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Designing a Logo
Richard Downs

Designing a Logo

with Nigel French

 


A great logo is often basic, composed only of essential parts, but simple is not always easy. Designer Nigel French distills over a decade of professional design and teaching experience in Designing a Logo. He discusses the principles and techniques of what makes a logo work, and explains type-only designs, type treatments, and logo symbols in depth. He also explores how to work with clients on defining job parameters and selecting a final design, as well as how to prepare the logo for print and web publication. Nigel demonstrates each of these techniques in the course of designing a new logo for a real client, so viewers can either follow along or apply the techniques to their own work. Exercise files accompany the course.
Topics include:
  • Choosing the right typeface
  • Exploring transparency, warped type, and other treatments
  • Working with line, shape, and imagery in a logo symbol
  • Considering current trends in logo design
  • Fine-tuning a design after client selection
  • Drawing up usage guidelines

show more

author
Nigel French
subject
Design, Logo Design, Print Design, Projects
software
Illustrator CS3, InDesign CS3
level
Intermediate
duration
2h 57m
released
Sep 17, 2008

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Introduction
Welcome
00:00Welcome to the series of videos on designing a logo. Here on screen, we have
00:04some very recognizable logos. I'm sure you are familiar with most of them, if
00:08not all of them. What do they have in common? They are all extremely simple.
00:13They use very basic shapes and all the elements have been boiled down to only
00:19their most essential parts. The most important principle when designing a
00:23logo, keep it simple.
00:25But before we begin, we need to ask ourselves, why we need a logo? The purpose
00:30of a logo is to identify your company, to make a positive first impression.
00:35Secondly and obviously, it wants to distinguish your company as being unique.
00:40Setting you aside from the competition. That doesn't mean that we need a
00:43flashing, blinking or singing or dancing logo. Quite the contrary,
00:48but we do need our logo to stand out.
00:51Thirdly, it needs to communicate, it needs to communicate a value about your
00:55company, a positive message. Maybe it should communicate the trustworthiness,
01:00the solidity of your company, the experience of your company or
01:04the friendliness of your company, the technical ability of your company.
01:08Whatever it is your company is, your logo should communicate that.
01:13What makes a good logo? Well, I think we can boil it down to five points.
01:18A strong uncluttered image, comprised of only the most essential elements.
01:24We don't need any extra stuff. The imagery that's used should be appropriate for
01:28the type of business that you are in. The imagery should compliment your
01:33company name and any type that's used should be in a readable font.
01:37Font singular, because we are probably not going to be using more than one
01:41typeface in the logo and that font should not compete with the logo symbol.
01:47Finally, your logo needs to work in black and white as well as color. The color
01:53may be important, but the color isn't the be-all and end-all because your logo
01:57is going to be photocopied, it's going to be faxed, and it likely going to be
02:01printed on black and white printers and it needs to hold its own in black and white.
02:07Throughout these videos, I'm going to be working on my own logo project.
02:11It's for a company called Deep Green Designs. They are a garden design company based
02:15in Brighton, U.K., that's where I live, and I'm going to exploring various
02:19different permutations of this logo and hopefully by the time we get to the end
02:24of the series of these videos, I'll have a workable logo, a finished logo and
02:29hopefully, so will you. Either following along with my examples or adapting the
02:35principles that I'm outlining here and applying them where appropriate to your own logo.
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Exercise files
00:00Female speaker: Exercise files for this course are available to Premium subscribers of
00:04lynda.com. However, you are encouraged to follow along by creating your own
00:09logo from scratch. The exercise files may use fonts that are not installed on
00:14your machine. If you get a message regarding missing fonts, simply select Open
00:18to allow your machine to substitute the font.
Collapse this transcript
1. Defining the Parameters of the Job
Meeting the client
00:00Now, I know you are itching to design that logo, but before we pick up tools,
00:05we need to ask ourselves some very important questions about the kind of logo
00:09that we are designing. Is it a new design or is it a redesign of an existing logo?
00:14Who is the customer? Maybe you are a designer, designing the logo for
00:19your client or maybe you have a business and you are designing your own logo.
00:24What's the kind of personality that you want the logo to project? How does that
00:28reflect the personality of your business?
00:31How does it reflect the values of your business? Lastly, an obvious point but
00:36an important one nonetheless, we need to check out the competition, we need to
00:40see what kind of logos are our competition designing. Are they falling into any
00:45kind of design traps and cliches that we should strive to avoid and how do we
00:51make our logo better?
00:53Designing a logo is a collaborative process and an important part of that
00:57process is meeting with the client and relating to the client, hearing their
01:01needs and taking on board their suggestions. Your client maybe has a logo
01:07already or may be they have some ideas for a logo and you want to try and
01:11incorporate those ideas as much as possible and when necessary, steer your
01:16client towards good design decisions.
01:19Perhaps you are your own client, in which case it's still worth trying to
01:24formalize this step and if necessary role-play the step. My client, the client
01:29that I'm going to be working with throughout the series of these videos is a
01:34company called Deep Green Designs. They are a new garden design company based
01:38in Brighton, UK, and the proprietor of Deep Green Designs is an experienced
01:43landscape designer and former head gardener of an historic garden.
01:48So in my meeting with her, talking about her company and how she wants to
01:52present her company, we came up with this list of adjectives:
01:57Deep Green Designs is imaginative, simple, transformative, inspiring, unique, inventive,
02:04diverse, friendly, informal, and experienced. In no particular order. These are
02:10the values that she feels represent her business or that she aspires to
02:15represent her business.
02:17Another important question to ask. Just fill in the blanks here. A Deep Green
02:22customer is.... And in this case, a Deep Green customer is, and all I need
02:27is a single one sentence response. Someone who wants to transform their garden.
02:39Nothing more than that. Now, in terms of these adjectives and how we find a
02:45logo that matches them, that represents them,
02:48let's just do a simple exercise. Here I have six different words, which
02:53represent values that companies commonly wish to project.
02:57The typefaces that I've chosen I think are critical. For example, technical.
03:02If I were to take the word technical, and put it in the same font as this one
03:06here, which is Cooper Black, which I'm using for friendly. It wouldn't look
03:10technical at all, I don't think. Let's try it. I'm going to take that word
03:13friendly, copy up there. I like that. Doesn't look so technical.
03:21Here we see with the word creative, and this is a common theme that we will be
03:25exploring, just a simple tweak to a word may be all your logo needs. We want
03:30to keep it simple. I'll be referring to that point again and again, keep it simple.
03:36Whenever we are tempted to clutter things up, to add more stuff than is
03:40necessary, just make things more complicated than they need to be.
03:44We are going to remind ourselves, keep it simple.
03:48Reliable here is set in a solid Slab Serif typeface. It looks solid and
03:53reliable, the kind of typeface that you can depend upon.
03:57Elegant, in a typeface that has a lot of contrast between the thick parts of
04:01the stroke and the thin parts of the stroke. The word caring, again I've
04:05tweaked this one, so that the C embraces the other letters and the letters
04:09themselves are set in a warm and caring and friendly san serif typeface.
04:15So try this yourself, working with these words or with other words that
04:19represent values that you feel are more appropriate to your business and experiment
04:23with different typefaces.
04:26Now that we've defined the parameters of the job and now that we've a much
04:29clear idea of the company that we are working with, we need to figure out how
04:33the logo is actually going to be used. Obviously, it's going to be used on
04:37business cards. It's probably going to be used in the brochure, on a website,
04:41poster, maybe in a magazine, on t-shirts, banners, vehicles.
04:45There are a multiplicity of different potential uses for your logo and you need
04:50to consider before you start designing your logo, how many of those uses are
04:55likely to be applicable to you.
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What information to include
00:00Now that we have a much better idea of the kind of logo that we will be
00:03designing and the kind of company that we will be designing the logo for,
00:08we need to think about what information we are going to include. Specifically,
00:12what kind of text we are going to include.
00:14As a designer, your life is going to be made easier if you are working with a
00:18company name that is short and sweet and to the point. There are many
00:22precedents for this. United Airlines in their logo becomes United.
00:27Apple Computer becomes Apple, Adobe Systems becomes Adobe. So we want to keep it
00:34short and to the point. If that means that by reducing the number of words in
00:39the name that you are no longer fully communicating the business of that
00:44company, then you can use a tagline to do that with.
00:47Now, here are some very common taglines. They are so common and so much a part
00:53of our everyday lives that I don't even need to tell you what taglines those
00:58logos relate to. Now, let's go and look at how I'm going to apply this
01:02information to my specific logo in progress. As we've already established,
01:09I'm working for a company called Deep Green Designs, a garden design company.
01:13The first change I want to make is, let's shorten the name to Deep Green.
01:24And then I'm going to use a tagline to communicate more information about the
01:28business and the tagline is going to be this.
01:33Now that's not exactly particularly exciting or clever, but it is descriptive and since this is a new
01:40company, I think we need to go with a descriptive tagline.
01:44I did suggest to my client 'just dig it,' but she wasn't going for that.
01:48So we are going to have Garden Design and Planting.
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Choosing your tools
00:00Now that we've decided what's going to go into our logo and we have an idea of
00:04the kind of image that we want to convey with our logo, we need to decide what
00:08tools we are going to use to create it. To my mind, the only serious contender
00:12is Adobe Illustrator. It's called great type tools and it offers really
00:17sophisticated vector graphics.
00:19Now, it being vectors means that we can scale the logo without diminishing
00:25its quality and that is absolutely essential. Vectors are resolution
00:30independent. Now, you could use InDesign for this, but Illustrator's vector
00:35tools are a bit more sophisticated. So that's the reason I'm going to go with Illustrator.
00:40Maybe you could use Photoshop, but Photoshop is mainly about working with
00:44pixels. I suppose at the end of the day whichever program you feel most
00:48comfortable with is going to be the right choice for you. But all else being
00:53equal, Illustrator I think is the best choice and let me just give you an
00:57example of what is I'm talking about with this notion of being able to scale things.
01:03So here I am in Illustrator and here is a quick fictional logo that I have
01:07created and this is vectors and we can see that when I click on it. Now, I'm
01:13going to make a duplicate of this. I'm going to select it all and hold down my
01:17Alt key and my Shift key and I'm going to pull away from it to create a
01:21duplicate. Now, with this duplicate, I'm going to rasterize it. So this is as
01:26if it had been created in Photoshop and the type had been rasterized.
01:31Object > Rasterize, i.e. convert it to pixels. I'm going to rasterize it at a high
01:39resolution and we'll see that even at a high resolution, it's going to run
01:42into problems. 300 pixels per inch. I think we can probably see even now things
01:49are looking a little bit jaggy, maybe they are not really that bad,
01:54maybe that's just the screen.
01:55But let's see what happens when I increase the size of this. I'm going to
02:00scale it up dramatically like so and then I'm going to do a similar amount of
02:07scaling on this one. What's happening there is this one is actually behind the
02:17pixel version. So I'm going to bring it to the front. Now, if we were to
02:26increase our view size, I think we can clearly see there that the edges of the
02:33pixel, the raster version are furry and that's what's going to happen when you
02:38scale a pixel graphic. That's not going to happen when you scale a vector
02:42graphic, which you can scale to your heart's content.
02:45So conclusion here is that Illustrator is I think the best tool to be
02:51designing your logos in and that's the tool that I'm going to be using
02:55throughout this series of videos.
02:57In the next chapter, we will be rolling up our shirtsleeves and actually
03:00getting into creating in some logos.
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2. Type-Only Logos
Choosing the right typeface for the message
00:00Take a look at these logos. I'm sure you recognize them all. What they have in
00:03common is there are all nothing but type. There is no illustration there.
00:07It's all just letters. So that means that even though we may not be Illustrators,
00:12we can create impactful and successful logos that really convey an image working
00:17with type alone. But of course we need to use our type skillfully. So let's
00:21take a look at some suggestions for working with type in logos.
00:27So here are some suggestions for working with type in your logos. As we saw
00:31before every front has its own personality. Typefaces are like clothes.
00:35You don't want to be caught wearing the wrong clothes for the wrong occasion and
00:39we want to keep things simple.
00:41Here we are again with that recurring theme; keep it simple. No more than two
00:45fonts. In fact, you probably only want to use one font in your logo. Very few
00:50logos use more than two fonts. And while it may be tempting to experiment with
00:55these fun fonts, chances are that they are going to give your logo a very dated look
00:59very quickly. So you want to stay away from fun fonts.
01:02And if you want to use scripts, now scripts can convey a very kind of informal
01:07feel to your logo. Rather than just choosing up script typeface from the font menu,
01:12instead do your own script. Make your own calligraphy. That way
01:16it's going to really embody your character.
01:19As we saw in the previous video, not any all type will do. We need to choose an
01:24effective typeface for the message, to convey the image of the company that we
01:28are working for. And in order to do that we need to make some broad
01:31distinctions between the different typefaces that we have available to us.
01:35And the broadest distinction we can make is Serif, Sans Serif and Script. So let's
01:41take a look at an example of each of those.
01:45So here I have on screen Sans Serif, Serif, Script. So beginning at the top,
01:49the Sans Serif font. By Sans we mean without and that means that letters do not
01:55have any of the ticks on the ends. So they are more minimal in their letter
02:00shapes and then obviously at the bottom we have got the Script. Let's look now
02:04at some logos that use Sans Serif type, some that use Serif, and some that use
02:08Script. And we will see if we can make any broad statements, come to any
02:12conclusions about the type of image that these different types of typeface convey.
02:18So here's some very recognizable logos using San Serif typefaces,
02:23and now some that use Serif,
02:27and now some that use Script. So broadly speaking I think we can
02:32say from this fairly random sampling that San Serif typefaces are apt to give
02:37you a more modern, contemporary, and a more simple, straightforward,
02:41more minimal look to your logo. Serif typefaces are apt to give you
02:47a more established, more sophisticated, more elegant look.
02:50Now that's a very, very broad sweeping statement and you may be thinking well
02:55wait a minute, what about this example and that example and you are right.
02:58It's a very broad statement, but I think broadly speaking it's true. And then
03:03thirdly, I think we can say that Script typefaces convey a more friendly, more
03:08informal feel.
03:09Now I want to make an important point about working with Script typefaces
03:12because if you want to use a hand- lettered script in your logo then
03:18hand-letter it. Don't bother with a script that you can choose from a Font menu.
03:21Because when you do that every A is going to be the same as every other A,
03:25 every E, the same as every other E. It's going against the very nature of
03:30the hand-drawn quality that you are trying to convey.
03:33So one of the things that we will be looking at is, how to create your own script.
03:37But next, we are going look at working with some basic type variables.
03:42Experimenting with casing and tracking and stacking the letters and
03:46adjusting the relative scales of the words. That's coming up in the next video.
Collapse this transcript
Exploring type variables
00:00When working with type we have an almost infinite number of variables. Just
00:04with the type alone, we can change the case, we can make it upper case, lower
00:09case or a combination. We can change the color of maybe one word or one letter.
00:15We can change the relative size of the words. We can adjust the spacing between
00:20the words, and of course, we can choose from a billion different typefaces.
00:25So what I'm going to do here is very methodically and starting with a really
00:29neutral, control version here, set in Helvetica Neue. I'm going to just explore
00:36some of the basic type variables working with our logo in progress for the
00:40company Deep Green Designs.
00:42So my first design decision is that, that name is too long to work with. I
00:49think it's going to work better if we loose that word. So having done that, I
00:54then want to think about the casing. Do I want it in lower case or initial
01:01capped and I'm holding my Alt key and my Shift key to make a duplicate. And the
01:08shift is just constraining the movement of the duplicate. Or do I want to have
01:14that all in All Caps.
01:16So this is a kind of confirm for I suspected all along that -- actually I want
01:23it in the lower case. But what I'm not liking is I have got two words, one of
01:30four letters, one of five letters. I think the space between them takes up
01:33disproportionate amount of space. I can track that space or rather kern that
01:38space and make it smaller. Or I could just get rid of it. This is after all a
01:44logo. We don't need to be grammatically correct here. But of course, how am I
01:48going to now differentiate those two words? Well I'm going to try and
01:53differentiate with color. Let's get in a little bigger here.
