Logo Design: New Ways to Create Custom Vintage Type

1. Trailer: Hi everybody. Welcome to my Skillshare class. I'm really thrilled and humbled that you guys have taken the time and spent the money to spend some time with me and learn a little bit about what I do and how I do it. I just want to start by saying that I'm aware of the fact that what I do is my way of doing it, it's not the only way of doing it, but it's the way I do it, and that's what I've been asked to show you. So, there are other guys out there who dabble in the same types of typography styles that I do, and I'm sure they have their own methods, you guys probably do too. Anyway, we're here to see what I do and how I do it so let's move on. I think Caslon typography is a large umbrella under which for a lot of different types of type design. On the one end of the spectrum you have your really loose, free form hand lettering, which is a lot of fun and it's something that I definitely downloaded before. Then all the way at the other end of the spectrum you have really a rigid clean font design. It's almost mathematical sometimes in its precision in the way that the letters need to relate to each other, and the thing that I'm trying to do is it straddles that line. It falls right between those two polar opposites and they're not necessarily opposites but it's just somewhere. It's this meeting in the middle of having some free expression but at the same time a little bit of that discipline that you try to achieve when you're designing fonts. I'm just hoping that that's something that appeals to the guys who are watching right now. 2. Introduction: Hi, everybody. Welcome to my Skillshare class. I'm really thrilled and humbled that you guys have taken the time and spent the money to spend some time with me and learn a little bit about what I do and how I do it. I just want to start by saying that I'm aware of the fact that what I do is my way of doing it. It's not the only way of doing it. It's the way I do it, and that's what I've been asked to show you. So, there are other guys out there who dabble in the same types of typography styles that I do, and I'm sure they have their own methods you guys probably do, too. Anyway, we're here to see what I do and how I do it, so let's move on. I think Cousine typography is a large umbrella under which for a lot of different types of type design. On one end of the spectrum, you really loose free form hand lettering, which is a lot of fun, and it's something that I've definitely dabbled in before. Then, all the way at the other end of the spectrum, you have really kind of rigid clean font design. It's almost mathematical sometimes in its precision in the way that the letters need to relate to each other. The kind of thing that I'm trying to do is, it kind of straddles that line. It falls right between those two polar opposites, and they're not necessarily opposites, but it's just somewhere. It's this meeting in the middle of sort of having some free expression but at the same time, a little bit of that discipline that you try to achieve when you're designing fonts, and I'm just hoping that that's something that appeals to the guys who are watching right now. 3. Sketching: Okay. Jumping right in, choosing the logo that you want to design, the business name that you want to design your logo for. I've had a lot of success in the past, just choosing a restaurant or a TV show that I've enjoyed and just letting myself go and just design it the way I want to do it, no client in the background kind of pulling the strings and telling me how they want it done. I think that's a really good freeing creative way to do what we're going to do here today and that's what I've done with my projects. I just did some doodling recently and just came up with the letterform that I liked and thought okay, I'm going to invent a word, going to invent a name to turn this into a logo and expand on it from there. I think that's the point, I think that's what we're trying to learn today, it's not necessarily a reflection of the real business world where there are clients and account people, and there's a lot of different people trying to steer you in one direction or the other, we're just here to look at it from a purely aesthetic perspective and see what comes of it. In terms of the letterforms, I think it's really fun, I think it's a good idea to choose letters that have a bit of play in them, us type design has really love an uppercase R because it has that little leg that kind of tails down and you can have fun with that and loop it around and do things with it. The case is similar to Q which is the letter that I chose for my logo, that's also good a letter to play around with. So choose, if you can, choose some letters that you think you'll enjoy working with, don't choose a name like ink or something where it's all just straight lines up and down, try and have some fun with that and see where it takes you. So, onto the sketching phase of the project, I personally keep my sketching to a minimum for the most part, I keep it very rough, very unclean. I don't do a lot of refinement in the sketching process, I like to do a lot of that stuff on the computer but I am not, by any means, here to tell you that that's not what you should do. I think most people for the most part prefer to craft their type during the sketching process. Use a lot of tracing paper and just really get those curves right and that has worked for me in the past on a couple of different projects, but for the most part, I just kind of have this kind of motor memory thing where the mouse just works better for me than a pencil does. So, for the most part that's kind of the process that I'm going to share with you. But I have done some sketches, I definitely did. So, I shared earlier that the letter that I started with for my project today was the letter Q. I was sketching recently, just doodling, I forget what I was doing, but I drew out a Q and I thought to myself, wow, That looks like a monocle, that's amazing, I've got to turn that into a logo one day. So, I took the bowl over the Q, drew a little line down, thought I needed a name, came up with the name Quinn and I ended up with Quinns Vintage Eyewear. So that's the logo that I'm going to be designing today and here are my sketches. I know a lot of people take a lot of pride in the sketching process, they probably have some really nice notebooks and they carry around really nice pens and pencils and stuff. I tend to just grab whatever's handy, I'm not particularly, like I said, I think it's just the fact that I'm not very refined in terms of how I do my sketches. So here's an example, I think this is the first sketch that I did for Quinns and this is on an old, it's a paid bill, thank goodness. So there we go. That was the first one, you can see the Q-U-I-N-N-S and then it kind of moved on to here. Let's see. This is the next page, this is another project I was working on a work for another client. Flip that piece of paper over and just started sketching away. Things started to come together somewhere kind of down here. You can see I got some good motion here. I've started adding in a few different layers of supplementary type, we've got, Since 1988, I'm just making this stuff up as I go along. Quinns Vintage Eyewear, I'm going to throw in a trademark things like that. The beauty of coming up with this kind of thing and just inventing it as you go along, is that you can, if things aren't working out, you can scratch a line, you can add something else and you