*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Kieron Lewis:
Hello, my friends, and welcome to Adobe Live. I'm your host, Kieran Lewis, a freelance graphic designer based in London. And today's stream we have the seasonal pro and I say that not lightly. Adobe Live Host and Creative Director Alex Lazaris. How, Alex. How you doing, man?
Alex Lazaris:
Fantastic, man. I am so stoked to be working with you today. This is going to be a collaboration of the minds, including chat. I love you guys. Hello, everyone. We're going to have some Mimis, some memes, hope, Buddha Val's here. We're going to have some fun, though. So, yeah, super excited. For those of you who don't know who I am, I'm Alex Lazaris. I own an agency called Lazaris, kind of based everywhere, especially during COVID like, all over the world. But, yeah, love it. We work on experiential brand stuff from translating brand experience from digital to physical and everything in between. We love doing it all.
Kieron Lewis:
Awesome, man. I'm ready for this collaboration. It's been months in the waiting and again, a massive welcome to our lovely audience. If you're just joining us, if you're watching us on YouTube, Behance, send some love in the chat. Where are you guys streaming from? I can see it's coming in thick and fast. We've got Cody, Misha, Steve, Barbara, Paco and Shauna. And many, many more. So, a massive welcome to you lovely people. And like Alex said, today is going to be like a highly interactive stream, so we want to get you guys involved as much as possible. So any suggestions, advice? Definitely share it directly in the chat. Just one little thing to flag before we get into the real thick of it. If you missed the previous stream, you can check the replay on Behance and YouTube. Check out photographer and digital artist Becca Bjork, where she will be showing you how to create some fantastical worlds from 3D models and photos using Photoshop. So, Alex, my man, should we take it away, find out what you're working on today?
Alex Lazaris:
Let's do it. So Steve's asking the hard hitting questions already in chat. We'd love to see it. He's asking, how much Comic Papyrus will there be today? So, in case you are not familiar with where I work, you can go to Alex Lazaris or Behance net slash Alex Lazaris. Check it out there. But Steve, just for you, look at that beauty right there. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the typeface comic Papyrus, but it is a classic Alex Lazaris meme font or a meme font. I love to bring it into design. Wherever we there's all those memes about or sorry, memes, we pronounce it memes. Also on Adobe Live, there's a lot of memes about designers spending a lot of time trying to figure out the perfect typeface for all their projects. As you can see, I've got a ton already on the left side of the screen, but there's nothing quite as delicious as a beautiful marriage between two typefaces you love and adore so much. So comic sands plus papyrus. Beautiful. Just ten out of ten.
Kieron Lewis:
We've already got Sean already. He's already laughing too hard. And we're like a few minutes into this. I love it. I love it. Guys. What are you guys feeling? Comic Sands, is that your cup of tea or? Nice. I love that. And the Lauren Epsom in there in all its glory. Great.
Alex Lazaris:
I love when you have friends that are saying that. I'm judging you so hard right now. They've known me for so long. You just at this point have to love and accept me for who I am. And that's what true.
Kieron Lewis:
Friendships like Shauna, can the typeface ruin friendships and marriages? I hope not. I hope it's one of those ones that can bring people together, right? It's like the differences is what brings us more.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. Just like comic sans and papyrus. This is beautiful. Love story. Better than love. Twilight all right, so let's send it into all right, what we need from you, Chat. So we are thinking a futuristic tech type brand. I could see this working really well for like, I don't know, NFTs Blockchain, retrofuturism. I don't know if you've seen the new Hyundai concept car. It's a little bit retro, a little futuristic. It's based in like, hydrogen or something. It's pretty cool. I don't know. We can go pretty wild. I think we're just going to keep it pretty ambiguous. For me, this project is obviously a brand new project. It's a graphic design project. I want to make something visually stunning at the end of the day. But I also want to give you all the tools to take your project to the next level. For me, a logo is just that. It's a logo. It's not your full brand. So I'm definitely going to work on the logo. We're going to get something to like a pretty good spot, I think. But then I want to show you some kind of fun tips and tricks to get your project to the next level.
Kieron Lewis:
Awesome, man.
Alex Lazaris:
While I was researching for this role or this project specifically, I was looking on, like, you work for them. It's a great resource for typefaces, graphic treatments, things like that. And I saw these cool little pieces. I was like, oh, cool, let's make some posters on stream. That would be awesome. You can buy these PNGs if you want, but PNGs are pretty limited. You get one dimension of it. You can't rotate it. Well, you can rotate it, but it's not going to give you the depth that you would get from like, a 3D object. So I think we'll probably move a little bit into dimension this afternoon, maybe a little bit tomorrow as well. I want to show you how you can make images similar to this with your own graphic design treatment in dimension. So you've already got the tools. It's already part of your creative Cloud subscription. So you might as well leverage it and then make custom bespoke pieces for your own work. I think this is a really good example of what we can do as well. They've got an iridescent one. We can light the objects, we can put the shading and the materiality on each of the objects and then light it in a way that creates it to be really engaging. And we'll probably do some mockups like this where it's like, okay, cool. You can start to see the brand come together. You got these 3D elements, kind of ambiguous, but we would love names. Chat. We want names for the brand.
Kieron Lewis:
Bring them in, guys, bring them in.
Alex Lazaris:
Objects, things that you want. We can easily go to Adobe Suck and we can grab some of these pieces and we can start to leverage it. I was already looking earlier for some Orbs. For some reason, typing an S at the end of Orb actually gives you more options.
Kieron Lewis:
You would have fought that little plural at the end, right?
Alex Lazaris:
Never works that way. But this abstract model here looks like maybe it's like an ornament or something. This piece right here already kind of starts to feel like some of these shapes that we see on the pack. So we can go in, we can light it, we can texture it, we can make it however we want and then pull it into our project. So we'll get into that later. But in the meantime, let's start sending it into some graphic design.
Kieron Lewis:
Sounds good. And guys, like Alex said, man, this is highly, highly interactive. So I also know that saying where no such thing as a bad idea at that very early stage anyway. So definitely throw names in there. And even going through those visuals you're showing us, Alex, it feels tangible, man. It feels like you kind of want to grab almost like Flubber, that Disney movie if you get that kind of vibe. Set a bar there nicely. But yeah, like Alex said, any sort of names or things you could think of that would work quite well with the know. Get them in the Chat and I'll share them directly with Alex.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, so while we're waiting on names from Chat, I pulled a name. Like, I literally went to Random Name Generator Latin and I was trying to pull from ancient Dead languages and I was trying to find something that kind of like could work and be ambiguous and kind of techy feeling. I stumbled upon this word VIX. VIX meaning hardly, scarcely, barely, sometimes with dumb. I don't understand the context of all of it. It's all Latin to me, but I think that Scarcity idea seems to work kind of well. So in the meantime, if you're wanting to play at home at home we work with VIX until we get a better name from Chat. And if not, we'll just run with.
Kieron Lewis:
It till the end run with Vic. I feel like an X was guaranteed.
Alex Lazaris:
To be in there.
Kieron Lewis:
Right. It almost feel like Countdown, if you know that sort of game show. You have, like, the missing letters. Thank you.
Alex Lazaris:
Countdown is so good.
Kieron Lewis:
You get that in the US. I don't know.
Alex Lazaris:
You get in the oh, I got my methods.
Kieron Lewis:
All right. I love that.
Alex Lazaris:
That and what's it called? Taskmaster are my favorite.
Kieron Lewis:
Oh, dude. Now we're talking about freelancers during the day when I should be working, but they're watching daytime TV. I can see already. Sean's already said I can love and accept you for who you are, but I still judge your decisions. There we go.
Alex Lazaris:
Sean. All right, well, I'll take that's. A good friendship there. So I feel like with a three letter word originally I was thinking I love Bitmap, but I love this kind of, like, digital tech kind of retro stuff that's happening in the graphic design world right now. So I wanted to find a way to kind of bring that into this project. With a three letter name. I don't really need something so thin or even a monospace. Like this monospace could work. This is Protomono. Let me see how it goes. It needs something else. I feel like if you're going to put, like, a URL in there, maybe it's like a website, like Vixio or something. That could work really well. You kind of need, like, a little something like it stand on its own, I think.
Kieron Lewis:
I'm thinking, like, AI. For some reason, that doesn't work to anywhere. But that'd be cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it can work. Doesn't AI work now as a URL?
Kieron Lewis:
Does that work? I guess you can customize however you wish, right? As long as you buy. Yeah, that'd be cool.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm just trying to play around with some wider, maybe some extended types. Try to see how that works. I can also use my filter over here if I want to. I can go down to filters fonts, and I can kind of classify if I want, like, thicker weights, heavier weights, extended widths. I'll click both of those and see what I can get from Adobe Creative Cloud or Fonts. Let me see here. Got. Show activated. I don't want that. Do I want? Oh, okay. And that should pull all of the Adobe fonts, I believe. Unless I've set a filter wrong, I.
Kieron Lewis:
Can see as well. We've got Sean. He said as an possible me, is Bix or Bitvix. Bitvix. That's almost like a serial. I love that. But it still works, though. Definitely. The bix is quite cool. Yeah. Everyone's jumping on the bix now, actually. We've got a few I feel like people are smoking. Are you on the Bix fence? Are you in the VIX fence? Guys, let us know in the chat what takes your fancy.
Alex Lazaris:
What a tongue twister it is, pretty much. That's so funny. Bix. Bix or bit? Dicks. Let's see how we got here?
Kieron Lewis:
I'm quite curious. I was going to say buddy. So in terms of your back, because obviously I've been watching loads of your streams before, but for anyone who perhaps are quite new to your background when you're working, what are the main programs that you're tend to like? What's your bread and butter in terms of what you operate in programs?
Alex Lazaris:
For sure. I would say that Illustrator is like 80% of what I'm working in. It really depends on what phase of the client project we're in, right? If we're in the logo generation stage, even some of the type pairing stuff. I'll do a lot of that inside of Illustrator, but then eventually moving it. All the mockups are done in Photoshop. Web design will be done in XD. I've actually started moving all of my clients, once in the handoff phase, into Express libraries. So, like, creative cloud libraries for everything, and then just building templates for them inside Express. So through and through Dig Adobe fan.
Kieron Lewis:
That makes it so much easier, right, for the client just to kind of have that streamlined process, which just cuts out a lot of faf, which no one really needs. So I'm down for that, definitely.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. And honestly, I think it's also just streamlined so much of our process as well. Historically, it's kind of a pain to set up templates and stuff to hand it off to a client. Like, it was a lot of work. You have to build a lot of guidelines to get it to a good enough spot. So, yeah, honestly, having that ability to just move it all into exprs and leverage our creative cloud libraries that we're already sharing with the client has made it so much simpler for us to just hand over files and get it to them in a good enough spot. They're extremely happy with it.
Kieron Lewis:
That's awesome, man. Again, if you're watching this, you're very much new to the Adobe Live Hemisphere. Massive welcome, and definitely what Alex was saying, that there's a lot of tools that you guys have at your disposals, whether it's the lives that we do or the different programs we have as well. And it just makes your life easier, really, as creative, whether you're photographer, fine art, fashion, graphic design. There's always updates. There's always kind of things to kind of keep you guys in the loop and to keep things a lot more easier and more streamlined. So definitely keep on board with what's going on in the Adobe world because there's a lot.
Alex Lazaris:
There's always a lot, and it's changing constantly. It's pretty amazing. Steve says that AI sure is a web suffix. Try s AI, apparently. Look at that. It's probably Steve's website, to be honest.
Kieron Lewis:
He just phoning his little Easter eggs in this. Jonah said a bix bix, but I mean, that's a tongue twister. Bix. Bucks. Bucks.