01:56If I'm going to differentiate with color then who says just because one of the
02:03words is green, then that's the word that has to be in green? Maybe, we'll have
02:10that word in green. Maybe no. Let's try now the different weights. So I have
02:17got the Roman, the Regular weight here of Helvetica Neue. What if I try Bold?
02:24Okay, now as I mentioned in an earlier video, this logo has to work in black
02:30and white. Now if I'm differentiating my words with color, then how is that
02:34going to work in black and white?
02:35Now let's just make a copy of that again. Set this back to black and how about
02:43if I make one of the words in a 50% Grey. Now I have got a 50% Grey there, on
02:49my Swatches panel or I can come to my Color panel and reduce the black to 50%.
02:55That makes me little bit nervous though, because that word is now going to be
03:01printed as a screen. A 50% screen of the black and maybe as a consequence of
03:07that the type isn't going to be as crisp as I would like it to be. So I think
03:12rather than doing it that way I'll set that back to 100%. And then we can
03:21differentiate the words with choosing a different weight. Now I have chosen
03:27your typeface family here with lots of different weights.
03:30I have got a lot of options in that respect. Maybe I want a little bit more
03:36contrast it, little bit bolder on the left. Then a little bit lighter on the
03:40right. Let's see how that looks, so instead of light what about thin and
03:46instead of bold what about heavy, maybe.
03:53Okay, go and make to this one. I'll go now, clear some space, get rid of those.
04:01Now I started off with the Sans Serif typeface. Instinctively I feel that this
04:05logo called for a Sans Serif typeface. I want a fairly minimal look to it. I
04:10started with Helvetica, because if we are going to stop with something neutral,
04:14so that we can evaluate each change as we make it methodically, then that's a
04:18good place to start. But I also want to look at some alternatives in terms of
04:22Sans Serif typefaces.
04:24I'm going to make a few different copies here, Alt+Shift and then I'm going to
04:29press Apple or Control+D to repeat that transformation and this one. I'm going
04:41to set that to Gill Sans and this one I have another popular, Sans Serif, and a
04:53favorite of mine Myriad Pro. Then about a geometric Sans Serif, Futura. Well
05:07one thing that tells me is that this maybe worth exploring. I like the
05:11two-story G that the Gill Sans has. Have to look to a little bit more organic
05:18then these single story Gs that the other Sans Serif typefaces are offering us.
05:23So let's see, Gill Sans now compared with Franklin Gothic.
05:33Now that's a font with a higher x-height. The relative size of the lower cases
05:42letters is higher and has this interesting hook on the G. Maybe this in
05:49potential there that we can explore with that. Now in all fairness I should try
06:01also in a Serif base. I'm going to copy that again and let's have a look at
06:09Adobe Jenson. Now I'm choosing that one because I happen to know that this has
06:15these diagonal cross bars on the Es. Then they are kind of interesting looking,
06:20I like the look at those. Especially with the two words that we are working
06:24with here got four Es. So it's like good idea to choose a typeface that has a nice E.
06:31Some food for thought there, but I also now want to look at it in a script
06:38face. So let's see what do we have in the line of scripts. How about a Brush
06:43Script? I don't think so. How about Linoscript, which is not really a script,
06:52but kind of feminine looking font? I suspect that might be a popular favorite
06:57although I'm not that keen on it myself. Another one, Papyrus, again no script
07:05font but I display font with lot of character, and again not to crazy about
07:10that one. But we started out with three words all set black and now we have
07:17boiled that down to two words. We got rid of the space which is by in itself,
07:23is quite a big design decision that we have made. Now we are differentiating
07:26with color and it looks like we are kind of gravitating towards a Sans Serif
07:32typeface with a two story G.
07:35Now in the next video I'm going to tweak the type a little bit more and try to
07:39tease out some more character from what we currently have.
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Changing one thing
00:00Take a look at these logos and what's interesting about them is that they all
00:04work by making a very subtle tweak to the type or adding one very small
00:10component, which completely makes the logo. So maybe one letter is bigger or
00:16we've got the famous FedEx logo up here, where the E and X come together to give
00:21a reverse out arrow or there is the tick taken out of the O and the S where
00:27they meet in the Microsoft logo. The house that's made of the H in the shelter
00:32logo. The dots on the J and the I made into an infinity sign in the Fujitsu logo, etcetera.
00:38So what I want to do now is I want to take these very clever, very simple
00:44concepts and try and apply them to my logo in progress and I'm going to pick
00:49up pretty much where I left off in the last video where we have got just the
00:54company name as now one word just like American Airlines done here. No space
00:59between those two words and I'm differentiating the two words by column. So
01:05this is a starting point, this is a Myriad Pro, so I have not yet decided which
01:11Sans Serif typeface I'm using. So I'm going to be going back and forth with that.
01:15Now if you don't have any of these typefaces though I'm using and some of them
01:18you will not have. Then just substitute some of your own that you feel broadly
01:22are equivalent. If that is if you are following along and if you are doing your
01:26own logo. Then feel free to adopt and adapt any of these techniques and none of
01:32them are to be taken absolutely, literally than more just suggestions. So this
01:37is my starting point as we saw this one in the previous movie just a different
01:42way of maybe instead of a space or if it's not having a space and underscore
01:47that really I don't think that it works but it was worth trying, and then
01:52I've now got this where I decide that I want to separate the words.
01:56Not with a space or at least I want to fill that space with something,
02:00not differentiated by color by having this swirly graphic. Now these are all the
02:05rage of the moment, these swirls. I got this from the Adobe Exchange website and
02:12I'm going to show you where you too can get it. So let's pop to Safari and
02:20I'm on the Adobe Exchange website. And this is a free download. It's by a woman
02:27called Jennifer Willis and you can download these effects of swirls and then
02:31just incorporate them into your InDesign document.
02:36So that's what I have done here. Now moving along, let's take a look at this
02:43example. Now I wouldn't really want to do this. I think this will create a
02:49printing problem having the counters of the letters built with a different
02:53color. But let's see how you can do this. It maybe something that you want to
02:58use in a different context or I mean if you're working on your own logo, maybe
03:02this is going to work for you.
03:03So I'm just going to start out by setting my Type and I'm using Futura here and
03:11I'm using Futura because it's geometric, it's going to give me nice round
03:17counters. So let's go over there to my Character panel and we will type in
03:24Futura and I'm going to make it Bold. Maybe not bold. That doesn't look quite
03:33what I'm after. So let's go for a Medium instead. And then switch to my
03:39Selection tool. Holding down my Shift key, I'm going to scale that up and move it down.
03:49Scale it a bit more.
03:50Now here is the punchline to this particular technique. I can't color any of
03:55those counters individually until I do this. And this is I need to convert this
04:01type to outlines of course. When I do that, it's no longer type. It's just
04:06editable vector shapes. Okay, so now there's outlines. I need to make sure that
04:13the status of these letters is actually they are compound paths and that's what
04:17is allowing the counters to knock holes in the letters. I need to release that
04:23compound paths. So I come to the Object menu, Compound Path > Release.
04:27Having done that, I can now select the counters individually. So I'm going to come in
04:33and holding down the Shift key, clicking on each of those counters and then
04:39applying a color.
04:41Okay.
04:45Now this is an interesting one. Here I'm using a very common technique of
04:49reversing out part of the logo and I'm doing that with an organic shape, a leaf,
04:54which seems appropriate to the subject. Now how did I get this leaf? Well, I
04:59could just draw with my Pen tool, but actually I was feeling lazy, so it's an
05:03Illustrator symbol, which I adapted.
05:06First of all, I'm just going to duplicate that type down there and then I need
05:15to get myself a symbol. So I'm going to come over to my Symbols panel right
05:18here. Now because I have already used in this document, it's on my Symbols
05:23panel. But if for you it isn't and you need to get it then come down to here,
05:29the Symbol Libraries menu and choose Nature. On your Nature symbols, you will
05:38find one right there called Leaf. So I'm going to click on that, that's going
05:41to put it on my Symbols panel and now from my Symbols panel. I want to put it
05:48onto my document. I'm going to click on this one just to add a single instance
05:54to my outboard.
05:56There it is, let's zoom in on that. Now that's far too detailed. Really all I
06:02want is the shape. So I'm going to come to the Object menu, and I'm going to
06:06expand that and then I'm going to choose my Direct Selection tool, click away
06:13from it to deselect. Click back on all that interior information and delete it
06:21and then all I want is the outline. So I'm going to get that and then I'll get
06:26rid of all of that stuff, but not including the font.
06:38So that leaves me with just the outline of the shape. Although it seems, I
06:45still have bit more detail there and I actually want so I'm going to return to
06:50the Object menu, Expand Appearance. Click on the outline once again and I'm
06:55wondering right now if it might have been easier for me to just draw the shape
06:59by itself. But now I have separated that from the shape. I can come to my
07:05Swatches, again give it a color and tend to be gravitating towards this
07:10particular green here. Choose that one and then move it into position. Choose
07:18my Rotation tool, and then spin it around a bit. Now of course, I need to send
07:27it to the back behind the type.
07:30So I choose my Object menu, Arrange > Send to Back and then it's just the
07:36question of positioning it. So that's it right behind that and perhaps scaling
07:42it a little bit. Something like that. Okay let's say what else do we have here.
07:59So then continuing with this leaf motif, after having done that one, I copied
08:05that and then as we saw from that explorations in the earlier video,
08:13the Franklin Gothic G has this interesting hook at the top of it and I can take my leaf,
08:19put that right there, scale it way, way down and position that. Something like so.
08:29Here is another one that I don't think will really work but you know in a
08:38different context it might be just what you are after. These letters have been
08:42converted into outlines and we saw that earlier. I just created it. Regular type.
08:47Converted it to outlines and then with my Direct Selection tool, that's
08:52the Y arrow, made a selection of those, bottom two points and then you can pull
09:02that up or pull down to make the P deeper as necessary.
09:11In this example here, this was kind of prompted by me coming across the Adobe
09:16Jenson in the previous video. Then we saw the Jenson has a two diagonal cross
09:21bar on the E, and I think what if I were to just experiment with that and join
09:27them together. So all we are doing here is typing in and in this case I'm using
09:37a space from my Character panel. Putting that in Adobe Jenson Pro. Scaling it
09:48up and then once again, it's just a question of turning into outlines. Just going
09:53to give us bit more flexibility or what we can do with it, Create Outlines.
09:58When I do that it becomes a group. So I now need to ungroup it, and that's
10:06going allow me to select the individual letters and I'll put those like so. And
10:18then I can just move the letters around as necessary to create some kind of
10:29effect like so which is cute but I'm not sure well that's already onto a winner
10:38with that one.
10:39In this final example, just want to make the point that so far we have been
10:43having both of the words of the logo in the same size. Of course, you don't
10:48need to restrict yourself to that. So here I'm radically scaling the two
10:52different words and I'm making the G quite a lot bigger, obviously, so that we
10:58can fit the word deep into that. So the G there is 80 points versus the other
11:03three letters which are 54 points.
11:08So hopefully I'll give you some ideas and especially if you are working on your
11:12own logo, which of course is the name and the type of business that you are
11:16working with, is going to suggest all kinds of other possibilities. But
11:20hopefully these will give you just some ideas to work with and explore.
11:25Okay, so coming up in the next chapter. We are going to look at some common
11:28type treatments. Working with transparency, working with outline type,
11:34warping type and making a monogram of the initials of your company.
Collapse this transcript
Tracing hand-drawn type
00:00There are many, many successful logos that use hand-drawn type. And with hand-
00:06drawn type you can convey a really personal, informal, friendly feel. But what
00:12we don't want to do, if we going to go down this route, is that we don't want
00:15to use a script typeface because if we do, it's going to look exactly the same
00:21as somebody else's logo who used the same script typeface. Much better to draw
00:26our letters ourselves and also much more characterful.
00:32So I'm going to look at two different approaches to creating hand-drawn letters
00:38in Illustrator. I spoke to my client and I said, "How's your handwriting?" and
00:43she said, "Well, it's not bad." So I had her write out the name of her company
00:48and I scanned it and that's what I have here. And then with that scan I Live
00:54Traced it. And this is the result I got or rather this is the cleaned up
00:59result I got.
01:01So let's just quickly run through that. I won't subject you to watching me
01:05clean it up too much because that's a little bit tedious to watch. But I'm
01:09going to select the image of the scan, Live Trace and then click on my Tracing Options.
01:19And I have got quite a lot of crumbliness around the shapes of the
01:24characters and that's just because it was done with the pencil. I'm going to
01:29try and eliminate some of that by blurring the image slightly. Then turning on
01:34my Preview to see if that makes a difference. I think it does help, yeah okay.
01:42So I'm going to trace that.
01:43I'll now want to get in and work with the shapes that Live Trace has created
01:49and modified them. So I need to click on the Expand button, choose my Direct
01:54Selection tool just swipe over that and then delete that. Now I can come in and
02:00adjust the Bezier control points and the anchor points to change the shape of
02:06these letters and it's going to be a somewhat painstaking process but hopefully
02:11worth it. So that's one approach.
02:13Now the other approach. If you have a tablet stylus, pressure sensitive pen
02:19then you can hand-draw your letters in Illustrator using the Brush tool. This
02:24too can be a painstaking process and I found it to be easier drawing myself
02:29some guides first before I get started. So I know where the base line of my
02:33letters is. So I'm going to come over to my Layers panel and I have this layer
02:40here, Guides.
02:42I have typed out my words in brush script. Not because I wanted to look like
02:48brush script but just because I want the proportions of the letters to be
02:51broadly similar and then I have drawn myself guides corresponding to the
02:54Baseline, the Descender line, the X- height and the Ascender height which all
03:02may sound a bit technical for something that's going to end up looking fairly
03:05child-like and informal but it does help, believe me.
03:11So then I'm going to zoom in and I want to make sure that my Brush tool options
03:18are set correctly. So let's just take a look at those. I want to Fill new brush
03:22strokes unchecked and I want Keep Selected unchecked also. So now I'm going to
03:29write my letters. Well that's okay. It's not great but I'm going to live with
03:39that for now. I can come and modify the shapes of the characters using my
03:46Direct Selection tool clicking on the outline, want to make sure that I just
03:51highlight the path and then I pull those shapes around may be adjust the Bezier
03:57control points. Before you know it, you have lost the whole hour to this
04:03technique. So be careful.
04:05So I'll do some of that getting it just how I like it. I want to make sure that
04:14my Strokes have the right end to them. So I'm going to single click on my
04:22Stroke panel and see I want this one here the Rounded Cap and this one here the
04:28Rounded Join. That's going to prevent us from having any sharp points to the
04:35tips of our letters and I think what I wanted to do next is increase the Weight
04:41of the stroke that we have here. Let's change that to 2 pt weight. Now I'll go
04:44to my Object menu and to Path, because I want to turn my strokes into paths and
04:55to do that I'm going to choose this one Outline Stroke. That's not looking too bad at all.
05:04It seems that when I choose outline stroke, things get a little bit thinner
05:08than they had been before because it's loosing the stroke that was there
05:12before. So I'm going to now having made my strokes into fills I'm going to give
05:17those fills a stroke. Let's see obviously we want a black stroke and yeah we
05:26will go for two point stroke and then I'm going to return to the Path > Outline
05:33Stroke. Hang on I have got my Guide selected as well. So I'm going to lock my
05:39Guides Apple+Alt+Semicolon or Ctrl+Alt+ Semicolon to lock them and then we will
05:47try that again. Path > Outline Stroke.
05:53Lastly, we're going to go to my old friend the Pathfinder panel and I want to add
06:01all those shapes together. We have got lots of overlaps and unnecessary anchor
06:06points there. So I'm going to hold down my Alt key and click on the Add To
06:10Shape Area to remove any of those. And of course I can further fiddle with that
06:16and pull the anchor points around to my heart's content.
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3. Type Treatments
Exploring type treatments
00:00In this chapter we are going to take a look at exploring common type treatments
00:04and how they can apply to our logo. Some of these type treatments may not be
00:09appropriate for the kind of logo that you are doing and for the kind of logo that I'm doing.
00:13But they are interesting nonetheless. So we will be taking a
00:17look at these following different approaches: using transparency, using
00:22outlined type, putting type around a circle, using the company initials to
00:28create a monogram and warping type.
00:32Let's begin with transparency.
