In the chaos that is self-employed life, it’s hard to find the time to do personal projects. Personal work is a great way to explore styles and hone your skills. Especially as a graphic designer, I think personal work is muy importante. But when do I do it?

After about a year of not doing personal projects (or doodling as I like to call it), I took the decision to answer that question with ‘every day’. As I have lined out on this blog before, I started out with a single purple hexagon with the number ‘001’ in it. That hexagon quickly got some neighbours and they started to… evolve.

Making these illustrations has had me experiment with numerous effects and techniques in Adobe Illustrator, my illustration app of choice. That way, the project did what personal work was supposed to: teach me lots.

Now, almost a year later, here is Hexagon Project number 200. To steal a joke from Rich Burlew, the author of the brilliant fantasy RPG webcomic The Order of the Stick, two hundred is an important number only if you happen to have a number system in base ten. Nonetheless, I’d like to celebrate with a little clip.

The original plan was to make a Hexagon Project frame for every day in a year, for a total of 366 frames. I’m having loads of nice ideas what to do with the project, so I think I will continue after that. We will see.

At least I’m doing some personal work every day.