Alex Lazaris:
I felt like we set, like, three, and then everybody's like, oh, just change it once.
Kieron Lewis:
Just add on top.
Alex Lazaris:
You guys can make know more than just changing.
Kieron Lewis:
They're so drawn to your bix VIX, Alex, that they don't want to leave because they've drawn, attached, and now we've got bricks, so we're slowly making our own. But yeah, like we said, definitely get them in. No such thing as a bad idea, we promise.
Alex Lazaris:
That's so funny. It's actually not. I kind of like that monospix.
Kieron Lewis:
So on that topic of rago and way too off piece, I feel like we could definitely because we're into that sort of style of Sci-Fi, but are you into your visibility? A passion project? Is that your kind of vibe? Is that what you're into in terms of Sci-Fi and this kind of futuristic kind of world of your just in general for entertainment? Is that kind of your vibe? Big question.
Alex Lazaris:
That's a great question. See Nick longo. What's up, man? How you doing, Nick? We need puns and names. If you have one suit, it over Sci-Fi. I love Sci-fi. I think it's really cool. This is definitely more of just me liking what I'm seeing in terms of design trends that I'm seeing out in the graphic design world right now and wanting to play it up. And I typically never get to play with trends because I always am trying to find something that works with a client and it's working to their goals and not just emulating what's happening as quick design fashion. So for me, this is an opportunity for me to have some fun, play with it and kind of just push my own comfort zones. I don't really get to play with this tile that often.
Kieron Lewis:
That's an awesome thing. And I guess as well, that idea of the passion projects, right? It's something that if you're freelance or you're full time, you'll probably get so wrapped up in that kind of world of work that you don't sometimes get a chance to work on projects for fun or to collaborate with friends or the community. So these kind of projects for me, dude, I feel like they're the ones that it allows you to kind of de stress a bit and just have fun with it and know there's no much rules to what you can and cannot do, which is quite fun at that early stage as well. So we've got Nick, who just said to fill me in in terms of the names. So you've got an idea of what we're working with? Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So essentially what's happening is we're making up like our own custom personal projects. We're making up our own brand. It's a tech company, it's generic, it can be whatever. We just need a cool name that feels cool and can build some hype around it. Kind of feels like maybe like a crypto NFT blockchain y. Like what does that company actually do? Type question. That's what I'm looking for, something ambiguous and big and cool.
Kieron Lewis:
I'm going to go for, like, make it pop, then this is a classic. You got to make it pop. Just make it wow.
Alex Lazaris:
Okay, so let me explain what I just did. So I really like this typeface. It's PP new bit. It's by Pangram Pangram. It's cool. It's a little bit too tall, I think it's a little bit too rectangular. I love kind of geometric Squarey things. So I think just by shrinking it down, I'm trying to see if I can get it to match actual squares on it. I think the typeface works really well on its own, but I want it to feel a little bit more wide. So I'm just trying to get the typeface to kind of match the exact dimensions and see if it's a one to one with squares in this typeface. It doesn't look like it. So we might make some additional squares for the X and then we can make a pattern out of that that could be really cool. And then start working with some probably pair it with a San Serif geometric typeface of some sort to counterbalance it and then start throwing in some collateral and some other of that dimension stuff as well.
Kieron Lewis:
Awesome. I mean, you made a really good point, though. I love the idea of once you've got the logo or that identity kind of that foundation set, you can kind of strip away parts of it to almost create a different thing. So when you mentioned obviously working with shapes or blocks, especially if it's geometric, you can kind of almost use them, whether it's icons or use them as visual language to kind of describe what the brand is about. Because already I'm almost thinking like, you know, that sort of tetrisy kind of like old school, like the eight bit kind of game, that kind of style, where they kind of come together different shapes to make one image, which would be cool. I always think that's quite cool with brands when you get they can kind of strip away at their logo, but it still keeps the essence of what they're about, whether it's simplifying it or working in that space. So, yeah, I'm definitely liking that. I'd rock a bit of VIX and VIX on a T shirt. I'd say on a screen printed T shirt. That would be my weapon of choice.
Alex Lazaris:
I love that you know the brand VIX, the cold rub, right?
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, I was thinking that the whole time.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, I can't get away from it right now. So now I'm just.
Kieron Lewis:
Using that a lot. But yeah, just because I was on well recently. So when you mentioned VIX, I was like, I'm not going to mention that I was really sick recently. But yeah, VIX and me were best friends recently.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, so I got those boxes. Okay. So now I'm going to just try to recreate this b. I think I just need room.
Kieron Lewis:
So again, for you lovely people, if you're said, if you're streaming in on YouTube or Behance, get those questions in the chat and I'll share them directly with Alex. And like we said, any names, it seems as though we've got almost like a running theme. We've got bricks bit nicks. I kind of like that. I can't even say the word. We got Bixed with a T at the end of it. That's a silent one. Yeah, definitely a running theme. But get them in there, actually, someone will rock it up and actually mix it up with, like, a P or something.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, there you go. Picks you never heard.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, so what I've done here is now I've got this one kind of column of squares going. I'm going to group it, I copy pasted it in front, and now what I'm doing is just going to transform it and reflect it across the vertical. And then I'm going to just drag it over and boom, boom. Now we got a V. I'm going to delete this second square here. Cool, so that's good. And then what I can do is just take this group over here that is already matching. Okay, so I've got an idea. I might just keep the eye tilted.
Kieron Lewis:
I just saw that as well. When I saw I was like that's pretty clever, actually. Nick. Nick?
Alex Lazaris:
Nick Longo with the brilliant names.
Kieron Lewis:
Brilliant.
Alex Lazaris:
Didn't we do it? We did a stream together where I was trying to name stuff after Nick, I think, together, where he's my host. It's great. All right, see here, so I can see why they so I duplicate, I pressed command C, command F, to duplicate and paste on front. And then I'm going to transform it, reflect again, go back the other way. So if I was to just do just move this up so you can see it an X, like, this is not going to work because it looks like that, it looks like a guy shrugging, but without a head. He's just kind of like so what we're going to do is we're going to just space them out a little bit and that's why they did the half steps on the X, which makes a lot more sense. Sometimes you don't know until you start playing with things. But I think if I just go.
Kieron Lewis:
Through this struggle bus journey I love Steve. So Steve said, Quantum VIX. That's all very marvel like now, isn't it? I like that. Quantum VIX. It almost rolls off the tongue a little bit, but, yeah, I love it.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, so I'm doing that was my thinking noises right there.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. It's always interesting, like, when I do hosting and seeing, either you got a thinking face or I mean, that's probably what it is. Mania. She's a thinking face, but in your case, you got a thinking sound. That's a new one, actually. That is a new one. Yeah. I'm a bit of a thinking fidgeter. I've got a Rubik's Cube or some sort of block beside me just to fiddle whilst I'm thinking, but smart thinking sound. And that's not me trying to be glasses. Me like, yeah, being fiddly, can you.
Alex Lazaris:
Solve it or you just play with it?
Kieron Lewis:
Do you know what? That's really embarrassing. Says live. I've done like two or three sides. And the irony is every place I've been at for work when I kind of moved on, they've always got me a Rubik's Cube. That always seemed to be the running theme. So I've got like four or five different sizes of Rubik's Cubes and each one has like one or two faces. Done. Yeah, I'm not going to be that guy. I'm like classic design. He just has it there to look cool. But yeah, one day I will do it. Maybe live on camera, who knows? But until that day, you got to put it together. Have you done one? Have you set the tone for the stream? Actually, yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
No, I've standard. I've tried. I have successfully exited out of that.
Kieron Lewis:
It is fun though. Even what we're doing now with the X, my brain is kind of thinking in that kind of cube like cuboid sort of shape. Yeah. For me, I kind of just get lost. I don't actually do it to complete. It's just more of a stress relief. That was a stress ball. Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
So essentially what's happening is we're making up like our own custom personal projects. We're making up our own brand. It's a tech company, it's generic, it can be whatever. We just need a cool name that feels cool and can build some hype around it. Kind of feels like maybe like a crypto NFT blockchain y. Like what does that company actually do? Type question. That's what I'm looking for, something ambiguous and big and cool.
Kieron Lewis:
I'm going to go for, like, make it pop, then this is a classic. You got to make it pop. Just make it wow.
Alex Lazaris:
Okay, so let me explain what I just did. So I really like this typeface. It's PP new bit. It's by Pangram Pangram. It's cool. It's a little bit too tall, I think it's a little bit too rectangular. I love kind of geometric Squarey things. So I think just by shrinking it down, I'm trying to see if I can get it to match actual squares on it. I think the typeface works really well on its own, but I want it to feel a little bit more wide. So I'm just trying to get the typeface to kind of match the exact dimensions and see if it's a one to one with squares in this typeface. It doesn't look like it. So we might make some additional squares for the X and then we can make a pattern out of that that could be really cool. And then start working with some probably pair it with a San Serif geometric typeface of some sort to counterbalance it and then start throwing in some collateral and some other of that dimension stuff as well.
Kieron Lewis:
Awesome. I mean, you made a really good point, though. I love the idea of once you've got the logo or that identity kind of that foundation set, you can kind of strip away parts of it to almost create a different thing. So when you mentioned obviously working with shapes or blocks, especially if it's geometric, you can kind of almost use them, whether it's icons or use them as visual language to kind of describe what the brand is about. Because already I'm almost thinking like, you know, that sort of tetrisy kind of like old school, like the eight bit kind of game, that kind of style, where they kind of come together different shapes to make one image, which would be cool. I always think that's quite cool with brands when you get they can kind of strip away at their logo, but it still keeps the essence of what they're about, whether it's simplifying it or working in that space. So, yeah, I'm definitely liking that. I'd rock a bit of VIX and VIX on a T shirt. I'd say on a screen printed T shirt. That would be my weapon of choice.
Alex Lazaris:
I love that you know the brand VIX, the cold rub, right?
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, I was thinking that the whole time.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, I can't get away from it right now. So now I'm just.
Kieron Lewis:
Using that a lot. But yeah, just because I was on well recently. So when you mentioned VIX, I was like, I'm not going to mention that I was really sick recently. But yeah, VIX and me were best friends recently.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, so I got those boxes. Okay. So now I'm going to just try to recreate this b. I think I just need room.
Kieron Lewis:
So again, for you lovely people, if you're said, if you're streaming in on YouTube or Behance, get those questions in the chat and I'll share them directly with Alex. And like we said, any names, it seems as though we've got almost like a running theme. We've got bricks bit nicks. I kind of like that. I can't even say the word. We got Bixed with a T at the end of it. That's a silent one. Yeah, definitely a running theme. But get them in there, actually, someone will rock it up and actually mix it up with, like, a P or something.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, there you go. Picks you never heard.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, so what I've done here is now I've got this one kind of column of squares going. I'm going to group it, I copy pasted it in front, and now what I'm doing is just going to transform it and reflect it across the vertical. And then I'm going to just drag it over and boom, boom. Now we got a V. I'm going to delete this second square here. Cool, so that's good. And then what I can do is just take this group over here that is already matching. Okay, so I've got an idea. I might just keep the eye tilted.
Kieron Lewis:
I just saw that as well. When I saw I was like that's pretty clever, actually. Nick. Nick?
Alex Lazaris:
Nick Longo with the brilliant names.
Kieron Lewis:
Brilliant.