Collapse this transcript
Using transparency
00:00So here we have some logos that use transparency. Technically speaking, the bp
00:05logo could be created without transparency although as we will see it's going
00:09to be very easy, perhaps easier than any other technique to achieve this kind
00:14of effect using transparency.
00:16I'm now going to go over to Illustrator and take a look at applying some of
00:20these techniques to my logo. Okay, here I am in Illustrator. Let's take a look
00:26at how some of these effects were created, beginning with this one. And what
00:32I'm going to do here is I'm going to zoom out, Apple+0. I'll select that and
00:40now I'm going to duplicate it down to the bottom of my page, holding down the
00:43Alt key and then I'm going to zoom in on that area, Apple+Spacebar or Ctrl+Spacebar,
00:50and click and drag over that, and I'll keep that one as visual
00:56reference and we'll just create it from scratch. So I'll type in my type and in
01:05this case I'm using the Franklin Gothic font, and it's Franklin Gothic Medium.
01:17Let's increase the type size on that, Apple+Shift+> or Ctrl+Shift+> and we'll
01:27just leave it like that in black for the time being.
01:30I now want to create my leaf, which I'm going to create using the Ellipse tool
01:36and I want to draw an ellipse outwards from the center point. So I'm holding
01:40down the Alt key and I'm going to make it something like that. Let's fill it
01:47with a light green. Now I'm using a light color because now I'm going to
01:50overlap these colors, and as they overlap, they are going to create darker colors.
01:55So I want to start off with something light. So I have got somewhere to go,
01:58here's my Fill property and my Swatches. Now, what I want to do is I want to
02:05pinch the top and the bottom of that leaf. I'll choose my Direct Selection tool,
02:11click away from it, click back on it. Now on the top anchor point, hold
02:16down the Shift key, click on the bottom anchor point, and then up on my Options bar,
02:21I want to Convert Selected Anchor Points To Corner. That's going to pinch
02:26the top and the bottom, like so.
02:28Now I'll switch to my Rotation tool, and let's get in big. Now, before I rotate,
02:34I want to set the transparency. Now I'll come over and click on my
02:38Transparency panel, and what I'm going to do is, I'm going to use Multiply.
02:44I'll leave the Opacity set to 100% and I'm going to click on the bottom point
02:49of my leaf. I'm kind of locking that in place so the rotation is going to take
02:53place from that point. I need to have the whole thing selected, so I'm going to
02:57hold down my Apple key or my Ctrl key and click on it so I have got the whole
03:01of the shape selected, click on that bottom point again. Now, I can move my
03:06leaf. But, I also of course want to make duplicates.
03:09So I'm going to throw in the Alt key, and let's say we've got about there, and
03:18now all I need to do is repeat that transformation, Apple or Ctrl+D, and I'll
03:24get as many duplicates as I like. You will see that in this particular instance
03:30I stop there, but if I keep going, I complete the whole circle. So then, all I
03:35need to do is come back here and select my piece of type, and we want this to
03:42be in a green color. We want the one word to be in white so that it reverses
03:50out these shapes.
03:51So I'm going to insert my cursor between those two words, hold down the Shift
03:54key, and click my Left Arrow, and then set the Fill on that to white or paper,
04:05and then bring that to the front, Object > Arrange > Bring To Front. Nudge it
04:12over a bit and then we have one of our transparency logos.
04:17So well now take a look at creating this effect. I'm going to zoom in,
04:24Apple+Spacebar, click and drag or Ctrl+Spacebar and here, we have a very
04:29similar effect to the one that we just saw with the overlapping petals, here
04:34with the overlapping fronds, and we are constraining all of those within a
04:39cropping rectangle.
04:40So let's zoom out again, Apple+ 0 or Ctrl+0 and I'll select that and duplicate
04:47it by holding down the Alt key. Bringing it down there, and then I'm going to
04:50zoom in again on this portion of the page so that we got some room to work
04:55with. And this time, I'll be starting with a rectangle as my basic shape, and
05:02having done that, I'm going to delete one of the top Anchor Points by switching
05:06to my Pen tool, and hovering over it, you will see a minus appear next to
05:11the Pen, click on that and that will delete the anchor point. With the top
05:15anchor point that remains, I'll press my Right Arrow, move that over to the
05:21right, give us our palm frond shape.
05:26Okay. So I want to rotate this around a specific point, and I'm going to use
05:33some guides to mark that points. I'm going to drag down a guide from the top. I
05:40need to turn my guides on, Apple+Semicolcon or Ctrl+Semicolon and there are some guides already.
05:47Let's get rid of the ones that we don't want. So I'll now need to unlock my
05:52guides, Apple+Alt+Semicolon or Ctrl+Alt +Semicolon. Let's get rid of those and
05:59with this shape selected, I'll now draw another guide right there.
06:06Okay. Keep the shape selected, switch to your Rotation tool by pressing R, hold
06:12down the Alt key and then click on the intersection of those two guides, and
06:18I'm going to rotate this by -- well funnily enough, it's coming out with eight
06:23degrees, that's the angle of rotation I used on previous instance when I was
06:30working with this. I think I'll just go with that, and I'm going to click Copy
06:34and then to repeat the transformation, Apple or Ctrl+D and I'll stop about
06:41there. And I'll lock my guides, Apple+ Alt+Semicolon. Select all of these shapes
06:52and group them, Apple or Ctrl+D. Then, I'm going to just move that over a bit
06:59there because I now want to reflect a copy of it.
07:01So I'm going to come over to my Rotation tool, where hiding behind the Rotation
07:05tool is my Reflect tool. So if I click and hold down on that tool space, bring
07:10out my Reflect tool. So I'm going to Alt+Click about there. That's going to
07:16bring up my Reflect dialog box, and I want to reflect it across the Vertical
07:20axis, and most importantly, I want a copy. So there is my copy, and I'm now
07:27going to set the transparency on this copy.
07:30So if I open up my Transparency panel. This time I think rather than using
07:35Multiply as I did in the previous example, I'll just take the Opacity way down
07:41to about 50% or thereabouts and then I can overlap that like so and...
07:53twist it around a bit, scale it a bit, pull it around a bit and just kind of
08:03move it into place. Well, maybe I want a different color.
08:06Okay. Let's pretend that that's exactly what I want. It's not exactly what I
08:15want, but I want to make you sit and watch me fiddle around with it for ages to
08:21get exactly what I want, but the concept is there. So now I want to switch to
08:24my Rectangle tool because I need to put a bounding rectangle around the two
08:30shapes. I'm going to hold down my Shift key, well I draw that to get a perfect square.
08:40If I want this square to be filled as I do in this instance, I'm going need
08:45two, because when I make this rectangle into a clipping shape, it's going to
08:49lose whatever fill it has. So having drawn one, what I'm going to do is I'm
08:54going send that one to the back and that's Apple+Shift+( or Ctrl+Shift+( to
09:01send it to the back. I need to make it bit lighter in color then, I'm going to
09:08copy it and select this shape and then I'm going to paste a copy in front of
09:16this shape, and to do that, I'm going to go to the Edit menu and choose Paste
09:19in front or Apple or Ctrl+F.
09:22Now, I need to select along with this both of my palm frond shapes. So select
09:29one, hold down the Shift key, select the other and then Object menu, Clipping
09:34Mask, Make. And now when I click away from it, we can see that those shapes are
09:41clipped or cropped by that clipping shape.
09:46Right. Let's now take a look at the third of our transparency examples
09:49overlapping letters, and where they overlap creating some interesting shapes
09:54with the resulting color. So I'll choose my Type tool, type in my letters, and
10:02then I'll scale it up a bit, give it a color. And I'm now going to convert this
10:10to outlines, but just before I do, I'll duplicate it, and so when I need it,
10:20there is my other piece of type and I'm going to use the complementary color
10:25there Magenta, and I may also select both, create outlines, that's
10:31Apple+Shift+O or Type > Create Outlines.
10:35Okay. Now, what it has given me for each different piece of type, it's given me
10:42a group. And I need to ungroup these elements. So I'm going to -- I'll select
10:47the first word with my Selection tool and then ungroup, that's Apple+Shift+G or
10:52Ctrl+Shift+G, and I can now come and set the transparency to Multiply, and I
11:02can select the letters individually and start overlapping them and you can see
11:08that where they overlap. We get some interesting results.
11:17So something like that. Now, I'll come to this one. Again, I need to ungroup
11:22it, Apple+Shift or Ctrl+Shift+G. I'm going to set the transparency to Multiply.
11:29I'll move this up into position.
11:38And just move the letters closer together.
11:43And you can fiddle around with that one for a long time until you get it just right,
11:46but we see there the effect that we're after.
11:49Okay. So there we have infinite number of approaches to working with transparency.
Collapse this transcript
Outlining type
00:00Here are some famous logos that use outlined or stroked type, where the color
00:06of the outline of the letters is different from the letter shapes themselves or
00:10where the letter shapes are shadowed or in some cases where the letters have an
00:15in line. We are going to see how we can apply these techniques in Illustrator to
00:19our logo in progress and hopefully, you will be able to explore how these
00:24may be applicable to your particular logo in progress.
00:28All right, let's now go over to Illustrator. I'm in the document that's called
00:35logo_outline. You can follow along with this or just work in your own document
00:39from scratch. Okay, here I'm in Illustrator with some different variations on
00:45working with outline type.
00:46The first one I'm going to look at is, not exactly outlined but just a simple
00:51drop shadow. The point being here though this isn't just the copy of the
00:55letters offset and put behind the original but rather is a drop shadow effect,
01:00and that's just easier in terms of editing in the future. And how we get this
01:04is just type in our text and let's make that something out of the black.
01:14We'll have it be red. Now, I want to give this a shadow, I'm going to come to the Effect
01:19menu and choose Stylize > Drop Shadow.
01:26Now, because we don't want to have any soft edges, if I turn on my preview,
01:30that how it's going to start. These gradated soft edges are going to be
01:34difficult to reproduce in certain situations so it's not going to be robust
01:38enough for our logo. So, we want to make sure that we got the Blend Mode set to
01:41Normal, the Opacity to 100, the Blur to 0. There's our shadow and now we just
01:49mess around with the Offset amount so I want a very minimal 1 point. And this is
01:55a live effects so the point being, if I edit my text, the shadow updates with it.
02:04OK, moving along to our next technique. All right, let's now take a look at the
02:09second outlining technique. This is a simple one, but it's an important point
02:16because when we apply a stroke to our type traditionally using the Fill and
02:23Stroke properties on our Tool panel, the stroke weight changes the letter
02:28shapes because half of it goes inside the letters and half of it goes outside
02:33the letters. If I un-apply that stroke, there we see the letter shapes and now
02:37if I re-apply that, we see that half of the stroke weight is going inside the
02:43letter shapes. So, it's actually changing the shapes of the characters. Ideally,
02:48we'd like to avoid that and here is how we can avoid that.
02:51Rather than applying the stroke and fill using the Stroke and Fill properties here,
02:56 I'm going to apply them using the Appearance panel. So, if I choose my
03:00Appearance panel, I'm going to select both of these and then from my panel menu
03:07I'll choose Add New Fill. You see that when I do that, the fill is now on top
03:13of the former Stroke property. I'm going to come and click on the stroke and
03:18I'm going to make the green color that we are using. What we can do here is to
03:25avoid the stroke changing the character shapes as I drag the stroke underneath
03:30the fill. Watch carefully when I do that and there we see that the stroke is
03:35now going completely outside of the letter shapes or rather we are only seeing
03:40the portion of it that goes outside of the letter shapes. So I might just want
03:43to bump up the weight of that stroke. So that's the preferable way of applying
03:48a stroke to types so that we avoid changing the shape of the characters.
03:52I'm now going to zoom out, Apple+0 and let's take a look at this technique.
03:57It's like a variant of that where I'm offsetting the stroke by having a copy of
04:04the type behind the original. So, if we look at the Appearance panel we see
04:12that I have got one fill that has a wide stroke and than I have another fill
04:16behind that, that is filled with green, no stroke on that but there is a
04:20transformation and that transformation is a live effect chosen from under the
04:26Effect menu and that is causing the green copy to be offset.
04:30With the green copy behind it, we see the white stroke that is on the black
04:34original that is at the top of the stack. I think what I'll do here is
04:38duplicate that, holding down the Alt key and dragging away from it. And then on
04:45the duplicate, I'm going to delete that transformation and then delete that
04:51fill just by dragging both of them in turn to the Trashcan.
04:57So with my type selected, I'm going to come back to the Appearance panel and
05:02choose Add New Fill and I'll change the color of that fill to my green color
05:09and then I'm going to move that fill underneath the existing fill and stroke
05:14and of course it's sitting directly beneath it so, we are not seeing it at the
05:18moment. But we did select it and I'm now going to go to the Effect menu and
05:23choose Distort & Transform > Transform. Now, this is not quite interactive as
05:30you might like, you have to use this sliders here and it's a little bit
05:33numerical but if I turn on my preview, what I want to do is I want to move it
05:38horizontally and not quite that much, may be about that much and I want to move
05:44it vertically.
05:44Now if want it to go down, I need to make the vertical a minus number, so I
05:49need to move to the left and that is almost exactly what I want. Let's have -2,
05:55here we go. The advantage here is that rather than stacking up different copies
06:05and then you go and edit one of those copies, and everything that's beneath it
06:08also need to be edited, I can edit this type and it will have that same effect
06:16applied to it.
06:17Okay, moving along with our different approaches to applying strokes to our
06:24characters. I'm now going to zoom out, Apple or Ctrl+0. Let's take a look at
06:30this example here, and this is again a slide variant on once that we have
06:35already seen. I have got multiple copies with multiple strokes. So, let's just
06:40take a look and deconstruct path.
06:42Using my Appearance panel, I have got type filled with green as the stroke and
06:46then behind that is another stroke of a thicker weight. Now if I throw that
06:52stroke away, I'll select both pieces of type. I'll throw that stroke away just
06:56by dragging it to the Trashcan. And you will see that the white stroke on the
07:01green type currently not visible because it is against the white background.
07:05But if I now choose Add New Stroke, I just need to make sure the white of that
07:10stroke is heavier than the existing stroke, well, it is a different color and
07:16it goes behind the existing strokes. I'm going to make it two points and I'm
07:21going to make it green and now when I drag it down in my stack in my Appearance
07:26panel, it sits behind the first stroke and I have got some nicely multipley outlined type.
07:32Moving along all the way over here. So I want to begin with type which I'm then
07:38going to need to convert to outlines and then I'm going to offset that path to
07:43make this much larger type shape its going to sit behind the type and form this
07:49interesting background for it.
07:51I'm going to do this one from scratch. So, I'm going to put in my type and I'm
07:56using a font here called Cooper Black, which is very brown and cuddly. The font
08:02I used in the original example was Helvetica Rounded, which I don't have on
08:06this machine, so I'm using Copper Black as an alternative.
08:09All right, let's set the fill of that to piper and I'm going to copy it because
08:16I need a copy of that to paste back in, after I have done the next few steps.
08:21So, Apple+C or Ctrl+C will copy that to the clipboard and then I'm going to
08:28choose, Create Outlines to convert my type to vector shapes. And now, I want to
08:34offset the path. Just before I do that, I'll change the color to the green I'm
08:38using and come up to the Effect menu and choose Path > Offset Path and turn on
08:45my preview and that's what we are going to get with that 10 pt offset, which is
08:50a little bit too much. I'm going to make that 8 pt.
08:53You might want to experiment with the type of joins, since I'm starting with
08:57such a rounded original that you might want to experiment with these. Choosing
09:01Round may give you a better result depending on the font that you are working
09:05with. And then I'm going to click OK and there I want to paste that copy back
09:09in front, Apple or Ctrl+F or Edit > Paste In Front, and it's going to go exactly
09:15on top of that.
09:16OK, now let's take this one step further, what if we now want to put a stroke
09:23on the bubbly shape in the background. Well, I'm going to select that and this
09:29time rather than doing it from under the Object menu, I'm going to do it using
09:32my Appearance panel and I'm going to choose Add New Stroke. Black is fine,
09:40that's actually the color that I want. I'm restricting myself to two colors for
09:45most of these examples because I want my logo to be in only two colors. Now I'm
09:49going to come to the Effect menu and choose Offset Path.