can just kind of really mold it and create it. Then here's the last page. There you go. So that was the point that I got to right there, and I thought okay, that's enough information. I think I'm ready to go. 4. Vectoring Basics: Okay, onto vectoring. Before I get into the logo that I designed for this project, I wanted to do a quick exercise in taking a piece of scanned artwork and drawing the vectors in and getting those curves to look as good as we can make them. So, I drew out this sort of funky letter Q here, if you want to call it that. It's a Q, it's not a Q. It doesn't really matter. It's just some lines that will give me the opportunity to sit here and work them out and make them into something beautiful and pretty. So, here we go. We'll start with this O. I'll just plug that in real quick. Copy and paste in front, and you can knock that out. This is the Pathfinder tool. I'll keep that outlines for now, but there we go. Looks about right. Then, onto the fun part. So, I know that when I started out vectoring, I found that the easiest way to get it done was to just click it in there. Just get those vector points in there and start to form that shape and then to go in afterwards and clean everything up and see if I can make everything look clean and precise and pretty the way I wanted it to. So, I'll just do that here real quick, I'll just kind of randomly clicking on these vector points, give us a place to start with. See where that takes us. So, I work in Keyline a lot. I need to get rid of this background here, actually let me just, I don't want that. Now, look at that. Clicked in, I don't think we're going to need it anymore. So, there we go. Yeah, Keyline, I find, is a nice way to just really simplify the process of getting the curves right, and you can toggle back and forth, just to see how things are looking. But, this is only the way I like to work. So, at this point, it's really a process of just eliminating any of the unnecessary vector points to just keeping things as clean as possible. I think it's important to understand how font designers work I think in this respect. So, I'm going to come over here real quick and look at a couple of fonts which I very creatively decided to type out the word font in these two fonts that I love. The top one here is tribute and bottom one is chalet. We're going to convert those to outlines, so that we can look at how they're constructed. So when you select one of these letters or any of these letters, you're going to see that there is real- in terms of how they're constructed, there's a real economy of vector points. You can see most plainly on the O here that you have your vector points on the north, south, east, and west. West in most points of the form, and the same thing kind of happens with these other letters. You know there's a few little funky little curves in here to make the serifs and stuff. But, basically, the designer has kept all of these points to a minimum, and if you select any of these points, they're almost always going to be perpendicular. You're not going to see anything skewing or any kind of a strange angle. Everything's going to be nice and perpendicular, nice and simple, and it's just kind of a good way to think about how to form the curves of your letterforms, of the shapes that you're creating in your logo. So, with that in mind, I'm going to come in here with the anchor tool, you add anchor points on, start adding some in on those extreme points, above these curves and take away some of the ones in the middle. Then just sort of step-by-step, just fix that one a little bit there. Take out those unnecessary points and what you're hopefully going to start to get are some smoother curves. Just grab the Convert tool right here. This is kind of the point where you can just let your mind go, not think about it too hard, just put your music on Zen out and just feel this stuff slowly coming together. Hopefully, you can see what I'm doing here in Keyline. You can see how these shapes that gets to the point right here on the edges where they just straight right out. What you want to do is put a vector point right there in the middle. Just start to straighten them out and start to clean them up. There and there. Slowly but surely, you're going to end up with something that feels a lot more graceful and a lot more natural. What you had at the slope. There we go. We move that point over right there. I can see that last one there. Hopefully, you can start to see how these curves are starting to feel a little bit more graceful. They're still a little wonky. I think there're still some adjustments that can be made. I find that generally, when you have a big, fat curve like this, two vector points that make up that curve, almost want to be horizontal. It's not a hard and fast rule, but don't necessarily have to be that way. This is a little tip that I learned actually quite recently. You can select two vector points, and then go to your Align tool, and you can actually make the two points align. It doesn't have to be a whole object. You can just see two points, and you can align them just like clicking right there on the- what was that? That was the Vertical Align tool. Anyway. Still a little wonky here but we'll get it. Let's fatten it up just a little bit, right there. Where is that point? Yeah, here we go. Oops. That wanted first, it's the main anchor. Yeah, I think these don't need to be too close together after all. This one looks like it needs to be little bit lower. That's looking pretty good. You could go on tweaking these things forever. This is usually the point where I stand back and I turned my head to the side, and I can flip this thing upside down, left and right, and just trying to figure out whether this thing is as balanced as I hope it is. That's feeling pretty good right there. Let me go ahead and close this up. We're going to get rid of the outlines and look at this shape. See how that feels. That's not too bad. You could certainly use a little bit more tweaking but generally speaking, it's starting to feel natural and deliberate. I always hesitate when it comes to talking about rolls with this kind of thing. But something that I've noticed with this kind of line work, the lot of us try to recreate, is that you usually have the fat part right here, right here, right here, and right here. You usually have the fat parts of those strokes on the right and left of your letterform, never on the top or bottom. I don't want to say never, that's not necessarily true. A hundred percent of the time, but generally speaking, it's just kind of a good rule of thumb I think that you have, it gets wider toward the sides, thinner in the middle, thinner on that up-stroke, wider again, thinner, then wider again as you get up to the end here. Again, not a hard and fast rule. Each project kind of dictates its own rules and its own forms. But a lot of these rules are just good little tricks to start the whole process, the whole creative process with when it comes to doing this kind of thing. 