Alex Lazaris:
Didn't we do it? We did a stream together where I was trying to name stuff after Nick, I think, together, where he's my host. It's great. All right, see here, so I can see why they so I duplicate, I pressed command C, command F, to duplicate and paste on front. And then I'm going to transform it, reflect again, go back the other way. So if I was to just do just move this up so you can see it an X, like, this is not going to work because it looks like that, it looks like a guy shrugging, but without a head. He's just kind of like so what we're going to do is we're going to just space them out a little bit and that's why they did the half steps on the X, which makes a lot more sense. Sometimes you don't know until you start playing with things. But I think if I just go.
Kieron Lewis:
Through this struggle bus journey I love Steve. So Steve said, Quantum VIX. That's all very marvel like now, isn't it? I like that. Quantum VIX. It almost rolls off the tongue a little bit, but, yeah, I love it.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, so I'm doing that was my thinking noises right there.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. It's always interesting, like, when I do hosting and seeing, either you got a thinking face or I mean, that's probably what it is. Mania. She's a thinking face, but in your case, you got a thinking sound. That's a new one, actually. That is a new one. Yeah. I'm a bit of a thinking fidgeter. I've got a Rubik's Cube or some sort of block beside me just to fiddle whilst I'm thinking, but smart thinking sound. And that's not me trying to be glasses. Me like, yeah, being fiddly, can you.
Alex Lazaris:
Solve it or you just play with it?
Kieron Lewis:
Do you know what? That's really embarrassing. Says live. I've done like two or three sides. And the irony is every place I've been at for work when I kind of moved on, they've always got me a Rubik's Cube. That always seemed to be the running theme. So I've got like four or five different sizes of Rubik's Cubes and each one has like one or two faces. Done. Yeah, I'm not going to be that guy. I'm like classic design. He just has it there to look cool. But yeah, one day I will do it. Maybe live on camera, who knows? But until that day, you got to put it together. Have you done one? Have you set the tone for the stream? Actually, yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
No, I've standard. I've tried. I have successfully exited out of that.
Kieron Lewis:
It is fun though. Even what we're doing now with the X, my brain is kind of thinking in that kind of cube like cuboid sort of shape. Yeah. For me, I kind of just get lost. I don't actually do it to complete. It's just more of a stress relief. That was a stress ball. Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Has a better suggestion for what I'm doing right now because the thinking noises didn't help. So I might have to just copy what they did with the X. The V and the X have the same footprint.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, I see what you tried to do with the eye. Just kind of mirrors the angle of how the X and the Vlogging either we'll see. Yeah, I see why their one is just like a single straight or maybe it could be the dot, if that kind of like a slight the dot of the top of the eye. If that's like a slight boxed slightly off, maybe.
Alex Lazaris:
Something like this you could even the great thing about having a digital design tool like this is you can just move things around and duplicate it and take up no space.
Kieron Lewis:
It's quite embarrassed. I've definitely done drawings, like for logos and my brains think copy and paste on pen and paper. It's like, why? No. You're so used to just Minority Report sort of star of just moving with your hands.
Alex Lazaris:
I think it might need a half step. One of the biggest pain points that I've realized, especially after going back to the grocery store and not doing grocery delivery and stuff, is I miss the feature or like command f to search for something in a physical grocery store. I get so frustrated having to go aisle by aisle trying to find the thing that I want when you're buying online, I want eggs.
Kieron Lewis:
But then again, just a little alternate for that. But then again, if you didn't have to do that, then you might miss out on some cool things en route to what you need to find. Right? I don't know. I'm just putting out there now.
Alex Lazaris:
That's definitely why they do it, right?
Kieron Lewis:
Exactly.
Alex Lazaris:
You have to go through a wave.
Kieron Lewis:
Of nappies before you get like your utterly butterly or whatever it is. So random. I said that one. Yeah, we've got Marcos, who said licks. So licks nix. You guys are testing me out today with the tongue wording. Yeah, keep those coming. Even not even a name, even a suggestion for Alex as well. Whilst there, if you see something in there, you think, oh, that could work. Well, I mean, we're on this kind of topic, this kind of theme of the geometric cube, like rotating, reflecting any ideas you guys might have. Definitely get those in the chat. But Nick, budy, I'm quite curious, while you're doing that, your background, dude, because you're freelance, right? Morrison saying, are you freelance or do you work for.
Alex Lazaris:
Talking about Nick.
Kieron Lewis:
No, yourself.
Alex Lazaris:
Sorry, I thought you're talking to Nick. Nick. Nick is a busy man.
Kieron Lewis:
What's? Your life, Nick.
Alex Lazaris:
What's going on?
Kieron Lewis:
What's in Nick's world now? You, buddy, what's your background?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, so I'm running a design firm called Lazaris. We're doing that full time right now. It's delightful. I think my boy Ethan's probably watching. Right? Cool. You know, just trying to hang out on Adobe Live as much as possible. Just make cool work. It's a dream.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. I love that. Your stuff is awesome, dude. I've been checking, obviously, streams before, but it's very strong in terms of design and everything about it is pretty awesome, man. Really cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Thanks, man. I'm going to try to keep that reputation going as I play with a bunch of squares right now.
Kieron Lewis:
Every minute that goes by, it's like, oh, actually, I actually like that. That looks pretty. My mind's already thinking in color with different tints as you kind of go up, but maybe that could work. I know you kind of work in black and white first and then you work in your in color. But that's interesting.
Alex Lazaris:
Does that feel too heavy or is that fine? It's a little heavy on the inside, right?
Kieron Lewis:
A little bit on the x. Yeah. It's almost like if the X was like a main selling point for what that brand is, then it's like you can get away with it because the X is really dominant, isn't it, in that middle?
Alex Lazaris:
Might just see if we can just do like what I'm going to do here to try to counterbalance that is we're going to just fake it. So we're going to do grab our object and then press S and then press Enter. That's going to bring up the scale tool. And then I'm going to just do a uniform change down to 50% since we're doing half measures. Already on kind of where the alignment is, so every square is like a half measure off. I'm just going to grab this and just bring it into the middle of this project. Just group it all together real quick. Press F and then align to center. Go away, zoom tool. I love going to the top of my screen and the zoom tools being like, did you want to press on?
Kieron Lewis:
Do you remember that? Remind me of do you remember the old school words? Like, did you mean with the paperclip? Did you mean this? Can you imagine they still have that? No, surely. No, that's old school, isn't it? I was in school days when that came out. Yeah. For anyone who's even before that period is like, what is he talking about?
Alex Lazaris:
I think we're close.
Kieron Lewis:
That looks strong. That looks good, right?
Alex Lazaris:
That feels pretty good. Chat, let us know what you think. Let's see.
Kieron Lewis:
He said vox for void or misha vicks. Vox.
Alex Lazaris:
Vox is a cool one.
Kieron Lewis:
Vox. Vox the O could be interesting, actually, how that could work.
Alex Lazaris:
Now. You got to think in Chat. I love it. Love when you nice when you bring it like that. All right. I feel good about the X now. Only took me 30 minutes to make an X. It's fine.
Kieron Lewis:
No judgment. In the Adobe Hemisphere world, we got Shauna, who said Clippy was awesome. What would be the Adobe equivalent of Clippy? I'm going to be cheesy and say Adobe Live, because you can guess. Maybe it is a bit, but I feel like there's anything you kind of want to know or tutorials. You could probably get away with watching Tommy Gone hair and finding out, right?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kieron Lewis:
What other shape could you even use as a Clip? I mean, paperclip makes sense because it brings things together, like documents. But a bulldog clip hasn't got the same filter, does it?
Alex Lazaris:
I think that whatever we do, it needs to have Comic Papyrus as the mascots. Like typing.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
Just going to throw that out there.
Kieron Lewis:
That's a good shout, Steve. So, yeah, vox is a Latin word for voice. There we go. Going, start going. Start going into the whole branding philosophy now of VIX, vox or bix. Yeah, I like that. Yes, Steve. Adobe express equals clippy. There you go. Smiley face. I like your style. Actually, on that topic, it's quite nice to mention, it's about half 830 now, or 830 my time. 830. So if it's everyone else's time, 830 my time. So half an hour has gone into the stream. So if you've just joined us, a massive welcome, first of all, and today we have the awesome creative director, Alex Lazaris, and he is sharing us one of his personal projects where he's drawing inspiration from a tech, Sci-Fi and digital world to create a branding of his choice. So welcome. You've just joined, and right now you can see him working on some cool branding on Illustrator. So welcome along. If you just joined.
Alex Lazaris:
Now, that feels too heavy, right? We can make lots of those. All right, so what I've done is essentially just duplicated and grouped them all. Now I'm going to ungroup them by command shift g. Let's just go one by one and ungroup them all. All right, cool. Now I can start messing with stuff. I can either try to go one at a time and go like that. Maybe I need to just that kind of kills it.
Kieron Lewis:
I see what you're trying to it's almost like make it go from an extra bowl to a regular.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, but I think we have the option because these are all half steps here as well.
Kieron Lewis:
Actually, my brain just thought, you know, when you had that X where it was quite chunky before, I don't know if there's like an extra cube in the middle, but my brain thinks because there's almost you got the O quite chunky. It's almost like creating as the different shapes you've created, you can start pulling them apart to create maybe something else in there because yeah, maybe I don't know. In my brain, it sounded like a good idea.
Alex Lazaris:
No, when you think about it, literally the ongoing challenge. That's what I love about Adobe streams. It's like you get to watch people go through the same process that you go through as a designer, and there's no judgment. It's just pure like I don't know, I feel like there's so much imposter syndrome in the graphic design world that definitely watching people who have portfolios that you admire struggle with the same decisions you make on a daily basis just kind of completes the human experience a little bit more. It's very philosophical, but it's like you don't feel as alone when you see.
Kieron Lewis:
No, I totally, totally get that. It's funny, actually, because without going to a piece, what you just said there about that impostor syndrome. It's interesting because I always think when you go to, say, talks and you go to maybe see your favorite designer, I'm always quite interested in, say, the things that went wrong rather than the polished work because, one, like, it makes them just feel more human and more relatable. But two, it's totally healthy, right. To just have a bit that creative block and just the unknown. I guess the downside of social media, which I love social media, but I'm not an ogre, but I guess everything seems so shiny right on social that it just looks as though there's no need for any failure because it's all our shiny things. But especially if you're just starting out, if you're a grad or you're a junior designer, it's imposter syndrome. And even older, actually senior as well. Right up to us. I guess the older you get, you're probably better at hiding it, maybe. I don't know if that's a true reflection, but perhaps I don't know. I think possibly yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
I mean it's all fake it till you make it, right?
Kieron Lewis:
Exactly. El Akrami, obviously correctly, he said we can pull the middle cube to the left and right to make more space, like pixels. Okay, I see what you mean. That's kind of what you've done, actually.
Alex Lazaris:
Kind of, but I think I'm cooking it somewhere. Let's see here. This is a fun challenge. I haven't made a pixel thing or a gridded type in a while.
Kieron Lewis:
It's looking cool, man. I like that. Again, it's just one of those ones. You have to just play around with it. Right? You have to keep duplicating rotating. Play around.
Alex Lazaris:
Look how much time that would have saved if I just took the X.
Kieron Lewis:
Classic design. Just take the long way. That's it, man. The scenic route.
Alex Lazaris:
I love that. My whole career at the beginning was, yeah, you could buy these PNGs, but we have to show you how to make it.
Kieron Lewis:
We're basking in the company, so we don't mind the long way round. We're all good for it.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. That's nice, though. I like the feeling of the spaces versus the I kind of just breaks the flow until it's kind of diagonal.
Kieron Lewis:
That looks cool. That box. I like that.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. So let's just figure out some of the spacing real quick across these letters even as well.
