Designing from scratch in Unicorn Studio

I'd just pushed a new section to the Basedash site, and it needed some Unicorn Studio juice, so I designed it live, from scratch, with no idea how it would turn out (0:21). It's 31 minutes and I didn't edit it.

It starts the way I always use Unicorn: throw stuff at the wall and see what happens (1:56). A duotone and dither, sine waves I'd never used before, a 3D shape, a vignette, a blur. Then I put it in Framer as an embed behind the section (8:05), and it was way too much. I'd been going for a circular shape, and that would work if there were one thing in the middle, but not with the two strong horizontals in the layout (9:39).

So I took out the ripple, added a beam, and kept going back and forth between Unicorn and Framer. I tried a gradient map, which I don't really understand yet, and found an effect I liked for somewhere else (16:25).

Then blending modes. Fifteen years I've been using these and I can never remember which one is which (20:18). And the duotone said it was black when it wasn't. I know black when I see it (22:13). I hid it on mobile and turned the opacity down (26:48), and got it about 95% of the way there.

I wasn't sure I'd keep it, but I wasn't going to spend more time on a video nobody was going to watch that long (30:38). A few days later I made one about the gold logo.

When I posted it on X I wrote:

The Unicorn Studio tutorial on Friday went well so I figure why not push something from scratch so you can see the full workflow. It’s long. I didn’t edit it at all. But it’s a real workflow trying to make something from scratch in unicorn for our Framer site. So watch me slowly and randomly stumble towards a design. If you want to see it live, check out the Basedash website. -- recorded with Screen Studio