Combination Mark Logo Design: Merging Symbols & Typography for Impact

1. What is a Combination Mark logo?: Hey, and welcome to this mini course on designing combination Marks for brand designers. Now, this is an exclusive module that I'm sharing for my brand designer Pro program with the Skillshare community to help you understand the world of combination marks just a little bit better. Ultimately, I want to share my process and how I think about creating combination marks with other brand designers to help you create better logos for your clients. 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 brand Agency Clementine house to design this logo for a real life business. So I Can await the dive in with you. Let's get started. 2. Amazing Combination Mark Logo Examples: So what actually makes a great combination mark? Well, there are a couple of things that we should probably know before we dive into the world of combination marks. And the three logos that we're going to be looking at in this particular video are Burger King, Dido's, and idas. Now, let's start with Burger King and Dido's first because those two logos are both in the exact same industry, and they both sell fast food, basically. They both sell really cheap and easy food. Now, Burger King has been through a couple of different iterations of their logo, but ultimately, they've kept things pretty simple. It's a burger, and their combination mark has allowed them to use their tie face, which is unique to Burger King, and also the icon of Burger King and also different variations of burger icons, which is unique to the Burger King brand across all environments within their branding. And Burger King gets super creative with their designs and their packaging, for example, their brand codes, which if you don't know what brand codes are, don't worry, we'll get to them a little bit later on in the course are super powerful because once you see the kind of colors together from Burger King, you can instantly recognize their packaging, their, you know, interior design for their actual stores. The outside of the stores, everything is super brand. Now, Did doesn't underhand you can see how they have taken an approach where their logo is really simple, but evokes so much energy, right? So you have the word mark with this little triangle above the eye, which links to the icon, which we'll get to a little bit later on during the process of actually developing icons. But basically, what you see is you see this triangle, which is kind of bolting through the word mark. Those two elements can be used separately. But the entire typeface and the entire logo itself is developed around triangles, which relates to the product itself. Now, these are little details that I really love about logo design because we don't initially see the triangles in the wordmark, for example, but they are everywhere. And that's what makes the actual combination mark look so great. And it also allows the word mark and the icons to be used interchangeably, separately or together. Now, the Adidas logo, I personally think is one of my favorite logos. I think it's up there with the likes of Nike because it tells such a great story. Now, if you don't know the story of the AIDS logo, it's actually pretty simple. It essentially symbolizes the challenges that athletes need to conquer to improve and to become the best athlete that they can be. Now, this is obviously quite similar to the messaging from another brand that you might know. I don't know, maybe Nike. This is one of the things that I really love about logo design. You can take the same message, look at three or four different ways to communicate it, and then pick the one which you personally think is going to work best both from a personal preference standpoint and also from a strategic standpoint hopefully those give you a little bit of insight emigrants to logos which look great as combination marks and also as well, setting us up to the next lesson of the course, which is ultimately to create a combination mark of our own, which I'll see you very soon. 3. Brief & Research: So the first phase of developing an incredible combination mark for a brand as a logo is the discovery phase, okay? So first and foremost, we need to understand the breath of what the client's trying to achieve and what type of perception they want to create within the customer's mind, for the brand. And then we need to go into the discovery phase, which is ultimately research and kind of saying, Okay, we have this message that we want to communicate, but how are we going to communicate it, which is a whole other story. So with that said, in this particular mini course, we're going to be branding a company called Bo Advocate, okay? Now, Boadvocate is a medical company that focuses on data within the medical field. So what they basically do if there's a hospital that needs to really elevate the customer experience, the patient experience, they would use this data to highlight points within the customer experience or the patient experience to make it better for the patient. It's all about making the patient's experience as great as possible. It's a great company. So I want to make sure that we get the branding right. Now when I was talking to the founder of Boadvocate we actually worked together on lots of different branding projects. This is a new project that he's just literally got in touch with me about. With