Kieron Lewis:
That one as well. It's like the way the V on the right hand side of it and then the X kind of coming in. It kind of hugs the O in a way. So you've kind of got a nice equal spacing in between. Yeah, I think that works really well.
Alex Lazaris:
Do we want it smaller?
Kieron Lewis:
And again, it'd be great to know if anyone in the chat excuse me, if you've worked on any, say, even futuristic projects or anything that kind of works on river, it's using shapes, tessellating, rotating. Any stories you guys have got, again, be great to know. Create a block. How did you kind of find your way out of it? We're kind of creating as we go along. There is no literally definitive destination, which is the beauty of it. But yeah. How do you guys kind of find your way? If you got any stories, please do share. We would love to. Love to hear about it.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely. I think chat's more interesting than I am, so I always love when chat helps up.
Kieron Lewis:
Do you ever like, just say just very quickly? It's weird. Even when I'm not hosting and say I'm designing, I usually have Adobe Live on in the background and that's not me trying to generally a plug, maybe because it's quite the time difference as well with the UK and the US. So at ten at night, most people are shutting off a shot. But if I'm still working, it's quite nice to sort of see Adobe Live and other creatives just have a chat and talk someone's in the background. Oh, yeah, it's quite nice to kind of vibe about sorry, dude, I interrupted you before.
Alex Lazaris:
You're going to no, you're good. I wasn't saying anything except for how cool Chad is. So now we're like at this weird here, this weird bit where the baseline let's grab our ruler. So by pressing command or Control R, you can pull out your ruler and you can set guides. So right now I've got the kind of top guides. Everything's working there. My O is below the guide, but if I want so maybe I need to do just an S. Do the uniform scale down like we did earlier. Use pink to help me with my guide there.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. When you said this pink I was making, I did the same thing every it's just like yeah, you could use rules, but sometimes by eye it's just a bit of like a nice bright color and that kind of distinguishes perfectly the spacing you need.
Alex Lazaris:
Typically when I'm doing like a logo and stuff for clients, then I'll figure out the guides and make sure that everything is correctly laid out. So I love when you can use spacing and make it uniform. So now I'll take off the guide. So feels decent. I don't know, maybe it's a mess. This is one of those things you do when you're a graphic designer. You just second guess everything. Like it's decent enough, I think. Let me just move this over.
Kieron Lewis:
Dig in the Vox emojis guys in the chat. What vibes do you get by emojis and play nice? Do you get when you feel Vox? When you see Vox, what vibes are you getting? Like a mobile provider. Loads of phone sync, phone emojis now pop up.
Alex Lazaris:
Why is that? I already got there. That like overthink everything.
Kieron Lewis:
In general for this project you mentioned, obviously you're kind of into this, your enjoyment, entertainment is kind of like Sci-Fi and that's kind of your vibe. Is that where you got inspiration from? Did you read anything? Did you watch anything recently where you ah, this would be to kind of share the guys on Adobe Live for this project in or where in general, where do you kind of find inspiration from?
Alex Lazaris:
Dude, for this project specifically, it was just mostly just paying attention to what's happening in the graphic design world. Seeing some stuff that was just like, oh, that's so cool. I love what they're doing here. I think over the last couple of years, I feel like a lot of 90s chrome stuff has been coming back up. I feel like there's that resurgence of 90s graphic tees and hot Topic from the 90s type stuff that's kind of coming back. But then now people are taking it and making it feel a little bit more elegant. And so all that stuff was coming up on my behalf. I was like, oh, this is really hot, but I can't do that for a client. A lot of my clients are, like, small to extra large businesses. It's not going to work for a medium to extra large, and the small ones want something typically a little bit more elegant. So it was mostly just trying to scratch a creative itch that I just saw, and I was like, I love this.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice. I love that. And you've come to the best place to scratch that itch, dude.
Alex Lazaris:
On Adobe. Honestly, Adobe Live has been so good for my I've gotten to do some really fun personal projects, and I just love getting to come hang out with Chat, try something new and see if it works.
Kieron Lewis:
Well, I like as well. It's funny because the more you do these Adobe lives and even the more that you guys join, you start to recognize familiar faces in the Chat. Familiar faces, familiar names, and you know what I mean? But it's quite cool because, again, it feels that's the whole community vibe, right? And the essence and the beauty as well. Is that where you're based in La. Right? And I'm in London, so hopefully one day we can meet in person. But we haven't met, but we've connected via Live. And same for you guys in the Chat, when you're talking, you're connecting. It is in itself as community. So it's a cool thing to kind of get involved with and see if you're new to this. Definitely kind of watch more and more because even after we're done, there's more and more streams to watch and even replays you can catch up on. So definitely watch and obviously get involved interact. That's why we love you guys to be here. So definitely take advantage of it.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely. Yeah, this is true. And I will be there probably in October, so come grab a boo.
Kieron Lewis:
You said that in a British accent. A little British twang there. What you lovely people in the Chat don't know is before he came live on, alex was testing out his very great British accents on me. Pots of tea, and all of that came out. But it's I do love tea, actually.
Alex Lazaris:
My visa is going to get declined.
Kieron Lewis:
It's all good, man. It's all good. I'm loving the emojis as well. In the Chat, we've got Christine, who said she's got, like, cool robot vibes. She's got, like, a robot emoji of, like, sunglasses. Wally. Wally, is it Wally with the Eve, like a badass. And you've got Nicole, who's the original dolly with Wally, the original, not Chucky. That's another thing. You got Nicole, who's got, like, a sort of planet and space invader, and I can't see what the other one is. Like a town. My eyes getting old. It's giving me space cyber city. Space cyber city vibes. I like that.
Alex Lazaris:
I'll take that.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah. Vox, the nightclub. There we go. That's the wrong thing that we're thinking of, but still.
Alex Lazaris:
Is there a Vox nightclub?
Kieron Lewis:
I just made that. Do you know what? Probably everyone goes on google now and types in Vox nightclub Influx. I have no idea. But you feel like it could easily be like a downtown matrix, like, kind of club everything's green neon.
Alex Lazaris:
Absolutely. Whoa. What is this happening here?
Kieron Lewis:
What did you just glitch in the Matrix?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kieron Lewis:
That was close. That was almost, like, on the cliff, isn't it?
Alex Lazaris:
It's one of those dialogue boxes that you're like, oh, yeah, I can just cancel over, and then pretty soon you're back to making squares again for another 30 minutes. Let's go.
Kieron Lewis:
Just on that topic, that's almost like anyone knows, Nika, one of our other Adobe hosts, there's always a running joke about knowing she's always down for saving. And we always try and plug that because even the greatest of mines will forget to press save sometimes. So save those files, ladies and gentlemen. Always save those files.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, so what I'm trying to do here is make some patterns. We've got some really fun tile patterns happening. I kind of want to make a soccer jersey now. Like I've got you're an Arsenal fan.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, there we go. You set the tone early on, find a jersey. And for our European friends, that's football, isn't it? So soccer. Tomato, tomato, potato. No one says potato. Yes, soccer. I am a soccer football fan, definitely. And when I saw this, I actually thought of the old school games that kind of came out on the original PlayStation, actually, even before that. Have you? Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Let me see if I can find that. Sorry. I'm, like, searching my computer frantically to see if I have a soccer jersey. Mockup.
Kieron Lewis:
I knew we should have mentioned the Arsenal word. We've got Anthony. He said, man united are better, but let's not go into that realm. Smile away, boys. Smile away.
Alex Lazaris:
Get my download real quick, because I think this have you seen the Nigeria jersey that Nike did? Yes.
Kieron Lewis:
That is a good shout.
Alex Lazaris:
The green.
Kieron Lewis:
And what I see, though, actually the pattern. You're that's do you know what? That would be a cool thing to brand? Like a football. Yeah, I think that is one of those dream clients to do that.
Alex Lazaris:
Those of y'all not familiar with it, it's this jersey that Nike made. You can't buy them. They sold out immediately. But it's so cool. It was one of the first that they started really bringing the lifestyle into design. It's such a cool kit. It's amazing.
Kieron Lewis:
It was awesome, though, because, like you mentioned, it's more than just the patterns and the shapes. They really went into the culture and the kind of material that you might have associated the continent and all these elements which actually made that kit. Because I'm going to geek out way too much. But I saw a thing about when it was the men's euros a few years back. And even though, you know, you might not even support that particular nation, people bought the shirts or the jersey just because of cool design, which for me, that's awesome. Because regardless of what nation you can appreciate good. That was that was cool. Really cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Why is this not working?
Kieron Lewis:
We've got Izzy, who's also an Adobe Life host, who said, oh, I remember when I forgot to save Live. So Izzy was another host who we have and also a designer previously, and we did ours a few months back, maybe even a year ago, and she forgot to press save. But it's all good. It's all good. We came back. We revived it. It's all good. We did revive it.
Alex Lazaris:
How was that redemption art?
Kieron Lewis:
It was even sweeter the second time around. It was even sweeter.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, I'm downloading my mockup. Got it. All right, so I'm going to make another pattern real quick. If anybody's watched my streams before, I'm a huge sucker for repeating patterns. I think they're such a great way of bringing your brand to life. Sometimes they can be really heavy. So let's just show you what we've got so far. Got X's. We got O's. We got nice V's. We can also add more spacing in, like man, these are cool. These are pretty fun.
Kieron Lewis:
I mean, don't be wrong. My eyes, they are warped into your screen, and I may even just head butt the screen directly because it's awesome. I do love it because I'm a sucker for those kind of like those patterns where you're just almost you know, when you like, of course it's cool where you it's that machine where you look through and it twists and it changes colors and the shapes the kaleidoscope. That's the name. Yeah, I see that now.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, kaleidoscopes are awesome. I was also thinking if I added some crazy colors with it, it could be one of those books that you have to look really closely into and go crazy.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that.
Alex Lazaris:
All right. Sure. All right. So color palette wise, I'm thinking the hot tech yellow neon color that everybody's doing right now. I don't know if you're familiar. So trendy. It's going to be, like, kind of like that, like bright. Yeah, I got you aesthetic green, something like that. Could probably even use a little bit more yellow if we really wanted high vis. All right. Who knew that we were going to be making a futuristic soccer team? This is the beauty of Adobe life. Just do it live.
Kieron Lewis:
Do you know what? Just very quickly and this is me not even geeking out. There's actually a thing called galactic football, and it's a mixture between The Matrix and football, but they touch on futuristic. So this whole in fact, this is actually still relevant, so I'm not going to go too please. But it does touch on using kind of like, futuristic shapes and graphics. And then you kick the ball, and the ball kind of disperse into pixels, and there we go. That's my end of my geek moment. But it's an awesome show if you're into football and animation.
Alex Lazaris:
I think I might just make it a little bit more green.
Kieron Lewis:
No, it was weird when your dog is like, why am I mentioning galactic football? But I'm going to say it with my chest out because I love it. We've got Uriel. I hope I said it correctly. Who said, I'm a professional magician and I'm a huge fan of optical illusion. That's an awesome job.
Alex Lazaris:
That's amazing. Being in La. There's the Magic Castle, Magic Kingdom. Maybe you're all those I have no idea.
Kieron Lewis:
What is frost? London folks, educate us.
Alex Lazaris:
It's a magician's only magic venue. So you can only go if you are a student of magic or student of theirs, or if you're a professional magician or brought specifically with the magician. I think it's called the Magic Castle or the Magic Kingdom.
Kieron Lewis:
The Magic Circle, is it? I've heard of heard of that. Like South Park. Some reference. But that's awesome. That is an awesome job role, and thank you for joining the Live. I mean, that just goes to say it doesn't matter if you're in a creative space or not. You can just appreciate cool work when it's being shown.
