*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Kristy Campbell:
Hello.
Alex Lazaris:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another exciting Adobe Live stream. I am here with Christy Campbell from Pink Pony Creative. I am beyond excited to be getting into it today. Wherever you're tuning in from, make sure that you come over to Adobe Live so if you're on YouTube, we won't be able to read your chat, so come over to Adobe Live so we can read your chat and engage with you. Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Wherever you're tuning in from, if you're first time here, long time here. Thank you for coming. Make sure you type in Chat. Let us know where you're tuning in from. We love seeing all of our international friends with that. Christy, take it away. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Kristy Campbell:
Hey, guys. So thank you for having me here today. I'm so excited to be joining us live. So, basically, I am Christy Campbell. I'm from New Zealand. All the way over in New Zealand. I own a graphic and branding design studio in Auckland, New Zealand. And, yeah, I just create awesome graphics for everyone all over the world. So I'll just show you guys a little bit of my stuff. So this is just my website. So I've been designing for about eight years now. I did a degree in graphic design and animation, and I just do, like, a whole lot of mixture of things. So I do everything from branding. So I brand up really cool small businesses, do some really cool illustration work, and then I also do graphic design in general. So even stuff like this, where I created a really cool gradient map portfolio for a photographer in America. So just a whole range of stuff. Packaging, design, yeah, a bit of everything, really. You guys might know me from my Instagram, my TikTok. I'm sort of kind of well known for my artboard photography. Now, this is a bit of the stuff that I kind of put out there to the world and how I show my brands off. But, yeah, it's kind of the way that people have started to know me, which is really cool.
Alex Lazaris:
I love that. Your artboard photography is phenomenal and it's super inspiring to see and it's a great way of laying things out. I know on your website it says you started out essentially with 100 Day Challenge back in 2019. Can you kind of unpack that?
Kristy Campbell:
Yeah, for sure. So, basically, I started the challenge out. I was working for another business, and it was just a one brand business, so I was getting a little bit I wasn't using my full creative juices, so I really wanted to be inspired and get more creative. So I did this 100 day design challenge. And so I posted every day a new design for 100 days, obviously not thinking it would go anywhere. And then I just used Instagram as, like, a bit of a tool to keep myself accountable. And then I started getting some inquiries through Instagram. So I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. This might go somewhere. And then from there, I just decided maybe I should move it into a business. And that was about a year and a half ago. A little bit over a year and a half ago. And now I do it full time. I have a staff member and yeah, so it's going really well. Loving every minute of it. I feel so blessed that I get to work with just like, really cool businesses, from your sweet sheets and gelato businesses to beauty businesses, really cool beauty packaging, a whole lot of whole range of stuff. So I feel very blessed that I get to do all that.
Alex Lazaris:
I love it. Fergie in Chat says that, OMG. Love the name. Pink Pony creative.
Kristy Campbell:
Love the oh, thank you. I feel like people always ask me, where did the name come from? Because it is quite random and honestly, it's as simple. It comes down to the fact that I was a horse rider growing up and I loved horses and I also loved pink, so it kind of just stuck and I didn't think too much about it and it's worked out well.
Alex Lazaris:
Love it. So let's start talking about what we're going to be working on over the next two days.
Kristy Campbell:
So today we're doing some editorial design, and I really wanted to incorporate my love for illustrations because I do use a lot of those throughout all my work, whether they're hand drawn style stuff or vector illustrations that I draw on the computer. So we're going to use those and create a really cool Hawaiian brochure, but kind of a more modern Edge style brochure that's a little bit more fun and funky than your usual travel thing that you'll see when you kind of go to a country and want to see your top spots. So that's kind of what we're doing today. Yeah. And we're going to use a bit of InDesign, some Illustrator, and also some Photoshop.
Alex Lazaris:
Perfect. Love the multi application approach.
Kristy Campbell:
Perfect. There's a few there. Yeah, that's for sure. So we're going to use them all. All right, cool. So basically, I'll just jump right into it. So to start with, I've created this bit of like a bit of a skeleton, just a bit of a plan to move ahead with. We've got our plan laid out. It's going to be about 16 page booklet. I've got content here as well, and I know some of you guys would have been given a link to some assets and within that link you will find this copy. So if you want to join along, I'd love for you to give it a go and also play around with your own stuff, make it your own style, things like that. But we've got all of our copy here, so we're going to use just some headings and also some placeholder text to kind of build up the copy a bit and make it look like it's a brochure. Because obviously this is just a pattern project. This is not a real project, just a bit of fun. So to start with, yeah, I created the skeleton. Just a bit of a plan. We're going to have our title page, our front page going to be really graphic, beautiful. And then we're going to head into contents and that's going to be some kind of really big imagery. And then go into things like your snorkeling, your surfing, your view. And this is where all the pages and all the content comes into play. So, yeah, I've just created this set template to give us a bit of an idea about where to head and where to go to from here.
