Shape zen: drawing simple forms as a kind of design meditation

Some days I just want to open Illustrator and make shapes. No brief, no stakeholders, no roadmap. Just the pen tool, a handful of circles and squares, and an afternoon to see where they go.

Every Shape Tells a Story is a collection of those afternoons. Each mark starts with something simple, then gets bent, sliced, repeated or rotated until it feels like it means something: a sun setting into stripes, a ribbon twisting into a loop that never ends, a flower that could just as easily be a fan. I started with a single blue so the shapes had to do all the work, then let colour back in once they could stand on their own.

The palette grew out of that blue. Cobalt stays as the anchor, joined by night, marigold, tomato, bubblegum and spearmint, all pushed bright, with a warm paper white to rest on. Each shape gets exactly two of them, one for the ground and one for the form, and no two neighbours share a background, so the set reads as one family while every shape keeps its own character.

Twenty-five of them ended up together on one poster, a couple earned posters of their own, and a few started to move. It’s a small project, but it’s the kind of making that keeps my eye sharp for the bigger ones.