5. Vectoring Your Type: Okay. So we're going to move on now and start talking about how I created my logo for Quinn's Vintage Eyewear. I started the way I started a lot of my projects with a simple single width stroke treatment of the type that I'm trying to create, which you can see here. If I go to key line, you can see how everything is made up of one stroke throughout the word, and I bet some boxes there, just some white boxes that I used to hide the tops of the letters where they get a little bit wonky and keep everything straight and everything in one place. You'll see what I do with that when we get to that part of it, but for now, this is where I start. I think this is a really good thing to practice. I know that I learned a lot of what I know about type from mimicking the fonts that I liked with a single stroke width stroke, just like I've done here. Just not worrying about the thicks and thins, just letting the strokes move and flow the way I wanted them to. The good thing about that, of course, too is that single strokes width-type is actually pretty popular at the moment anyway. So, you could even stop here if you wanted to, just do a little bit finessing and you'd actually end up with something pretty decent. But that's not what I'm going to do in this case. I think I noticed right away, of course, that the word that I come up with Quinn's, well, for lack of a better word it's a very humpy word. You've got the u, you got the I, you got the n, so it's loop, loop, loop. Just very humpy. I don't have the circle here, I don't have a little dot to the i, yet, obviously. But right now, it's feeling a little bit straightforward, a little bit monotonous with all those humps. The thing, of course, that breaks it up and gives a little bit of life at this stage is the s. I've said this to many people before that the s is, My God, it's one of the hardest characters to draw. It's crazy. I can spend hours and hours working on an s. More times sometimes that it takes me to create all the other letters in a word. Now, it's certainly the case here. Although, what you see here is not the end of the process. We'll go through that as we move along. Anyway, so let me see here. I think what I want to do is I'll show you what happened. I'll show you what the next step of this is. You know what? I'm going to cut it right there and start over. Not start over, most of that was good. We'll just edit that back a couple of seconds there, few seconds. Okay. So, what I'm going to do next is just to show you the kind of result I'm trying to get towards and then show you how I got there once I've done that. So, if I scroll over here, you will see what happened from that first stage. So, you can see I've started to create some thicks and thins here. It's starting to feel a little bit more like a font. It's starting to get into that world that I dabbled in, where things start to feel really structured, really nice and clean, almost mechanical in the way that they font. But let me go back over here and show you how I got there. So, what I'm going to do is take this. I'm going to scoot this up a little bit, create a new copy and come in here and just show you step-by-step. Just a couple of the letters because I don't think I'll have time to do all of them, but I'll show you a couple of the letters, and hopefully, spend a little bit of time on the s to show you how I got to where I ended up. Okay. So starting with this O, we're not going to fuss around too much with this one. The O in the case of this logo is just meant to represent a monocle, so we can keep it perfectly round. So we'll do an outline stroke on that one. Take that inside stroke there and I'll just pump it up like that, and that gives you a nice little thicks and thins, starting to feel like a nice looking O there. Perhaps a little bit too geometrically perfect but that's okay. Again, it's meant more to represent a monocle in this case than a regular O, which, of course, at the end of the day, it's going to be a Q. But for now, it's an O, of course. So, we'll start here with this u, outline the stroke. Again, this is where I take this blocks which I've used to delineate where the tops of these characters will end. Copy that one, paste in front. Use it to trim up the top of that there, using the Pathfinder Tool. So, I'm going to go to key line here, because key line always makes it a little bit easier for me to understand what I'm seeing and move that over just for the time being. We're going to come in, take these vector points in here and just scoot them down. I think that's probably a pretty good start. That's going to start feeling like a u, like a proper u in a serif sort of italic. Ultimately it is going to be more like an italic feeling font, once we skew everything, once we have everything done. This is starting to head in that direction here by making these thicks and thins and putting them in the right places. Again, it goes back to that roll/non-roll, where your thicks are usually on the outsides of your letters and your thins are usually on the tops and bottoms. I hope that made sense. We'll continue one here. With this one, we do the same thing. This is a good time to join some guides here, once you get the relationship here between the sides and the thicks and thins, pull yourself a guide down and that way you can match everything else up after that. So, we'll bring that one up a little bit right there. It's actually going pretty quick, so let me see if I can do the rest of the letterforms here, all the way through to the last n. Outline stroke. We have these vector points. Drag it down, it will be the same on this end here. It's potentially going to be some weirdness in some of these curves right here, but we'll just come back and visually fix those at the end. I think will do the same with this one right here. Just drag that down. I think we're going to have to do some adjustments in here also. Let's trim this off first. I think we need to do that one, that one. Yeah, this one right here. So, we'll copy and paste it in front, trim this in front. Trim. There we go. Shop off the bottoms here to make them nice and straight. There we go. Okay. So, it's starting to feel a little bit better here. So, let's put this dot in right here. It doesn't have to be perfect but just put it in the right place, so that we can see where our letters begin and end. So Q i, we got these two n's, so now, we need to do some adjustments here. On this side of the curve on the end, we definitely want to make it thinner, which I think is a fairly standard convention for this kind of letter n. So, we're going to economize our vector points here, take out any ones that we don't really want, we don't really need. So, we've got quite a few in here actually. Let's see if we can smooth out some of these curves. I think we need to bring these points up too. Let's bring this point over a little bit more. It's just a process of elimination here, just trying to simplify everything whenever we can. Let's have a look at that. That's starting to feel a little bit better, a little bit nicer. Maybe this little point here doesn't have to be quite as just conflicted from thin to thick. Pull that down a little bit so it's more of a gradual taper around there and that's a little bit nicer. I think in this case, we can actually just reproduce this n and replace this one. Now that we've gone through all the trouble to make that look nice instead of having to do it twice we can come back in here, shop the end of this one off. We can play around with this relationship here. It's a little bit awkward with the end of this s, is meeting with the end of this n. But it's a darn good start. Then there's the s, and that's a whole another story. We'll move into that in the next video. 