Guedda Hassan Mohamed, better known as Guedda HM, is a designer whose portfolio is filled with vibrant colors, warped patterns, and surreal visuals.

The artist behind this year’s Adobe Prelude splash page identity, Hassan Mohamed produces otherworldly work that’s reminiscent of the psychedelic movement of the 1960s — yet distinctly different. While psychedelic art is often characterized as an expression of a transformative (and oftentimes drug-laced) experience, the Avèze, France resident’s work is, instead, largely inspired by sci-fi and music.

“It kind of all stems from that one scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Hassan Mohamed explains, referring to the moment when Keir Dullea’s character, David Bowman, enters a black hole and is engulfed by technicolor distortions. “It looks like a rainbow explosion and it just kind of stuck with me. It challenged my perception,” he says. “Anything that has to do with a portal to a new dimension excites me.”

When Hassan Mohamed’s family got their first computer when he was age 14, he used the instrument to figure out how to make his own brilliantly transportative scenes by playing around with available software. “I started messing around with [old art software], but I didn’t consider it making art. It was just about messing around and having fun.” When he turned 18 years old, he got his first laptop of his very own and started to “mess around with more intent” in order to train himself on the basics of graphic design. Following one-off freelance gigs, like making flyers for friends, Hassan Mohamed left Europe to live with his uncle in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and attend design classes at a local community college. When he moved back to France in 2016, his hobby slowly transformed into a career.

Today, the designer generally uses Adobe Photoshop to create most of his art. Much of the time, his projects begin with a White Pixel Layer; then, he adds multiple Difference Cloud renderings to the panel’s Red, Blue, and Green Channels. From there it’s about playing with Gaussian Blur, the Liquify tool, and various gradients. Still, Hassan Mohamed’s creative process is difficult to pinpoint because it is forever changing and largely dependent on constant experimentation. “I never know what I’m going to create,” he notes.

Here, Hassan Mohamed gives us a few tips on how to explore the boundlessness of modern psychedelic art.

Turn up the music.

“Music has the ability to motivate me and help me get started. Once I get going, it allows my mind to wander, improvise and come up with new ideas.”

“Going with the flow is definitely what helped me get more familiar with Photoshop over the years, using a lot of different tools and combining them in any way I could possibly think of. Ultimately, I think that it’s a great way to keep things fun and challenging at the same time, and it’s always exciting when you end up with something totally unexpected.”

“Knowing when to stop is the hardest part of the process. My gut feeling plays a huge part in making that decision. The piece has to hit me in some way, not remind me too much of previous work, and feel interesting enough. In most cases, I’ll go too far — using, like, 20 layers too many — and then go back a couple steps. That’s usually how I find the sweet spot.”