Abstract Logo Design: Crafting Unique & Meaningful Brand Marks

1. What is a Abstract logo?: Hey, welcome to this mini abstract logo design course teaching brand designers how to create incredible abstract logos and taking you through the process so you can design better abstract logos for your clients. I'm sharing this exclusive module for my brand designer Pro program on Skillshare to help brand designers to understand the world of abstract logo design, just that little bit better. Now, this logo that we're about to design together is a real life project for a real life client. And I'm actually being hired through my branding agency, Clementine how to design this logo for a real life business. So I Can Await the div in with you. Let's get started. 2. Brief & Research: Start to the abstract low design process all begins with understanding the brief and doing some research. We need to generate some IDs. Okay? Now, for the real life client project that we're going to be developing today in this very mini course, we're going to be looking at developing a logo for a brand called lumen. Now, Illumin essentially creates strategic presentations for clients. So people who are looking for investments or startups who are looking to ultimately employ people. We are developing a brand identity for Illumin. Now, the first thing I'm going to do when I start to speak to the client and understand their brief is I want to narrow them down to a couple of directions or ideas that they think might work for their logo. Because obviously, when you're working with a client, you want to make sure that you develop a logo which can work strategically and that makes them look professional and good. But also you need to make sure that you actually develop a logo that they like. That's the two things that you're trying to balance at all times. When I was speaking to the founder of Illumin, she said that she wanted something that was pretty minimal, quite simple, which is good because abstract logos are better when they're minimal. She also wanted something which was clever, and she also wanted something which kind of suggested presentation, but not in a super obvious way because that would be a pictorial logo, but she also wanted something to suggest that we could help to elevate the client's business or presentation by developing a really strategically well designed presentation for. So we're going to dive into Pinterest and Google and basically get some ideas for this. So let's just start with presentation logo, okay? Let's just get some ideas. Okay? There is literally nothing here, okay? Let's go down here. Okay. This isn't really given me a whole lot of promise, to be honest. There's nothing really here that I can either use or even discuss with you. So, okay, no problem at all. That's fine. Pinterest is not going to help us here. Let's move on to Google images, okay? So presentation logo. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Now, when I'm looking at these icons and these existing logos, I'm looking for ways to communicate the thing that I want to communicate, which is ultimately presentations and elevation, right? That's the idea that the founder has said is kind of, you know, what she wants to communicate. So I'm like, Okay. How do I communicate elevation visually and how do I communicate presentations visually? That's what I'm looking for. And a really great place to find icons in universally understood icons. So for example, if you put this icon in front of anyone in the world, they would know exactly what it's trying to say. So if I go to this particular website called Flat icon and put presentation that is not how you spelled presentation, but you get the idea. We're starting to see this square kind of pop up again and again and again. Specifically, I really like, and this is kind of the whole discovery phase. I really like this kind of curved square. Because that looks really, really cool. I really, really like that. I think that looks awesome. Okay. Perfect. So I want to pop this into my little folder here. And it doesn't matter at this point, whether it's a screenshot or whatever, I'm just taking the ideas so that I can then come back to them a little bit later on. Okay? Here as well. I'm going to take this Perfect. Okay. I'm actually just storing ideas. That's all I'm doing. I'm just storing ideas there just so I can understand. Okay. In terms of presentation, I'm pretty happy with what I have, okay? I'm pretty happy with where I am right now and how to communicate presentation. In a really simple and minimal way. Okay? So let's move on to elevation. Let's look at elevation. Also as well, when you're talking about elevation, elevation can be an indirect way to say a lot of other things, like improvement or clarity or, you know, elevating, obviously, levitation, which obviously isn't that relevant, but a really great thing that you can do if you're struggling to find things that are relevant to the thing that you're actually looking to communicate. Elevation, synonyms or you could say other words. And what this is going to do is going to give me other words. So ascent, uplift, rise. Okay, so now we're getting somewhere. How can we communicate elevation? It's going to be going up or it's going to be going kind of, you know, bigger or something. There needs to be a way to communicate improvement in a visual sense, using the visual language, right? Okay, so let's just have a little look at elevation. Okay, so we're getting elevators, which is obviously not what we want, okay? Improvement. Let's help it out a little bit. We're getting somewhere with this. Obviously, this