6. The Letter S: So, the letter S. I made a few adjustments to these other letters here. Brought the tail up on this end a little bit so that the relationship between these two characters isn't quite as janky. Over here, I think those of you from England or those of you who've spent time in England will understand the reference when I say, "Here is one that I've compared earlier." Lupita fans, there you have it. This is kind of what we want to get to, right here, and this is our single stroke with S from which we're going to make that S, over here. The trick, and it takes some practice, but it really is doable, is to be able to create an S using only six vector points, as you can see here one, two, three, four, five, six, keeping in mind a few other basic attributes for your S. The first being that you have a slightly smaller bowl on top than the one on the bottom. If I spin this around, you'll see that it's actually really quite bottom heavy and also it's a little bit skinnier too up top. The bowl at the S up top is not quite as wide as that on the bottom. Anyway, again, yeah. If you can do this in six clicks, you're doing pretty well. I'm going to see if I can do it again here in real time. One, two, three, four, five, whoop! So far, six. Okay. So that looks horrible, of course, but with little bit of tweaking, a little bit of finessing. Slowly but surely, you can start to form it into something that feels quite nice. Again, if you just let your mind go, just move those vector points. Don't be too concerned about whether it takes five or 10 clicks or 100 clicks. To be honest with you, just keep doing it, just keep clicking and moving and shimmying the points around until you get it to the point where it starts to feel quite nice. That one is not bad, but you get the idea. I'm going to lose this one. We're going to go back to this one right here, which, I think, is a little bit stronger. Now we're going to take it. Outline the stroke. This is where it gets tricky. So, I'm going to convert to key line here. I'm going to lose these two lines because I don't think we're going to need those. We're going to start shifting some of these characters here. So, I'm going to select these, Command X, and then Command F. Paste in front. Now, this right here, this little curve right here is a separate object. Drag that up. Now it starts to feel a little bit more like a real S auto-fill. We're going to do the same thing with the bottom. Now that's my left. Pull that down. Yeah. It's getting somewhere. Feels a little bit fat in the middle here, but that's okay for right now. So, now what I'm going to do is remove these extraneous points here in the middle. Do the same with this one. Couple of them there. Drag these two points out. You start to get some much better control over this curve right here. Let's drag the next one right there. Another one. Again, it's all about just letting go, just feeling it out step by step, just stepping back and taking a look at the whole thing and thinking, "This is where it needs to be in a knot." Again, this looks like too abrupt to be shift right here. If you look over here, it's a little bit more tapered. So, bring this in. I'm going to join these two points for now just so I get a better idea of what my S actually looks like. It's not quite the same. Looks like it came through with a slightly different result this time. This isn't too bad. Whoops! We don't need that point right there. Let's get rid of that one. Get rid of this one. Same here. I think these sharps that appear on these little points right here, they often add some structural stability to a lot of really good fonts out there in the world when we do this kind of thing. It seem it's just getting away. So, I want to click them all out of there. So, it's starting to come together, starting to happen. Again, Ss can just take so much time, just so much time, but it's worth the effort. It's worth sticking with it and just clicking it out till you get to where you want to be. That's not too bad. That's not too bad. It's pretty similar to what I have over here. Little bit different. It's like we got a little bit wider bowl right here, that we did right here. Oh my God! It's down here. Let's see if I can match these up a little bit. Looks like that's a little bit low right here. So, from all those points up, that's not too bad. Yeah, that's okay. I made worse Ss in that amount of time. So, there we have it. Yeah, I think there's probably a little bit more refining I could possibly do, but we'll lose that one for now, and there's our S. So, what I found, once I had gotten to this point, was that I still wasn't getting quite the lilt to the characters that I needed, not enough differentiation between the thicks and thins. So, I made a slightly more exaggerated version over here by dragging out these points. Let me show you how I did that real quick. Just take those points and using the arrow keys one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, just thickening everything up, rounding that point, and that point there, one, two, three, four, five, and just making the adjustments for them. The bowls at the bottom ended up somewhere in here, and this would be the launching point for the rest of the logo, which we'll get into in just a moment. 7. Layouts: Okay. I just want to talk a little bit about the process that I went through to get to the logo that I ended up with and how I got to that point from the sketch that I had done at the very beginning. The two are quite different when it was sort of an unexpected result, but it's interesting sometimes how despite your best efforts and despite the grand vision that you have in your head for the final outcome. Sometimes it just doesn't work out the way you expect and you have to kind of roll with it and see what you can do to make things work. So in this case, if you can recall the initial sketch that I did where we had this sort of upward sloping Quinn's with all the information kind of arranged around it. So, what I did here was I got a key line I created some lines here as guides and sort of took these letters over here and formed them to the guides that I've made. It's given me a nice sort of upward-sloping word there, Quinn's, and proceeded on to the next stage which we have here where I'm starting to put the rest of the words in. What I'm not showing here is every single stage of the exploration that I did initially of course the name of this thing was Quinn's Vintage Eyewear so I had decided I was going to put the word Eyewear right here but wasn't looking right to me. Didn't really work out so for the time being I was leaving it off and just wanted to see if I can figure out what to do with the rest of the space. So, you can see how I decided you know what? I've got to fill this space in a little bit might be kinda fun to extend this S down. Makes it a little bit more playful and does the double duty of course of filling in this space a little bit. Tried a different style of S in here I wasn't sure about how this was feeling and didn't know if it was taken away too much from this initial cap here which is sort of the main focus of the logo but again it's still wasn't really quite feeling right to me so I abandoned that and moved on, tried something here with a little bit of a tail. At this point, I think I said to myself, "Well you know what? I've got to get the eye in there." So I created this little eye right here. I don't think there's ever a time where a single eye staring at you isn't slightly creepy. So I wanted to make sure this was something that felt pretty benign, I didn't want to get too detailed with it, didn't want to make it too sinister. But also didn't want to make it too playful to [inaudible] so I kind of stopped at this very simple, very graphic looking eye right here. Again, I'm starting to play with this space in here, we've got the trademark that I've added in here which is a fun little thing you can add it to almost any vintage style logo created some other letters, too. 