09:53It's there because it was the last thing that I used but typically, we will
09:57need to come down to Path and slide over to Offset Path. And let's turn on my
10:04preview. That is a bit too much. So I'm going to reduce that to about 3 points and
10:12that's exactly what I'm after. So this is my offset path applied to the bubble
10:18shape that is now behind the type.
10:22So in this movie, we have been looking at different techniques for putting a
10:25stroke around type and working with multiple strokes and offsetting the paths
10:30of those strokes. In the next video, I'm going to be looking at putting type
10:34on a path, specifically putting type around a circle.
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Creating type around a circle
00:00Here are some logos that put type on a path, specifically type around a
00:04circle. And in four of their instances, we see the type goes around the top of
00:08the circle and around the bottom of the circle. So we are going to see how we
00:12can do that in Illustrator.
00:15And here are some explorations I have been making with the logo in progress.
00:19It's for the company, Deep Green, a garden design company. Some of these are
00:23more successful than others but they all use very similar techniques and this
00:28is the first three examples up here.
00:32I put them inside a colored circle and I'm using, in the case of number 1 and
00:38number 3, these are Illustrator's Symbols that I got from the Symbols Library
00:44and we saw that in an earlier movie. I'm not going to do that here. I'll just
00:47point out where they are, Symbols, and I got them from the Nature Symbols Library.
00:54The second example of the rose is Live Traced and then modified from a
01:01photograph and I'll be recreating that in an upcoming video. But for now I'm
01:07just going to look at these simple examples here, which in topographic terms
01:11use exactly the same techniques as the upper examples.
01:17So I'm going to begin by drawing a circle using my ellipse tool. I want to draw
01:20outwards from the center point somewhere, so I'm holding down the Alt key and I
01:23want it to be a perfect circle, so I'm holding down the Shift key and then, I'm
01:28going to use my Type On A Path tool and click on the top of that circle and
01:32when I do the Fill disappeared and then I'm going to type in my text. I can now
01:40use my Alignment options to adjust the position of the text relative to the
01:44circle. And/or I can use my Selection tool and these vertical ticks would
01:50appear on the circle.
01:52First of all, what I'm going to do, before I get to moving the type around, I'm
01:56going to make sure that it is centered on the circle. That's going to move the
02:00type round to the bottom of the circle. Now I switch to my Selection tool, I go
02:04at this stick that represents the beginning of the story, the one to its left,
02:08the end of the story and this one at the bottom representing the alignment.
02:12Now I'm going to get this beginning tick representing the beginning of the
02:15story and have that chase the type around the circle. When I get to the end of
02:21green reaches the top of the circle it going to seem to disappear. Don't be
02:25alarmed by that, I'm going to lick over that as far as there and then I'm going
02:30to get this tick which represents the end of the story, I have got that Overset
02:34text indicator there.
02:35Now if I pull that around, I get the word back and I want to make sure that the
02:42center tick aligns at the very top of the circle. Now here is a case in point,
02:48we were discussing in earlier that it was how to be wanting how to space
02:52between the two words or do I want to differentiate them with color and in this
02:56case I definitely did not want that space because it's making things seems
03:01slightly weighted to the right. So, if I come in there and choose that and then
03:05I can click on that now I have got the G, exactly at the top of the circle.
03:11I'm also going to adjust the size of the type. Now, I got the circle selected
03:15with my Selection tool and I can now use the shortcuts to reduce my type,
03:20Apple+Shift+< or Ctrl+Shift+<. And now I'm going to track some space between
03:27the characters Alt+Right Arrow just to space out those letters a bit. Right so
03:34that's the type reading at the top of the circle. I now want to read at the
03:38bottom of the circle and I'm going to put the tag line of the logo on the
03:42bottom of the circle. So, the technique here is I want to copy this, Apple+C or
03:47Ctrl+C and then I want to paste that copy in front, exactly on top of the
03:52original. Apple or Ctrl+F, doesn't look any different, but I have got two
03:57copies one exactly on top of the other. With the copy that is on top, I'm going
04:03to drag that down and inside the circle like so and switch back to my Type On A Path tool.
04:14I'm there and select that. It is Garden Design and Planting. It is Garden
04:25Design and Planting. The problem here is that, I have now got overset text
04:30again, I need to reduce the size of that text with my Type tool in my text,
04:36Apple or Ctrl+A will select all including the portion that's currently overset
04:41and then Apple+Shift or Ctrl+Shift+< reduce the size. Track it a little bit
04:48more and then I can just experiment with the relative sizes of the two pieces
04:54of type. But when I click away, I have got now my type reading on the top of
05:00the circle and the bottom of the circle.
05:02If these were actually around a circle, I'm missing a space there, it may
05:08appear that the bottom portion is on the inside of the circle which of course
05:12is and we want to shift it down so that the top of caps sits on the outside of
05:18the circle. So, to do that, I need to go to my Character panel, Show the
05:22Options and I'm going to use an option called Baseline Shift, which is this one
05:26right here and I can then knock that down so that it's outside the circle.
05:32So, that is essentially it. that technique with slight variance applied to get
05:39me these different results here. So in this particular instance, all I have is
05:43two circles, one on top of the other with the size of the topmost circle
05:48reduced. Let's see how we can recreate something similar to this. I'm going to
05:52zoom out, Apple+0. I'm going to use what I have already got down here as a
05:58starting point. So, I'm going to click on that, hold down by Alt or Option key
06:03and drag away from that. Zoom in on that. And now what I'm going to do is, I'm
06:08going to scale this by double clicking on my Scale tool and instead of
06:14duplicating the original, I'm going to duplicate a copy.
06:19Just like so, and then come and choose my Type On A Path tool, click in there
06:25and I can type in my tagline. As in the previous example, I have exceeded the
06:34size of that text area, so I need to select my type and this needs to be
06:41smaller, anyways so I'm going to resize it, Apple+Shift+< or if I need it to, I
06:48could come in pulling these vertical ticks that knock the extent of the text area.
06:56But I'll also change the color that as well I think, there we go. So there are
07:02just a couple of different approaches to creating type around a circle or
07:07indeed type on any kind of path. We have been using circle but this would work
07:11on any shape.
07:12It is not a common technique to use in logos and it tends to be used more on
07:17car companies than anything else it seems. But as we saw of from those logos
07:22that we looked at and we'll just pop back take another look at them. Obviously
07:27there are some household brands that use this technique. Okay, in the next
07:33video, I'm going to look at using the company initials as a design element to
07:38create a monogram logo.
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Using company initials to create a monogram
00:00Some examples of logos that use as their main design element the initials or
00:04the initial letter of a company. Let's explore this approach working with our
00:10logo in Illustrator.
00:14Here are some approaches that I have taken. Starting up at the top left I have
00:20combined the two letters into one. I'm not sure I'm crazy about it but it's an
00:25interesting exercise to see how this is done, so let's take a look at it.
00:29I'm using this version, I do here not Franklin Gothic but rather I'm going to
00:35use Gill Sans which also has that beautiful two story G that's so decorative and
00:42gives us so many possibilities to work with.
00:45Now on top of that it might be tempting to try and do this to lower case D on
00:53top of it but when we look at the letter shapes carefully we see that the size
00:57and shape of the counters are just so different, that's not really going to
01:01work. So what will I'm going to do to create the D is I'm just simply going to
01:06make a vertical stem that attaches to the G.
01:09I'm just going to use this D as an indication of how wide and how tall that
01:16stem should be. So with that D there at the same size of the D, I'm just going
01:19to draw myself a rectangle over it. That's now serve its purpose, we can say
01:26goodbye to that.
01:28I'm going to put that over my G and we can see already there it's just looking
01:35too big. I'm going to reduce its size, I'm going to reduce its width. We are
01:39not going to extend it all the way down to what would be the Baseline but
01:44rather overlap it and like so.
01:47Now, in terms of adjusting the overlap you may find this easier working in
01:52Outline View but before I can go any further I need to convert my G to
01:59Outlines. Then if I switch to my Outline View we can see how one shape overlaps
02:07the other. And I'm going to get them really nice and big, click on that
02:13rectangle. Make sure it's not interfering with the counter. Make sure it's not
02:18coming outside of the curve of the letter and that's about as far as I need to
02:25go with that.
02:25Now I need to retract this portion of the G, I'm going to swipe over those two
02:32anchor points with my Direct Selection tool, hold down the Shift key and bring
02:38that in inside the shape, I don't need to match up exactly with the edge of the
02:43rectangle, but just inside the shape is enough. I think I'm now ready to switch
02:52back to my Preview.
02:56And that's just not really looking quite right is it. So I'm going to zoom in
03:01again on that. We can see it bulging out slightly, so I'm going to need to make
03:09some adjustments here. So size of that rectangle -- and I do actually want to
03:19continue it, move all way to there and that's looking a lot better, zoom out.
03:28Even though it is the height of what a Gill Sans lower case D would be, it just
03:34looks too tall to me. I'm just going to reduce this vertical size, all right.
03:41That I think is looking a little better and now I'm going to select both of
03:46those, go to my Pathfinder tools and use the Shape Mode to add them together.
03:55There is our result. Not sure I'm entirely solved on that but an interesting
04:01experiment nonetheless.
04:05In the second example, I would say, I'm just using the initials but extending
04:09the hook on this G with a turning into stem of that into a leaf, reasonably
04:17successful I think. Now where did I get this leaf from because I didn't draw it
04:21myself. I actually got this from Photoshop.
04:24In Photoshop, there are some shapes that we can take advantage of. While
04:29Illustrator has symbols, there is no Shape Library as such. So if you want to
04:33draw some simple vector shapes or you want to access some vector shapes very
04:40easily Photoshop might be a good source for you.
04:42So I'm going to now come down to Photoshop and in Photoshop let's hide
04:48everything else. I'm going to start a new document. I'll just tune to default
04:56size, doesn't really matter what size it is, click OK. Then I'm going to use my
05:01Custom Shape tool. All I'm going to do here is use Photoshop to draw the custom
05:06shape and then copy and paste it into Illustrator.
05:09So using my Custom Shape tool and then I'm going to come up my tool options,
05:13here is where I get my shapes from. I can expand to see what I have got. Not
05:19too many options this is just the default shapes but if you click on the panel
05:24menu, you have access to over these different shape libraries. I'm going to
05:29choose All and I'll append those.
05:34Now see we have got a lot more shapes available to us and one that I'm after is
05:44there it is, there is our leaf. So I can now just click and drag to draw the
05:50leaf, I'll switch to my Path Selection tool, select that, Apple or Ctrl+C to
05:58copy it. Switch back to Illustrator where I'll paste it, Apple or Ctrl+V and I
06:06want to paste it as a compound shape. It's coming out rather large, so I now
06:13need to scale it down, spin it around, apply a Fill Color and also I wanted to
06:30flip it around. So I'm just going to kind turn it around on itself like so,
06:34move it around a bit more. I'll get rather that one to replace it with this one
06:42and scale it, I'm just kind of dock it into position like so.
06:50Well, like the previous example, interesting but I don't think that's going to
06:54be a winner. Let's now zoom out and see one more example of working with the initials.
07:02In this third example of using the initials as a design element, I'm going to
07:08recreate this fourth example here and I'm going to do this using a feature in
07:12Illustrator CS3 called Live Paint, which is a very cool feature and allows us to
07:18identify different elements that are created by overlapping objects and apply
07:23paint to them without first separating them into distinct paths.
07:29Now this is an idea that was suggested to me by my client. She handed me a
07:34piece of paper with some sketches on it that she'd come up with, so I'm
07:37working out this idea to just can show her how successful this might be.
07:43I'm going to begin with an ellipse and I'm going to -- we saw this in a previous
07:51video. I'm going to pinch the top and bottom of this ellipse to make it into a
07:55leaf shape. So I'll use my Pen tool, hold down the Alt key, click and click.
08:03Now I'm going to get my type. I'll do both letters at once and I'm using a font
08:11called Meta, Meta Normal. I'm going to increase the size of that, position the D
08:20right about there. I want to make sure that the top of this stem of the D just
08:26overlaps the leaf at that point. Then we'll have to separate the G from it so
08:33I'm going to come away from this type area, hold down my Apple or my Ctrl key
08:40and click and then insert my cursor and Apple or Ctrl+V to paste.
08:50The G needs to go down here. Now I realize I need to my both letters, need to
08:54position the letters relative to each other. And then I want to size them both up.
09:09Kind of fiddly.
09:14Something like that.
09:17Yup. And I think that's about right.
09:24We're now creating any small-trapped
09:27areas of space where the letter meets the outside shape.
09:38All right, good enough!
09:43So with both my letters now selected, I'm going to convert those to outlines.
09:49Apple+Shift+O or from my Type menu, Create Outlines. Now I'm ready to use my
09:57Live Paint, I don't actually need to combine these overlapping shapes into a
10:02single shape, might be an idea for me to do that but it's not strictly
10:06necessary. I'm going to swipe over my three elements and come and choose my
10:13Live Paint Bucket. And then when I hover over these three elements I get this
10:18message, 'Click to make a Live Paint Group' and that's exactly what I'm going to do.
10:21You will now see that I can hover over any one of these segments and apply
10:28paint to that segment independently.
10:30Ideally, I have used more than two colors here but I'm trying to restrict
10:36myself to using two colors for all of the logos wherever possible when I'm
10:40breaking that rule in a few instances but I'm going to try and keep to it here.
10:44So I'm going to use my green color and let's apply that there and there and
10:54there. I think I'll make the letters white and I'll make the right-hand side
11:09black and that should be --- I have got one small area of trapped space there so
11:17I'll come back again and make sure that also gets white.
11:23Now you will see that when I hover over any Live Paint segment, I get three
11:27little swatches above the paint can and I can use my cursor arrows to choose
11:32the different swatch.
11:36Zoom out a bit. There are my monogrammed initials.
11:41So we have seen three of an infinite number of potential approaches to working
11:47with the initials of the company as a design element for your logo. Next we
11:53will look at creating warped and extruded type.
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Warping type
00:00Some logos that use warped type and in the case of this one here, Latitude,
00:06extruded type to create 3D drop shadow. Let's explore these options.
00:12In Illustrator, you can see the exploration I would be making here, starting
00:17with a simple piece of type, warping it and then experimenting with the 3D
00:22Bevel option and then applying a gradient to the type. So let's do this from scratch.
00:30I'm using a font called Arnold Boecklin. It's a very art nouveau
00:36style of font, kind of suggested by the Latitude logo. I'm not sure I would
00:40ever really use it in real life but now is my opportunity to cut loose and
00:48experiment with this one.
00:49I'm going to come to the Effect menu and down to Warp where I'm going to apply
00:54this as a live effect, an Arc. And 13 degrees is probably just about right,
01:01okay? Lovely. And next what I'm going to do is I'm going to convert my type to
01:09outlines. So that's going to be necessary so that I can apply a gradient to it.
01:14If I want to commit to that angle or that degree of arc, I might want to expand
01:19my appearance so that what I'm seeing and my anchor points are one and the
01:24same. It is going to narrow my options in terms of backing up to this point but
01:28I'm going to live dangerously and do that anyway. Expand Appearance so we now
01:34see the selection outlines and my objects are not different things.
01:39Now I'm going to apply the gradient to that and I want to change the angle of
01:44the gradient. What's happening at the moment is the gradient is filling each
01:48shape independently. And I actually want it to go across the whole of the range
01:53of letters and I want it to go from bottom to top, something not quite like
01:59that but maybe more like that. I can just keep swiping over it with my Gradient
02:04tool until I get it right.
02:07What I want to do next is I have got -- all of these elements are grouped and
02:13to really fine-tune this what we need to do is probably mess around with the
02:18beveling on each of the letter shapes individually. I'm not going to do that
02:22because that can be too time consuming and about as interesting as watching a
02:26paint dry, for you to watch me do that but that's what we would need to do to
02:29really refine this and in order to do that I need to make sure that these
02:33objects are all un-grouped.
02:35So I'm going to come to the Object menu and Ungroup them and now I'll go to my
02:403D > Extrude & Bevel. If I turn on my Preview, there will be a pause;
02:50it's quite demanding of the processor this. Now that's not I want at all. So I'm going to turn
02:56off my Preview and just move this cube around to set the angle of my Extrude
03:04& Bevel, something like that. So it's a pretty much head-on view.
