How I made my graphics less bad (and what I learned) 

I can't believe you don't have more subscribers. Simply because out of all the amazing work you do for Vox!

I like the attitude of “it’s not perfect but it’s okay.” I get stuck in MASSIVE analysis paralysis trying to make things perfect, to the point where I’ve abandoned projects altogether because the stress is so insurmountable.

Mate, excellent video! Even as a professional designer, with a channel talking about design, time is really the limiting factor when it comes to motion graphics. I would love to make every shot pixel-perfect, but most of the time, I have to settle for good enough to get the point across without making me cringe. RU-vid is a hobby for now, and with a job and family, it's a tough one to find the time for. Also, for some reason I completely missed your rebooting your channel on paternity leave - I was subscribed then I wasn't. Fixed that, and binge watched all the new videos in a single night. Great work, inspiring as ever!

This is awesome, man. Thanks for inspiring me to make the time. 💪🏻

Motion design is an everyday learning process. Most of us doing it didn't have time or a school to go specifically for this, so squeezing some tutorials in our work hours is absolutely a must. I also like to watch said tutorials for fun on my free time because they tend to stick better in the back on my head and inspire me when I'm actually working. Good luck with your graphics, I can see you already made great improvement nowadays!

Fantastic! As a father of a 4 week old and 2.5 yr old, the struggle is real! I will try and make the time (to just get work done), and try and divide that work flow... I am in awe that you can find the energy!

Huge fan of Ponty and I enjoyed seeing your process. I'm making a game this year and I'm lucky enough to be able to hand the baton off to friends so I keep working on different aspects of the project every few weeks and that novelty keeps things fresh, plus collaborating with other artists is a great feeling

this is dope. seeing creators create is one of the most interesting things out there.

This is good. I appreciate ALL of it, the storytelling, the variety of shots, colors, style, everything is so layered with your identity as a creator!✊🏾

Special animations or not, I love your videos and your style so much! Thanks for everything you do Phil!

Your videos make me feel what I first felt watching the early years of vox and vice to some degree. I'm not sure what it is, its just really cool.

Thanks Phil loved seeing your process here and the expression/resizing tutorial is something I've been stalling on for a while, so will now find the time to learn this super handy skill!

POZOLE!!! Genuinely though, this was a fascinating video! Would love to see more of your video making process

I can't tell you how much I appreciate this video. I stopped making RU-vid videos because I wanted to increase my motion graphics quality and quickly got swamped with choice and a lack of time. Your video has given me the kick I've been putting off to get started again. You're the bomb! And congrats to you and your partner on your new bub

As a motion graphics designer, it was cool to see you go through this process. It's *harrrrd*! And can take a lot of time and patience. Love your work, and love to see the passion that you put behind all this!

You are an amazing journalist and content creator. I love your videos. You have a way of turning topics forgotten to time or on the fringe of pop-culture into engaging content...keep 'em coming.

I really appreciate this video. Division of time, good advice. Thanks for the video and congratulations on the addition to your clan.

I LOVE seeing examples of workflows! That “behind the scenes” stuff is fascinating. And with an inspiring message towards the end - thanks.

I understand. With two kids my time to get videos done has drastically decreased. Granted I’m much more a beginner than you I truly do feel I’m getting better and actually a lot of it is how you said. Divide and conquer. Thanks for the great video.

Your first run around 5:43 looked pretty cool. I'm rooting for you. You got this. You will make awesome graphics and you will _not_ wake the baby!

Saw a message about your channel from Johnny. Every video you make is bingeworthy.

The only information that stuck in my brain is that your a dad, and that gives me the warm fuzzy feelings

Really appreciate all your videos 🙏

Yet another awesome video. I hope this channel sees 1M+ subscribers really soon - it's easily good enough IMO. thanks for posting! :D

I think it looks you're really on the path to something you are genuinely happy with. It looks good.

I once made an AE expression to load text from external text file, so you just open project, adjust end point, render. Changed my life.

Needed to hear this today. Thanks.

Thank you for your hard work!

This is really useful, thanks! I'm trying to figure some similar skills out myself, so this was cool.

2 years and 2 days after you uploaded this and I see it for the first time, hope you’ve been managing to get more time since then! It shows that even though you had a small amount of time, you managed to get further into something that you wanted to change. By the end of that week you was further ahead then at the start. (That made sense in my head at least) I know it’s 2 years late but great video again Phil.

Love this. Thank you for sharing

"Your constitution may vary depending on your diet/government" NICE. Quality humor. Well done. It's the details that make a picture.

As a video producer this definitely hits home. Just wanted to see how someone who i watch all the time handles these challenges. your viewers definitely have got your back while you work out the deets... Good luck

Very inspiring, big fan of your content.

Yo let this man do this for a living, RU-vid gods praise this man with the algorithm

Dammit, every time I watch a video like this I tell myself that I shouldn't be watching this because I use DaVinci Resolve. You're just so darn entertaining and you made a running joke. The silver lining is that I'm learning something about story telling.

Damn I love this video!

dude you deserve so many more views and subs.

did you serve the pozole (poh-SO-lay) w/ skillet-warmed corn tortillas? I've made the same recipe and that was the secret to my success

As a design student, this was well produced! Thanks, Vox Journal Man!

The way you said pozole had me in tears lol.

