learn-create-design

The 60s were a decade defined by bright colors, fluid patterns and psychedelic imagery. This era was a huge turning point for the design industry. This era saw creatives move away from earthy tones, Ad style caricatures and pin-up style icons that dominated the design world of the 50s. The 60s were a time for creatives to experiment and that was incredibly evident in the graphic and surface pattern design of the era.  From pop art to opitical art, to the loose melty vibes of psychedelic design the time brought about new styles that were often inspired but he psychedelic movement. This style spanned multiple genres and impacted art, movies fashion and music.

The style inspiration of this  era has found its way to modern day design aesthetics. Early in 2022 and into 2023, I shared my annual surface pattern designs and graphic design trends forecast and one of the most popular trends for 2022 and continued on for 2023. I continue to see it in the groovy florals I see in fashion, fabrics and interiors as well as the ever popular mushroom motifs that have come about. In this month’s class, we are going to be experimenting with these concepts and applying them to surfaced pattern design to create some fun groovy 60s inspired designs in Affinity Designer on our iPad.

Hello everyone! If this your first class with me, welcome! If you are a returning student, welcome back! I am Jen and I will be guiding you through this creative course. I’m a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and educator based out of the midwest and I run Bella + Sophia Creative studio. If you want to learn more about me, you can visit me online at: www.bellasophiacreative.com and you can check out my youtube channel: The Creative Studio. There, you will get a behind the scenes view of the work I do as a creative freelancer and educator  as well as access to a huge library of additional free tutorials relating to art, design and illustration.

What the class is about 

So, what is this class about? As I mentioned at the top of this video, this month I am coming back with another surface pattern design course. We will be tapping into inspiration from eras past and creating our own groovy 60s inspired psychedelic patterns in the affinity apps right on our ipad. I will also share my process for sourcing research and the steps I take  to build a collection.

A few of the Skills Students Will Learn 

When it comes to the skills, before we jump into learning how to create the designs, we will learn more about this transformative era as it applies to the design world, what influenced the era and some popular motifs that we see continuing to be used even today. We will tap into research to help us create a narrative for our collection, then using that narrative tap into keywords that we can use to pull inspiration for our patterns, we will build a mood board that we can reference in our sketching process. Then, we will begin the creation process - we will sketch our motif concepts, refine them and then begin to build the patterns in affinity designer. Then we will finalize and export those patterns, I will show you how I set up a file system and save my layered files, and create look sheets so that they can be sent to clients for future use.

Who this class is for 

This is more of an intermediate class. So, in order to follow along I suggest you have some basic knowledge on how to create patterns, but if it’s your first time building your patterns in Affinity Designer, don’t fret as I take my time walking through this part of the course.  If you want to have a basic understanding of pattern design, I do suggest checking out some of my other intro to surface pattern design courses and I will be sure to link them in the course description.