03:09And turn on my Preview back on again.
03:13That's more like it. I want to increase the depth of the extruded type to about
03:2080 points and then the last thing I need to do here is to change the shading
03:26from a gray to a black. I need to come down to these options. Now if you don't
03:30see these options come and click on this button right here.
03:33You will see that my shading color is actually black already but what's making
03:37it gray is the Ambient Light, which I need to take down to zero.
03:46And there I now have a black extruded 3D shadow.
03:53We have arced it, then we applied a gradient to it, having first made into
03:59outlines and having ungrouped those outlines and then we have gone to the
04:03Effect menu to apply Extrude & Bevel and there is our result.
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4. Designing a Logo Symbol
Designing a logo symbol
00:00This chapter is about designing a logo symbol. Your logo doesn't necessarily
00:04need a symbol; perhaps it's type only. But having a symbol is probably
00:08preferable and that symbol doesn't necessarily need to be anything complicated.
00:12In fact it's better if it's something really simple.
00:16The world's most successful logos use nothing more than simple shapes. They are
00:21alarmingly simple when you break them down. Perhaps it's nothing more than a
00:25line or a square or a rectangle, a circle or an ellipse, a star or a triangle
00:31incorporated with the type.
00:33Or perhaps it's some kind of representational imagery that is related to the
00:37type of business that you are in. Common sources of inspiration for such
00:42representational imagery are animals or nature or buildings or if none of
00:47those do it, you can always just go with an abstract shape.
00:50I am also going to be talking in this chapter about trends in logo design and
00:54how to avoid being a victim of logo design fashion and we will be seeing how we
01:00can trace an image from a hand- drawn sketch or Live Trace it with an
01:04Illustrator. I will also be looking at the option of using stock or Clip Art.
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Working with lines
00:00Here are some famous logos that use lines. Maybe the lines underscore the
00:05name, or maybe the lines are the logo itself. Maybe the lines suggest some
00:11kind of connection, maybe they go through the type, maybe they join
00:15things together. Many, many different ways of using lines.
00:19Let's now see how we can apply lines to our logo in progress working in
00:24Illustrator. So here in Illustrator, I'm beginning with nothing but type.
00:30I'm going to work with some lines. I have got my rulers turned on. I'm going to
00:34draw myself some guides and then I'll switch to my Line tool and draw myself a
00:42row underneath my type.
00:46Set the weight of the row using my Stroke panel. I'm going to make it about 6
00:49pt, let's move it down a little bit. It doesn't get more simple than that, but
00:54that's completely valid approach. Let's maybe make it dashed line. We can
01:01adjust the width of the dashes or if we want it to be a doted line only to make
01:06a rounded cap and have the dash be 0 and set the gap to in this case I think
01:13something like about 6 pt.
01:15Little bit more than 6 pt, let's have it be 9 pt, there you go, a dotted line.
01:21If I just undo that and we'll go back to a solid line, let's say that we had a
01:27version of the logo that also incorporated the tagline of the logo. We can have
01:35the row separate the tagline from the logo itself.
01:42I think what I want to do with that type is I want to put it in all caps and
01:49then space it out a lot with the tracking. Let's just really pump that up, really pump
01:55it up and increase the point size a bit. Maybe not trying to quite so loosely,
02:06and then I can just pull my type out to that guide using the line as a
02:10separator, as a version of the logo.
02:13Now for something a little bit different, how about we will keep the tagline
02:17there, but this time I'll get rid of the horizontal row, move the tagline a
02:23little bit closer and we will have a vertical row. Now, I'm going to draw
02:26myself a guy that mounts the top of the caps and another guy that mounts the
02:31baseline, and then I'll use my Line tool just to draw myself guide right there
02:40and I'll set the Weight of that to something like 10 pt, and I think I'll make
02:45it in a green color, may be a little bit heavier.
02:50There we go, now the line doesn't necessarily need to be a straight line. Let's
02:59see what we can do with some wavy lines. I'll turn off my guides for a moment.
03:07Let's use the Pen tool. Now, I'm just going to create myself some kind of
03:12little swooshy line underneath my type like so. If I'm going to do this, I
03:18probably don't want a line of uniform weight.
03:21So I'll go to my Brushes panel, and I can apply maybe this artistic brush
03:29here. If you don't see this on your Brushes panel, you can access this from the
03:33Artistic_Paintbrush and in fact what I have opened up those brushes and I can
03:40apply any one of these to my line. There is another logo or maybe I do want a
03:53straight line, but instead of going above the type, below the type or by the
03:59side of the type, how about right straight through the type like so, and then
04:05make it weight, increase the weight of it a bit.
04:09So it's about the same way as the horizontal corresponds on the e's. So that
04:19actually slices through the type. Rather than having a single go through the
04:25type, how about having multiple lines go through the type. And you have seen
04:29this effect numerous times before, commonly used in logos.
04:33So I'm going to move that rule up a bit, I'm going to extend its width just to
04:37make it easier for me to select without selecting the type. I'll change the
04:42Weight back to a very light, Weight 1 pt and then I'm going to duplicate that
04:47holding down the Alt key and the Shift key to put a copy of that beneath the
04:54type, and then I'm going to swipe off above.
04:58I'm going to choose my tool Blend tool, and I want to click on the start point
05:01right there, you will see I have got little cross next to my Blend tool and
05:06click on the equivalent point down there. I get multiples of those lines as
05:13specified numbers of steps between the two points.
05:16Now, that's not what I want or is not quite what I want. So I'm going to
05:20double-click on the Blend tool and for Spacing change that to Specified Steps.
05:25I want far fewer than that, let's try 24 and turn on my Preview. So I have now
05:30got 24 lines going over my type between the starting point and the ending
05:36point. Not really appropriate for the kind of business that I'm working with so
05:40I'm getting get a rid of that.
05:43Getting back to our idea of a swooshy line, we could have it go through the
05:48type. So I'm going to start with my Pen tool up here, click and drag, click and
05:53drag again down here and then come and click and drag down at the bottom. I
05:57need to apply a color to that, I'll apply the green to it, and I want to change
06:04the Weight, increase the weight quite a bit. Then go to my Brushes and we will
06:10give it one of those artistic brushes.
06:13Now, obviously I don't want it going over the top of the type. So what I'm
06:16going to do is choose my Eraser tool. Now, my type is locked from the previous
06:22example I did. That's important that my type be locked. Now that it's locked, I
06:27can't affect the type, so I can just rub out the line where I don't want to see
06:31it like so. Then when I let go of my Eraser tool, my type comes back and there
06:42is my swooshy line going above and below the type.
06:46So there are just several ideas to play with when working with lines as part of
06:50your logo. So we began with just a simple line, we made it dashed, we made it
06:56doted. Now, I can think of one more thing, which kind of suggested by doing
07:01this, and that's how these things work out, you do one thing and it kind of
07:04leads to another, and you end up going down half that you haven't initially foreseen.
07:08Some of them will be dead ends, but some of them may turn out to be really
07:11fruitful. So what I'm going to do here is, I'm going to draw myself a wavy line
07:16that goes through the type. Something like that, then I'm going to select my
07:26type and I now need to convert my type into outlines.
07:30So Type, Create Outlines and then I'm going to select the whole thing there and
07:37I'll use my Live Paint tool; my Live Paint Bucket, and see what it says Click
07:44to my live paint group, I'll do that right there. And what's happened here is,
07:49where that line intersects with the letters, it's making individually editable
07:55shapes. All about retaining the existing appearance of the same time. I need to
08:00now choose from my swatches, let's choose the green. I'm going to make the
08:07bottom halves of the letters here green.
08:10Then I'll switch to my black. I'm going to make the bottom half of the letters
08:13here black like so. I don't want to see that line any longer. So I'm going to
08:22select the line itself and I'll make it color none. So we have got that lovely
08:28line going through it now, and the great thing about this is that it's live. So
08:33if I want to just come and tweak it, I can click on that line and choose those
08:37anchor points and move them around to a modify that effect.
08:41So there are some ideas to experiment when working with lines.
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Designing with rectangles
00:00So we are keeping it simple and we are working with simple shapes. Here are
00:03some famous logos that use simple shapes. Circles, triangles, ovals,
00:10rectangles, stars, rounded rectangles, all incredibly easy shapes to do in
00:17Illustrator. I am going to begin working with squares and rectangles, move on
00:21to circles and ellipses and then to stars and triangles.
00:26So this is a starting point. Nothing but our type. Let's see, how about we draw
00:31ourselves a simple square like so and we will give it a stroke weight.
00:37Move it up like that maybe. We can call that a logo, maybe not the best logo, but
00:44it's a logo. How about we do this? I will select that and I will switch those
00:49values, so I will give it now a green fill rather than a green stroke.
00:53And I will send that to the back and then I will need to come in and select
00:58that piece of type and make the fill of my type white. I think I will want to
01:07just reduce the size of it a little bit. And again, we call it logo. What if we
01:13were to rotate the rectangle? So I will choose my Rotation tool.
01:17I'll click on the center point and then I'll spin that around and now things are maybe
01:22going to get a little bit more interesting, another logo.
01:24I am going to back up, press my Apple+Z or Ctrl+Z a few times and get back to
01:33this point, make the green square reduce its size and that we have some
01:38multiples of this. So I will drag one of its about there. I will hold them my
01:43Alt key and my Shift key, drag away from it and then may be size. I am not sure
01:51what that means, but may be it means something, may be I will mirror those two
01:56objects down here.
01:59I could maybe flip them back on themselves like that. Put them down there and
02:04then we have got another approach. Now, I am going to set the type to all of it
02:13to black, and I will put a space between the two this time, and I will draw
02:18myself a rectangle over that one like so. Fill it with green, duplicate it over
02:27there, select them both, send them both to the back, and then I will come in
02:34and make both those initial letters white.
02:39All right, let's press my undo key few times and get back to this point. How
02:46about now? I just put a rectangle behind it. I want to draw the rectangle
02:50outwards from the center point so I am holding down the Alt key, and I need
02:55to just position that a bit better. I will make the stroke black, no fill,
03:01nudge it over a bit and you can change the weight of that a bit.
03:05There's a logo. Of course I could have done that with using my Rounded
03:09Rectangle. Numerous logos are nothing more than the line within a rounded rectangle.
03:14What I want to do actually is something kind of along the lines of
03:18the London Transport roundel. I have got the center point of that rectangle selected,
03:23I can see it right there. I am now going to choose my Ellipse tool. Hold down
03:27the Alt key and the Shift key and draw a circle from that point. I will then
03:32fill that circle with my color and send it to the back. I need to make sure
03:38that rectangle also has a fill color. That needs to, I can send to the back as
03:44well and then I will send that ones to the back once more and here we go, we
03:48have got another logo.
03:49So we can see that just working with nothing more than rectangles, and doing
03:55them as multiples, putting them over the type, rotating them, combining them,
04:00in this case with an ellipse, we got ourselves logos that look not the similar
04:05to many logos that we see and respond to every day.
04:10Next, I am going to work with circles and ellipses.
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Designing with circles and ellipses
00:00Okay, now we are going to work with circles and ellipses. So here we are in
00:05Illustrator, just go to our basic type and I going to use my Ellipse tool,
00:10draw myself a circle and I want to make sure you that has a Fill. Let's position
00:17that up there. Then I am going to duplicate it holding down the Alt key
00:19dragging away from it. Reduce the size of the duplicate, position that like so.
00:25There we have a logo. Now I'm going to move that one over there, making it a
00:31little bit bigger, choose this one and give it fill of white over there and
00:38making it little bit smaller and there we got a logo.
00:43Now let's try something a little bit different. Let's put a -- I am going to
00:49set my type to all be black. Actually I'll leave it to be white. All right, so it'll be white.
00:56And then I will choose my Ellipse tool and approximately the center
01:00point of that still selected type and now I can say it but its still selected
01:04holding down the Alt and the Shift key and I will draw myself an ellipse that
01:10will go behind it. Fill it and then send it to the back Apple+Shift or
01:14Ctrl+Shift+Left bracket and then we have to just nudge it up into the
01:20position. Like so. Maybe I will just want to tweak the size of it a little bit as well.
01:28Okay now what if I wanted to put a stroke around that perhaps, the stroke be
01:32inside the shape. I need to make it a little bit bigger in order to do give us
01:37a little bit of growing room.
01:39So, I am going to do this using this Appearance panels, I will come and click
01:42on Appearance, click on the Stroke and I want to make my stroke white and then
01:49I want to let's say I want to increase the Weight of that stroke. No, I think I
01:54will leave it at 1 point. But I want to bring it inside the shape. So this is
01:58going to be applied as a live effect and I am going to come up to my Distort &
02:02Transform and Transform this and I will transforming just the stroke, I am
02:08going to turn on my preview and let's see what happens when I will make that
02:14Less than 100 percent.
02:15I want to do the Horizontal scales slightly different to the vertical scale, I
02:20have to come up with the Horizontal 97 and the Vertical 93. That looks just
02:26about right and I think I wanted a whole shape a little bit bigger and there we
02:31have another logo. Now just press my Apple+Z a few times or Apple+Z as you say
02:39here. Getting back to that point, I think what I will do this time is I will
02:45draw myself a circle like so. I want to make it green and just want to mark
02:52this center point of that.
02:53So I am going to select it. Those handles indicate the center point. I will
02:56draw myself a guide right there. I'll need to turn my guides on, Apple or
03:01Ctrl+Semicolon, and I am going to position that circles about that now I want to
03:08rotate multiples of arc, create some kind of semicircle made up of circles
03:13going over the letters in an arc.
03:15I could use my Blend tool for this, instead of using this Blend tool I am just
03:19going to use my Rotation tool and repeat the transformation, but I want to
03:22rotate along this axis. And so that the arc doesn't become too tall, I am going
03:28to move down to about here, on that guide. I'll just click to set that as the
03:33point of rotation and then we will see that's the point around which I will
03:38make those duplicates. So I will just drag a copy away holding down the Alt key
03:44to about there and then having done one I can just press Apple or Ctrl+D to get
03:50my copies, like so.
03:52And let's have a gradient be applied to this so they start out with almost no
03:59fill here and get to a solid fill over by the end. So all select them all and
04:07then I will group them and then come to my Gradient tool, show on my options,
04:13apply the gradient to that and now if I open my Swatches panel which I'll see
04:19my Gradient and my Swatches at the same time so tear off my Swatches. And then
04:23I going to drag that green down on top of the ending color stroke like so, then
04:29to make the gradient happen across the range of objects rather than gradient
04:34starting and ending in each one. I am just going to use my Gradient Direction tool
04:39over there and then drag that across like so.
04:43And there's another logo. Many, many possibilities we have for applying a
04:50different kind of calligraphic stroke to the outlines of our objects. We saw
04:54this from working with lines, works with circle too and this is going to look
04:59very reminiscent of famous logo. So I'll see on a postcard please, so as to
05:05which one that is. I will draw my circle right there and I will give it a
05:10stroke rather than a fill. I am just going to move my type over a bit, so I can
05:15get a little bit space inside the page. Put my circle right there. Increase the
05:20weight of the stroke to, let's say 7 pts.
05:24Then I am going to my Brushes panel. Let's see, what do we have? If I don't see
05:30what I want there I can come to this dropdown menu and come to my Artistic
05:35brushes, I want Artistic_Chalk Charcoal Pencil and let's see what options we
05:42have here. I like the look of that one. I am making sure I am on the stroke and
05:47apply that to it and there we have another logo, as seen without all those
05:54panels in the way. Many, many possibilities we have for working with multiples
06:00of any of these shapes.
06:03The possibilities are really endless. I am going to just press my Undo key
06:07Apple+Z to get to that point where I got a mono white stroke and let's set that
06:15back to 1 pt. What if I just wanted to click on my Scale tool say and I will
06:23have something scaled to 95 percent and will make that a copy and then I can
06:31just press Apple+D to get a copy of the copy, each one at 95 percent of the
06:37original. And there we got an interesting shape there, would be a bit of a
06:42nightmare to print, I think but interesting nonetheless.
06:46So there we see many, many different approaches that we can type working with
06:50circles and ellipses. We can change this, the fill, the stroke, the style of
06:55the stroke and we can work with multiples, we can apply gradients, the list
07:00goes on and on. So, experiment on your logo, the letters, and the types of
07:06images that you are trying to convey with your logo, I cannot suggest all kinds
07:09of other possibilities. The ones that I've shown you are just nothing more than a starting point.