'Since 1988' just threw that in there just a date I pulled out of nowhere in particular. You can see I'm starting to run into a little bit of trouble in here things are just starting to feel a little bit too squat. The initial sketch felt much more rounded, I was having a hard time trying to get this thing to look the way I was hoping it would. It doesn't feel horrible it just feels a little bit cluttered so me. I'm trying to see what the difference is between some of the ways I think I started to add in this little shape right here to fill in space and it was just getting a bit too heavy a little bit too much. Tried even bringing in some thicker type right here and just putting in a straight slant as opposed to sort of this light curve that I have right here. Took out the word 'vintage,' simplified the name of it a little bit so it's just 'Quinn's Eyewear.' You know, it's just it's just not coming together for me. It's okay. The Q is pretty legible, I like that, it's just not quite doing it for me. So, I did what I always do, I get to a certain point and said, "Okay, I'm going to create another layer. So, turn off that layer and turn on the new one. So, I thought what if I start stacking this stuff? Give myself a little bit more breathing room. Stop letting the curve of these main words sort of dictate where I put things. And Immediately to me it started to feel a little bit more control, a little bit more genuinely Vintage, I guess. I'm trying not to be skewed by the word that sits staring me in the face over here but there you have it. Still not quite there, needs a little bit more stuff going on here, needs a little bit more play, now it's like it's just brought over from the other page. Let's see, so what other things start to change? Somewhere in here, something about simplifying this whole thing a little bit. The curve, sort of upward slope of this has been reduced a little bit. I really was liking the way this S dipped down and it was really nice to be able to kind of bring this tail from the Q in, let it interact with that S a little bit. This still doesn't feel any quite right of course. The flip flop of the two fonts that we have here, Vintage and Eyewear, just isn't quite working out but yeah. So, I think we're going to fast forward here to the solution and this is where I ended up. So, you essentially have three font styles here. These two are pretty similar. Another thing before I forget, that another change that I made was to lose the script element of this typeface right here and take out the connectives. Let just scroll back up here and see if I can find another one. See we'd lost them here too and here also. I'm not sure if I have a version where they connect, there we go. Okay, so we have the connectives right here and I think it was working just fine. I think it felt pretty nice, but again it was that sort of multiple sort of humpy kind of thing that was throwing me off a little bit, it was making it a little bit hard to read. So yeah I just took that liberty and decided you know what? We're going to lose those humps. The way they were and just kind of lose these gaps in here and something about it to sort of free this whole thing up and it feels a little bit more loose, a little bit more playful now and that's when I was able to introduce this other font right here which is a font that I created kind of in a hurry for another project, but I thought you know one of these could work in this case, too. I think that's one of the joys, one of the beautiful things about vintage-type lockups is that you can have a number of different style typefaces but if you arrange them properly, they can all work together, they can all feel cohesive and sort of flow in a nice way. I don't think I overdid it. Vintage trademark; Austin, Texas, all the same font-style. Quinn's and Eyewear fairly similar, not quite the same, but I think it's still kind of works. Something kind of enjoyable and playful about the fact that this is all kind of straight up and down and this one slides to the right a little bit. And just sort of the hierarchy is starting to come together here for me, too, in a way that it wasn't before that was exciting to feel that happened. I'll be honest with you, there are many times in the creative process where I freak out and I despair and I think I'm not getting it, it's not going to happen, it's not going to come together and I was kind of feeling that way about this one. It really wasn't coming together for me, and so I stopped, took a break, stepped back, I think I even left it for a night, told myself I'm not going to look at it. Came back the next morning, opened it up, and it was kind of like you know what I need to do, I need to do this, this, and this. And sure enough it all came together and it'll kinda worked out. So there we have it, there's the solution. Before I run out of time here, let me just show you the next couple of steps that I went through, and we're going to cover in more detail in the next video. It's actually the edges of all the type here. Let's give it a nice sort of dated, weathered, vintage feel. And then the final product, added in some texture on top of the type, on top of the art work to really finish out and bring home that vintage style that we're after. 8. Vector Textures: All right. We're going to do a little bit of texturing here, and we're going to start with the edges of the logo. The first thing you want to do, select everything, and we're going to go over to the pathfinder tool here. So, like this one right here, the Unite, the Unite tool. So, I'm going to click on that and that's going to make everything one objects basically. As far as the computer is concerned it's one object. But, that's not quite enough. For whatever reason, I'm not sure quite understand, you have to make this whole thing a compound path also. So, you want to come here and you want to hit make Compound Path. Once it's done that, you're good to go. This whole thing is now irretrievably one object. That's going to make it much easier for you to add texture in all the different ways. We're going to do it and control it and make everything so even and cohesive throughout the logo. Before moving forward, I like to get rid of the edges so that we can see the logo as it starts to change. So, we're going to go up here, we're going to do view hide edges, there we have it. It still use this bounding box. So what I like to do is come over here click on the Zoom tool and that gets rid of that bounding box and the whole thing is still selected. If you just can't see the selection box anymore. I'm actually going to zoom in a little bit. That's fine. Now, I can see pretty closely what's going to happen here once we hit the Roughen tool. So, we're going to go up here to Effect and come down here to Distort & Transform, I'm going to click on Roughen. It's going to bring up this box right here. So, once we click on the preview box, everything's going to go crazy for a second, but we need to come back up here select that, make it a much smaller selection, I'm going to do 0.05. That actually looks pretty good. You can play around with the details here to actually looks quite nice, I like that. You always want it to be on smooth. So, we're going to click on one right there. That just gives it a little bit more of an organic natural