Create a series to learn

Why you should work with a series in mind

Screenshot of a series of sketch made in Illustrator

You don’t need books but practice

During my studies as a graphic designer I had a logotype creation project. I was the kind of guy that came to graphic design because I loved to play with basic shapes, images and type on my computer. But I hated to draw and was pretty terrible at it. As you may know, if you want to create a logo, you need to draw that logo first. You usually have to research with pen and paper.So I went to my teacher, Diego Bontognali, and told him: “I can’t draw. What should id do?”. Diego is an amazing teacher, he uses provocation as a teaching method and that’s exactly what he did. He said: “I want you to produce 500 logos by hand for the next lesson”. I’m not sure that he really wanted me to produce 500 logos, he just wanted me to not think about doing one nice drawing, but try a lot of things. I followed his provocation, produced 500 logos. When he saw it, I think he was first surprised. Then again, with provocation he said: “Ok, now do the same things for the next time”.

The thousand logos created.

At the end of the end of the project I was able to draw things that I thought were impossible for me, like the hand you see above. I previously was drawing like a child, and now I still couldn’t draw like Picasso, but it was good enough to get work done.

This provocative experience learned me that If you use create work in series, then you get to learn the skills quiet rapidily. In fact, I used also the work in series to get better sketching skills with my 300 shit ideas sketches.

A series is simple to setup

What is nice with series is that they are easy to setup. Let’s imagine that you want to learn to code or draw. You could just follow a course or read books. Or you can challenge yourself and choose to do a lot of little projects.

How I finally learned Rails

Going further

Now that you have decided to make a series,
define a huge numbered goal for it