- [Instructor] I glean insight
when I see how other people work,
how they design, write, or use software.
At times,
I've studied different styles to expand my own offerings,
or hyper-focused on the details of an illustration I saw.
It could be just observing how someone communicates
with a client, or prices and itemizes a project.
My experience in reality is just an amalgamation
of learned experiences I've had
by working with other creative people, agencies,
and businesses over the last 37 years.
So in this movie, we're going to dive
into a real world brand project
for the iconic brand Kool-Aid, and deconstruct it for you.
Now, this project started with the iconic face of Kool-Aid,
and the agency provided me with the source files,
and kind of where this was
for them was, Kool-Aid had been around for a long time,
and all of their brand assets for Kool-Aid Man,
the character, were a mix of traditional media,
meaning somebody at one point, from what I could tell,
had illustrated them in colored pencil,
and then that was digitized,
and then it was mashed up with some Photoshop work,
and so everything was kind of a hodgepodge,
and it didn't work very well.
And they wanted us to re-idealize Kool-Aid Man,
not fundamentally change the character, but build it
in a way that's going to be easier to use,
and be all vector-based.
So the first thing they did is they gave me
Kool-Aid Man's face.
And as I was looking at this, I noticed some things,
and that is, how wonky it was,
because I think what happened at some point,
this was inked years ago, probably several decades ago,
and at some point somebody image-traced it,
but didn't do such a great job.
And so the first thing I did
for the agency is I did an iconic facelift,
and I kind of argued for that by putting this together
where I categorized areas that need improvement.
So if you look at number one down here,
you can see how it terminates and comes
to a point, that looks kind of wonky,
or this isn't very elegant, doesn't really curve nicely,
and that looks a bit wonky.
The terminals, instead of being nice
and clean elliptical shapes,
are again kind of clunky in terms of how they're formed.
And so those are the details I wanted to fix.
And if we zoom in on this, you can see the top
is how I improved those shapes, clarified those shapes,
and made 'em more elegant.
I didn't fundamentally change the character,
I just gave it a facelift,
and made it so it's going to work better moving forward,
and they really liked that.
So that was the first part of this,
is helping the agency make Kool-Aid Man's face
work a lot better.
But, where did this start?
Well, I'm just going to deconstruct the actual layers
that my build file had.
It started with the base, the base of the pitcher
which makes up Kool-Aid Man's body.
That's what this is.
The liquid inset, or the area
on the inset that implies that there's Kool-Aid,
in this case, they don't define what the red Kool-Aid is.
You can make guesses,
I guess maybe Cherry Kool-Aid, I don't know.
But these were all the shapes and how I organized them.
So this represented the actual Kool-Aid,
but what this shape did is it created that illusion
of a nice highlight that kind of rims
on both left and right side.
Then we have, of course,
what's going to end up being the liquid surface,
the top part here, and we have ice cubes.
Now, these ice cubes, once again, we spent
about two weeks finessing these ice cubes, simplifying 'em,
but we wanted them to still communicate
in a proper way, so when people looked at it,
they're not going to, "Oh, what are those?"
They have to look like ice cubes,
but they had to also look somewhat transparent
to be believable.
So we use some gradients and transparency
in those, here's kind of the cover part of the top,
because those are supposed to be popping up out
of the top of the Kool-Aid.
So this is just simply a shape that's sitting
on top aligned with the bottom ones to cover that portion.
The pitcher detail, so here's where we have some
of this detail, and this makes more sense
when you see the top part of the picture.
Here's some shadowing on the base.
So shadowing, and you can see one highlight
we have there as well on that layer.
And here's the main highlight.
Now the main highlight isn't hard edged.
This actually had the Photoshop effect applied to it,
a gaussian blur, it's just turned off.
So we're going to turn that on.
And that became the iconic highlight of the character,
almost like a highlight on his face.
The top part of the picture and the rim,
this is the area with the iconic splash
along with the ice cubes that we spent two works
just finalizing that.
We wanted to get it to what we call the gold standard.
And then with every new pose of Kool-Aid Man moving forward
for the different SKUs, we wouldn't change that.
We'd just articulate his limbs to match whatever
he is doing.
Here's the masked inside shape on the pitcher
and the shading around the pitcher
to make it look more glass-like.
And of course, KAM's face.
Now, KAM isn't a disembodied torso without limbs.
So we do have an arm, this one's pointing up.
We had one arm we created like this.
We always usually did several poses of the different limbs.
This is the one on this specific pose.
And of course, he had legs, but all of those,
we didn't want to fuse 'em
with the base of the body
because we wouldn't recreate everything
on the pitcher itself.
We'd start with the base,
and then create the pose using the limbs combined with it.
So, over the course of five months,
we created a lot of different poses.
This shows all the poses we created here for Kool-Aid Man.
A lot of them were for specific contexts.
They had a sour drink,
so that's kind of what this one represents.
You're going to see some packaging coming up
in this course that shows Kool-Aid Man doing cannonballs
off of a watermelon waterfalls, which was kind of fun.
That's what this one's for.
Don't really remember what this one was.
This one we used on some packaging,
and this was for Galactic Blast,
which we actually put a rocket pack
on the back and he's going through space
chasing meteorites that are grapes, so there you go.
Our task was to create an action-adventure Kool-Aid Man
who goes on flavor adventures for the different flavor SKUs.
And I'll show you some examples on that.
So it was all about starting, how did we start this?
Well, we start it like we do anything.
Any project we work on starts with the base art.
Since we had the gold standard
on the very first pose determined,
this is where we'd start our sketching.
We wouldn't redraw everything
because this would just represent
what we had already functionally had built.
And then we'd work off of this to create the various poses.
