See what People have created with Gravit Designer #4
Great designs from the community keep coming in our social media channels each day, so it’s time for another roundup. I’m constantly impressed by the bandwidth of different projects our users approach on a day-to-day basis.
Please also have a look at the other three instalments in this series for even more inspiration.
Vincent Designer
My name is Vincent, I am a working for a French group specialized in the train industry. That’s why I draw a lot of trains and train station on my Dribbble account. This domain inspires me and I love to transform buildings into minimal illustrations. Maybe, one day, I could be a designer in this society and live from my illustrations and design things for them.
My work on Dribbble
Most of the illustrations I post on Dribbble are minimal with a colorful palette. I also try to diversify my work and use more grey shades in my palette, like two shots of a train station.
Do you want to have a similar style? Follow my short, three-step tutorial:
First: Line work
I mainly use the shape tool to draw my illustration with slightly rounded corner. I try to avoid the Pen tool because sometimes the overall shape I want to draw is unsymmetrical and not as clean as with the Shape tools (Square, Ellipse, …).
For this illustration, I thought about the cold weather in France at the moment and tred to materialize the idea of comfort and heat.
Second step: Color
I generally use the same colors for my illustration, I’ve set up around 20 different color in Gravit Designer. And I hope, they will soon bring the possibility to organise them in folders (like grey shades, pastel colors, …) or create your own categories. Back to my process. As you can see, I don’t use crazy colors, I try to represent the most realistic color for the item. Don’t look at my layer section — this is something I have work on it to be more organized (more groups, renaming layers).
Third step: Shading and detail
The last step is to work on shading highlight and shadows to bring some detail. I usually add a minimal background, sometimes some text, and voilà!
Final words
I hope this article will help you in your design process. Don’t forget to consider Gravit Designer as a serious alternative to other software! If you are interested by my work, I am on Dribble and Twitter.
Why Gravit Designer ?
A few month ago, I searched for a vector software. I was already familiar with Inkscape, but as a Mac user and design lover this software doesn’t appeal to my eyes. I just wasn’t inspired to work with it. At this point, my research for an alternative began. I wasn’t focused on a free alternative, that’s why I tried Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator. But one day, after a lot of research, I found an article about a free and clean looking vector software: Gravit Designer. I tried it, fell in love and now I use it daily! Of curse it’s not perfect (who is?), sometimes it has a bit difficulties with a lot of items on the canvas but the power of this software is surprising me. The reason behind that? Tools, simplicity, UI. These three reasons make it an important part of my process in illustration for my Dribbble work.
Mentie Omotejowho
Links: Dribbble | Twitter | Instagram | Behance
My name is Mentie Omotejowho (moja as I like to call myself) and I am a self-taught designer. I work as a freelance UI/UX Designer and Illustrator. I live in Lagos, Nigeria, where I work remotely from home. In my search for alternate design tools apart from Adobe products, I stumbled on Gravit Designer in a Youtube video. I found that the UI is similar to what I am used to, with a few differences here and there, so it was easy to adapt to it.
Project Description Afro Rey
I like creating characters with alternate skin tones and I decided to do the same for Rey from the Star Wars — Last Jedi movie. I hardly see characters with kinky hair so I tried to create some with different scenarios.
For this project, I wanted to highlight the fact that she could use the force and light sabers when she fights.
Workflow
I used an image of Rey in Star Wars — The last Jedi as reference to get the pose and clothes for this character. I used mostly basic shapes and flat colours for different parts of the body. I started off in a blank canvas by creating the face and hair, as skin tone and hair colour is important for the character.
Tip: For the hair, I used the Ellipse tool and the Transform button to create multiple copies instead of copy/paste.
Next, I created the body parts with the clothes. I used the Pen tool to manipulate rounded rectangles by converting them to Vector Paths.
I did the same for the legs and arms to achieve the pose I wanted. Then I created the fingers with the Rectangle tool.
Since she had to hold a light sabre, I changed the position of the legs and arms and added a colour to the background, as the white was similar to the greys. I added some shadows to give the character a little more depth.
Next, I had to create an expression depicting that she is ready for a fight.