Alex Lazaris:
I would say that magicians are so incredibly creative.
Kieron Lewis:
That's actually a very good point. Yeah, that's a very good point.
Alex Lazaris:
That are, like, essentially just graphic designers that are always trying to make people look where they want. Yes.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. My business kind of be like Kieran Lewis, wizard extraordinaire magician. Just like yeah. So URA said, magic castles and members only for magicians. That's the one. Magic Castle.
Alex Lazaris:
Magic Castle. Yeah.
Kieron Lewis:
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Alex Lazaris:
If you're in La. And let me know. Hit me up.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice little plug.
Alex Lazaris:
All right. Okay. I feel like now I'm just like copying the Nigeria jersey. Am I kind of.
Kieron Lewis:
Use it as your inspiration? Very heavily stolen, inspired by the entirety.
Alex Lazaris:
Do a color overlay. Change it out to like I'm going.
Kieron Lewis:
To put it out there to the chat. It could be quite a bold question, but is there any particular kit for any maybe soccer fans or even not soccer fans, but are there any kits that you've seen that you appreciate in terms of clothing that you may. If you're into sport or even just sort of kits, branded materials that you've seen on different clothing or fashion labels, let us know. It doesn't have to be football. Just put it out there. Or soccer. Anything you've seen recently that would be cool to know what you're kind of.
Alex Lazaris:
What you're thinking in terms of what's your vibe. Chat, what's your vibe?
Kieron Lewis:
What is your vibe? Let us know, please.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Honestly, soccer kits are so hard, man. You don't want to step on people's know.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Or at least I don't. Maybe some people do.
Kieron Lewis:
I was going to say Simon Dixon. He's a freelance graphic designer in a studio, and he recently rebranded because Everton is a football club in the UK.
Alex Lazaris:
Freelancer. He owns a huge studio.
Kieron Lewis:
That's what I meant to say. He's like a back alley designer. That's the guy.
Alex Lazaris:
He's like us.
Kieron Lewis:
We go way back. We go way back. Just chilling out, kicking the curb. Yeah, his stuff was cool. Because, again, if you know about Everton and the brand, they have that I don't know if it's the famous castle, right, or some sort of architecture thing. Yeah. And they've kind of kept essence in that true design, if you haven't seen it, definitely go on Dixon studio. Not just one bloke, not just one lad that's never going to let me go, now, is it? Just one lad in a basement.
Alex Lazaris:
You're never getting hired there, man.
Kieron Lewis:
It's all good. I can appreciate my file. Yeah, but definitely check that, because I saw it, I was like, I'm not an Everton fan, but I can appreciate that. And actually, on that topic, lastly thing about football, Arsenal's kit is awesome. Just saying, they have a very cool kit. No, you say that, but actually, there's been I don't know why they do this, but they do, like, a vote every season of the best kits in Arsenal tend to be number one. I mean, who's counting, right? It's like, seven years in a row, but who is counting? So, definitely check that out. After the stream. Of course. Not during the stream.
Alex Lazaris:
That's hilarious. AC. Milan just went through a rebrand. Juventus went through one a couple years ago. Footy's a big deal now. Footy. You like that? I saw in British now.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. Set the tone early on. Set the tone early on. We've got Steve Kieran Woods. Know this guy's name? There's a famous UK magician who does street. Is he still around? I'm gonna say dynamo. I bet it's possibly Dynamo. He's cool. He's like, down with a kids kind of magician. Have you heard of Dynamo? Do you know that is?
Alex Lazaris:
No.
Kieron Lewis:
He is awesome. Yeah, definitely. I hope it's dynamo. I mean, I don't know many UK magicians, but I feel like it probably is him. He's got the most modern up to date. That's horrible to say, but just, like, more current, I guess, in terms of magicians in the UK, potentially. I hope that's what you're on about, Steve. If not, have a Google. Let me yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
Like, I love the new kit from Barcelona that Spotify did. That's just the lifestyle one. It's like the beige one. They're doing such a good job of making kits exciting for people who are maybe not your traditional fan.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, because when you think about that, that's a good point. One thing to brand for your fan base, your clothing. But I guess if it's a sport in particular where it's forever growing, right. It's never like a set target audience, because it changes a generation. And whatnot trying to create identity on a clothing for something that it changes every year, right? Every season they change the kit. So it's always having to be updated. But enough that doesn't offend or not, right? Word offend. But it still is a positive reaction with the crowd. That could be quite tricky as a brief, actually. I mean, don't be wrong. I would love to do that as a job for sure, but yeah, it can't be that easy, I imagine.
Alex Lazaris:
I've recently declined to purchase a jersey because of their sponsorship logos.
Kieron Lewis:
Really? We're dying to know the name now. I know you break.
Alex Lazaris:
Mean, I can say it with my whole chest, I guess. Yes. There's a Portland Thorns is a women's soccer team in Portland, Oregon. Really strong team, awesome work. Their proximity to Nike, I think has helped them a lot with their kit. Their kit has been amazing for like the last three years. I feel like I've had their jersey for every year essentially the last three years. It's amazing. It's got roses, it's a rose. Thorns is pretty much their whole petals and stuff like that. It's amazing. Even the new one is pretty sick. It's got like a ribbing of just like thorns. And it's just the stripes of thorns across.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
Pretty cool. But they got a TikTok sponsorship recently and the logo is on the sleeve and it's so big. It's so big. It's like every time your client comes up to you and goes, hey, we need to make the logo bigger.
Kieron Lewis:
It's like that there's big, but they're silly big, right?
Alex Lazaris:
It's like a captain's armband big.
Kieron Lewis:
Dude. I think it's like your passion for TikTok then, if you're going to I'm so off that radar of TikTok. I mean, I'm not against it, but I'm not in that space.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, for context, their old brand sponsors was like Jersey Mike's, which was like the sandwich place and like a healthcare company before. So it's oh wow. Okay, now it's TikTok and it's very big.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, this is looking cool. By the.
Alex Lazaris:
To.
Kieron Lewis:
It feels like it could be like well, it's the badge on almost like the emblem potentially on the maybe. Yeah, put like kind of like sewed on patch.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. I love that. This stream has just become a soccer stream now.
Kieron Lewis:
It's great. Yeah, no, I apologize for anyone talking about football, really. We talk about every alpha in between. You just caught us in that particular period. But actually it's quite nice time to actually mention now because about an hour into the stream which time has literally flown by. Ridiculously. But yeah. If you have just joined us, massive, massive welcome. If you've been already awesome. And today we have creative director Alex Lazaris. And he is designing his personal project, which taking inspiration from tech, Sci-Fi and digital worlds. And we're creating a brand right now using different shapes, geometric patterns in Illustrator, and a bit of Photoshop. So massive welcome. You've just joined us. Any thoughts you want to. Put in the chat regarding what we're working on, or just know about Alex? What is he into? His vibe? Does he support Arsenal or not? All these questions you can throw in the chat. That was a little sun. Anything in the chat, just throw it in there. And I would happily love to share it with Alex.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Do I support Arsenal? I support it's. Got a cannon on there. It's pretty nice.
Kieron Lewis:
It is.
Alex Lazaris:
Strong motif.
Kieron Lewis:
Mix it up. It's funny, actually, because there's always some sort of what's the one I'm looking for? You mentioned with the football team you mentioned before it's the fawns, the cannon, the foxes, which are like wolves. There's always some sort of animal or object that is I won't say the word violent, but what's the word I'm looking for? Aggressive is the right word. I don't know. You're not going to get the ladybirds, are you, as like a brand? I don't know. Maybe there is, actually. I say that now. Can you imagine? There's a ladybird soccer team out there? But, yeah, I'd like to see maybe a less passive aggressive.
Alex Lazaris:
What is Suventus's one? I mean, it's just a J logo now.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Oh, my football knowledge now. Yeah, they've changed it. Yeah, sometimes they do. Typographic actually was quite nice when they mix it up. Now, a little pivot away from football, we've got Isabelle, who's asked Alex, what is a successful design for you? I mean, that's big question, but what would you consider to be a successful design in your world?
Alex Lazaris:
Honestly, it's such a cop out answer and I'm sorry for that. For me, success looks like the client being thrilled by the process. At the end of the day, I've structured my contracts in a way that have removed my ego from it as much as possible, and I tried to make sure that the client is just really content with the end result, because that gives me so much more roadmap down the line. As a business owner, I want to make sure that my clients are happy. It's way easier for me to get referrals than it is for me to always hunt for new business. So if I keep the clients happy, I'm typically going to get a referral. And so what is it? Fish on the line is a fish in the hand is better than the fish in the pond or whatever, something like that. That's kind of an ideology that I really want to always have. Instilled.
Kieron Lewis:
No, I think it was copper. That totally works. I think you mentioned as well, like, the idea of, because they're a happy client, everything's going well. It's for every freelancer or just business in general where you can continue that relationship. Right. You don't want to do a one off thing and then wham, bam, thank you, ma'am kind of thing. It's a continual thing and you can kind of keep that relation. And I don't know if you found it too, Alex, but with clients who you have, even of my own, that when you've worked with them several times, it's almost like there's a lot more I want to say freedom is the right word, but more of a trust element, perhaps on both sides, where you can run with it. Exactly. But they do trust in that design process. More so of what especially in opposed to when you're just starting out with them, they don't know what they're going to expect, but the more you do and the more ideas you kind of put to the table and obviously justify why you've done what you've done, they really kind of buy into that philosophy, I find. And for me that's the kind of answer to that question is from my side. For me that's the million dollar thing where you can kind of keep that relationship strong, you can come back, but also you don't just become the yes man, yes woman anymore. You can kind of challenge and that's okay, right, to challenge because you both want to get the best deliverable possible. So that's almost a sweet spot for me, I'd say, with having a successful design or even a client in general.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, I agree. I think as you get up in your career, the more trust you can get from a client, the more, like you said, ability to challenge them and think in new ways is kind of everything that you want, what you've worked so hard to get to. So we value that.
Kieron Lewis:
Great question, Izzy. And in fact, what's your I know obviously you work in the brand design sector as well, so definitely get us your thoughts back to you in terms of that question and to everyone else in the chat as well. What do you guys consider to be successful design? You've obviously heard mine, Alex's thoughts. We'd love to hear what you guys thinks. If you're in the freelance world and full time world or just general, you can appreciate good design. Sure. Which is why you're here. So let us know in the chat what it is and we can discuss it'd. Be awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. All right. I'm just like futzing with this thing and I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. All right.
Kieron Lewis:
I like it. Do you know what? When my brain gets like that, it's almost like because I like it, but I don't want to keep editing it, I just duplicate and then I'm like, yeah, I keep my original. That's cool. That's almost like Xx, isn't it? Is Xx band?
Alex Lazaris:
The band? Yeah.
Kieron Lewis:
No. What am I saying? I know Xx the band, but I've seen some sort of music album recently where it's got this kind of geometric feel to it almost I don't know. I won't say religious, but it's obviously.
Alex Lazaris:
Got a cross and kind of a religious vibe to it. I don't know, maybe it's because I just got back from Portugal. Now I'm converting.
Kieron Lewis:
Influence without even realizing.
Alex Lazaris:
All I'm going to do is just add a little background to it by just drawing. We'll go ahead and flip it.
Kieron Lewis:
So Izzy said so, like design of a strong concept, a design that exists with purpose. Boom. There we go. Yeah. Chocolate teapot. Otherwise, isn't it? Very good shout. It's designed with purpose and even design that can influence change. Right. Potentially as well. Especially if it's community based or something for a good cause. Which I feel like even the same thing for protests and without getting too off. Peace. But the branding that they do in protests is certain styles and things that are there to influence. Yeah. I'm liking this, by the way, dude. Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
My goal is to have this done to a place that you would want to buy it or wear it.