feel, the corner points option does. Let's see what happens if we shift the detail here. Yeah, it just starts to make the texture a little bit crunchier a little bit tighter. I think I like that where it was right around 10. That's actually not bad. You can see down here on the smaller letters, the warping that happens is a little bit more extreme but I think that's okay, because I think in the natural vintage creep world, smaller type of course was going to bleed and work more than the other forms would. I think that's mirrored in the process that we're creating here. So, that's okay. We'll just leave those as they are and we're going to go in and fix those manually in a little bit. So, I'm going to hit Okay. That looks pretty good. The one that we want to do is well, let's bring back View for us so we can see what we are doing. Show edges and as you can see, it's still not showing all of the view vector points that it's created. We want to get those, we're going to Expand Appearance. Then boom, there we have it. We have some crazy texture to work with on the edges. So, I'm not going to do all the letters obviously. I'm just going to click right in here. I'll show you what I do to clean these things up make them feel a little bit more natural. So, for the most part the straight edge, even the curves look pretty good. Nice and wobbly but the edges here start to get a little bit crazy. So, you need to start coming in and get to a point there to keep all that in line, and just start clean those up. So, you still want those corners to be soft on the inside and the outside. It takes a little bit of time. This is actually part of the process that I really enjoy. This is where I put on some music or documentary, and grab myself a drink, and just go into how and just let my mind going, let it happen. Hopefully what I'm doing here makes sense. Just oops, want to have a little point right there. There we go. [inaudible] away. When you zoom out so as to feel a little bit more natural. You don't have those little sharp warped corners that the roughened tool seems to leave behind. But again this is part of a process that I really enjoy. It's where I get to really focus and craft these things the way I want them to look. Anyway, you get the idea there. So, you're going to end up with this soft edges which mimics the bleeding of the ink on that old vintage paper. It's really nice to, I hope I wasn't sure. We are here with the zoom, so okay. You do the same thing throughout. You can do on all these points right here, and these points right here. Obviously, over here and on the interior points. So, you want to round those up like they can feel nice and soft and the dated edge. You know when you get down to these smaller letters where everything's so crazy, it takes a little bit more time. But I'm going to do this eight here to show you how it really does hangs together. It doesn't really a weird warping thing down here. What you need to compensate for by adding some vector point bringing it back up to where that baseline should really be. Taking those out. Looks like we going to do the same thing here. As long as you leave these structural points exactly where they're at, what you're going to end up with when you zoom out is a structurally sound letter form that feels nice, and weather and aged. See this is really is a sad thing for me. I almost forgot that I was making a video there for a moment. Almost done. So, that seems really janky and warped right now. But when we zoom out, it starts to feel like it's supposed to look. Anyway, sorry this thing's bouncing around like crazy. I'm going to come over here and show you the one that I made earlier, that's the blue print reference. Now, you can see how these letter forms work themselves out. I probably spent a little more time here I'll be honest, crafting these and making them feel a little bit more controlled. But you get the overall idea and hopefully you end up with something a little bit more like this. That is stage one of the texturing process. So, using this as a base, we're going to go into the next stage which is adding texture on top of the letters. I have a few open up here and I'm going to go to this one. You just type. I'll provide these textures to you guys. I'll put them on the site for you to download and use yourself. I have this texture, it's a better texture, and I have to say it's one compound objects. So, I can copy, paste that right over here on top of this image. It really quickly just will cover these whites. See what happens. There you go. You can see some of the texture of that. Of course, the next thing you can do is you can take that texture. I'm just going to double check to make sure that this is a compound path. We're going to use the Unite tool there. Objects, Compound Path, make. I'm thinking no, we need to make this logo one compound path of the selected texture there, Unite, Compound Path. Now, we have a texture on top or logo layer underneath. Make a selection of both. We're going to get this minus front tool right here. Click on that, take a couple of seconds. There you have it. Of course, the funny thing with the texture that's been knocked out in the vector object is the visually on screen. It plugs up a little bit so you don't see quite as many of those vector points, but it should print exactly the way it looked before it was made into one object, as you see right here. I've gone back a step. So again once it's printed, it won't look the way you want it to look. You can to see that when you zoom in. All those vector points are still there. It's just the way it renders it on the screen. So that is one method for texturizing a logo. 9. Raster Textures: Okay. So, the last two texturing tricks I want to show you, actually, the raster texturing tricks, a lot of which I've used on my online portfolio, something you've seen of mine before, I'm sure. We're going to start with this version of the logo where we texturize the edges but nothing on the interior yet. We're going to do a copy, we're going to make a copy, we're going to go with Photoshop. Again, these are files that I'll provide for you guys to play around with. This is one of my old favorites. It's not a particularly big file. There it is at 100 percent, that's about as big as it gets. But for use online, just for making some really pretty vintage looking texture. This has been pretty useful to me over the years and I still use it from time to time. It's made up of two layers, this one's pretty great. If I turn off this background layer, you can see that it's made up of little pixels here that are separated from the background, which is pretty nice. Which means you get to make a selection of them and use them to create textures in ways that are much harder to make if you had a different type of texture in there. Anyway, so we're going to select this background layer here, paste. I pasted this as a smart object but I think we're going to have to reassign that, make it a raster placement. All right. Let's make that small enough to where it fits within that texture. Right about there it looks good. Okay. Yeah, so let's go ahead rasterize that smart object right there. Now we can do what we want to do with it. So, this one's a pretty fun one. You can play around with it in a number of different ways. There's a much heavier texture right there on that one layer, then the layer underneath has a slightly lighter texture, which is a lot of fun to play with, too. So, what I like to do, it's a really simple process. You want to hit