice. It looks like he's headbutting.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, exactly. Is he the one that bit the guy's ear? Is that someone else?
Alex Lazaris:
No, he headbutted the other soccer player.
Kathleen Illustrated:
How to select hair from complex backgrounds using photoshop. How to create memes.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Honestly, you don't need to know that. You just need to know how to.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Make memes select and mask it's easy.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Nice. All right, joj for clever meme ideas. Meme ideas. Oh, wow. You're really getting into it, aren't you?
Alex Lazaris:
Wow, I feel like I just got called out. I know. Unlabeled assets. What are you doing?
Kathleen Illustrated:
What time is it? Oh, that's what time it is. Cool. All right, everyone, those are all of the submissions that we have so far. So if you want to keep posting before you post on social media, get those uploaded and then people are just going to be in here giving feedback for the next forever. We're in here all the time. Voodoo says I met Sequisha last year. He's wonderful.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, he's got a great mustache.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, it's like all you can think about right now.
Alex Lazaris:
It's part of his brand. It's so like a staple. There's like a video game company that put his mustache in as a special item.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Oh, so accurate. Yeah, man. Cool. So if you want to check these out, go to bit lycapital P, capital S, discord. And then we have like five minutes left. So maybe we could talk about what you did yesterday, today and then what you're going to do tomorrow. Perfect.
Alex Lazaris:
So yesterday we started off with this typeface. Didn't really know where it could go, just had kind of endless possibilities. And we started whittling it down, starting to get a little bit more bouncy and a little bit vibrant, a little bit more energetic, playing with the type and just kind of breaking the rules and making our own rules and doing whatever we wanted, which is kind of fun. Started jumbling up the other type, trying to make it a little bit more consistent across all of the different types of bottles we had. And then, as you saw today, we started working in on the labels and trying to see how they could potentially look.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Wow, I really like that.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's starting to feel really nice. I'm going to play with the blue agave bit because I know it needs to be in there because that's such a selling point.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
But I feel like each one has a different spot that it could fit in. I feel like there might be an opportunity to lock up the blue agave in this little area here. A little bit of negative space, rather than feeling like everything has to be bottom tray of the bottle.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So each one, I think, has a little bit of area that we can play with. We've got niejo, we've got the reposado, which again, is a little bit more mustardy in there. And then I'll build out a let's see here. And then we got the blanco. And I like the idea of just having the straight blanco. So I'm going to save and then clear bottle, really separate on the shelf.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Magic.
Alex Lazaris:
Beach ball.
Kathleen Illustrated:
A party ball. Party ball for our tequila.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. Photoshop's getting all festive with us. Yeah. Whenever you're working with mockups and things, lots of smart objects and things like that. Files can get a little bit heavy, but it's always fun.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Cool. So simple.
Alex Lazaris:
It's simple. It's clean. Doing the decal on there, there's going to be a little bit I'm going to lock up the back label, side label and try to see what I can kind of show tomorrow. But tomorrow I want to have different versions of these bottles to show and then start showing collateral. So we kind of explored what it could look like if we threw some background images behind and just kind of helped reinforce the idea of the Blue Agave story behind it and showing the purity and the nature and all that good stuff. So we'll start messing with the collateral tomorrow, whether it's incorporating photographs or just doing color blocks, and start building it out to feel a little bit more like a Behance project. So maybe we'll even just start uploading things to behance. So you can kind of see how I approach. Here's a JPEG, here's PNGs, here's how I approach the grids using all those good things. I know you saw a little bit of it with Val yesterday on her little bit. So I think I'll build off of that with kind of this collateral stuff so that you at home whenever you're building out projects. Can see how I kind of portray things and explain it to clients.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah. So Alex does a really good job of laying out his Behance projects. They're super beautiful and tell the story really well.
Alex Lazaris:
Thank you.
Kathleen Illustrated:
So I think that'd be really helpful for people to see tomorrow. If you want to go check out his Behance, you can totally do that. Behance net Alex Lazaris. You can also click on his little face over here in the info tab and you can see how he kind of gets started. And I remember seeing this.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, that one. I was thinking about this last night when I remember you asking me yesterday if I was competitive. This still keeps me up at night.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Why?
Alex Lazaris:
Because I wanted to win so badly. So the Creative Jam project was a three hour competition where they give you a prompt and so you can kind of see the theme. This one was we all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories, some take us forward, they're called dreams. And you can kind of do whatever you want within that theme, but you have 3 hours to do it. And typically they do a team based approach, but they had an OD number of people. So then I volunteered to do it by myself. So my take on it was building my own beer brand in 3 hours and telling the story of how I think memories. You can kind of sip a beer and it'll take you back to that time where you had a good time with your friends and just those hops and the fragrances and all that stuff kind of transport you in 3 hours.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You did this.
Alex Lazaris:
So 3 Hours did this and I froze on the spot because there was like 400 people that I was presenting to at Creative South, and it was like, oh, no. And I was just like, I made a thing and I lost by like, two votes because I didn't tell a story. So tell your brand story.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Okay.
Alex Lazaris:
Tell the stories. It was a lot of fun, but I still wish that I won. It's fun, but all this stuff is a great learning experience, and you can always adapt and change and build off of it in the future.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, and you can hold on to that time that you were close to winning and you didn't and just kind.
Alex Lazaris:
Of be like and use that as fuel.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Totally. But that's crazy that you were working solo and you still got second place.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, but like, first loser doesn't count. Just kidding. A little bit competitive, guys.
Kathleen Illustrated:
You're like, so close.
Alex Lazaris:
It was fine. It was good. But it was a fun project.
Kathleen Illustrated:
Yeah, seems like it. Cool. So we'll be back tomorrow at twelve after Val does her daily creative challenge and Mel and Mel in the Morning do their awesome XD magic. So make sure you come back for that. Keep working on your daily creative challenges for your meme projects, and we'll see.
Alex Lazaris:
You want to see more memes?
Kathleen Illustrated:
More memes. Bye.
Alex Lazaris:
Bye.
