Simple Shapes
Hand Drawing and Sketch Demonstration
Many of the complex web designs on the internet use simple shapes to create more complex shapes. With some styling, complex shapes transform into compelling compositions. Mastery of the fundamental use of simple shapes is the path to creating beautiful designs.
Today, I’ll demonstrate how to use simple shapes to make complex designs in hand drawings and in the Sketch App.
Hand Drawing
Drawing is a great way to practice design because we can erase our mistakes or quickly start over. The physical sensation of drawing is a nice change from the sometimes frustrating digital mediums.
The Bat Logo provides a good example of a complex design made of simple shapes. The image is re-creatable by overlaying eight circles (sixteen if you consider the borders). After shading at the intersections, the bat appears and we can erase the remaining lines.
Retro Fox presents an intricate challenge, but still achievable through simple shapes. The background is a large circle and the body, head, and tail are a collection of circles, rectangles, and triangles. The border of strawberries and flowers are just circles and ovals.
Sketch
The concept of simple shapes carries over to digital design mediums like Sketch. Sketch provides an array of design tools to make precise and replicable designs.
The orange diamond of the Sketch icon is an example of a notable design that uses a collection of simple shapes. The shapes fit together and the colors produce a nice shading effect that gives the design a dynamic feeling.
Surf Van uses multiple shapes and the deconstructed image display how the design originated from rectangles, circles, and triangles. The tools in Sketch allow you to manipulate the simple shapes by adjusting point positions and adding curvatures.
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