is a kind of a paid thing, but we have this upwards trajectory thing going on. We've got this as well, which is obviously extremely it doesn't matter if that little piece of wooden is in there as well. That doesn't matter at all. I'm literally just collecting ideas just as inspiration. We've got this one, which is a little bit cleaner, I think. At this point in time, I basically have these images. And this is literally what I do for pretty much every single direction for the client. So for example, with this client, I will probably do, depending on the package that they choose, I have packages which range from four logo designs to eight logo designs, which is usually a little bit too much to be honest. Four to six is usually enough. That will give me this direction and then three more directions to explore, this one being presentations and elevation, and then another one might be, I and presentations on transparency, which will obviously be a slightly different approach, which then I would just search for how to communicate transparency, which I think is fairly obvious. And when you confirm the direction of the logo and the message that you're trying to communicate before you actually go and do the research and the discovery, and then sketch and then digitize and then showcase, there's never going to be a situation where the client is like, Nat, this logos terrible. It's not what I expected. As long as you follow this process, you can't really go far. It is kind of like little milestones along the journey. Every single time that I've went away from the process and tried to think I was too good for the process, which doesn't happen very often now because I understand how bad I am when I don't follow a process, it always ended badly. So at this point, I am literally just looking through the different icons which can communicate, elevation and presentation. Those are the two things. I don't want to overcomplicate it. It's an abstract logo. It should communicate either one or two things. That's literally it. I understand what it is going to be in play here, okay? You can literally see the shape which is consistent. And if I use a shape like this, we should be able to get some form of instant perception that this is a presentation focused company that develops presentations for clients, right? That should be pretty obvious from just looking at the icon. If you look at this, there's a couple of different ways that we can focus on communicating, elevation or improvement or something like that. So at this point, I have the ideas and I understand kind of what I need to include. I need to bring it together now so that it geometrically makes sense so that kind of the shapes look nice together. I need to make sure that it looks aesthetically pleasing. I also need to look at, you know, what thickness is the icon, so it kind of marries well with the word mark. So at this point, I'm going to keep my images, and I'm going to ultimately move on to the next stage of the process, which is sketching, okay? So on that note, I will see you in that video. See you soon. 3. Sketching Your Logo Ideas: So now we understand the brief and we've done the research, and we have some inspiration that we've captured from Pintest and Google, for example. Now it's time to start sketching our abstract logo. So if we actually look at the icons that I've collected for lumen, you can see that we have kind of the presentation icons here, which are essentially something like, what, like, a square like this. Something a little bit similar to this. And then we also have this sort of upwards or kind of elevation, you know, like getting bigger, getting more. And I'm wondering how we can actually communicate that in the actual icon. So we're going to look at, okay, how can we do it? We could maybe do it in this sense here. Okay, so I mean, this is kind of Okay, that doesn't really work, but at this point in time, all we're doing is simply exploring different options. So I'm not even really thinking about what I'm doing. I'm just looking at different ways that I can interject this message with this type of shape for presentation. That's all I'm doing. And if you can do that and just kind of take the pressure off it, it actually makes things a lot easier. So again, I'm just using this presentation icon to look at different ways to ultimately communicate improvement or better Okay, this doesn't look too bad. I actually wanted to be a little bit more square and kind of compact, but you can see kind of where it's going. Um, maybe inside? No. Okay. Um, yeah, that doesn't really communicate the improvement or the enhancement or the cla kind of the clarity if this was kind of transparent potentially, maybe, but, okay, let's just do another one. Ah, bum, bum, bum, bum bigger, okay. Like this, maybe? It is not bad, but again, I think we would need some sort of transparency here just to kind of bring things together. I mean, usually, what I would do is I would look at kind of maybe 20 different options for each direction. So kind of like 80 little quick sketches like this. But for the purpose of this little mini course, I just want to show you kind of how I'm thinking about things. So we can bring something together that looks half decent, okay? So again, I'm looking at I'm looking at this one, which I like how it sort of has, like, a structure. It kind of looks like this is the first slide, and this is the second slide, and this is the third slide. So it's kind of like a progress. It's kind of like you're progressively getting better or you're progressively improving with the actual slides that you're getting