Kieron Lewis:
Dude, sell in your shop. And I'll be the first one to rock it around the UK. I'll wear it around Piccadilly Circus. I will get number 14. I love that wrapped. Gift wrapped it with the pattern, of course, as well.
Alex Lazaris:
For sure.
Kieron Lewis:
Tissue paper. Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
What's the transparency? That's what I'll do right now.
Kieron Lewis:
I can see you're working between the Illustrator and the Photoshop, which, I mean, every designer kind of does that. But again, if you're quite new to the programs, you'll probably realize that we're working between the two programs. But there's a lot, especially if you're just starting out, there's a lot that Adobe programs can kind of work in terms of how they in sync with one another. I tend to use Illustrator InDesign Photoshop myself, but in this case, we're working with Photoshop Illustrator. But the two will very much work hand in hand. And the more you watch, tutorials or practice and bits and bobs, you'll start to realize how they actually do work. So if you're very new to this space and thinking, how is he drifting between back and forth worlds, there's definitely a method to the madness. Keep on watching and keep on practicing as well, if you get a chance to.
Alex Lazaris:
I am shamelessly stealing this idea from the Nigeria kit. No, I'm going to make this a little bit more like designy now.
Kieron Lewis:
Okay.
Alex Lazaris:
All right. So I race cars. I used to race motorcycles and skateboards.
Kieron Lewis:
Cool.
Alex Lazaris:
I had my helmet painted by I don't know if you watch Formula One or anything, but there's an artist named Ornamental Conifer who paints helmets. He's painted Daniel Ricardo's helmet. He painted one of mine, one of my race car helmets. He did an Adobe helmet a long time ago that was like sponsored logos and all this other stuff on it that he used the transparency background. And it was amazing. And I'm going to steal the idea of using the transparency logo on this. You'll see how it all comes together in a second.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice. Oh, dude. The Crescenda you've built. I love that sort of build up tools. Excuse me.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome.
Kieron Lewis:
We've got RB. Who said it's the classic line, Alex, make it pop is make it wow. And for anyone's thinking, why are these jokes coming from? It's like, I feel like a lot of designers will hear these words in their design lifetime, potentially. Maybe if you're more of a junior, you're hearing it a lot, but make it wow. I want to be wowed. It's like, what does that even mean? But hopefully you're being wowed right now, which is why you're here. So massive. Massive. Welcome.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. So now I've just created my own little transparency background, and I'm going to just pull it in and then take it into Photoshop, and then let's just plop it underneath this color fill. Smart object so we can edit it later. I think that's probably a good one. What I'm going to do here is actually take that color fill back up over it, and then I don't know. What sponsor? Do we have sponsor today? I swear I made a Nick Longo logo. Let me see if I can find it.
Kieron Lewis:
Actually, I saw that he mentioned that you owe me a logo. I'm sure I saw that as a comment from Nick.
Alex Lazaris:
I swear I made him I mean.
Kieron Lewis:
You got IOUs all over the creative community of logos, and you own people.
Alex Lazaris:
You will never be able to I don't know what I named it. Oh, no, I did. We did a helmet design. Let me see.
Kieron Lewis:
All right, Nick, if you're still here, help us out. Nick, I don't know if you've drifted off into the realm, but if you are still here for us, a lifeline.
Alex Lazaris:
Okay, I found it. All right, I think let's see. Lazaris racing. All right, this is what we did with Nick back in the day. Longo rongo.
Kieron Lewis:
See? Sweet. I love that.
Alex Lazaris:
It'S a thing. All right, this happens.
Kieron Lewis:
I'm not judging, dude, I'm laughing with you.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, longo no, wrongo. Let's grab this. We'll throw it on the jersey. Wicked smart object. Just see. Let's see.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, that's awesome. You've definitely got to make this into an actual jersey, dude.
Alex Lazaris:
You have to it's off center a little bit. Let's adjust it. All right, that's looking pretty good. Now what we're going to do is I'm going to pull this layer actually up, and then I'm going to mask it completely. And then I'm going to actually take my brush and just try to make it look like I'm erasing it off. Nice pencil.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. I feel like that was how long ago was this was this logo created?
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, man.
Kieron Lewis:
Are we going back in the archives? Before my time as a host? Never.
Alex Lazaris:
How far back was October 5, 2021?
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, that was before my time, but I've seen is that on your behalf by any chance?
Alex Lazaris:
Is that no, not yet. I've seen probably what he's talking about.
Kieron Lewis:
I love this. We've got a little bit of communication happening in the chat. That's what it's about, guys. You guys all talk as well amongst yourselves. We love to see it. So Isabelle's asked so a question to you, Alex. And then we've got Steve who answered it, which is asked, Alex, what qualities does a creative director should have? So that was a question to you. But then we had Steve who answered it and said, creative directors should always buy the staff drinks every Friday. There we go. You have one job, one job.
Alex Lazaris:
Steve's not wrong.
Kieron Lewis:
Steve's not. And if you don't drink, then a mocktail or some sort of food.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's alcoholic or non alcoholic, you're getting a drink. It can be water, it can be juice or pastry.
Kieron Lewis:
Mondays I'm down for a pastry Monday, if that's a well afterwards. But yes, I'll answer your question, Alex from Izzy. What would you say special qualities or quality should a creative director have?
Alex Lazaris:
No pressure.
Kieron Lewis:
The gift to me, the most important.
Alex Lazaris:
Thing is to be able to uplift the people around you and make them or help them do the best work of their lives. I think in a perfect world, that's what creative directors would be doing all the time. They would be able to manage the stakeholders, which is typically the client. They would help those around them do the best work possible and grow and get to the next level in their career and help see the blind spots that they might be experiencing or seeing. Yeah, I think it's mostly about support and making sure that everybody feels like they're getting kind of taken care of and listened to and heard and all that awesome.
Kieron Lewis:
I'm taking notes, so there we go. That's great to hear. I'm not in that space whatsoever, but like you said, those kind of qualities. I imagine a good creative director, or even just senior level, someone who's working with, say, younger people, say, or graduates, it's just that nurturing ability. Right. It's one thing to have the talent as a designer, but also the people skills and to be able to the patience and to listen and all these qualities, like you said. So that's awesome. By the way, I'm liking that brush that you've done with the pixels on the kit. That's awesome, dude.
Alex Lazaris:
That's kind of fun, right?
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah, that's cool.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm trying to figure out what is our actual color palette. Is it just going to be black and white and green? Like black, white? Is that a thing? Chat, let me know if you have any ideas. I am all ears.
Kieron Lewis:
What colors are you guys vibing to that you think could work quite nice? Do you know what I'm even thinking on that where you got your longo logo, the stripe that goes through, is that like an orange or a red?
Alex Lazaris:
It's red right now, but I could kill it. I could do something else.
Kieron Lewis:
No, I love that I realized if that background is red, then it would just completely merge in. So that's a bad choice, but I like that color. Anyway. My brain was thinking, something in there.
Alex Lazaris:
I could kill that stroke in the background. And then since I'm already striking through it with the yes, I like that. Nick has left the building, and he's getting his jersey. Now.
Kieron Lewis:
You left at the best. Go wandering.
Alex Lazaris:
Go. So I can't tell if this stroke is a little bit too big, so I might just scale it.
Kieron Lewis:
I was going to say yeah, because it's almost that way, where you kind of want to maybe make out what the letters are. But enough. That keeps you in suspense. Right.
Alex Lazaris:
It's just moving on to a different layer.
Kieron Lewis:
I'm just thinking of, like, a design football team, like the pixels or like I don't know. I don't know where that came. I just thought of the band Pixies. Yeah, the pixel. Pixels.
Alex Lazaris:
I thought the exact same thing, man.
Kieron Lewis:
So uncool.
Alex Lazaris:
All right, so I got, like.
Kieron Lewis:
That'S a nice comment from Ural, who said, so on that topic of what we were discussing about what makes a good creative director. He said it's like any management leadership position, you make your employees feel valued, heard, and guide them to do better. So yes. Couldn't agree with you more on that. Oh, that's a good shout. Marcus. The Invaders. That's it. In terms of names for, like, you looked at what do you mean? The Invaders.
Alex Lazaris:
Space Invaders. Space Invader was one of my favorite graffiti artists for a long time.
Kieron Lewis:
Really? Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
You know who Space Invader is?
Kieron Lewis:
I know of. Nice. That's a strong name as well. That would work. That would work quite well. The Invaders.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's got the whole, like, the pixel. You just take the Space Invaders icon and made it, like graffiti mark.
Kieron Lewis:
Oh, I'm sure it's a pretty nut dotted around. Are you feeling it's weird? Do you think, like, would it be weird if when you have a shirt, does it kind of bleed into the shorts?
Alex Lazaris:
Do the kit? I was wondering if the sleeve should have the maybe actually, I think on.
Kieron Lewis:
Kits, do they kind of continue?
Alex Lazaris:
Let's see here. Let's do all right. Let's see.
Kieron Lewis:
I'm liking your style. I'll be in the chat. So Space Invader is the everlasting game. Yes. Very true for anyone born, like, was it ninety s? Eighty s, maybe. Nostalgia now. Trip coming in in full bloom.
Alex Lazaris:
Name here or place? Logo here.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
And then I can take the 120. All right, let's do it. It's that's amazing how fast time flies when you're having fun.
Kieron Lewis:
I know, dude. It's absolutely I knew hosting you as well. It would it would be like this. I'm so that's what I was saying, and I generally mean it. I was really excited to be hosting you because I've seen your previous dreams, and I knew it would be a vibe doing it. I don't know how much football we're talking about, though, and definitely proved me right. It was a lot, but in good terms, hopefully you guys vibed at that, too, which is great. Yeah, it's been a blast. We've got a question from Karthik and excuse me, let me know if it obviously crosses that boundary of slightly personal and you don't have to answer it. He's asked, how old are we? Just out of curious curiosity, does that determine how good we are? I don't know. I'm 31 years old, if that adds to anything. There we go. Age. Nothing but a number. Don't have to answer it. Made it weirder.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, I'm not going to answer that. Okay. The reason why is because I typically have to manage people that are much, much, much older than me. And ageism shouldn't happen, but it definitely can. And so, definitely, I just prefer to keep those cards a little bit closer. I think when you're in a corporate environment, especially or other things, nobody needs to know. Nobody needs to know.
Kieron Lewis:
Very good show. Very good show. And it's funny because on that topic of age, but even going into the space of one thing I've always found a bit frustrating is the junior level midweight senior. And I always find, does that sometimes have to be based on age? But actually, if you're already I know many, many designers who maybe just came out of uni, but actually what they're performing is actually at senior level. Age is in our space. Maybe other job roles as well, but especially in our space, it really doesn't matter about that. For me, it's the skill that you have and the ability you have and age. Yeah, okay. You might have a bit more experience because a bit more time, but people learn in different ways. People learn quicker, slower, that's regardless. But yeah, if you ask in out of curiosity, there we go. If you want to know karthik yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
I totally get that. I have hired very old people in roles that were based off of their age. They probably should be a lot higher, but their skill set wasn't and all that stuff and vice versa. It's really your skill set at the end of the day is what gets you the job, and your performance in that role is what gets you promoted.
Kieron Lewis:
Definitely.
Alex Lazaris:
It's not a competition, and a lot of people think that it's like a race and you'll be fine.