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Designing with polygons and stars
00:00So we have seen squares and rectangles, we have seen circles and ellipses,
00:04let's now look at triangles and stars.
00:07To draw a triangle we use the Polygon tool, which is on the same tool space as
00:11the Rectangle and Ellipse. Click and hold down to access that.
00:15If necessary, you can tear off the whole panel. Then you've got access, easy access, to
00:20all of those tools. So with my Polygon, as I click and drag if I want to add to
00:25the number of sides, I just press my up arrow or my down arrow to remove the
00:30number of sides. Now, actually I want a triangle, if I want to constrain it, I
00:33hold down the Shift key. So there is my triangle and the triangles of course
00:36will look like arrows, so they suggest direction.
00:41I can flip this around like so, I'm holding down the Shift key to constrain the
00:46rotation to 90 degrees. I can put it right there and maybe I would want to just
00:51size it so that it's the same size as the type itself and there we have a logo,
00:57I could position it anywhere relative to the type to suggest all kind of
01:02different things with the triangle or maybe let's now put it flat again, there
01:09we go. And what if I were to maybe duplicate that like so and then flip the
01:19duplicate a 180 degrees so that it looks like that and then I could put that
01:26one right next to that one and maybe have this one have a stroke rather than a
01:32fill and you can create all kinds of interesting shapes, just play around with
01:35this stuff, there is so much you can do.
01:37We are just messing around with multiples of these simple shapes. Of course,
01:41you could put a triangle within a triangle, let's make that one bigger and then
01:47I'll double click on my Scale tool. Let's have one scaled to 50% of that and we
01:54want - have it be a Copy, and then we will fill it with white and I'm going to
02:01switch to my Selection tool now. I'm going to flip this around and position it
02:08down there like that, put a white triangle inside of a filled triangle and from
02:14one triangle you get four triangles.
02:16Let's now look at some stars. I'm going to hide my guides for a moment, Apple+;
02:22or Ctrl+; will start the Star tool. When working with the Star tool, if you
02:28want to constrain it, hold down the Shift key, if you want to add to the number
02:31of points on the star, press your Up arrow, your Down arrow will remove the
02:36points. So I'm going to - we would just go with a five-pointed star. If you
02:40want to change the star inset, hold on your Apple or Ctrl key and you can drag
02:46in or out with that to change the inset value.
02:50But I want just a regular five-pointed star and again that's going to be green
02:55color. I'm just going to pull that down there like so, and stars are used all
03:01the time in logos. We saw the famous Converse logo uses a star.
03:06We have been talking about the issue of separating these two words and I'm
03:10differentiating them by color, but what if I wanted them both to be of the same
03:16color, then I could put a space between them. I might need to make that space a
03:21little bit bigger, so I'm holding down the Alt key and the right arrow just to
03:24turn that space a bit bigger and then get my star and then put that in the
03:30middle right there and hold down Alt and Shift to just scale that down a bit,
03:36like so, separate our two words with a star in between them.
03:41Let's just back up a little bit, I'm going to press my Undo key a few times to
03:46get back to right there, again working with the star. This time what I'm going
03:52to do is, I'm going to increase the size of it, and I think I'll make the
03:56points rounded rather than sharp. So I'll choose my Direct Selection tool,
04:01click off the star to de-select it and then come and select each of these
04:05anchor points one by one, using the Direct Selection tool.
04:08In fact, I'm holding down the Shift key and just kind of dragging over them.
04:12Get to the -- one go there and then using my tools options up here, I can click
04:17on this button Convert selected anchor points to smooth, I have got a rounded
04:21star. Well I'm not crazy about that but maybe I want a star that does not have
04:26quite such an inset as that, so I'm going to draw myself another star and make
04:32it a little bit more like so, size it up and I'll do the same thing again with
04:40my star points, selecting with the Direct Selection tool, convert them and
04:47that's kind of more along the lines of what I was after. And then, I don't
04:51know, maybe I want to put that in inside a circle or something.
04:55Now the star, for some reason, doesn't have a center point, but we can add one.
05:01If I come to my Window menu and choose Attributes, and I can then click on this
05:06little icon here, Show Center, that's going to show me where the center point
05:09is and then I can use that information to center a circle on that, send the
05:17circle to the back, come back and select the star and we will make the star
05:22white. Actually even though it is centered, it looks a little bit off-centered.
05:27So I'm just going to optically center it by nudging up a bit, and there is my
05:33symbol that can now go with my logo, or maybe I want another circle inside of
05:40that really not knowing when to stop sometimes, there is another circle inside
05:45there, and I'll fill that with the green.
05:49Now I think maybe I should quit while I'm ahead on that one, because that's not
05:52getting any better. But of course we can inverse these values, I could maybe
05:57select this star and rather than it has a white fill, it could have a white
06:03stroke, and I can make that stroke a bit heavier and there is another slightly
06:07different version.
06:09These explorations with stars and triangles they are nothing more than just a
06:14starting point, play with them, make multiples, experiment with the different
06:18fills, with the different weights, position the resulting elements differently
06:23with your type. All kinds of interesting things will come up. You'll find
06:27yourself going off on all kinds of different tangents. Some of them will lead
06:31you nowhere, some of them may lead you to exactly the logo that you are after.
06:35But there is no way of knowing until you try these things.
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Working with abstract imagery
00:00When you are trying to come up with some imagery to go with your logo, maybe
00:04your choice is going to be defined for you by the kind of business that you are in,
00:08and maybe you want to use as your source of inspiration animals, nature or
00:14buildings. Three very common sources, and we will be seeing examples of all of
00:18those. But maybe the range of services that you offer is a little more broad,
00:23little less easy to define and perhaps you want to go with some kind of
00:27abstraction in your logo, as we have in all of these examples on the screen.
00:32Let us take a look at how easy it is to create shapes and symbols like this,
00:38especially using Illustrator's Pathfinder tools. So, here in Illustrator, all
00:44the results of my explorations of combining simple shapes; overlapping
00:49triangles and rectangles, circles and rectangles, multiple squares, etcetera.
00:55Repeating transformations to create these interesting kind of flower like
01:00shapes and combining the different resulting shapes using different Pathfinder shape modes.
01:06I'm going to be doing most of these from scratch and we will get similar
01:09results, although not exactly the same. I'm going to start a new document. So,
01:15here I'm with a blank page and I'm going to start by tearing off my Shape
01:21tools, locking that panel up there and I also want to make sure I have my
01:25Pathfinder panel open, and I'll put that up there. Let us begin with my
01:31Rectangle tool. I have got my smart guides on, you can see that those messages
01:37popping up, telling me what I'm aligning to. That is going to make it slightly
01:40easier when aligning one object with another. Let us zoom-in on that and now
01:46I'll switch to my Ellipse tool and I'll draw myself an ellipse over the top of
01:53that rectangle, select both objects and then come to the second of my shape
01:58modes; Subtract from shape area, that is my result.
02:03Using the Polygon tool, I'll draw myself a triangle, which I'll then re-shape.
02:09Press E key to go to the Free Transform and just narrow that. I then just want
02:17to intersect that shape with a guide. I'm going to turn on my rulers, Apple+R
02:23or Ctrl+R. I'm going to put myself a guide right there and using that guide as
02:31visual reference, I'm going to draw a circle over the top of that. Select both,
02:38subtract from shape area, and I get that result. Now, how about I'll copy that
02:44over to there. And these are all compound shapes, I can release them using the
02:52panel menu on the Pathfinder panel and this time, I'm going to get rid of that,
02:58switch now to my Rectangle tool and I'm going to draw a rectangle over the top
03:05of that triangle, like so. I'll then send it to the back; Object, Arrange, Send
03:12to Back. Select both and again, subtract from shape area.
03:18Now, let us experiment with some circles. One circle, duplicate it, select
03:29both, subtract from shape area. Now, how many times do we see that kind of
03:33shape in a logo? Very frequently and of course, I could if I want to just
03:38rotate that through any kind of rotation to get different interpretations of
03:42that shape. Zooming out slightly, I'll select both, copy them across, release,
03:53delete the front most circle, and this time, I'm going to pair it up with a
03:58Spiral. Hold down the Alt key, so I'll draw my spiral outwards from the center
04:04and if necessary, pressing my Up arrow to get more winds on it and the Apple or
04:13Ctrl key to determine how tightly wound it is, it's a little bit hard to
04:17control this. There we go, that is a little bit better, something like that,
04:24and then I'm going to give that a stroke weight, maybe just hold that around a
04:31little bit, position it slightly differently on top of the circle.
04:38Now, let us see what kind of result I get by combining the two and subtracting
04:44the spiral from the circle, and I get that kind of shape. This is the land of
04:49happy accidents sometimes.
04:53Now, let us try combining some squares together. So, I'm going to hold down the
04:56Shift key, zoom-in a bit, then holding down the Alt key, drag away from that.
05:03I'm also going to hold down the Shift key again to constrain my copy to
05:0645-degree angle. Now, I'm going to repeat that transformation, Apple+D or
05:13Ctrl+D a couple of times, select all four and this time, I'm going to exclude
05:19the overlapping shape areas to get that result.
05:21How about I'll now try a square and, of course, if we rotate a square, it
05:30becomes a diamond. So, I'm going to double click on my Rotation tool and rotate
05:35a copy through 45 degrees. Select both, exclude over lapping shape area. Now,
05:44let us take a look at working with repeat transforms. I'll use my Ellipse tool,
05:50create myself a tall skinny ellipse like so. Double click on my Rotation tool
05:56and again, rotate a copy through 45 degrees. Repeat that transformation, select
06:03all of the objects, exclude overlapping shape area. Now, that is a compound
06:09shape and I can combine that compound shape with another compound shape. I'm
06:13going to duplicate that and I'm going to draw a rectangle, actually a square,
06:24position it to something like so. Select both and actually, I need to make sure
06:30that this flower like shape is on top. So, I'm going to select that,
06:33Apple+Shift+Eight bracket, to bring it to the front, select both. Subtract from
06:39shape area or I'll duplicate it, Release the Compound Shape and instead of
06:46subtracting, exclude.
06:48I now realize I'm running out of space on my outboard. So, I'm going to zoom out;
06:54let us select everything and just scale it down a bit to give me a bit more room.
07:00The final point I want to make is using blends and how useful they can be, and
07:06we have seen an example that's kind of similar to this before, but it is a
07:10very, very easy thing to do and in fact, a very commonly used technique. I'm
07:14just going to draw myself a square, which I'll then -- so, I'm going to draw
07:20myself a line and I'm going to make that line a thick line; I'm going to make
07:25it a weight of ten points. Let us give it a color, I'll make it green and I'm
07:32going to duplicate it or then Alt+ Shift and dragging away from it. I'll now
07:37make the stroke of the copy a lot lighter, I'll select both, go to my Blend
07:44tool and click on the top point of one, and then go and click on the equivalent
07:50point of the other and that is going me a blend of specified steps. If you are
07:56not getting exactly what you want then double click on the Blend tool and you
08:00can specify the number of steps that you want, and I'm now going to just make
08:05that a white stroke, so that it sits on top of the colored rectangle like so.
08:12So, there we see just a few of the many, many options you have when using
08:17shapes and combining them using the Pathfinder shape modes as well as doing a
08:23simple blend or repeating your transformations to create multiples of a specific shape.
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Working with representational imagery
00:00Now, if you are looking to incorporate some kind of representational imagery
00:03into your logo symbol, common sources of inspiration are nature, buildings, and
00:09animals. Let's take a look, first of all, at those logos that use nature as
00:14their source of inspiration and now let's take a look at those that use
00:20animals. Obviously, in this case, the animal suggested by the name of business.
00:26In many of these instances at least. And then some examples of logos that
00:34incorporate iconic buildings into the logo.
00:39Now, for the logo that I'm creating, it's for Deep Green, a garden design
00:43company, and obviously that is kind of suggesting that I go with the nature
00:48theme and that's what I'm going to do. The approach I'm going to be using is to
00:54start with a photograph and trace it. And I'm going to use three different
00:59approaches to tracing an image in Illustrator. First of all, I'm going to do a
01:05Live Trace on this example here and here we see the finished results. So, I'm
01:10going to try and get something like this from this beginning photograph.
01:15But we will also see how you may sometimes get a better result from hand
01:21tracing in Illustrator, literally just putting a picture on your page and
01:25tracing over it with the Pen tool manually. Or kind of a combination of that one
01:31combined with printing out your photograph and then first of all, tracing over
01:36it with pencil on tracing paper, scanning that and then Live Tracing the
01:41result. So, we are going to see three different approaches beginning with this one.
01:46So, I have placed this image into Illustrator, I'm going to zoom in on it now.
01:52And I want to vectorize it and Live Trace is going to do that for me. First of
01:59all, we'll see that the result I get from what I currently have is not going to
02:03be very usable. So, we are going to see that it's going to help before I trace
02:08the image if I tweak the image first of all in Photoshop, but let's just see
02:12what kind of result I'm going to get from this.
02:15I'm simply going to come up to my tool options and click on the Live Trace
02:19button and then to adjust my Live Trace Options, I'm going to come and click on
02:26this icon, opening up my Tracing Options. And I'm going to turn on my Preview,
02:32so I can see any change take effect, and adjust this Threshold. This determines
02:37how much of the image results in white and how much results in black when
02:42tracing as black and white, and that's the mode I'm going to be using, because
02:45I just want this to be a two-color result. I need to go in the other direction;
02:50I need to go more towards, lower numbers give me more white as my result.
02:58Now, that's okay. I mean it looks pretty good but I don't want to see any of
03:02that black. So, if I were to work with this, I would have to delete all of that
03:05black. So, actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Photoshop and
03:09I'm going to make a negative of the image and then I'm going to trace that, so
03:12that all the parts that are currently white will be black and vice-versa and
03:17it's the black part that I'll thereafter work with. So, let's just cancel out
03:22there and now, switch over to Photoshop and here, in Photoshop is my original
03:27image. So, I'm going to do the following to it.
03:29I'm going to go to the Image menu, Adjustments > Invert. So, it's now a
03:35negative and then I want to really pump-up the contrast as much as I can. So,
03:41I'm going to go back to my Image > Adjustments, this time Levels, and I'm going
03:47to get the black point, bring that in towards the center. I'm going to do the
03:51same with the white point and I get this grey point and move that over to the
03:58right. Okay, and then I'm going to do one more thing; I'm going to come to the
04:06Filter menu and to Sharpen and choose this filter, Sharpen Edges.
04:11Since I only want to trace the bits of the image that I'm going to be keeping,
04:14I'm also going to crop the image. Crop tool, draw myself a cropping rectangle
04:20around that. All right, I'm now going to do a Save As on there. I call that
04:28tracing_image. Pop back to Illustrator.
04:34Turns out I actually want -- I want to keep
04:36this original image around. I might need this for reference. So, I'm just going
04:41to move that over on to my paste board and then I'll choose File and Place and
04:48I'm going to come and find that image that I just saved and scale it down;
04:57holding down the Shift key and pulling from bottom right-hand corner.
05:01I'm also now going to go to my Layers panel, which I don't seem to have open.
05:06So, I open it from the Window menu. I'm going to create a new layer and then
05:12make a duplicate of this to that layer. So, I'm going to move this square ahead
05:18that represents the selection holding down my Alt key and drag that up to that
05:22layer that's going to make a copy of it. And now, I'm going to just turn that
05:26off for a moment, we will come back to that.
05:28Now, I'm zooming in on my image, going to select that and click on my Live
05:36Trace button to trace the image and then click on my Tracing Options to adjust
05:41my results. I'll adjust the Threshold, this time moving to the right because I
05:48inverted the values of the image turning on my Preview. I want to ignore white;
05:54I don't want to trace around any of the white shapes.
06:03That's a very fine line here and I think I'm going to leave it about there and
06:10any further adjustments, I'm going to make manually. So, I'll now click on
06:13Trace. There's my result. Now, to be able to work with this, I'm going to need
06:18to expand it. So, now that I have expanded it, we see that my tracing result is
06:24just a series of halts and lots of anchor points. I'm going to move my Layer 6,
06:30which is a copy of that flower, I'm going to move that underneath and then turn
06:34that on. Now, we can see the original shape and how similar or in some cases,
06:41dissimilar it is from my tracing result. I'm going to lock that Layer 6 so I
06:46don't interfere with it.
