21 Comments
User's avatar
Brent Naseath's avatar

What a helpful article. Thank you for sharing your experience, rationale, and recommendation.

Expand full comment
Janis Ozolins's avatar

My pleasure! Happy you found it useful. What other things you would like me to cover when it comes to this craft?

Expand full comment
Brent Naseath's avatar

That is a great question. I will keep it in mind and let you know when I'm working and have a question. I find it interesting how your graphics are not simplistic but require thinking to understand them and the important message. So it engages your mind beyond just illustrating the text. I haven't read your posts for long, so you probably have talked about that before. It's another dimension of interaction besides information and stories. I've used charts and graphs to illustrate data and the key message but I've never really thought about their purpose in articles. Thank you for helping me gain awareness in this area.

Expand full comment
Janis Ozolins's avatar

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing all this. :)

Expand full comment
Hidde Douna's avatar

This is so good! Love the journey.

I get this question frequently as well, I’ll start referring people to this post now!

I use Figma exclusively, I’m more drawn to the clean, no clutter style of vectors.

Never understood how you make those intentional out of line coloring though. At least not in a way that wouldn’t require a lot more work :)

Thanks for sharing Janis!

Expand full comment
Janis Ozolins's avatar

Thanks, man! Appreciate it.

Your style is 🤌 (so good, same as your ideas).

I get that effect just by using layers. The top layer is stroke only, and the bottom layer is fill only—it goes slightly outside the top stroke. There are two ways to do this. One is to copy the stroke, change it to fill, remove the stroke, and move the points around so it sits outside and creates that look. Lately, though, I just use the Pencil tool (not the Pen tool), add a huge stroke with the background color I want, and it gives a similar, more imperfect effect.

Might turn this into a separate newsletter. Could be a fun one.

Expand full comment
Hidde Douna's avatar

Appreciate that!

Found out that first way as well, but I’m really way too lazy for that 😅

Would indeed be a good post going into this, always interested in behind the scene stuff 🙌

Expand full comment
Janis Ozolins's avatar

Thanks! Yeah, no right or wrong way when it comes to style. I do it as it helps me to fight perfectionism. 😂 Imperfect style make it perfect by default in a sense. Weird logic, but works for me.

Expand full comment
Hidde Douna's avatar

Absolutely, love everything you put out. Also your website and blog, so clean and functional 💯

Expand full comment
Janis Ozolins's avatar

❤️🥲

Expand full comment
Sai Rahul's avatar

Right now. What we're doing.. 🍀

Expand full comment
Lewis O’Brien's avatar

Great article Janis. This will be very helpful to refer people to when I am asked!

Expand full comment
Janis Ozolins's avatar

Thank you so much, Lewis! ❤️

Expand full comment
Christoph Schiffer's avatar

🫶

Expand full comment
Anastasia Galichanina's avatar

for a long time I had a mentality “need a perfect tool/app”…I finally found one - pen and paper..it was right in front of all these years…

Expand full comment
Janis Ozolins's avatar

haha. can relate by getting iPad, buying all the paid software but in the end using Figma which is free and I had access to at the very beginning. :D Another case for "less is more"

Expand full comment
Anastasia Galichanina's avatar

Whatever works really.

Figma is not an easy tool for someone who is not from the design space. It was too much of a learning curve for me, considering I am professional learner 😆

We draw in Canva, Miro and the good old Freeform app ☺️

Expand full comment
Rachna Ghiya's avatar

Love how you shared your journey with different tools. I enjoy using Figma and currently exploring ipad just for fun 😊

Expand full comment
Janis Ozolins's avatar

great idea and happy to hear you're playing around and experimenting :) If you have not check the "Faster, more accurate tracing and drawing in Figma." post I made recently in the community.

Expand full comment
Rachna Ghiya's avatar

I haven't. Thanks for telling me 😀 I will check that out.

Expand full comment
Ashish Kolarkar's avatar

Great article. Gave me so much clarity.

Expand full comment