Kieron Lewis:
Most definitely.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. Chris says, I'm trying to get into junior position, but not a typical junior. I mean, honestly, people will reset their careers. People pivot. You're allowed to do these things, so don't get fixated on numbers and stuff. Just focus on your craft and your skill set and you're going to be in a really good position. I met people at mentoring events who were coming from the banking industry, and they're like, I don't know if I'm good enough. And I was blown away by their work and they were just now swapping, and I was just like, you're incredible. This is absolutely your passion and you're calling, do this, please, and you'll be in a really good spot.
Kieron Lewis:
I love that. It reminds me of sure. Even when I was at Uni, because I think that's for anyone who's been to Uni may echo this too, but you find that you're a mixture of all walks of life and age is just maybe when you're in school and I've done the school system in the US. Of high school, but in, say, secondary school, where you're around that sort of teenage age, obviously you're the same age. But as you go into college and uni, you're surrounded by all walks of life and all different types of people and ages. So for me, that's like the best example to kind of get familiar around working with people of different ages and skill sets. And also people bring different things to the table, right. It's generational, so you're going to have a different mindset to someone else, potentially different age. All culture, not just age. It could be culture, could be background as well. And that's the beauty of it. You've got to celebrate it and be respectful and just learn from it too. Right? There's always something anyone can bring to the table. So hopefully, Chris, what you asked about getting into a junior position, these kind of comments and advice kind of helps you and definitely keep us posting how you come along. It'd be great to kind of know how you're getting on because it'd be cool to know what actual junior position are you looking into? Is it like graphic design? Is it photography? Let us know. We're quite curious to know what space you're operating in. Yeah.
Alex Lazaris:
And if you need a portfolio review, shoot me a note on Behance or email. Happy to do a portfolio review. But also bear with me. If I don't get back to you immediately, it's not because I don't like you, it's because I'm busy. Feel free to ping me and bother me if I don't get back to you on time.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice. Just send Alex loads of emojis, one email after the other. And don't do that. I'll be the kieran told me I can immediately retract that statement.
Alex Lazaris:
I'm just going to start forwarding you all my emails.
Kieron Lewis:
I opened the floodgates for that. Definitely. Okay, cool. Graphic design. So you're in a good place then, Chris. Hopefully what you're seeing now, and this is a pageant project to run, don't forget. And again, on that topic of being a junior and just starting out, it's all good, obviously, trying to find a job in your role, but actually, whilst you're looking and say it might take a bit longer than expected, you can do these little side projects. You can do these passion things and keep your creativity afloat. Like what we're doing right now. So hopefully these kind of tutorials gives you some inspiration, kind of doing your own thing whilst you're waiting to actually secure that junior position. So good luck, dude, on your journeys.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, the passion projects are such a correct way for you to get the work that you want to do. Honestly, the best recommendation I can do is say, try to find the kind of work that you want to do and just put that work in your portfolio constantly and go apply places that can give you that work. Otherwise you might be applying for things that you're not showing in your book and have a harder time getting into.
Kieron Lewis:
It's funny you say that just before we kind of wrap on that part. Even when I've looked at portfolios or for job interviews, I always find that the client jobs are awesome. But when you've got those little gems in there where it's the side projects, the community based projects, the ones that really resonates with why you are actually a creative or designer, for me, that clearly shows your intent and your interest in our craft. So, for me, I always find those a bit more exciting. I mean, that's a personal preference, but I always find I wouldn't say have your whole portfolio full of side projects and one or two clients, but a nice balance works well. And you'd be surprised the feedback you may get as well. When you need interviews, people see these projects, you kind of gone out your way to do these things. Keep pushing those sort of side hustles, for sure. We've got a comment here from I think it's like, Okovix, I hope I got that correct, but I like your icon, it looks pretty cool. He's asked, Is this 3D that we're looking at now? I think you maybe just came in.
Alex Lazaris:
And seen so this mockup is actually a Photoshop mockup. It's flat technically, but it's using smart objects and warping around like a 3D image. But I wouldn't be able to rotate it or spin it in space. This is literally just a Photoshop document. If I would want a different angle, I would need to buy a different mockup of it, which I do have another mockup of it if I wanted to do that. But no, this is just a one off drug piece.
Kieron Lewis:
It's cool though, because with these mockups that you get, whether it's on Dolby stock or any other site, it looks so realistic, right? Whether it's the shading, what they've done to it. So it's interesting you mentioned it 3D because perhaps that's the vibe it gets when you first see, especially if you're new to maybe using mockups.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, this one feels so legit. A lot of these mockups to help kind of sell it to a client. To answer that question again, what do creative directors do? A lot of my job is like being a good salesperson, selling to the client selling to the team, selling a vision.
Kieron Lewis:
Be a magician.
Alex Lazaris:
I wish I was a see how happy that feels.
Kieron Lewis:
So you've got Izzy. He said, I still do present projects even if I feel established in my craft. I just love design that much. There we go. Exactly. That's what it's about, guys like doing it for fun and actually taking time out to do stuff like that. Because I realize within our world, in our space, time goes so quick, right? Like the stream is going right now, but to a point where you almost forget sometimes maybe why you actually are in this space. Maybe a bit biased because we're creatives. But I do think with our line of work, we're in the best job ever. Right. You're creating stuff because you have a talent and you enjoy it. And how people interpret it is obviously up to them. But I think it's a cool thing to do. So don't forget, take time out to actually really enjoy it. And you get that more with passion. Projects, I find as well.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, totally. I think we are very lucky to have an industry where we're very passionate about what we're able to do. Including scribble on a jersey.
Kieron Lewis:
That looks cool. You got to do like the Alex. The alex signature.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah.
Kieron Lewis:
Zoro sort of style, like.
Alex Lazaris:
Not bad. What are we doing? Chat. What else is needed? We got like 25 minutes left.
Kieron Lewis:
We've got actually it's funny going back, we've got quite a lot of people experiences about age in our space. Actually. Don't want to go too off piece on no, that's fine. It's interesting seeing everyone's thoughts on it. We've got Dina, I was saying it correctly, saying about I would like an entry level position, but not at the age either. They tend to advise for college or graduates and I want to learn new stuff. I may not know. I think that's touching on from Shauna's experience as well. It's always interesting sort of hearing, you know, first in the community what you experienced or what things you know as well and what you may have seen. So definitely can keep those going. But on the topic of design and what you can see now, what are you guys vibing when you see these awesome colors and shapes.
Alex Lazaris:
Can you imagine.
Kieron Lewis:
The brand's called just place logo hair? Honestly, just like insert.
Alex Lazaris:
I wonder. Let's see where the helmet was from last time. Laura Nepsum because we did a helmet mockup. Let's see if I have it.
Kieron Lewis:
Dusted off the cobwebs of that's sick. I love suck dog.
Alex Lazaris:
We have the little like shall not pass logo on there. I thought I put sponsored logos there.
Kieron Lewis:
But no, that's cool, man.
Alex Lazaris:
I guess I could use the subdog on there too. The great thing is when you ever have a bunch of projects that you've made, you can just place your own logos everywhere. All right, I think that's good enough. For right now. I think we need to do like a mock up now or get closer to it. All right, so I'm going to license this object in three D twenty five minutes to get us all these incredible things done in Dimension. Might be a tall ask, but this is your mission.
Kieron Lewis:
If you choose to accept it, Alex, it's almost mission impossible.
Alex Lazaris:
I'll do my best.
Kieron Lewis:
You got this, man.
Alex Lazaris:
But if not, then we have another day tomorrow that we can start to jam out more on. So indeed, super amp.
Kieron Lewis:
That's great to see. Oh, so I was going to say in the chat it's great to see. So we've got Okovix who mentioned he doesn't tend to use mock ups to represent their work. But then you've got Steve who's and again it's nice when you guys communicate one another saying, depending on the subject matter, it can look amazing and it's a lot more common. So there we, you know, Alex mentioned it before. Sometimes that can really sell it to the client when they can see things in know the fun execution in opposed to just say, a flat single page piece of artwork. So definitely look into that. And like Alex is doing now obviously using Adobe stock where you can get these awesome assets from.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. So right now what I'm doing is I've got such a big canvas.
Kieron Lewis:
Like a Christmas ball. Born, I guess.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it kind of is. Right, document settings. All right, I'm going to just make it like thousand. All right. So what I'm going to do here is just let's get to know our object in Dimension. In case you've never used Dimension, and I know we're talking about mockups, you can use Photoshop, you can use Dimension for your mockups. Really depends on what you're trying to do. You can also use tangible mockups. If you have a packaging project, go get a label printed, show it to the client. They would love to turn it around, feel it in their hands. If you can't use Dimension, totally viable, totally acceptable. What I'm actually going to do here is I want to get to know this object a little bit. I want to see what part of it I want to actually shoot. I'm going to click option one and then that will give me the top option two, three, four. Trying to see specifically I think. So like that might be an interesting approach. So all right. Been a while since I've used Dimensions.
Kieron Lewis:
Off. There's a question because I know we're trapped for time as well. Is there a question I can ask whilst you're in that process of doing it as well? From Christine who said, it's a question for both myself and you. What is your favorite part of the branding process? And in brackets and no Alex, you're not allowed to say when the client receives their brand and they're happy with got you there, man.
Alex Lazaris:
My favorite part is when things start to click or you have that AHA moment and you're just like, this is the coolest thing. This is going to work. I'm sure that the client will love it. It's going to resonate that experience. Honestly, it's such a dopamine rush where you're just like, this is amazing. I think graphic designers and creatives, we crave those moments of delight because if you look at the chart of the creative process and you start a project and you're at a high and it's great, and then you start working and you're like, oh no, I'm stuck. And you're kind of at the bottom and then you kind of work through it and you're like, oh yes, this is a great idea. That's amazing. Like those moments where you're just like, this is so cool. And that I think, is what we all kind of live for at the end of the day. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.
Kieron Lewis:
Sweet. No, I mean that's definitely your perspective, which is I hope it answers your question. Christine, from my part, do you know what? I actually enjoyed that early stage where I wouldn't say visual research, but if it's a branding project, say in particular we're doing, I tend to draw pen to paper a lot. So sometimes it is going online and finding visual research. But I actually enjoyed the drawing stages as well of the early stages, just pen to paper. And it's that early stage where no idea is a bad idea and if there is a bad idea, just kind of work backwards from there. So I kind of have a lot of fun with that idea of just wicking or winging it, but just having fun because you don't really know what's realistic at this stage. And obviously as you kind of go through it, then you start to filter it down and really get it down to its purest form. But yeah, hopefully it answers your question. Your question, Christine. Christine, I should say and please us know what favorite part of your branding process too.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, absolutely. So right now I'm trying to find a cool materiality to bring to this ball so I can do a bunch of crazy things with it if I want to. They've already separated out the two layers on there and do gold or red on those things. You can get funky and fresh with it. I kind of want to just keep it like black because I think with how cool we've got that lime green but we also got the black happening on our design. So maybe I just want both of those to be black. I might want like a black synthetic of some sort.
Kieron Lewis:
Texture is very cool.
Alex Lazaris:
Here, gonna open this up. How familiar art is chat with dimension. Have you all used it before? Never used it before. What's your experience been?
Kieron Lewis:
There we go. Let us know in the chat. Your vibes. Have you dabbled in that world of the 3D hemisphere. I personally haven't actually I definitely would like to know. I mean, even watching you do this is pretty cool. Educate myself on this, for sure.
Alex Lazaris:
You can get very dialed with it. I think it's a really great tool for people who are trying to explore the 3D world and want to understand it a little bit better. I think it's a really good tool for that. I've got kind of two different materialities happening here. Emboss color, I can make it darker.