Finally, I created a few stars with the Rectangle tool, with “Round2” corner types, and some clouds with the Pen Tool, and done!
Why I love Gravit
It is one of the simplest design tools I have come across, as most of its functions are self-explanatory. It comes with a nifty built-in library, that is amazing for UI/UX work. It is both cross-platform and web based, which allows me to continue my work regardless of the system I am using at that moment, as I tend to switch between a MacBook and a Windows PC daily.
The best part is that it is free (who doesn’t like amazing free stuff) and comes with regular updates, so you don’t have to worry about it being outdated or buggy.
Petra Gergely
Link: Website | Twitter | Facebook
My name is Petra Gergely, and I work as a freelancer web designer in close cooperation with an online marketing agency. I started out as an economist, specialized in PR and marketing, but a few years ago I rediscovered my old hobby — web design. So, using my experience and education in marketing, I design webpages where beauty and functionality go hand-in-hand. In my opinion, design should support marketing objectives and enhance user experience, rather than being there for the sake of “being pretty.”
Project description: Daily UI
I am shifting from web design to UI design, and in order to become a better and more versatile designer, I started the 100-day Daily UI challenge. I’m getting familiar with principles of creating mobile and desktop apps, as well as experimenting with colors and layouts — something, I didn’t have the chance to try before.
Today’s project is a Flash message, both for both error and success.
I usually start with sketching on paper, and deciding about content first. It’s a lot easier to design around content, rather than trying to fit content in a given design.
When I have the final content, and layout idea, I make wireframes in order to decide on sizing and layout. Sometimes, elements get dropped in this phase, as well.
When the wireframe is done, I start thinking about colors, style and where this message is going to be used, and how to present my idea. I usually save wireframes and colored versions in separate files. Therefore, should something go wrong, I can always start again from the wireframe.
After creating a simple dashboard, as an example environment in which the message takes place, it’s ready to go on social media. 🙂
Why Gravit Designer?
For me, Gravit Designer replaces Illustrator, and it has everything I need for simple web graphics and vectors, like icons. The easy-to-use UI and familiar keyboard shortcuts make my workflow as fast as it would be in the software I previously used, therefore I’m not hindered at work by swapping to Gravit Designer.
Also, I like purple. A lot.
Alex Kovalenko
Link: Website | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
Hi, I am professional graphic and web designer with a passion to teaching.
Project description: Home Page Redesign
In my recent web design tutorial, I was redesigning a homepage for a space-related website. It was the first work of the design-driven developer, Piotrek Kosmala.
So we have started with his work and finished here.
During the session I redesigned the logo. To make it more lightweight and spacey, I increased the leading and chose a lightweight sans serif typeface with a big deal of negative space.
Next, I got rid of the drop shadow from the title, because this effect neglects the readability and legibility of the text. I deleted the “childish” illustration of the plane, as it doesn’t play well with the serious space business.
After that, I deleted the unnecessary elements from the bottom and redesigned the down-pointing arrow, as it contradicted the entire mood of the scene. Priming is a psychological factor, that we need to take into account while placing minor elements on the page.
As the next step, I reduced clutter on the header in order to make the navigation cleaner.
Then I grabbed a more focused image, that portrays a shuttle in the sky, rather than placing it on the background with the water in front of it.
Now I brought back the subscribe button and placed it in the header, because the site provides valuable insights on shuttle-construction.
Lastly, I reassured that I had generous margins and a nice text flow to create an outstanding reading experience, resulting in a clean design, that focuses on the copy. It should guide our customers below the fold to our value proposition.
This can be a risky tactic, but since 76% of visitors scroll, it should be no problem. We need to test the design anyway.
Why Gravit Designer?
I think, Gravit Designer is an excelent tool for every design instructor on the planet. It is free, has a healthy amount of the effects and a slim, intuitive interface, that allows you to focus on what you are designing.
Just a glimpse …
That’s not all yet. People have created countless more designs recently. Beware, there’s a boatload of images ahead …
Do you want to be a part of our next instalment in this series? Shoot us an email or create a comment. See you!
