How To Design Anything | Design Fundamentals

hey welcome this is Jonas I'm a game designer and that means I have to do a lot of different creative things from designing sound effects to game mechanics to music to graphics to 3d meshes you name it and the cool thing is there is a three step process you can go through to become a lot better and designing pretty much all of that the very general workflow you can pretty much apply this to whatever you want I'll let you in on a little secret of mine I'm not good at drawing let's see what happens when I try to draw a humanoid character here however with this three-step process I'll be able to design things that look way way way way better and I'm talking without years of practice okay right away as soon as you understand and utilize these techniques your designs will start getting a lot better if you're not using them already yes it might very well be the case a lot of you are already using these techniques subconsciously or even better consciously but all of those of you who don't I hope this will give you a better understanding of how a design process

should look like in this case I will use digital painting as an example but this really also applies to a lot of other fields including sound design music design step number one is setting the constraints and goals for your design and now let's just assume that we want to design the main character for a 2d point-and-click adventure constraints are basically everything your design needs to have and goals are basically everything you want to have in your design first constraint could be to have a cartoony 2d look to make the design blend in with the rest of the game and then maybe for the story or something like that we need the character to be male and around 17 years old and then perhaps it would makes sense to shoot for a simple design because it's a game character the game character needs to be animated and animating is a lot cheaper and a lot easier if the character isn't too complicated though those constraints over here are just set into stone those are things our design definitely will need to have and then for the goals we can specify a couple of other things perhaps you want them to be some perfect friendly but creepy mysterious he's an

alchemist he has a pet or it is this is getting a little bit messy but you're getting the point right you need to be very aware of all of the things your design Steff and you need to be very aware of all of the things you want your designed well without that there is absolutely no point in designing something your design goals and constraints can really vary a lot depending on the project no matter what you're designing get aware of the situation you're in what you want what you can do and what you can't do because in step two that allows us to figure out what the best way of getting there is I feel like this is the step most people skip out on but you really shouldn't because there are so many different ways to go about designing something you should not go for any random workflow you should go for a workflow that can give you the results you want that is step number two before you design the final product you have to design the workflow for getting there and I would totally encourage you to cheat and take shortcuts nobody cares how you got are

resolved the only thing that matters is the result you get for example if you really can't draw just dress up as the character and then draw over it in Photoshop or if you want to make a more cartoony character then go into sims or any other game that has a character editor design a character take a screenshot and then use that as a starting point yes I know a lot of that feels like cheating but once again who cares nobody cares what matters is the result course you need to be little careful not to infringe any copyrights but other than that hey do whatever works really in fact cheat as much as you can take as many shortcuts as you can so step number two is really taking a moment to figure out what the best shortcuts are and then in the best case scenario you really want to go through all of these points one by one and make sure that the workflow you come up with will definitely support all of these points one way of making sure that the character fits through the cartoony 2d look of the game for example would just need to be put a screenshot of the game in the background while working on the

characters all this way you can always see that's the character fit to the background yes or no that would be one way to adapt and to design your workflow then how could we make sure the design stays simple one way to do that would for example be to use a big pen size that doesn't allow for a lot of details there are so many ways to go about it you could even draw a character on paper scan it in and then keep working on it on on PC you could use a photo of somebody you know as a starting point you can use photos from the internet what you want to do is basically come up with a step-by-step process that will get you to the school make a plan or in other words design the workflow for designing the actual thing so what I'll do in this case is I'll start with a couple of reference images I'll cheat a little bit as well and perhaps I'll even use a couple of references from the internet and in fact I will start out by designing the silhouette from the silhouette I will move on to the line art and from the line art I will move on to the colors step number one figure out what you want right here and then step

number two figure out what the best way of getting there is and think about it don't skip this except of course you've designed something like this 100 times already at that point you should know what the best workflow is and you can just use that step number three is really interesting because this is where you actually start to design something and you design by iterating from what I could identify there are three main ways to iterate your design you can iterate your design like a river like a street or like a tree iterating in general if you don't know basically means going through multiple versions you start out with one design and then making the next iteration means making certain improvements to it then you have the next design that's one iteration then you make certain improvements search then if the next iteration that's what iterating means basically the first way to iterate is like a river a river only goes in one direction which means you make certain improvements then you stop for a little bit think what should be improved maybe even show the result to somebody else get a little bit of

feedback and then depending on your own thoughts and depending on the feedback you got from others you create the next iteration and that way you progress like a river I might add that all three of these three iterations strategies come with different up-and-down sides so one is not necessarily better than the other the second way to iterate over something is like us to reach which is very very similar to a river but the street goes in two directions that means whenever you make a change whenever you create a new iteration of your design you take the time to compare the new one to the old one you do a side-by-side comparison between the old version and the new version and then you decide which one is better if the old one is better then you backtracked with the old one your car turns around on the street and you try something else the advantage of the street iteration is that it usually gives you better results it makes sure you don't make any mistakes and make sure you actually make progress towards a better and better design the disadvantages it can also be very easy to get stuck on a street and to go back and forth all the time of course it also takes a little more time another disadvantage though depending on the