Alex Lazaris:
I love this. Wireframing things out is so powerful and so helpful when you're planning these types of things out. When you're wireframing this, how did you approach it? Did you already have content kind of in mind? Did you already kind of know? Did you start with wireframing it out first or did you leverage the content or copy first?
Kristy Campbell:
So what I actually started to do first is I went on to beehunts and I knocked my microphone there and I planned out a bit of a mood board, just of some kind of stuff that I'd really like to I was really inspired by this kind of stuff. I love just like that sort of edgy, little bit messy, but still really tidy in its nature. Loved all this kind of stuff as well, where we can see those illustrations coming in. So I got all this sort of stuff planned out, a bit of a mood that I wanted to create. And then from here I went ahead, did a bit of research and planned out my copy and kind of what I wanted to bring across and the kind of stuff that I wanted to have within this brochure. I love that. Yeah. And then from there, that's when I went into creating the layout, how it's going to work. And as a designer, I feel like things come so naturally as well. It's really hard to explain creativity. I think sometimes that people sort of ask your processes and things like that, but it's sort of a gut feel. And a gut feel like, this is the way I want to head. And I feel like most of the time, my first gut feel is the one that I'm always going to go with. So, yeah, and then I just planned it out. And then that's when I went on to start to create my hand drawn illustrations. So I've actually got them here, the pictures. So I actually drew these by hand, if you guys can see these. And then what I did from there, I scanned them in my phone and then uploaded them into my computer. So they basically just come through as a scanned PDF like this. And so I thought I'd show you guys today how I then converted these into vectors because it's quite an interesting process. So I'll just jump straight into it. So we'll pull this up into Photoshop and then from here, we're just using Photoshop to basically enhance the black lines. So we're going to go ahead and enhance the brightness and the contrast a bit to try and get rid of the sort of dusty spec and bring up the black a bit, just a tad, just so that we can see it a little bit more. We'll even try and do some auto toning and contrasting. See how that goes. It didn't bring it actually up too much.
Alex Lazaris:
You can do an adjustment layer for black and white and then you'll have a little bit more granular control as well.
Kristy Campbell:
Yeah, actually, I actually weirdly don't use adjustment layers that much. I probably should. And designers like the process are always all so different, for sure. I feel like it can be so different between them all. So we'll just save that. That'll probably be good enough for where we're going to go to here. Open up Illustrator. We'll just open up just like an a four page. So from here, this is when we're going to move our vectors or try and create our vectors from our scan document. So we'll just open this into Illustrator.
Alex Lazaris:
Dopegasm says, I'm so excited to learn as I design my first commissioned project.
Kristy Campbell:
Oh, I love that. That is so cool. The first commission. That's a big step, but always such a good step.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely great.
Kristy Campbell:
That's when you're when you're going into the world of freelancing. All right, so this is quite interesting because I start to expand and image trace my file, but obviously it's not very detailed here, so that's when I move into the image trace options, the tools, and then just going high color here will hopefully really increase that black and also get rid of the white a bit more. And it's really nice because you can kind of adjust it quite easily here as well. Sometimes it does take its sweet time.
Alex Lazaris:
Chat is oggling and loving your illustrations.
Kristy Campbell:
Oh, really? Oh, cool. Glad to hear.
Alex Lazaris:
Nice sketches. As much enthusiasm as possible.