developed for you. I'm wondering, is it worthwhile maybe looking at so this is kind of like phase one of the development process, right? Like I'm literally just looking at the initial ideas. And again, I would do like 20 different ideas for this, and then I would go on to phase two, which is basically picking one or two of these ideas and then developing it further, doing different variations of it. So for example, I'm going to choose this one, and I'm going to look at, okay, this is too kind of rectangular. This is, again, too rectangular, but I like the kind of the message of it. This is a little bit too. From a transparency standpoint, this one isn't going to work. I like this one out of all of them a little bit more than the others. So I'm going to develop this one a little bit more, okay? So we're going to take this, and we're going to look at different options, so maybe three different options. So, okay, so let's so we're looking at, like, progressively getting better. Okay? So what about this? We kind of have that, and then we have, like, the three different presentations. But that kind of communicates getting bigger, right? So we kind of have that progression of getting bigger or better, okay. These could be potentially more transparent than So, okay, so this gets less transparent. So this is more kind of solid. This is, like, maybe like 90% transparency, and this one's 80, so they're still pretty solid, but this one's 100. So it kind of, like, gradually becomes, like, better or clearer or okay, that's making a little bit more sense. It's a little bit long, though. It's a little bit too long. So let's try and compact that a little bit. Okay, so let's do this. Let's do the last one first. Then we'll work backwards from there, okay? And then we'll maybe curb these slightly just to see how they look. Okay. I just do this. And again, these are just quick sketches. We're not trying to create a masterpiece here. We're just trying to get the message communicated in a nice simple way to start off with, okay? Okay, okay, okay. So we've got that there. That's the first one. What if we did something like this, potentially? You can see now we're starting to be a little bit more kind of careful with where we're putting the actual pencil, but still not too careful. Okay? Then what if we did this? Just to show a little bit more structure. Okay, I mean, you can kind of see where it's showing a little bit of potential here. Obviously, this needs to be curved again, so let's curve this. Okay, so we've got the two messages. We have the presentation. And although we're not using these specific shapes, we are still looking at kind of showcasing improvement or progression or something like that. Then let's put another one there just for the time being. Okay. So, I mean, this isn't perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but I definitely like how this is kind of starting to look. It's starting to look a lot better. Like, this is actually a pretty decent a pretty decent idea, I think. Like, it isn't actually a bad idea. What I would like to look at just as like an additional little idea, which I've just had, and this is fine just explore these different ideas is when I'm looking at this, I'm kind of seeing this presentation slide here. So, what if we looked at doing like a presentation slide like this? So there's a presentation slide here, and then maybe doing, I don't know. Then maybe doing another one here. There may be another one on top. This could look terrible or it could look good. I'm not 100% sure. I don't think it's gonna look as clean as the other one. Okay. So I'm looking at this now, and I'm like, Okay, it was I'm glad I exploreed it, but Uh yeah, I'm not in love with it. I'm not in love with it, to be honest. I think there's too many parts. It doesn't look as clean. Okay, let's knock that out. I think this one has the best potential at the moment. It looks clean. It looks it looks cool. I don't like this. I would probably refine this a little bit. I'll just get rid of that just because it's currently There we go. That looks a little bit better. Okay. I mean, we're kind of at a place where I think I think that looks okay. You know, if we look at that. So it's communicating improvement, it's communicating presentation. And I think that this could be a real contender. Okay, so I'm actually really happy with how this logo for lumen is coming together. I love how simple it is. I love how it tells a story. I love how clean and modern it looks, but it also looks a little bitraditional. I'm not sure if it's going to go well with a Sam seraphon or a serapon yet. We're going to kind of figure that out afterwards. We don't need to figure that out right now, but the main thing is the icon tells a great story, and ultimately, that's all that matters at this point. We're just trying to ultimately showcase that the icon tells a story of the brand and something that can tie into the copy of the website, the story of the brand, all that good stuff. So, yeah, let's get this digital. Let's get an Illustrator. Let's start to play around with things, and yeah, we'll see how things go from there. Anyway, I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Digitising & Perfecting Your Design on Adobe Illustrator: Okay, so we've got a great design for Illumin, and now it's time to dive into Adobe Illustrator so we can start really bringing the logo to life. And so with that said, let's dive into Illustrator. Okay, so now we have our sketch for our logo for Illumin inside Illustrator. Now it's just a simple case of recreating it and seeing if it works once it's been kind