So if I turn on this sketch,
this shows how he's walking down a beach,
he's hitting a beach ball,
and this was for their Kool-Aid coolers,
which are freeze pops.
Now, before we built any of this vector art,
I knew we were going to have the product kind
of needed to be illustrated in it.
And so I focus completely
on just creating that product first.
So with these, if I go into any of these,
let's double click into it and I'll just deconstruct it.
Most of this is white sitting on top.
This is just a diffused gradient
with a gaussian blur applied to it.
This is just a shape that has a subtle gradient
but it's transparent.
And all of that sits on top of the artwork.
The artwork itself has elements that have
a gaussian blur applied to this highlight
and this highlight.
This is like a rim shadow on one side.
And then we have these little sleeved elements going down
the side that represent where the seal is.
So all of those combined together, it's illustrated,
but it still accurately reflects the product,
even though we're not going for photorealism.
So, figuring out that ahead
of time made it a lot easier to compose the final artwork.
The final Kool-Aid art in this context looks like this.
That's how we worked it out together.
Now, when we started this,
the brand name for this product was Koolers.
And then after we delivered the artwork,
they actually changed the name.
The final product was called Freeze Pops,
and this is what you'll see in the store.
And so I don't like that they added all the flavors there.
I get it, but it's okay.
It worked out okay.
We didn't do this kite by the way.
They added that, which is kind of ugly.
And everything on the back we did not do.
And I'm saying that because I didn't like that either.
You don't always get to control all those things.
But this was kind of cool seeing this in the store.
Now, when we worked on another product,
it would start with sketches.
So here's a sketch for kiwi strawberry flavor,
and once again it's turning Kool-Aid Man
into an action flavor hero.
So he's swinging
through a fruited jungle of kiwi and strawberries.
And this area you leave open,
because this is where you had the product,
and in this case it was kind of a juice box
or pouch-type product.
And then all the information would go here,
left areas up here
so they could drop in information, the size,
and the quantity information down here in this open area.
But this is how the final composition on this came to be.
As you can see, the base or the torso picture
and the splash and the ice cubes, that doesn't change.
We just added new appendages, added some extra accessories,
like a backpack here, and made him swinging
from a vine through this delicious forest of sorts.
Let's go ahead and turn this on.
We also had to do some of the fruit illustration as well.
And this was kind of challenging to figure
out how do you match the style of Kool-Aid Man,
but still accurately kind of show fruit?
Well, it's simplified, but in this case,
on this vector art, here, you can see we have this,
which blends, if we look at
the gradient palette here goes from the base color red,
which is the base color in the strawberry here,
and we have that set.
If I click on this and go to Transparency,
we have that set for 55% transparent.
But if we go to the Gradient tool and select it,
you can see it's actually going off the shape.
So that starts here, you don't even see that,
but it blends in with that nice hue.
And then if we look at the gradient palette,
it blends out to, in this case, to white here.
And we also have the overall shape,
that also has some transparency to it as well,
so it's not a complete bright white here,
it's kind of a muted value.
So if we go into the isolation mode,
and we select this shape, we can go to Transparency,
and you can see this is also set
for 85% in terms of the opacity on that shape.
So that's how we created that.
But the one element that pushed it over the top
is I thought this looked good, but it's all
about even in a style that's this kind
of cartoony if you will, it needs to be delicious.
And I'm going, how do you do that?
It's like, well, you make it look wet.
And so that's what we're going to do.
You can see over here we have a couple drops
and it makes it look more appetizing.
So that's all we're going to do here,
is we have this shape here,
and we just used elements of white, so I kind of cheated
and I have this pre-baked like a good cooking show.
We'll select this, apply this graphic style,
which is just, once again, a gradient that goes
from white to zero alpha white blending out like that.
And then we'll select this interior shape,
this will get colored like this.
Again, it's a blend going in a different direction this time
just so it makes a nice interior shape here.
And then let's go ahead and select this last shape,
and we'll apply this gradient blend.
And that's just to get a nice rim highlighting,
and on this shape will be the full value white,
so it's the highlight, the hotspot, if you will.
And that's how you can create something
that really adds to the overall design.
Now, this didn't fall off the package,
I just wanted to be able to show you that,
so I didn't want it masked,
but that's how I would create these kind of elements.
And it's all using transparency and blend modes,
and gaussian blurs, and gradients to pull it all off.
Another good example
of a gradient is just this cash shadow on the pouch itself.
So we did a lot of different fruit for this.
Here's a bunch of different fruit.
By the way,
I just created one drop and just rotated it and flipped it.
So it's not like I recreated the wheel every time.
That works pretty good in that respect.
But lots of different flavors, lots of different fruit.
My final two favorite packaging
in the whole line was probably the strawberry one.
I thought that came out good.
You can see the information,
how it dropped in here with the pouches
and all the necessary information for size, et cetera.
But this is how the packaging that houses all
the product looked.
Here's another one.
Probably my favorite is the Kool-Aid Man doing cannonballs.
Now, me and my daughter had fun
with this because they said, "Okay,
we want watermelon waterfalls,"
and we're going, "Okay, that's kind of unique."
And this just shows him doing a cannonball.
And my daughter said, "Hey, let's have him jump off
like he's getting ready to jumped off the the top
of the waterfall."
And I go, okay, that's kind of cool.
And as soon
as she sketched out the cannonball, I go, that's it,
we need to do that.
And the agency loved it.
So a really fun project to work on.
To be completely honest, even as a kid,
I didn't really like Kool-Aid that much.
I didn't like the way it tasted,
but I did like the Kool-Aid Man character
because he would crash through walls
in the commercials and say, "Oh yeah,"
that was always fun.
The work I share with you is just a fraction
of what we created over about a five-month period.
But hopefully it'll show you how complex vector art can get
to capture the look
and feel needed for this project's brand character.