Animation Futures: Iterating and Iterating and Iterating- The Sketchbook Project Returns
First of all I’m going to be cheeky and reuse the same graphic I made last time.
It’s a graphic that also reuses graphics from another piece of design work that I made for these blogs. The colours are chosen from the six colours that make up todolaMEDIA’s branding. The pencil and the particular colours used are borrowed from the graphic I made for cadaDOSsemanas. Even the exact width of the stroke used on the text comes from that graphic.
It’s a part of a brand. The style which I’ve developed through practice over the years.
When I first began doing graphic design my designs looked nothing like they do today. In 2014 I had a task to create a layout for a (fake) multimedia magazine. I had to produce everything from scratch, including coming up with a name. I first came up with something basic, I was going to call it “Everything Media Magazine.” Then I thought that perhaps I might try something a little more playful.
In Spanish “Todos los Medios de Comunicación” (literally “all the media”) was far too mouthy. “Todos los Medios” was an improvement, but still didn’t have that ring to it.
toda la media
It was close. It sounded good but it could be stylised further. The original intention behind “todo” instead of the more grammatically correct “toda” was based on yet another pun. “Too-doo la Media” was the original intended pronunciation in English, with the Spanish pun taking a bit more of a sideline. That spelling of “todola” would be the only thing that I retained from early “Todola Media”. (It even had a space back then.) If you promise not to laugh I’ll show how bad the first design for todolaMEDIA’s logo was.
Long before todolaMEDIA was ever something I actually wanted to create. It was simply a piece of work I made half-jokingly, with a pun for a name.
The choice of colours is… interesting. Red, Blue and Green for the T and then my signature pink and yellow for the “odo la.” Interestingly the gap between “todo” and “la” is also more pronounced. The fact that they were originally seperate words is definitely being highlighted here. The filename still refers to it as “Todola Media” though. All one word.
And I also really don’t know why I put “MEDIA” above “todola”.
I’m also aware that version with black lines instead of white exists but can’t find it on my hard drive. Which came first I’m unsure of, but this version is the one that I would end up using.
It’s… different. Everything is built out of circles or straight lines. A style or technique I used quite a lot at the time, although it was eventually abandoned.
Before I came up with the current design for the ‘cadaDOSsemanas’ logo it briefly looked like this. This wouldn’t have been the final design but it was one iteration that I quickly decided I didn’t like. It wasn’t playful enough and it looked too different to the rest of the todolaMEDIA brand.
It had failed and I moved on to new versions.
Ironically the seventh in the list was the first one that I made. It was also the first one I was even close to happy with.
I took that design and I changed it though. I changed the size of words. I changed the layout of them too. I kept every new version and saved them.
I then took all seven of them in the exact layout you see now and started sending them to my friends and my peers, just asking them which one they liked the best.
Two and four received the most comments and attention. Seven, three and one also got a bit of love but not nearly as much.
Overall though, I just felt more potential in four. It stuck to me the most personally too, though I also had a fondness for three.
The first thing I started changing was the little flaws and imperfections. The layout wasn’t quite right yet and the annoying gaps between letters and words got on my nerves. I actually rebuilt it from scratch, giving me a chance to more accurately set a baseline and figure out the exact placements. Then I finally got around to messing directly with anchor points on the strokes, taking out all the little holes and filling in the ones that couldn’t be deleted.
It looked plain though, so I knew I needed to add something more. I was writing a blog, so a pencil just seemed to work. Several versions of the pencil were made, with varying colours, before eventually settling on the final design. I experimented with different placements. I tried adding a little pencil trail as though it had been writing something out.
Many versions were made before it got to where it is today.
And that’s the point.
If I’d have been happy with the first attempt and not pushed myself to work harder and do more it would never gotten any better.
It took repeated practice; many tries and several iterations before my designs were good enough. And I know that there’s still tremendous room for me to improve.
And it’s on that note that I finally return to…
The Sketchbook Project
To put it simply, I’ve been uploading more of my sketchbook again. What I call The Sketchbook Project is the goal to try and upload everything that I draw in my sketchbook onto the internet for people to see.
Back in 2019 I uploaded the contents of my sketchbook to todolaMEDIA and called it my “Digital Sketchbook.” It started with 100 speed sketches I’d done for my university and my reason for publishing them was simple:
My drawings weren’t that good.
And they’re still not amazing but they’re getting better. My mediocre art has always been one of the weakest aspects of my animation. Just like my designs from over six years ago: I have to make things, to make things better.
I eventually let my digital sketchbook go neglected as I began using my actual sketchbook less. But that’s not how I’ll get better at my work. For the past several weeks I’ve just been taking my sketchbook out with me and drawing. Doesn’t really matter what, but people and characters are what I animate so they’re my main focus.
Sketches are raw. They rarely look “good” or “presentable”, but that’s the point. Not everything I make needs to be a masterpiece. Sometimes it’s just a stepping stone on the path to moving forward with my art.
It might now yet be developing a signature style, or finding all the answers about how to draw all the things I’ll eventually want to draw.
But it’s a start.
Reece Morgado, todolaMEDIA
But wait… there’s something missing, could it be…
The Biweekly Recommendation
Wayde is Dying by Redmond Beer
Red is an incredibly talented and absurdly hard-working 3D character animator. A couple of weeks ago he also published a quirky animated short. Redmond displays his skills as an animator with some