situation this might be better of us and then the three iteration is where you basically try out a bunch of different things and then in the end you decide for one you discard the other two and then you continue from there the disadvantage of three iteration is that it is even way way slower than the street iteration instead of creating one new iteration you have to create several new iterations and then compare them to one another but it also has the big advantage that most of the time this is what gives you the best results at the cost of a lot of time invested of course but especially if you're not as experienced if you're not as skilled then this is the easiest way to iterate this is the simplest way to get really good results if you think about it that makes a lot of sense because comparing different solutions to one another and deciding which one is the best is definitely way way easier than coming up with a good solution right away so in the best case scenario you'll use a mix of all of these if you're more on the beginner side of things then focusing on the three iteration and if you're more on the professional side of things then

you can focus more on the river iteration they're all good they all have their place on basket scenario just choose the correct mixture that works for you as you can see here I'm actually starting my design out with a three iteration meaning I made four different versions of the silhouette you might be wondering where I got these silhouettes from those three over here are from Planet coaster I created a couple of characters in planet coaster screenshot at them and took their silhouette to this one over here's from a photo and now in order to decide which one of those we should pick we should definitely think about our design goals and about our constraints something I definitely forgot to write down and goals here's that we want to have an interesting shape for the character an interesting silhouette it needs to be an a recognizable character but other than that we want to make sure it's cartoony it's simple we can think about which of these characters meets those requirements the best just gonna delete those two we had four different possibilities we eliminate the two of them and now we can keep working on two others is a river

iteration if I make two lines that's a street iteration we can keep mixing them we can keep combining them in different ways and then perhaps at one point we decide that this one over here is not the one we want to keep working with and we just continue onwards with this one I think I'll branch out here again especially in the beginning of a design process I feel like three iteration is very useful to figure out the general direction you want to go and what I'm doing on this character here at the moment is mostly River iteration because I'm just having a look at him thinking okay what do I need to change then I change it now what we can do is a little before and after comparison there's a street iteration which silhouette looks better like this simple one here still wins out that is probably more robots than anything else I think that is a dead end now we can basically repeat the same process over and over again I've decided I'm gonna get discarded those two over here it's finally time to decide and this the one I want to continue onwards with okay so here you

made a couple more experiments and what's crystallizing out is like the simple one in the middle here the best here you go I just picked an image from the internet and paint it over it so for the face I cheated a little bit as well but now we can still iterate on this a little bit perhaps the eyes are still a bit too realistic for the cartoony look we're going for we do a before and after comparison here then we can clearly tell that the new face a little nicer that was basically a street iteration I compared it to the last one please keep in mind that this is not on our tutorial these exact same iteration strategies work in any other creative field as well I'm not all that good at drawing I'm just doing a somewhat decent job of following the three design steps I named you and iterating in the right ways now for the shoes I'll once again cheat a little bit on image underneath how shoes are actually quite difficult to get right and I can remove the image underneath time to branch off a little bit really hope this works as a proof that even if you can't draw you can still draw all a question of iterating and cheating in the correct ways okay so

here are three different versions should decide for one right now now we can create some further variations comparing these to one another is way way way easier than just coming up with the best color scheme right from the get-go and obviously one thing to mention is that your skill level still matters you're more skilled and more experienced of course you'll be faster you'll get better results of course that's the case I'm not trying to deny that whatsoever okay I would say that's our main character done so now let's start with the pet which one of those sidekicks would best fulfill our design goals I mean we want to make him local Oh sympathic making him own nice cute pet is definitely a way to do so which is why I would say we probably won't go for this one this looks like a pretty ugly monster oh yeah that's a really cutie okay now that I see them in color I think I'll get rid of this sidekick again because that one is such a cutie oh my god it's such a cutie oh

here we go that's the final design very nice oh this character is s intended likable creepy its empathic due to this nice creature here would fit into a 2d point and click adventure quite well so if you design more towards specific goals it is way more likely that you actually reach those goals so from start to finish just iterate through it for my YouTube thumbnails I use three iteration as well for example I always grade around 10 15 different thumbnails and then in the end I just pick the best because choosing the best thumbnail is easier than designing the best thumbnail the next time you have to design something no matter what it is define your constraints define your design goals design your design workflow before you start and then iterate doing that will get you to your goal faster it will give you better results you're welcome there are two excellent videos I highly recommend you watch next one is

the but design method that can really help you to spark a lot of cool new ideas for your designs and the other one is about how to create game art when you don't know how to create game art or when you're not good at it there are solutions I promise