the command button. See when I command click this little icon right here. Command click, boom, you've selected that texture, and you can deselect that layer. Make sure you have the logo layer selected and then just hit the delete button. Then hit deselect, and there you've got your texture right there. Now, if you want to go crazy with the texture, we can go to that other layer, the slightly lighter texture layer. Do the same thing, command click on that layer, making sure we still have the logo layer selected in the layers palette. Hit delete, and now we've got some really, really broad texture over the whole thing here. You can play around with either of these textures. You can use one or the other or both, however you see fit. I found that I have interesting results in Photoshop if I take this layer that I've created where I've taken the texture out of this type and make a duplicate of it, and it starts plugging the holes a little bit in the way that I find quite satisfying and interesting. Actually, I think that looks a little bit better than the original version. So, that's quite a nice effect. It feels like a genuine print of some kind. So there you have it. That's a texture trick that I've used many times over the years and it's still me well so far. So, there's one other type of texturing trick that I'd like to show you, and that's the reversed out texture. I have this leather texture here that I've used for a number of different logos also over the years. So, we're going to use the Quinn's logo as it is, even though once we reverse out this eyeball, it's going to feel a little bit strange because it's going to feel like an eyeball but a negative version of it, which isn't going to look right. So, you know what? I'm actually going to deselect that part of it, just for the sake of demonstrating this technique. So, we'll copy that, and then we'll go over to Photoshop, we're going to hit paste. It's actually not going to work at all. I'm going to have to edit this part out. Hold on one second. I don't know why I did that. All right, we'll leave the eyeball in. Okay. So, we're going to come back to the logo as we have it here in Illustrator. We're going to select it, copy. We're going to go over to Photoshop and we're gonna paste it in, mix it in as pixels this time. There we have it. You just see it there. We'll make it a little bit smaller. There we go. So, I've got some layers here I don't need from earlier projects, we'll delete those real quick. So, this one's fun. So, we'll take the logo layer right here, make a selection by command clicking on the layer thumbnail right there. We'll hide it. Select the texture layer. I won't use my key commands, I'll show you on the main menu on top here. We're going to hit Copy, and then we're going to hit Paste and it should create a new layer for us. If I turn off that background layer, you can see that right there, you can see the texture coming through, so that's quite nice. That's a nice stock. Of course, you can always come back over here and select, bring over these textures from this file right here, drag them in, and do the process that we saw earlier and you can add a lot more texture to that that way. But what I'm going to show you here is a little bit different. We're going to turn this layer back on. We're going to make a selection again of this layer. Actually, forgive me. We don't need to do that now, we already have it. There it is. So, we're going to just select this layer right here, and then we're going to go up to Image, Adjust, and then we're going to hit Invert, and boom. This is a really cool effect, I think, because what it does is it retains the texture of the leather, but it makes it look like you've printed some white or some sort of a light gray color on top of it. It feels completely natural, it's a really cool little treatment, I think, which, again, I've used a number of times in the past. Then, you can come back here again and take one of these texture layers, drag it on over, stick it on top. Yeah, again, this one is not the biggest file. It's not a super high res texture but just for the sake of showing you right now. We'll drag that out there. Come in and click right there on the left thumbnail, hide it, select the logo layer, then hit delete, deselect, and that's added a really nice extra level of weathering and aging there, that really just as a whole feels quite natural. I think it's a really handsome texturing effect for a different kind of feel, for that sort of reversed out feel, which I think you'll enjoy. That is it. I hope you guys have enjoyed this process. I hope you got something out of it. It's a lot of information to try and squeeze into the amount of time they gave me to talk about this stuff, so I'm excited to see what you guys come up with. Again, I would love to hear your feedback on what I did, what I created for this project. Yeah, get to it and let's see what happens. Thanks a lot. 10. Addendum: So, I just wanted to take a few minutes and briefly cover some of the things that I wasn't able to cover in the rest of the lesson. It became clear to me really quickly that even adding on 10 or so minutes to the original lesson plan, I wasn't going to be able to share everything I wanted to. So, I'm hoping that maybe I can just briefly talk through some of those things and just cover a bit more, give you a little bit more bang for your buck so to speak. Anyway, so the first experiments I ever did with the sorts of rigid, controlled font-style letters I do a lot of today, they were pretty terrible in a lot of ways but I feel I was able to develop some really good disciplines fairly quickly by forcing myself to study existing fonts and more importantly, to duplicate them in some way. Whether that was literally typing in a letter and eyeballing it and then vectoring it off to the right, just freehand or finding some decades old type style and an old book and creating letters that weren't there in front of me to match that style. Which is to say, if I found a word in an old book like Alabama or something like that, then I would try to imagine what the S would look like, or the E, or the X. That was a way to hone those skills and start to develop more free thinking and creativity in my own work, while at the same time learning the secret roles that people don't really know how to tell you about what makes a good letter a good letter. The kind of roles that we all inherently know because we see it, we look at a good font, we know it's a good font and we know a bad one. Doesn't mean we necessarily know how to create it, especially from our own hats. So anyway, those roles can be super hard to learn unless you learn them by getting them wrong a few times and you get that down just by doing it. So, there's another way of creating good type that I've mentioned in this class already, which is of course just working width single stroke with letter forms, whether it's a script, or a sensor, or anything in between, I think when you work with that single stroke width, let me just pop open a few here that I've done. There we go. So, I think this kind of thing really allows you to focus on the overall structure and shape of letterforms without worrying too much about the trickier, more graceful aspects of type design and how to vector them in a way that feels natural and smooth. So, right here, this is just a few logo lockups that I've done recently where I worked with single stroke widths just click, click, click to create the letterforms. Obviously, had a bit of fun with