Design Like Draplin: 21 Tips for Speeding Up Your Design Workflow

Aaron Draplin frames this course around a single joke that doubles as its thesis: designers waste a "commute" every time they hunt for a palette, a swatch, or a folder, and this class is about eliminating that commute. The 21 tips are split into three even blocks of seven, covering setup before a project starts, habits to run mid-design, and cleanup before a file ships. It is not a course about design theory or aesthetics. It is a course about the mechanics of working faster inside Adobe Illustrator, taught by someone who has clearly built and rebuilt these habits over decades.

What actually gets taught

The strongest material sits in the "before" section, where Draplin walks through building a custom new-document profile: a modified basic-CMYK template stored in Illustrator's application-support folder that auto-loads a curated set of Pantone swatches and custom vector symbols every time a blank document opens. He shows the exact file path, drags a swatch into the palette, quits, and reopens to prove the color persists. It is a small trick, but it directly answers a real problem: repeatedly digging through swatch libraries for the same three brand colors on every new file.

The "during" section's centerpiece is designing by subtraction, demonstrated live as Draplin rebuilds a Skillshare-arrow mark by stacking flat black and white shapes, shearing edges, and sending pieces forward or back until the composite reads as clean line art. It is a genuinely useful mental model for vector work: instead of drawing every line as a stroke, fake the negative space with layered fills. The spot-color check in the same section, where every color is temporarily forced to zero to confirm nothing was left uncolored, is a simple QA habit worth adopting on its own.

The "after" section is the most practical for anyone who ships files to clients or printers. Draplin shows a "clean doc" profile stripped of every symbol and swatch, used specifically to catch stray artwork that might otherwise ride along into a final file, plus a password-protected PDF export so a client can review work without being able to reopen and edit the vectors before final payment.

Where it falls short

The course is entirely Illustrator-specific, and several tips depend on menu paths and application-support folder structures that shift between versions and operating systems, meaning some steps will need translating for anyone on a different Illustrator build. It also assumes existing fluency with the tool. A viewer who does not already know what a compound path or a pathfinder operation is will struggle to follow the design-by-subtraction demo, since Draplin narrates it at working speed rather than beginner speed.

The tone is loose and heavily anecdotal, with long digressions about wiener dogs, snowboarding magazines, and Southern California commutes that pad the runtime without adding instruction. Viewers who want a tight, list-style tutorial will find the pacing frustrating; viewers who enjoy a personality-driven teaching style will find it part of the appeal.

Verdict

This holds up as a genuinely useful reference for intermediate-to-advanced Illustrator users who want to tighten their file hygiene and speed. The included printable checklist gives the material a second life as a habit-forming tool rather than something watched once and forgotten. It will do little for anyone outside Illustrator or new to vector design.

What you will learn

• ·How to build a custom Illustrator new-document profile preloaded with your own color swatches and symbols
• ·How to organize tool palettes and folder structures so repeat clicks and searches disappear
• ·The 'design by subtraction' method of layering shapes to fake complex line work quickly
• ·A spot-color check trick that reduces each color to zero to confirm nothing is missing
• ·How to build a reusable multi-page template with find-and-replace placeholder text
• ·How to hand off a locked, symbol-free, password-protected final file to a client