Kristy Campbell:
Thank you very much. I feel like I really wanted to go for that edgy, really sketched style. So that's why they are quite messy. But honestly, I think if I try and do it too perfect, it doesn't even look that good. Anyway. I love Illustrator when it takes its time. Yeah, it's the one all right. Hopefully it'll hurry up. I've actually also sorted these illustrations out in another file so that we can easily just go and grab them after this. But I thought I'd love to show the process. So from here, I'm just going to change it to black and white as well, just to really bring that color that black out all right. So hopefully this works a bit faster. There we go. And you can kind of change the colors here to try and bring the black out even more. And then basically from here, once it's done rendering oh, there you go. That's looking pretty good. That's awesome. Yeah, that's when you can expand it and actually make all your illustrations into vectors, really, which is pretty cool. And then you can go in and delete all the white things like that. And then from here, it's actually one full vector. So you can make it any size you want, any color, and really play around with it. So what I've also done today in the Assets folder that you guys might have seen, you'll see a file called Illustrations. And this is where I've actually popped all the illustrations in there. So I want you guys to take this and have fun with it. They're all separate files now, so you can take these and blow them up, make them a different color, play around with them a bit, which is pretty cool.
Alex Lazaris:
This is huge. Love illustrations are so cute.
Kristy Campbell:
Oh, thank you. The little turtle, I love him. He's probably my favorite. Cool. So now that we've done our illustrations, we've got them all prepared. They're all individual files. This is when we can start really going into the document and giving a go. So if we open up InDesign here, I'm going to make the when I'm thinking about print as well, and things that are in your hands, it's really nice to also not make them potentially like your standard a four. So I love to just to make them feel a little bit more special, a little bit different. So we're going to make it 210 by 280 here today. And we're going to do 16 pages. I think that's the one perfect. And margins I always just throw on, say, like 14 to start with 1410 or something. And I can adjust them when I go back into the document. All right, so we are good to go. Cool. So we're going to get into our document and move into the just laying it out. So we're going to think about the grids here. So from our little skeleton here, our wireframes, I want to have like at least three grid blocks so we can work with. And I think it's a really nice standard template to kind of start with. So we'll go back into Illustrator, move into the parents. Not the masters, but the parent. All right. And then go create guides.
Alex Lazaris:
I know you said that this is a good standard to start with. Do you typically have a favorite kind of column grid structure that you like to place across all your editorial work?
Kristy Campbell:
It's definitely between I always go between three and six. Well, kind of either between three and six, but I like six because you can kind of work with, say I'll just open this up. It's looking pretty good. If you're thinking about a box here, you can actually make like a grid out of these. So you could have three columns here. So this could be like your text, your body text. You have your three columns. You could also make it one and that sort of style. So there's lots of different ways to work around it. You could even just go the one full column, which is across the whole grid, say there so lots to play around with. And I think that's why I really like the six column grids here in particular.
Alex Lazaris:
I agree. I love when you have the system that you can kind of break or play with. I think breaking guides and grids can be super helpful to reinforce your visual, for sure.
Kristy Campbell:
And I'll even actually chuck in just a couple of grids. We might go six again here, too. Nice. I feel like this is such an important step as well that a lot of designers tend to forget. And I know a lot of designers, especially when you're starting out, a lot of them tend to start or just sort of design in this view where you're not looking at your grid, looking at your margins. I think it's so important to remember to keep switching between them both to get those views coming up.
Alex Lazaris:
I agree. There's a lot of eager beavers, and I am one of them sometimes where I start jumping in and designing, but then I really struggle at the end because I didn't set up all the rules and guides and layers structures correctly. So a little bit work 100% saves you so much trouble at the end.
Kristy Campbell:
That's the one. Exactly. All right, so let's get into so when I start out like a document like this and I've got my content, I basically, if this is the front page content, I'll just copy all that across and just literally pop it right beside it. I'll kind of blow it up a little bit just so I've got it all there. I'm going to work with it right beside me.
Alex Lazaris:
Cool.
Kristy Campbell:
And then what I've done today, I've actually also played around with some fonts that I was thinking about using. So I've just opened these up in Illustrator just because I found it quite easy just to showcase them. So you've got your subheading, your heading, font, and your body. And I just wanted to play around with a few ideas because I know that font choosing can be so tedious, and sometimes you can honestly look for fonts for like hours and you're just like, where did that time go?
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely. How did you come about kind of selecting these typefaces?
Kristy Campbell:
It's such a tricky one. I definitely go through my whole font library. So, say if I'm making a I'm trying to find a heading, a subheading font, I'll literally kind of go through, see what feels right. I'm wanting this really edgy style booklet that's a little bit different. So I don't want sort of your classic, just standard helvetica font. So I wanted something like really bold and striking for the heading. And there's always like those few fonts that you have in your head, your kind of select 20 that you might use for bold, edgy stuff. But most of the time I get these from, say, like know, Adobe fonts, google Fonts is really great and other places to purchase them from. I really liked this one though.
