I am just back from New-York where I attended the 99u conference for the second time. This is a really awesome conference, created by the Behance team. The name comes from the famous Thomas Edison quote: 

 

 

The program was excellent and the talks inspiring. It is also a great opportunity to meet people from various background. For example, I met someone who created a start up in Germany, a woman who is a designer for a construction firm in the middle of New-Zealand and another woman who, still in her twenties, has been the CEO of her company for over 8 years already!

 

While I will not attempt to summarize all the great talks and learning (e.g., from the "Design the life you love" session, or the one by Rohan Gunatillake), I decided to make a project with one key reminder 99u: "You are not your job".

 

Since I took note during the conference, I wanted to create somethign that had the look of hand drawn sketches and some of my hand written notes. The composition is a play on 99u, with 99... 'u' glyphs and another one (for inspiration) which stands out.

This project is pretty simple. It starts with shapes in Illustrator.

which are then imported in Cinema 4D for extrusion, scene composition and rendering. The screen captures below show the different stages of working with the sketch and toon materials in Cinema 4D to give a natural rendering look to the strokes.

Finally, I used the cell shader for the luminosity channel to help create the right shadows on the composition, along with a little bit of ambient occlusions which work well for a hand drawn look like this (even though the shadows are definitely not hand drawn, all the rest is). The final rendering and compositing is done in Photoshop where the paperlike texture was created (using multiple textures from subtlepatterns.com).