From the course: Illustrator: Designing with Grids and Guides

Create a penguin logo with a grid of circles - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator: Designing with Grids and Guides

Start my 1-month free trial

Create a penguin logo with a grid of circles

“

- [Instructor] It's a popular trend in logo design to create a logo from an overlapping grid of perfect circles. A notable example being the Twitter logo. So I thought I would try and take this technique and I'm going to create a penguin. I wish I could say there's an easy formula here, but it involves a lot of trial and error to get these circles in just the right position. It certainly helps to start with a pencil sketch, and you can experiment much more easily with pencil and paper than you can in Illustrator or in any software. So with my circles in place, I'm now going to use the shape builder tool to tease out the penguin from the circles. Just a bit of setup first of all. I'll select everything. And let's Copy it. And then come to the Guides menu and choose Make Guides. My guides must be hidden, so I will press cmd or ctrl + ; to show them. And I will now Paste in Front the copy that is on the clipboard. Now the reason I've done that is because I am next going to apply no fill and no stroke to that. And without the guides, I wouldn't see where the circles are. So with everything selected, I'll come and get the shape builder and choose black as my color. And it's now just a question of joining the relevant segments together. And when we get down to the feet, I think I'm going to change color there. We'll have the feet be in orange. And I think I've got all the segments. So I'm now going to zoom out. We'll deselect. And it makes an interesting client presentation when you can present the logo to your client like this. And it seems to, in some way, give it more value. But ultimately, it's going to be seen without the guides. So I'll turn off the guides, Command or Control + semi-colon. So there is my penguin constructed from all of these overlapping perfect circles, the shapes combined with the shape builder tool.

Contents