Creating a logo

- [Instructor] In this tutorial, I'm going to give you 10 tips for creating your films logo. First, use software meant for logo design. Ideally, you'd want to use a graphic design tool for creating your logo and not Microsoft Word or Premiere or some other tool that's not intended to create logos. Adobe Illustrator is my preference but there are tons of other great tools out there. The main feature that you're looking for is actually my second tip, the ability to create a vector logo. You can find out more about this here on LinkedIn but essentially, many tools create art with pixels and not vectors, but pixels don't scale well and logos need to be able to scale up and down well. When you create a shape with vectors on the other hand, they scale up without losing resolution. Note that when creating art in some applications like Adobe Photoshop, they might have both vector-based and pixel based, also called raster, images. So, if you're using Photoshop, be mindful of which tools you're using. Third, iterate. When I created the assurance logo, I started by just typing the logo out in a bunch of different files that kind of appealed to me. It's important to note that I wasn't really trying to find the logo necessarily. I was trying to understand exactly what I wanted in the logo, which leads me to tip number four. Make sure that your logo does as much as possible to tell the story of your film. If I had used like Times New Roman as the font for the insurance logo, for example, that's a stylistic mismatch. Times New Roman is polished and professional and even has serifs, which are these little pieces at the end of letters that are intended to guide your eye to the next letter. And that's way too sophisticated for the world in the assurance. I wanted something that felt significantly less civilized. So then, I had all these logos and all these different styles and I would search them, meticulously all the little details for what I call moments that I liked. Just little elements that could be a cool shape to a letter or part of a letter or a way that some letters fit together with a given type face. And that's tip number five. You can use multiple sources for your logo. Well, it can create a beautiful sense of cohesion to use a single font from one designer, you might need to use other sources and that's okay. This is especially true if you have any type of special character in your local like an exclamation point or something. Okay, tip number six, keep your logo clean, simple, simple, simple. The best logos are not complex or busy. Logos for films are usually very basic. This makes them stand out and be more memorable but also helps with tip number seven, make sure that your logo is legible. Like, obviously, you probably, you know, we're planning on making it cryptic like a death metal band logo or something, but legibility goes beyond that. Legibility in this context means that it's like instantly legible. I eventually narrowed down my assurance logo to these few fonts and then later just to this font. But I didn't like the way that some of the letters looked. So like, look at the H, for example, in the. Is it clearly an H? Yeah, it's clearly an H but I want it to be more readable than this. And to that end, some of these letters just feel, I dunno, I guess kind of out of sorts and messy, like the logo just got in a car accident. So fixing this is tip number eight. It's usually a good idea to convert a logo to outlines so you have total control over it. In Adobe Illustrator, you can do this by creating text and then going to the type menu at the top and selecting create outlines. Illustrator then sees these as just shapes, just regular old shapes that I can fiddle with as much as I want. And that's exactly what I did. I made each of these letters a bit more standard, I guess you could say, so they fit more into a basic grid. This helped the loader to feel more readable while still retaining the ancient crude feel that I was going for. Now, the chances are high that you're not going to be creating a crude logo like this. So, this next tip is more universal. Kerning. Kerning is the space between two given characters. Now, tracking is the space between all the characters on a line and letting is the space between the lines of text, vertically. And those are important too. But after a little bit of fiddling, you kind of start to become aware of tracking and letting. But, kerning is a little bit more subtle sometimes. It makes a huge difference once you start noticing it, though. You see each character in a font has kind of like built in spacing. But some character combinations create too much space, like here between the capital letter, W, and the lowercase, a. Now, if you thought of each of these letters as people in a line, it would almost feel like the W isn't well liked or something. It's just too much space here. So, if I put my cursor in between those letters, I can tweak the kerning here to bring these closer and make this text feel more harmonious. I also might want to reduce the space around the e or on this side of the a or whatever. Now, this might seem like a small thing, but trust me, it makes a huge difference in the perceived quality of your logo. Once you start seeing kerning, you can never not see it. And then when you see a logo that doesn't have its kerning fiddled with and tweaked, you can really tell it sticks out and feels very unprofessional. And finally, I recommend creating your logo in black and white. Even if you know that you're going to add a specific color later, you want to make sure that the logo is well-designed and keeping it in black and white can help ensure that you're following good design principles and that the logo will look good regardless of where it appears. So, that's a lot of stuff. But, realistically, tip number four is perhaps the most important. Your logo should help audiences immediately understand the style and tone of your movie. We'll take this a little bit further in the next tutorial where we'll look at designing a poster for your film.