06:48Come and choose my Eraser tool and if necessary, adjust the size of my brush
06:55while pressing my right square bracket to go bigger and the left square bracket
06:59to go smaller. I'm just going to delete the bits that I don't want, fixing up
07:10all these raggedy bits and unnecessary bits over here. Okay, now further
07:21adjustments I'm going to make by tracing over that with my Pen tool. So, what
07:28I'm going to do is I'm going to get in there, I'm going to draw a separate path
07:32over to top of this and I want to make sure that I don't actually interfere
07:39with the current path that's already there.
07:40So, I think I'm going lock that, I'm going to press Apple+2 or Ctrl+2 that is
07:44going to lock that. I'm just going to draw a shape. It currently has a black
07:54fill, which I don't actually want, so that I can see the shape that I'm just
07:58going to switch that to a Stroke. This shape I'm drawing is just going to
08:04overlap with the traced result. I'm going to do the same down here; clicking
08:17and dragging with my Pen tool to make control points and close that off there.
08:51Now, you may be wondering why did he not just trace the whole thing manually?
08:59And around this point, I start wondering the same thing myself. Now, I think this
09:08is going to be a slightly -- well, it certainly going to be a quicker and I think
09:12a better result as hopefully we'll see in just a moment.
09:28Okay, I want to then select
09:32all of this stuff over here is... actually the Trace just didn't know what to do
09:39with that. So, let's just clean that up there.
09:56All right. Now, let's turn Layer 6 off for a moment. We'll select that path and
10:08make sure it has a black fill and all of these extra bits that I drew, we'll
10:16make sure they also have black fills.
10:33Then I'm going to select them all. Now,
10:35go to my Pathfinder panel and I'm going to add them all together. Add to shape
10:41area and I'm also going to hold down my Alt key, my Option key to expand that
10:46result. So there, all of those nasty, jaggedy points at the ends of the petals
10:52have now been removed.
10:53Obviously, I still have quite a lot of clean up to do here. So, I think I would
10:59then just come and click on the edge of my path and using my Pen tool, delete
11:07where I don't need those unnecessary anchor points and this can be rather time
11:13consuming and I might just want to incorporate all of these into one with a
11:21nice graceful shape right there. Select those to add those two together. And
11:32then there's a lot more of that involved to finally get the result that we have
11:38over here, but when we have that result, it's scalable and kind of raggedy
11:44there but that wouldn't take too much to fix it up.
11:49So, that's one approach, using Live Trace to work on a tweaked photograph and
11:55then manually fixing up any inaccuracies along the edge. So, another slightly
12:02different approach we see here if I turn on the flower 2 layer. This is
12:10original image I began with, this is the resulting image after I tweaked it in
12:15Photoshop. Let's just have a look of what I did to that in a moment and then I
12:20printed that out, hand traced it and then Live Traced the hand traced version
12:28right here and this is the result that I ended up with.
12:30So, I'm going to pop out with the Photoshop and to this image, turn off my
12:39layers. See, there's my original image. So, I'm going to make a copy of that
12:44layer, drag the layer on to the New Layer icon to do that and then I'm going to
12:50come to the Filter menu and choose Stylize > Find Edges. Because I want it to
12:58be just a gray-scale image to my Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. I'll use
13:05the levels as I did before; Image > Adjustments > Levels. This is all about
13:12maximizing the contrast. I just really want to retain the main lines of detail,
13:19get rid of everything else and I might here with my white paint brush.
13:35With a hard brush.
13:43Clean it up as much as possible.
13:58I could also rub out any other detail that I don't want. Maybe I could also run
14:03that same filter, Sharpen Edges, on there just to pump it up a little bit more.
14:08Then I'd print this and the result is this second image that we see here and
14:15then I hand-trace that and that's the point on which we rejoin the action. So,
14:23I'm going to select my image, click on my Live Trace button. That's my result.
14:28I'm going to then go to my Live Tracing Options, turn on my Preview and rather
14:35than tracing as Fills, just I want to trace as Strokes. Let's adjust the
14:42Threshold. I'll put them up to about 175 and I also just to kind of clean
14:54up the line a little bit, although actually I don't think I need to. I was
14:57going to think about blurring it, but I don't think I need to that.
15:01So, I'm now going to go ahead and trace that and to then have access to edit my
15:08resulting strokes, only to click on my Expand button. Then choose my Eraser,
15:15I'm just coming and rub out any bits that I don't need. I want to make my
15:20Eraser a little bit bigger by pressing the right square bracket.
15:23How's that looking? It's a little bit hard to tell with those selections lines on. So, I'm
15:27going to come to my View menu and choose Hide Edges. I'm going to zoom-in a
15:33little bit, rub those bits out there and I could go on refining that and I won't.
15:40I'll leave it at that.
15:43And one final thing I want to do is maybe experiment with the style of stoke
15:49that is applied to this, so I can click on my Brushes panel and maybe go for a
15:55Charcoal stroke. Yeah, that looks pretty good actually, better than I had
16:00expected. I'm going to make that a little bit lighter. There's my result.
16:05Okay, now I mentioned there are three methods I was going to show you; the
16:09third method is the more manual method but it is very, very straightforward.
16:12I'm now going to zoom out. Let's come to my layers. I'll turn off flower 2 now
16:20and I'm going to turn on this one, the Rose template, and this one, the
16:24handtraced rose on top of that. Now, if we see it without the template beneath,
16:29that's my result and the way I got that was placing the rose image,
16:35double-clicking on it, making that layer a template, which automatically will
16:39dim the image to 50%. I'm going to make a new layer above that and I'll call it
16:47trace1 and I'm just going to zoom in and using my Pen tool without a Fill, I'm
16:56going have a black stroke for now trace around the shape. That can be a little
17:05bit time consuming, a little bit painstaking, but if you are handy with the Pen
17:10tool, this may also be your best most reliable option. I'm not going to subject
17:17you to watching me do that but that's essentially what I would do.
17:22So, in this video, we have seen three different approaches to working with Live
17:26Trace and experimenting with the Live Tracing Options. The first method has
17:31been to trace an image, which has been tweaked in Photoshop to enhance this
17:36photograph because that's what Live Trace is really going to response well too,
17:40and then fixing up the rougher edges. The second method, as we see here in
17:45these full images in the center of the page, has involved tweaking a Photoshop
17:50image to again enhance the contrast, bring out the edges in the images.
17:55That image was then printed, traced with pencil and then that pencil result Live
18:01Traced in Illustrator. And the third example down here has been literally a
18:06manual tracing of a template image.
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Working with clip art
00:00Clip Art has a bit of a bad name, perhaps deservedly so. It conjures up images
00:05of businessmen shaking hands or party balloons or other cliched graphic images
00:11that we want to avoid at all costs really. Having said that, they are a number
00:16of Clip Art type options that we have available to us in Illustrator. You have
00:21seen me in a few of the videos up until now use some Illustrator symbols and
00:27adapt them and these examples that we have on screen are all using Illustrator
00:32symbols. The idea of the Symbol Sprayer tools is that you get multiples of
00:38these things, so you can build up a whole background of leaves or grass or
00:42whatever it is. But in this application of them, I'm taking a single of these
00:47symbols and then adapting them to my needs.
00:50So, let's just take a look at those and I also want to point out and this is a
00:54point I did also make in a previous video and that's where we can get some
00:58shape tools, some very interesting shape tools in Photoshop and copy and paste
01:03the vector parts into Illustrator, and then adapt them in there. So, the
01:09Symbols panel is this one right here and these are the default symbols, but we
01:14have also got these symbol libraries. The ones I'm choosing, all come from the
01:20Nature symbol library. For example, there are my leaves, there is that
01:26particular leaf right there. If I want one of these, I click on it, it adds it
01:32to my Symbol panel and then I can either just drag it over. If I want to spray
01:36multiples, I could use my Symbol Sprayer or I can just choose this option here:
01:40Place Symbol Instance.
01:43Now, the key is, for purposes of doing a logo, this is probably going to be far
01:48too detailed. So, we just want to completely simplify and boil it down to only
01:53its most essential elements. So, I would then want to come in to the Object
01:58menu and expand that. So, it's no longer a symbol but rather, it's now an
02:04editable shape, and then I want to get in and delete any stuff that I don't
02:10want, like so. Leaving it with just the basic shape and then I think I'm just
02:16going to put that in one color as well. Let's say, not the Stroke but rather,
02:22we want the Fill. There we go.
02:28So, that's working with an Illustrator symbol, breaking it down. Let's also now
02:34take a look at some Photoshop vector shapes. So, I'm going to pop up with the
02:39Photoshop and in Photoshop, I'm going to open a new document. Apple+N or Ctrl+N
02:45and I'm just going to use the Default Photoshop Size, doesn't really matter
02:49what size we have here. From my vector shapes, I'm going to choose my Custom
02:53Shape tool, and then up on my tool options, I have got my different shapes to
02:58choose from here. Now, we can use any of these but we can also explore all of
03:05these shape libraries. I'm going to go ahead and add all of them, and append
03:09them to what I currently have. Let's say, I'm designing some kind of animal
03:14welfare logo. There is my cat shape right there. I then use my Path Selection tool
03:22to select that, copy it. Flip back to Illustrator, paste it as a Compound
03:29Shape and then I can do whatever I want with it.
03:32So, some very interesting options to explore there in Photoshop with vector
03:36shapes. But the cautionary now here is, if you are going to use Clip Art
03:41adapted so that ultimately it doesn't look like it was Clip Art.
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Using negative space effectively
00:00One of the hardest tricks to pull off in a logo is to use negative space
00:03effectively. But when you can do it, it really makes the difference between a
00:07mediocre logo and an excellent logo. Let's take a look at these very popular
00:12examples. Beginning here with, you might say, is the most famous logo of all
00:17time and it's so simple and yet so effective the way the E and the X are
00:23brought together, so the negative space that's left, makes the arrow.
00:27That didn't happen by accident.
00:29Also, the World Wildlife Fund; how the shape of the panda is just suggested by
00:34the negative space, brilliantly simple. Likewise with the Champions League in
00:40the football. The Siegel in the Bank of America. The way the part of the A is
00:46rubbed out in the V&A logo. A major part of the success of these logos is the
00:52way that they use negative space. Let's see if we can try and do something
00:55similar with our logo in Illustrator.
00:59So, as I'm sure you know by now, we are working on a project, a logo for a
01:03company called Deep Green, a garden design company. Of course, you are probably
01:08working on your own logo which may be for a company entirely different from
01:12this, but nonetheless these techniques are going to be just as applicable to you.
01:17Now, the most basic use of negative space is to have your type reversing out of
01:22a shape. That could be your logo right there. Maybe you need nothing more than that.
01:27But what negative space does for us is it gives us the illusion of more
01:31colors, because we are using the color of the paper. I'm going to zoom out.
01:35Now, if you know the Orange logo, the cellular telecommunications company?
01:41Looks rather similar, doesn't it?
01:44Here, I think things are a little bit more successful. We have the shape of the
01:48leaf suggested here and then echoed here. Negative space taking a bite out of
01:54the rectangle and then repeated but smaller in the top right. A similar
01:59version here, but what we are using in this instance is one of those Pathfinder
02:04options and let me just go to my Pathfinder panel. So much you can do with
02:10these Pathfinder options. I'm going to release that, so we see it begins as the
02:15leaf overlapping the rectangle and if I select both of them and choose this
02:20option, Exclude Overlapping Shape Areas, very interesting effect.
02:24I'm going to come to the picture in just a moment. Couple of slight different
02:29variations on a similar theme here, using -- I think this was an Illustrator
02:34symbol that I adopted and adapted using the methods that we saw in previous
02:40video, talking about Clip Art, just boiling it down to its essential shape and
02:44then making that shape white, overlapping it with the rectangle. Here doing the
02:48same thing, but as we saw in the example just above, using the Exclude Overlap
02:53Pathfinder option. So, let's now take a look at this picture that we have up
02:58here, because this picture was a picture that I took from my client, who I'm
03:01designing the logo for Deep Green.
03:03It's a picture of a garden that she works in and I was thinking about this
03:07picture, and how that might inspire some kind of logo symbol and that's what I
03:15came up with as a result of working with this picture. We saw this or a slight
03:21different version of this in an earlier video. I just want to deconstruct this
03:25and go over how it was put together.
03:26So, I'm beginning with two shapes, one of which is just reflected and copied
03:31from the original. We have got a single spike or frond or whatever it's called
03:37that has been rotated around the center point of a circle to make multiples
03:41using the repeat transform. We have seen that technique several times and that
03:46will group together and then that's reflected and copied right there and that's
03:51where I'm going to pick it out. I was tempted to maybe use transparency to give
03:57this effect here, wherever we have the overlapping fronds, but I don't want to
04:01use transparency because that's going to involve introducing extra colors into
04:05the logo. It's going to complicate things. It's going to make printing harder
04:08and reproduction of small size is harder. So instead, I wanted to use a
04:13Compound Path or Exclude Overlapping Areas from my Pathfinder panel.
04:17So, I'm going to select both of those and then do that and that's the effect
04:22that we get. Now, I want to contain the whole thing within a rectangle. So, I'm
04:26going to draw a square with my Rectangle tool, holding down the Shift key and
04:32then I'll select everything. Come to the Object menu and choose Clipping Mask > Make.
04:38There we have it. I can thereafter, if I want, if I use my Group
04:43Selection tool, I can come and select either of these elements that go to make
04:48it up and move those around independently. So, this is a kind of fluid thing
04:53I can experiment with to get just the right combination of these two different
04:57elements and how they overlap.
05:00Now, continuing with this theme of negative space, I encourage you to just mess
05:05around and experiment with shapes and combining them with other shapes and
05:10reversing one shape over another, and just see what results you can get.
05:13Here are some of my explorations. I won't go into them, but this I found a
05:18useful exercise working with, say, a leaf shape and then combining it with
05:23the rectangle, experimenting with my Pathfinder options and just say, how
05:28juxtaposing the two together in various different ways, we get some very interesting effects.
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Considering trends
00:00So, I'm sure I don't need to remind you at this point in the course of these
00:04videos, but we are working on logo for Deep Green, a garden design company.
00:09When I began this assignment, I started messing around with some ideas and I
00:13found myself being drown to these swirly things. This is essentially a piece of
00:18Clip Art. I mean it's somebody that has created these, made it available on the
00:23Adobe Exchange website in the Illustrator section and I have discussed that in
00:27an earlier video.
00:29But I found myself drawn to these and messing around with them and I thought,
00:33well, yeah, that looks pretty good and I was liking the direction this was
00:37going in. And then walking around town the next day, I started too see swirls
00:43everywhere and my point here is that logos like everything else are subject to
00:51fashion and it seems like at the moment, swirls are really in fashion. I wasn't
00:57really aware of that until I unconsciously almost started working with them and
01:04then having done that, it seemed like they were everywhere.
01:07That has turned me off a bit. It turned me off because I thought well, is my
01:12logo, if I go with this design, is it going to be a victim of fashion?
01:17Are these swirls are going to have 2008 stamped all over them? I mean we can't
01:22really evaluate that from this current perspective, but I think the swirls for
01:27me transforms from being that song on the radio that I heard the first few
01:32times and really liked to being that rather irritating song just that just kept
01:37getting played over and over again. No disrespect to the swirls, who in some
01:42ways are a victim of their own success, but I'm now being aware of how common
01:48these are, I'm a little bit wary about using them.
01:52My point being here that just beware of anything that is perhaps a little bit
01:57too trendy and may end up looking very dated very quickly.
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5. Selecting and Preparing the Finished Logo
Presenting ideas to the client
00:00Throughout the course of these videos, you've seen me work on various concepts for
00:04our logo for the company Deep Green, a garden design company. It's now time to
00:09present some of those concepts to our clients. So, I want to find the three
00:14best and explore slightly different variations of each one and then present
00:20them to the client. Hopefully, they will like one of them. We take the one that
00:25they like, we refine it further, especially we look into the issue of what
00:28color we are going to use. Because right now, we haven't really explored color
00:32options too much. When our client signs off on that finished version, we
00:37prepare the digital files. The print version or versions because perhaps there
00:41will be alternative versions and the web version or versions and then when the
00:46whole thing is done, we archive the job.