Kieron Lewis:
It's amazing how just the definition and the textures and the shape, it feels tangible, right? You feel like you want to grab it from the screen and almost stressful.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, absolutely. And then once you start to press this button up here, it starts to render it out so you can start to see it actually kind of awesome come to fruition. So now that I'm seeing the real lighting happening on this could work. Could not work. Kind of like that. It feels like there's two different plastics happening on it. I can also adjust the lighting so in case you're new environment lighting up here, you can take the default lighting if you want, and you can apply studio lighting. You can put these like crazy neons on here. This is one of my favorites. Not necessarily for this project, but you've got some blues and purples and pinks happening in it. It looks really good on a chrome object. I like to light my scenes myself, though. So what I'm going to do is save this camera setting by bookmarking it so I can come back to this.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice. It's great to see you guys. On that topic, when you were discussing Alex about experiences with 3D, we've got two lovely comments there. We got one from Colby who said, yeah, I've been diving deeper into 3D this past year or so. I love dimensions. Definitely makes the process very approachable. And then we got a lovely one from Denna who said, I did some ornaments around Christmas with my logo. It's on my behalf. That was fun. That's awesome to hear.
Alex Lazaris:
That's awesome. Yeah. Colby, that's great news that you're working with it more. I think I saw some of your older streams where you're starting to dabble with it, I think. I don't know, maybe I'm making that up. What I'm doing right now is I am essentially making a volume. So if anybody's done photography before in the past, what I'm doing is I'm shaping my own light. So what I'm going to do is make this rectangle and treat it like you would a strobe off the scene. So what I'm doing like this is I'm just moving it around and trying to get it to angle towards the piece and treat it just like you would move it a little bit more, rotate. So I'm a little bit off with this piece. I'm going to move this over, pull it up and then tilt it down. And then I'm going to change the material on it so you can put the glowing material directly on this piece. And now it's like appearing white. But if I was to like so if I just turn this off right now, cube, I have no environmental light on right now. Nothing is happening. It's just a black ball in this space. I can turn on the environmental light now. And you'll see with the old thing, it's kind of hard to see. Probably on my tiny little screen. I can zoom in.
Kieron Lewis:
Boom. By the way, I never asked. Actually, I was going to say, what are you are you using a desktop, laptop, iPad? What's your choice right now that you're operating in?
Alex Lazaris:
I've got an imac pro. Okay, cool. So it's super beefy. It helps with my render times, especially with, like, a 3D program like this. So this is just an environmental light. I put on just a directional light and taking off the blue green one from earlier. So you used to see just with this one circle light, it's lighting the object, but it's not really giving me what I want. I can now change that and just turn on my cube. And you'll see what happens whenever I just light that cube like that. So it's directional. Now it's coming from that one source that I've already lit on the slide. I can also increase the intensity that's on the environmental light. My bad. That needs to turn off. That needs to turn off.
Kieron Lewis:
That's awesome.
Alex Lazaris:
So now I have one direction. Where the light's coming from? Let's go back to where our bookmarked light is, see how it goes. Cool. That could be fine.
Kieron Lewis:
Do you ever find as well when you're obviously fiddling around these tools and then you're editing or moving around should say the tool, and then looking, editing, moving, looking. It's almost like the surprise of what's going to happen next once you've done it, because you never know until you just keep tweaking and tweaking right. Until you find what you really want. So it's almost like a nice surprise, but it's quite cool when you see the final end product.
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, absolutely. And really what I'm trying to do here is I want like a close up, something ambiguous, something that feels like, interesting, and now that I'm looking at it, see if it's rendering.
Kieron Lewis:
And Alex, my man, this is crazy to even say this. We've got like, ten minutes left. I don't even know how this is what happens in the Adobe Hemisphere world for you guys. If you've watched many Adobe lives, which hopefully you do, you realize how quick time flies. We're in the space of it, obviously. I want to make sure that you have time to do a little bit we're doing now, and even like, a nice little recap. Ten minutes before we wrap up.
Alex Lazaris:
Let's do it. So I'm just going to spent through this really quickly. I'm going to try to file the plastic a little bit more. And you want the lighting, so the computer needs to think a lot whenever it's doing the rendering light. And so I'm just trying to turn on the environmental light, the directional light. I want to see what's happening with this texture because it's kind of ugly. Super up close, the way I'm looking at it. Let me see if I can fix some of how big the pattern is. It might require me to just change the material.
Kieron Lewis:
That looks crazy.
Alex Lazaris:
That's mother. I didn't realize. Mother. You can get so wild with it. Do cardboard. Nothing says tackle cardboard. Let's see if the weave does. All right. Properties offset roughness.
Kieron Lewis:
If I had a stress ball, it would definitely look like that. I think I would like it to look like that anyway.
Alex Lazaris:
Oh, no. It all right. It's failing me.
Kieron Lewis:
It it do you know what? Just for my it's my curiosity here, like, there's a gold one. I think it was just the one above that you just had. Maybe it's the one game show. Now there's, like, a gold one. Yeah, that's the one. Maybe not.
Alex Lazaris:
Okay. We can get super wild with it. It's right now rattlesnake environmental lighting. That's doing that. That should change it a little bit. Let's change the material.
Kieron Lewis:
That's pretty wild.
Alex Lazaris:
I just wanted to change the texture down. I don't know why it wasn't why is that more tile pattern, size lower. You can literally spend, like, so much time in dimension. I'm excited.
Kieron Lewis:
So watching you, like, drag and drop and seeing what comes next, I feel like it's like I don't know what's going to happen next.
Alex Lazaris:
That's kind of interesting. The difference between looking at it rendered and not rendered is kind of night and day. You can't really tell until you start to render it. And what it's doing is essentially all those little dots start to pop in. That's like the Ray Trace lighting actually bouncing off of it. Once you're done rendering it, it will be a lot clearer than what you're seeing right now.
Kieron Lewis:
I feel like you've opened the floodgates now for anyone who's quite new to maybe the 3D rendering part, just to have so much fun and just explore and just play around, create your own shapes. And if you do create some stuff, add it on a behance page. It'd be awesome to see and to share the community as well. We'd love to kind of see what you're working on. It's looking good.
Alex Lazaris:
Cool. Actually, that's good enough for right now. Let's see here. I need to environment background. I'm going to make the background black. Maybe that's a little bit too much.
Kieron Lewis:
That was the mission, Alex, from the start, and you've accepted it. Well, I like it. I'm the same thing when you got, like, a client deadlines, like, I've got to make it work. Got to do it. Time goes even slower.
Alex Lazaris:
Let me put the hex code in. Thank you. See what it's like. Green. I think that could work. Let me this my home screen. I hope it is. No, it's not. Okay, I'm going to just pull in on it again. Let it render, see how it goes. Cool. I'm going to resave that camera, and what I'm going to actually do is take a more move my cube out. Move the cube. I'm going to move that lighting in real time.
Kieron Lewis:
Carol is digging your stars, man. She's like, great to see someone playing with DN right now.
Alex Lazaris:
Carol is there for me all throughout my dimension streams. All through my 36 days of type streams. She was there. We've been through that chicken thing.
Kieron Lewis:
Your nose changed to Adobe Live. That's what we love to see. We love to see it.
Alex Lazaris:
She's always here. She's awesome. Cool. So I think what we're going to do, since we don't have enough time to properly render this, I'll do it after the stream is I'm going to just take this piece and just screenshot it. And what I'm going to do is just bring it into Illustrator really quickly. Maybe five minutes. Yeah, you're good for it.
Kieron Lewis:
You got 4.3. Yeah, like four minutes.
Alex Lazaris:
It's fine.
Kieron Lewis:
This is, like, your first rodeo. You know what to do, man.
Alex Lazaris:
Now, if I can find the right mockup quickly let's see here. All right, good enough. All right. So what I'm going to do here really quick paco loves when I get everything done right under the wire. Just trying to do it for Paco.
Kieron Lewis:
Happy? Paco is a good pucker.
Alex Lazaris:
Exactly. So I got this guy. I need to hold this in here. Smart object. Sure. Cool. What I'm going to do is take that color flood. Solid color. Boom. POW. Just say.
Kieron Lewis:
Like a ninja. I love it. I'm the same. I figured that today, actually. Your brain just kind of goes into bit of autopilot. But you know what's? What?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah. I'm just trying to see if we can get this throw this in the corner, and it looks like a website. Wow. So cool. Box. Boom. Now we got that. Pick this, rotate it, boom, boom, boom. Do it again. All right. Thank you. Boom, boom, boom. Now that's a equidistant little menu button that goes there.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
Super small boom. Perfect.
Kieron Lewis:
And then good old burger menu.
Alex Lazaris:
Three minutes remaining.
Kieron Lewis:
All right, it's literally the countdown song now. Isn't literally. You can hear in your head, alex.
Alex Lazaris:
Are you my Jimmy Carr?
Kieron Lewis:
I could be your Jimmy Carr, dude. It's all good. It's all good. That's looking good, man. Is it fortnite kind of vibes there?
Alex Lazaris:
Yeah, it's a fortnite font.
Kieron Lewis:
Yeah. There we go.
Alex Lazaris:
That's why it is bold. Check out our new hoodie, team. All right. Paragraph shrink. It 32. Boom. All right, two minutes. Let's see what we can do.
Kieron Lewis:
I feel mean. I feel I want to give you another two more hours now, but that's the that's exactly it. And that actually leads on quite nicely for you guys to definitely check us out for tomorrow, because we're back on tomorrow. But, yeah, we've got, like, a minute and a half. Yeah, but you're good for it now. You're good.
Alex Lazaris:
All right. This needs to be bouldered black. Boom.
Kieron Lewis:
It makes it better with the sound effects as well. We've had your thinking effects and your thinking sound effects, and then now, like, the Mr. Bean in, like, 2 seconds, we got to move really quickly. Sort of sound effects. I love it.
Alex Lazaris:
I love the crunch. Like, this is my favorite part of anything. All right, cool enough, right? Perfect.
Kieron Lewis:
Just a little overlap. I like that.
Alex Lazaris:
So rigged. I don't know why. It's all right. Whatever fine. Everything's fine. Look at that. Boom. Perfect save.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice ship.
Alex Lazaris:
It boom. Look at that. Tech company done. Tech company.
Kieron Lewis:
That's it. That's my million dollar creation.
Alex Lazaris:
Take it out of Google. All right, so with a minute left, we got a little logo, little soccer kit. We ended up making our logo, which you could see here in the top left. We made the little quick screen mockup. We showed you how to make some stuff in Dimension. We're going to start playing with some type and stuff tomorrow. We're going to start pulling in even more collateral pieces in tomorrow as well. Lots of using the pattern. Lots of green coming your way. Lots of fun. I'm super excited.
Kieron Lewis:
Nice.
Alex Lazaris:
Holy moly. I feel like that was you've done it, dude.
Kieron Lewis:
I had sweaty palms, but you made it. I mean, I was nervous for you, but you guys, I hope you did enjoy that. And just to kind of wrap up on that. So we'll be back tomorrow, like Alex has said, for 12:00 P.m. Pacific for part two of Alex Lazaris's Next stream, as he said, where he'll continue to build a futuristic tech brand visual density system in Illustrator and Photoshop. And just before you leave, Adobe Live will be back tomorrow morning with Saunak Shah on the Adobe Express channel. Here, you will learn how to create compelling Instagram stories on the easy to use app. So on that note, thank you, alex, my man. You've been a dream to host, dude. Thank you, of course, to you guys in the chat as well. Without you guys, there is no stream, of course, to our moderators as well. So on that note, a massive thank you, and we'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one.
Alex Lazaris:
Later. Bye, SA.