them beyond the initial vectoring stage but I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. It's a really good tip, it's something I still use. Let me come over here. Even you might have seen the recent packaging design I worked on for Eastsiders and this is where it started out. I started out with just a single stroke width script type thing and tried to do something funky with the R here. That wasn't working out so, I moved on and this one didn't feel quite right either. I wanted to just do something to make it feel a bit more ownable, get away from the types of Rs that I've seen done before and there we go. I ended up with this one here which actually did a nice job of filling in the space left by the S right there. That one looks like it's the same, I'm not sure why I did that. But ultimately, ended up somewhere in this ballpark and this all from just working with the single stroke width thing. I've obviously covered some of this earlier in the class. Takes some practice for sure but there you have it, it's just a really good way to venture into it and it's something that I think will stay with you either way. So, the three tips that I have, the basic tips for developing custom hand skills are, number one, work with single stroke width type. Two, find examples of existing type and then fill out the missing characters, that's actually something I did with the Modern Times logo. I found some type somewhere online and thought, I really like those letters, I wish I could find a font that look like them. Blew them up, vectored them out and then started imagining what the other letters would look like and ended up with a type system that was I pretty happy with. Then number three, recreate fonts that you like, any font that you like and just copy them as best you can just to learn how they're construct it. So, the bottom line is that you learn lettering by doing, not just by looking. You got to do it, you got to mess up and you got to keep on going because it'll come to you in time. I know that for a fact because when I started doing this kind of thing, I wasn't so great, I really wasn't. In fact, I'm going to show you something here which I haven't shown almost anybody ever since I did it. But this is one of my first pieces of script type on the computer that I did for a client and God bless him, he sent me off down a path that has been good for me ever since but I resisted at the time, it wasn't something I wanted to do. There you have it. It's not horrible but it breaks quite a few cardinal rules I think, the first of which I think the screams to me is, you don't usually and again, I'm not into keeping all the rules, I really think that you should be able to- once you've learned the rules about type, that's when you can break them but you got to break them properly and I haven't done that here. The capital E, usually you don't take your initial cap and connect it to the first letter or the second letter of the word, which I've done here. Usually, it should stand alone, you find a way to make it stand alone, don't flow it into that next letter because it's not usually done. It may not be something that you've noticed but do it, do a little search online, look around and see how other people do that kind of thing and you'll start to notice the same thing. There's a ton of vector points in here and they're all over the place. It's a little fat in places where it shouldn't be, a little skewer here, all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But it didn't take too much practice after that. Well, I say it didn't take too much, it took a year or two for me to get really comfortable with it but yeah, you start small and work your way up. Anyway, I think once you've gotten the basics down and you're starting to draw letters with some real knowledge of all the subtleties of type design that make one font bad and another font good, you can really start bending those roles and breaking them and going to town and letting your letters kind of flow and go crazy all over the place, which is why I suggested at the beginning using uppercase Rs and Ks and those letters for your logo because we all love taking that bottom stroke on the uppercase R, and making it loop back and flow into another letter, or come back and underline the word, or something else equally satisfying. But I will say that I think it's important to use restraint and to not force letters to work together in ways that they don't want to, and that happens more times than you think. Let me show you my Gold Top logo here which you may be familiar with. I can't tell you how many times I've had clients come to me and said, "We really want something like your Gold Top logo," but their business name has absolutely no letters that lend themselves to that kind of playfulness in any way. To me, I'm okay with that. As type designers, we have to find ways for our letters to be graceful and interesting without forcing them to do unnatural things. So, the letters in Gold Top came together beautifully but I've almost never had exactly this kind of thing happened with another client with this sort of playfulness quite the same way because you just can't force it. So, don't force it. Use restraint, let your letters play where they want to but also let them be beautiful and stand proud in and of themselves when there's nothing else for them to do in a lockup. I have another example back here which I think I just showed. Here, we'll just look at this one. I think this is a really good example of this kind of thing. I think the C, it's definitely having some fun with it. I think this initial C right here, I think it flows naturally, nicely into this edge, I think that's kind of nice. The R of course, had to bring it down see where it would go. It's always an adventure, you never know where it's going to go until you draw it out and then it came back around and made that crossbar on the edge. It's pushing it a little bit but it doesn't feel like "Oh my god, what was he thinking?" It feels natural. You're starting to create some flow and balance here, it's nice and it's dramatic but I didn't have to make the characters do anything unnatural. But when it came to the word Anglican, I didn't really feel like I was able to recreate that same level of playfulness with the letters. There were a couple attempts to do things with the A but I started to resent the impulse to force it to do anything, and it was all starting to become unbalanced anyway as I started doing stuff right here. So, I had some fun with the G. I just thought "Hey, there's a place to get crazy and do something a little different." Again, it still wasn't trying to come up and joining with the C, or do anything with the A in a way that I felt was really comfortable. It just felt forced and shoe on. So, I just let it do its own solitary thing which is fun and nice, and it also has the bonus of balancing out the composition pretty nicely. It creates an invisible triangle right here, which just balances the whole thing well. So, with a logo as busy as this, I decided that supplementary type like I do on a lot of my logos where you have established dates and the place names and all that kind of stuff, I think it was just overkill because this one already felt busy and crazy in it's own way. So, I let it be and you should certainly do the same in your explorations if your logo leads you down a similar path. Don't add a bunch of stuff if it just seems superfluous. Let the type be the hero. 11. 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