of digitized. So we have the presentation. We would then just create, like, a nice curve on that presentation, and then just kind of replicate, I guess. Do we want it? Okay, so we're not actually sure. Okay, so let's do this. We'll just get it to stage like that. Then let's just put it as like 90. That doesn't work. 50, 80? I mean, it kind of looks a little bit better, right? It does look better than what it did before, but let's do it like 70 and 40. Okay. Okay. So it looks okay with all of them the same size, but what I want to try is what if this one is just slightly big? What if this one's slightly bigger? And then if this one's slightly bigger, it actually looks like they're getting bigger. That's far more interesting, right? That's far more interesting because here here there's depth through color and through transparency, but there's no depth through size. I think this one looks 1 million times better. Okay. Then what if we actually pull them in a little bit tighter? I want to actually see them side by side so I can actually decide which I like best. So pull that in a little bit. Pull it in a little bit. What I don't like is I do not like how they don't fit together, if that makes sense. That doesn't look good at all, no. Let's just tighten them up a little bit. No should. Give us a little bit of an idea as to what it looks like with a word mark. Let's get a word mark. There you go. And then Then let's get the pattern, which I created for lumen in a previous lesson. Or in the lesson that you are going to get when you get to the color phase of brand designer Pro. We've got this Got that. If we change this to white, it starts to look a lot better. I still don't like how. I don't I think this needs to be like high 95 or something, or even 100 to be completely brutally honest. I doesn't quite look good at 95. Okay. Okay, I can live with that. I can live with that. Okay. Now, I think all we need to do now is just to size it up. Maybe make it a little bit more. Maybe make it a little bit more kind of flat as well. Like that a little bit. Instead of being too, like, vertical, just make things a little bit flatter. That looks a lot more realistic, I think. I think that looks a lot better. Okay. Okay. Let's see how this looks with. On top? Okay. It looks good on top, okay? Awesome. This still looks like it's kind of in front of the other one, which I do not like at all. This needs to be less. This needs to be like maybe 25 or something. There we go. Now it looks a lot more. Actually, I think it's because of the Okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to divide those, and then I'm going to connect this with this, and then I'm going to add the transparency because at the moment, just ain't do enough for me. It's a little bit too Yeah, I was just cutting into it a little bit too much. It just looked a little bit weird. I think we can definitely put another little bit to maybe 30 or something. Now we've got that. Yeah, I think that looks a lot better. It looks 1 million times better, actually. Because if there's just too much going on, it's just not going to look very good. Okay. Awesome. So now we have this one. And then we can also add this as a horizontal mark as well? If you wanted to. Now, obviously, we could spend more time, you know, fiddling around with this, making it perfect, but all I wanted to get across in this little mini course is how to take an idea and then ultimately create a digital polished version which looks and feels great without having to, you know, make it super complicated. Just keep it simple. This is ultimately what brand designer Pro is all about. It's all about creating these logos and brand identities which can help the client look super credible, super established to tell a story with their brand identity and their visual expression without having to cost thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, right? So, ultimately, I hope this has been helpful. I hope you have kind of picked up a couple of things from just watching my process over the past couple of lessons. Yeah, hopefully, I'll see you again in the future lesson. I'll see you soon. 5. It's Project Time!: Teaching brand designers and working with them to improve their skills and help them build more profitable businesses is by far the thing that I'm most passionate about. And just seeing the designer become more confident and more capable and also see them have more success with their design business, it brings me so much fulfillment, and I'm so grateful to be in a position where I can help brand designers on a personal basis. Pretty much every single day. Now, if you are an ambitious brand designer and you really want to accelerate your learning and become the best brand designer you can be, I love to invite you into our community, the brand design abroad community, to help you to get to where you want to be as a brand designer and building your brand design business. I really do put a lot of effort into making the content look great and also trying to be as informative and as helpful as possible to help support brand designers to ultimately be the best version of themselves. I'd love you to share one of your logos that you've designed that you're super proud of as a project this course. That way I can give you some personalized feedback to really help to accelerate your learning and just add a little bit more value after you've taken the course. Anyway, I just want to really say that I'm super grateful for you spending the time, watching this course, and yeah, hopefully we'll connect again sometime in the future. Anyway, I'll see you very soon. Take.