Nice video, mate! Not sure how you came up in my feed, but I appreciated the video. I produce video lectures for the class I teach. And it's been a process to figur eout how to get things done. I think the most important trick for me has been to split my work in phases that could theoretically be delegated to someone else. And of course, I do everything myself. But the idea that there is pre-prod, prod, and post-prod is critical. this is particularly hepful becasue ther eis only so much time you have to get a product out. And so if you know that you need it out in 4 days, and you know that post-prod takes a day, and prod takes a day. Then you only have 2 days in pre-prod and what you got is what you got. And, I need to learn how to up my graphics game too! :) "Making the time" is critical. I figured my sound and camera quality was terrible. Once I had a place where I could break, I spent a week figuring it out. Trying a dozen different camera, differnet mics, different mic positions, figuring out how to post-process the mic audio for better quality. Took me a while, but the videos are much better now! (I did not say they were 'good', I said 'better')

I cannot lie these graphics are pretty neat.

My bad, I thought your graphics were really good.

Phil! If you're curious about designing procedural textures, objects, or graphics (sounds crazy) but I can teach you in like... 1-2 hours with a free software. I promise it's easy!

Great video! Nice to know that somebody else is working on his stuff during nap time. Good luck! And make more BTS videos :)

inspiring really

Really great, more meta video!

5:47 random graphics tips. I think you should justify the text to the right. Most English speaking people read from the right. So justifying you text to the right makes it so much better. Also removing the stroke on the shape, strokes make your work look very dated. Great work dude. I can definitely relate with the struggle

Really enjoyed your Pentagon video. Looking around your channel and this vid stood out to me. Making big changes, figuring out priorities. May nap time bring peace and quiet.

Perfect graphics or not, your topics are always interesting

Come visit Jalisco, Mexico! They'll give you a great pozole, there's lots of different ones you can try. Great video.

Up next: A video on how I make videos about making videos

Unsolicited advice, but something I've seen other creators talk about is adding a small amount of film grain, to avoid the color-banding that happens in the background after RU-vid compression gets done with it.

Cool, cool, Cool!

Division of Labor is not to be taken lightly for up and coming RU-vidrs/Producers. It takes a lot of skills from a variety of completely different fields to assemble really good, high production videos. Its unrealistic to think one person can just have a go at most of it and hope to come out with something decent. My advise, keep it simple, find something that works on that, and just get better at those elements in play. Don't add more of what you don't need, and if you need it, look for someone else to 'wear that hat'. Otherwise, you end up taking away the time/energy out of things your better at. In the end, it don't usually work out so well. Remember the KISS. Keep It Simple, or risk looking Stupid.

Thanks Phil, really enjoyed this. Working during parental leave must be tough! It was enticing and a bit frustrating to hear you talk about video game development even a tiny bit. Enticing because not enough serious journalists talk about the medium or the industry in a meaningful way. Frustrating because you have not (AFAIK) done anything on the topic. Video games are about 70 years old so there must be some substantive history there. I hope such a story will strike you some day : )

you are a the long lost twin of youtuber Stuart Hicks. He is a fellow Moustachu too !

As a video game developer who will never make RU-vid content, I like this video and I feel you :)

“Mr Strawberry rhubarb pie” again. Good video. Here is why I express that opinion. In the “trades” out here there are many old guys like me(over fifty but under seventy) that continuously run their pie holes with a bunch of complaints such as “ these kids don’t know how to get sh- done” “ these kids don’t want to work”. As lead and field super I will normally let it go for awhile. Then I will take the guy out for a paid extended “lunch”. I have three basic questions and two statements. #1 Are you a veteran? If yes there about 5 more questions. #2 Can you think of three dumb things you did in your 20’s #3 What was the name of the person that you learned how to do hard stuff from?

@5:17 How do you get such clean screenshots when zoomed in so much?!

I cannot do video graphics and it does my head in! It just seems like an insurmountable task and I don’t know where to begin 😩 I am a website developer though so maybe there’s some crossover there 🤷‍♂️ Great video though and I think your graphics look sick and I like the “make the time” mantra 👍

Great content!! I’m glad you have your own channel. You should follow the steps of Johnny Harris and go solo - his social media is exploding! Your talent shouldn’t be attached to a company. Ps It’s pronounced “Pozol-e” (you pronounce the “e” at the end) ;-)

Stupidly, I always forget how weird it is that Americans pronounce template as 'templet'. This was a powerful reminder. I see some other commenters were baffled by the pronunciation of Italian words in American English. Luckily I'm immune to that after watching many seasons of The Sopranos.

Vidception!!

Late congrats 😊🖖 Brilliant channel.

Ayy RVA!

Loved the video! Btw as a Mexican its pronounced Po-zol- leh

Pozole has 3 syllables

Is that Monument Avenue? You're in Richmond?

I'm a freelance logo designer, how do I get more jobs? I trying to now focus to design logo for RU-vidr, a lot of them just want to see more of my portfolio and rate then went silent

Really confused about how I feel about websites like designspiration. Isn't it just closeted plagiarism and not 'inspiration'

DaDooDooToo....6:21 😆

Motion designer here: It's okay to use templates for design. If your mission is to make bespoke designs, design it yourself. If your mission is storytelling? Use a template. when possible. Thousands of example projects you can buy cheap.

If you ever start a patreon I will be one of your first supporters.

Are you using MOGRTs at all with the Essential Graphics panel? Inquiring Adobe Product Managers want to know.

This was really inspiring and insightful. Why not chat with Johnny Harris? I've learned a lot about design from his vids too. Seems like you're both in Vox world, learn from each other? Thanks!! ❤️

You call pozole, poezol? You got me 😂

Awesome, I could give you Industrial Design lessons 😂 maybe you ll learn something too😁 I love your videos👍

You're like a generational portal.

Why aren't you using Final Cut Pro X? You have a Macbook. I don't understand.

Make time

...what's wrong with that font?

Didn't finish that Johnny Harris GameStop video?