00:50So, here I'm in Illustrator and in no order of preference here are my three
00:55concepts: #1 , #2, and #3. Let's look at them one by one. So, this first one
01:04with the reversed out type coming from the leaf, this just kind of happened very
01:11easily. Looking through all of my printouts, it appealed to me. Its simplicity
01:17appeals. The leaf is actually nothing more than one of the Illustrator symbols
01:22that has been simplified, which is in a solid color. For each version, I'm
01:28showing the logo without the tagline and with the tag line in color and in
01:34black and white because it's very important that the logo also work in black and white.
01:37Now, when I did this I thought, well, what if the leaf shape were more simple
01:42and less ragged as this upper version is? So, from my Photoshop vector shapes,
01:49I went and got one of the leaves from there and then just pulled that around a
01:54bit and use that instead. So, we have got essentially two different versions of
01:58this same concept. Now, in this one and you may have seen this one before
02:02because it's popped up in a couple of the previous videos, this was inspired by
02:08a photograph of overlapping palm fronds. I made the two different frond shapes
02:15into a compound path so that where they overlap, rather than transparency,
02:19we are just seeing this kind of reversed out checkerboard-like shape.
02:24This one presents a set of problems. I like this very much, but the problem
02:28that it presents is how to do we orientate the type next to the imagery.
02:34I originally drew it like this, but then I'm realizing this creates a hard
02:39border on the right-hand side which could be problematic because we want this
02:44space here opening out into the business card or the letterhead or however
02:50else it's used. So, that suggested that I flip that around, which I did. I have
02:56a sense that this is probably going to work better and then I want to
03:00experiment with is the typed going to go at the bottom, is it going to go in
03:04this area of negative space. I'm giving the game away here, but perhaps we will
03:09see that I further refine the typed placement in this particular version.
03:14The third concept is this one that uses the swirls. I have to say this is my
03:20least favorite. I do like it but my reservation about it is, is that these
03:25swirls are being used a lot these days. Now, I suspect they may look rather
03:31dated very quickly and maybe it is little bit like a Clip Art because other
03:35people can get these exact same swirls and it's maybe not quite unique enough,
03:41even though, I have actually fiddled with them a bit and I have chopped a bit
03:45off here and there, but still it's just not quite unique enough. In the black
03:49and white version, I'm having the swirl to be in a 50% black.
03:54How you present these to your client really depends upon the relationship that
03:57you have with them and are they remote or are they local. If you are able to,
04:02then present them in person. If not, send them a PDF and try not to say too much.
04:08The logo should speak for themselves. If they need explaining then they're
04:12not really working, but at the same time, be on hand and be prepared to justify
04:17your design decisions and why you made them.
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Fine-tuning the selected design
00:00Okay the results are in. My client has got back to me and she wants this one.
00:06Now we are still undecided about exactly where the type is going to be
00:10juxtaposed next to the image. I said to her I want to refine it a little bit more.
00:17I'm not entirely sold on the shapes that we have here. We both liked the
00:21concept and we are leaning towards this orientation with the hard edge on the left.
00:29Round three now begins. The first thing I want to do is when I originally made
00:34this shape, I made it rather hurriedly. It was inspired by a photograph and
00:40let's take a look at that photograph. I have got the source image right there
00:45and that's just the detail of the photograph that I was using as my inspiration
00:50for this. I made the original with a rectangle; then I had made one of the ends
00:56pointed and then reflected various copies of that around the center point and
01:00then duplicated that overlapped the two.
01:02It's looking a bit uniform and I thought what I would like to do is just mix it
01:07up a bit, make it look a little bit more plant like, a little bit less uniform.
01:12So how I did this was I placed the image and we saw that when I was tracing the
01:18rose in an earlier video and I just traced over the shapes and essentially used
01:24the same approach as I did here; reflecting or rather rotating copies. But then
01:31just adjusting the copies, so they are not all quite exactly the same.
01:35Another approach that I tried, it came off a little bit but just to use the
01:41Warp tool and now if I use the Warp tool you can see what I mean, I can just
01:45bend these around a little bit. So that's something else that you might want to
01:53experiment with; having refined this to this state, you may see on your screens
02:01there is a little ghosting of the rectangle edge down at the bottom there,
02:06where my cursor is. I assure you that isn't actually there and if I zoom in
02:11nice and big we see that it goes away. That's just a screen anomaly.
02:15So the next thing I need to decide is what am I going to do with the type; the
02:20next thing I need to decide is where am I going to put the type relative to the
02:24image and that's what I'm experimenting within in this particular version. So
02:31beginning up here, we are really getting into the fine tuning at this point, is
02:35the type going to go at the bottom, is it going to go at the top and then some
02:39live breaking news, my client wants to change the tagline. So it's no longer
02:44garden design & planting, it's now planting & design. So that kind of changes
02:49things a little bit.
02:51I'm noticing with, there are two lines of lowercase text, the spacing between
02:56those two lines is looking a little bit odd to me and that's just because of
03:01the shapes of the characters. So I thought what I'll do is I'll put the tagline
03:06in all caps, so I'm leaning towards this now. But in these versions here,
03:12versions 5 and 6 my reservations here are the combination of the image and the
03:18type create an overall shape that's a little bit too big. I think I want
03:23something a little bit more contained and for that reason I'm now looking at
03:28putting the type either on the top or on the bottom and I'm going to go with it
03:34on the bottom.
03:35For the type what I have done is, I have made sure that their width of the
03:40tagline is exactly the same as the widths of the company name and I did that
03:45just by turning on some guides, which I'll create a couple of guides. There is
03:50a guide right there and another guide right there and then I just selected this
03:58piece of type and holding down the Shift key, dragged it out to that guide so
04:03that its exactly of the width of the line of type above.
04:08So the next decision we want to make is what color we are using. So far I just
04:13been using a fairly generic green chosen from the Swatches panel but we want to
04:17specify a specific Pantone color, a spot color. By spot color, I mean a color
04:23reference by number and chosen from a color matching system and the most
04:27commonly used color matching system is the Pantone system.
04:31So here I have chosen three different versions Pantone 369 the lighter green,
04:37354 the more forestry green and then the 349, which is the very dark green. To
04:44choose these Pantone colors we need to do that using the Swatches panel and
04:49come to the Swatches Library menu where I click and come down to Color Books
04:56and the one I want is Pantone Solid Uncoated. I'm choosing uncoated because
05:01this is going to be printed on uncoated stock for a business cards. So there is
05:06my Swatches panel right there and if I don't see this Find field then I can
05:14just make sure that is ticked right there.
05:17If I type in my numbers, it would jump to that number. If I select the items I
05:22want to apply the color to, click on the color, the color thereafter appears in
05:27my Swatches panel and it's distinguished in my Swatches panel by having this
05:31triangle and a dot in the bottom right- hand corner. So I send these versions
05:36off to my client, I wait, she gets back to me and she says "I like the first one."
05:42Which I find a little surprising but she is the client so we are going to go
05:46with the first one, the Pantone 369.
05:50My next step is to create a few different versions of the logo then we are
05:56going to evaluate the logo according to the criteria that we set up at the
06:00beginning of this series of videos. So here are my finished logos, I have got
06:08five different versions of little more or less the same but let's look at how
06:12they differ. So I have what I'm calling the Regular version that's the one we
06:21have been seeing up until now. I have the Boxed version and this is for use and
06:26I could go into how they should be used in the usage guidelines which is coming
06:31up in a couple of movies time.
06:33The Boxed version just has a half point role around the elements and this is
06:38for when the logo is going to be used in conjunction with lots of other
06:41elements on the page, just to isolate it so that our logo doesn't look crowded
06:46in by any other elements that may be adjacent to it. Then down here, I have
06:52what I'm calling the Bleed version. Now when I started experimenting with the
06:56logo in the context of a business card, I felt that it works best or maybe it
07:02works best, I'm still undecided about that. Bleeding of the edge here on the
07:07left and the bottom, so for the Bleed version I'm repositioning the type at the
07:11top of the image and I'm extending the image itself by 3 millimeters or
07:17one-eight of an inch on the left and on the bottom.
07:23The Reversed version is for use on a solid color background, bear in mind that
07:27what we see here is the reversed version on our background but when we come to
07:33prepare the file I'm going to be deleting that green background, I need to show
07:37it here because otherwise our white on white is not going to show up and then
07:43finally we have a Black & White version for use when we are printing in only
07:48one color ink. Then at the bottom of the page I have just quickly knocked up
07:52the logo in the context of a business card and I'm defining the bounds of the
07:58business card by this rectangle, that's three and a half inches by two inches.
08:02Of course when we actually come to do the business card for real, I would make
08:06sure that that stroked box is not really there.
08:09Finally I would just like to revisit those criteria that we started with at the
08:14beginning of this series of videos. So I'm going to come to my Layers panel and
08:20turn on Layer 1. We said at the beginning that a good logo has a strong
08:27uncluttered image comprised of only the most essential elements. I think that's
08:31true, uses imagery that's appropriate for your type of business, definitely,
08:36compliments your company name, absolutely. Uses a readable font that does not
08:41compete with the logo symbol, yes and you will notice that I have done in fact
08:46to using the type all in black with spaces between deep and green. Whereas
08:52originally I was thinking that I would have it be a logo element where I
08:56differentiated the words by color and no space.
08:59But I feel that the color in the image itself is enough color so I don't want
09:04to compete with the logo and for that reason the type is all now in black. And
09:10looks good in black and white as well as in color. Yes, I think so. Perhaps I'm
09:14being over generous here but I'm going to give myself five out of five on this.
09:18I hope that you got a similar score on your logo and of course bear in mind,
09:23it is very subjective. All right, next we are going to look at preparing the digital files.
Collapse this transcript
Preparing print files
00:00So all that now remains is for us to make the digital files for the print and
00:05the web versions of our logo. I'm going to begin with the print and I'm using
00:10this document here as our master file from which I'll be copying the different
00:15versions of the logo and pasting them into separate documents and then saving
00:19them out from there.
00:21So I'm going to do this for the regular version, I'm going to select that, all
00:25the elements are grouped together and I'm going to copy that, Apple or Ctrl+C,
00:31create a new document Apple or Ctrl+N. I want to make sure that the Document
00:35Profile is Print, not really that bothered about what the Size is, doesn't
00:39really make any difference, click OK. Apple or Ctrl+V to paste.
00:45I want to do one more thing here and that is -- so that we don't leave anything
00:50to chance with the fonts. I'm going to convert the fonts into outlines that way
00:55if the recipient of this logo file does not have Myriad Pro it's still going to
01:00look okay. Of course we need to make sure that we retain our master file with
01:06the fonts so that we can make edits if we need to. Type > Create Outlines and
01:12then I'm going to Save, now for maximum compatibility I'm going to be saving
01:18this as an EPS, lets call it deepgreen_logo_regular.
01:27A native Illustrator document would probably be fine but just in case anyone is
01:31working with a very old version of a page layout program. For maximum
01:35compatibility we are going to say as an Illustrator EPS and also just to
01:41maximize the compatibility I'm going to take the version number down to
01:45Illustrator CS. We might see a couple of warning messages related to that but
01:52those warning messages are not relevant to us. So there is the print version
01:56and now on to the web version.
Collapse this transcript
Preparing web files
00:00Now when creating the web version we can adopt a slightly different approach
00:04and that involves using this tool, the Crop Area tool where we can use this to
00:09define the portion of our board that we wish to capture. So I'm going to zoom
00:14in on our Regular logo, define a cropping area, make sure that the spacing
00:20around the logo is uniform and then go to the File menu and choose Save for Web
00:27& Devices. So let's see, here we have the original on the left-hand side and
00:33our optimized version on the right-hand side. What you first see when you come
00:37to this dialog box may vary slightly but I'm looking at a 2-Up layout.
00:43Now its chosen, the Gif file format and that is actually the file format we
00:49want and if your logo is using flat colors and type as mine is and as yours
00:56probably is too than the GIF file format is going to give us the crispest
01:00version of the logo. So that's the one that we want, I'm going to, it maybe
01:04worth experimenting with these different color palettes to see which one gives
01:09the best result. I think in this case they all are going to be identical so I'm
01:14just going to go with Selective. Transparency, I do not want transparency.
01:19If I check that then I'll see my transparency represented as a checkerboard.
01:24Actually I don't want the transparent version of the logo, that's going to make
01:28sure that no one can take the logo and put it against a brightly colored
01:33background and make the logo unreadable.
01:35So not having transparency is going to make sure that it's on a solid white
01:39background. One last thing to do and that is I need to check the Image Size. I
01:44want to make this 200 pixels, I'm actually going to be making two separate
01:49versions of this, another one at 100 pixels. Now it's important that you
01:55consider the size is that's going to be used on a website because unlike the
02:00print version, the web version is not going to be scalable. This is going to be
02:04resolution dependent rather than the vector version, the print version, which
02:09is resolution independent. So my larger version is going to be at 200 pixels,
02:15I'll apply that change and now I'm ready to save it and I'm going to save it in
02:21the GIF file format and we are done.
Collapse this transcript
Drawing up usage guidelines
00:00Our logo is finished, but our work is not yet entirely done because we need to
00:04draw up usage guidelines. The purpose of the usage guidelines is so that whoever
00:09uses the logo, whoever you may be passing on the logo to, to maybe use in
00:14some kind of cross promotion; that they use the logo in a way that you had
00:18intended. As a tip you can download different company's usage guidelines and
00:24see what kind of content they contain and adapt one of theirs to your own needs.
00:29Now even if you are the only person who intends to be implementing the logo,
00:35 it's still a good idea to have a style guide. That way it helps you
00:40control your own branding and think more clearly about how the logo is going to be used.
00:47What I have done is make an InDesign document with various different categories
00:51of usage and then I have made that into a PDF and this PDF will be sent to
00:56anyone who is going to implementing the logo. Here we are in Acrobat looking at
01:02that PDF. I have made some bookmarks for easy navigation. First of all,
01:07Versions of the Logo, it just talks about which different versions there are
01:11and their appropriate usage and I can scroll down there and we can see we have
01:15the different versions shown. Minimum Size discusses exactly that, specifying
01:22that the logo shouldn't be reproduced than anything less than 30 millimeters or
01:271.2 inches wide and that's because anything smaller than that and this type is
01:34going to be unreadable.
01:36Next we have the logo colors, specifying that it's in Pantone 369 and Black and
01:42saying that if this is going to be included in a CMYK document then it's
01:46okay to convert the Pantone colors to its process color equivalents, which is
01:51going to be broadly the same as the Pantone 369. But rather than printing as
01:57one custom ink it will print as four inks: cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
02:03The fourth issue is that of Clear Space. We want to make sure that whoever uses the
02:08logo doesn't but up against any other element in their publications.
02:13So we are specifying that we want at least 10 millimeters of space all the way
02:18around the logo and then just to make it as idiot-proof as possible we have
02:23thrown in some examples of Incorrect usage. Distorting it, making it too small
02:29and putting it against the background that's clearly going to make it quite
02:32unreadable. Next we discuss online usage and the point I'm making here is that
02:38there are two different approved versions for online usage. The regular version
02:44and the boxed version and each is provided at a size of 200 pixels and 100
02:51pixels. And then finally and this is very important, I'm including a screen
02:57capture of the folder containing the two sub-folders for the print logos and
03:02the web logos and this takes the place of any kind of Read Me file that you
03:07might want to send to your client, if you are providing the logo to your
03:12client. They are not necessarily going to know the difference between an EPS
03:16file and a GIF file.
03:17So here we have clearly broken down what's on the disk that we are providing
03:22them with and these files are saved in their appropriate folders. So there we
03:27have our style guide, which very simply and explicitly states what is an
03:32approved usage of our logo and what is not. So hopefully anyone following these
03:37shouldn't have any problem.
Collapse this transcript
Conclusion
Goodbye
00:00Thank you very much for joining me for this series of videos on creating a logo
00:04where we have gone from zero to a finished logo and I hope if you have created
00:09your own logo you can feel confident about putting it next to the logos of
00:14everyday brand names and feel that it holds it own.
Collapse this transcript


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