this new project, he wants it to look super clean, he wants it to look techie and he also wants to communicate something about data and something about the data kind of merging or linking together to essentially help to elevate the patient experience. That's ultimately what he wants the logo to communicate in some way, shape, or form. So I thought a combination mark was going to be great because then we could have the word mark and the icon work together and separately, which all icons and wordmark should do the Anyway but I just think as a combination mark, it should look really nice together as well as separate as well. So with that said, let's dive into Pinterest, Google, and also potentially an icon website where we can get a little bit of inspiration for our logo. So starting with Pinterest, I'm looking at some medical icons and logos, and I'll be honest, there is some incredible, incredibly clean work here. For example, if we check this one out here, this one looks absolutely awesome. You can see here we've got health icon, which the medical cross is very synonymous with obviously health medicine and hospitals, obviously, so that's great. We've got the heart icon, which is awesome, so that's kind of showing love and care also have a person icon, so that's even more awesome. And we also have sync. This is obviously I can't just copy this logo, it's not going to work, but I like how this just really ties everything together and it's just super nice. I also like this here and it looks like it's for an IT company or something. But I love how they've got this this link. It's two different ways even three different ways look here. So we've got three different ways within the first search communicating kind of linkage or synergy between synergy is a really nice word, actually, synergy in medicine in the medical field, right? So we've got this one here kind of linking to show synergy. We also have this one here showing kind of a linkage or synergy. Then we also have this one, and there's probably tons more as well down the line. But I feel like having a look at, I mean, even here as well, we see this, there's this kind of thing is really starting to look very attractive to me. Like how this linkage is at least for this particular direction, obviously with a client, what I'd usually do is we'd explore four to six different directions within that particular ideas. We basically have this idea and then we would have maybe three to five other ideas that we would explore. But for the linkage idea of linking together the hospital with the data to ultimately aviate the patient experience, I think this could be a really, really great option. It just looks super clean. It looks techy which is the best thing. It looks like data. If we look at data, Data logo, we kind of get that that little nod, right? So what if we did that? What if we merge together the node with the actual medical cross? We made a medical cross out of nodes. That would look simple. It would take a lot of boxes that we are trying to tick. And I also think that it would actually be fairly unique as well, because I can see that people have tried to kind do something similar. But let's have a little look. Data medical cross. So you can see here somewhat people have tried to do it. I think we can do something that's pretty unique and distinctive without trying to reinvent the wheel. Yeah, no one I don't think anyone's execute super well. I think we can do better. Okay, awesome. So at this point, I have some inspiration for this particular approach and I understand why I want to execute. By no means am I going to copy what's actually on here? I'm just getting inspiration. I'm just looking at, Okay, this is what I like with this. I like how this is linked together. That is coming into the harmony and the synergy of the message that I've already confirmed with the client. I think that if we do this, I think if we create an icon, which looks like a medical cross, but it is made up of little nodes like data, and it's all linking together in a really nice way, we could also even do it, going from left to right or right to left, like going upwards so we can kind of symbolize a little bit like this, but I actually think going from the bottom left to the top, right, it's going to be a little bit better. I also think that with this one, I like how it's really simple, but it's not immediately apparent to me that this is a medical cross, if that makes sense. So I've got a pretty good idea of what I want to achieve with this particular approach. So the next step is ultimately just start sketching. So on that note, I'll see you in the next lesson. See you there. 4. 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 Pinterest and Google, for example. Now it's time to start sketching our combination mark. Okay, so with bio advocate, we are basically looking to create kind of like a cross for medicine, but also kind of something that looks digital, a little bit like this. Now, I didn't like how this had, like, the nodes, but it didn't really look like a cross. You can kind of see it, but it's not as kind of evidence. So I don't want to be that kind of indirect about it. I wanted to look like a cross like this, a little bit like this. So let's start there. At this point, basically what I'm looking to do is I look to develop two phases. So this is phase one. This is phase two in regards to sketches, okay? And what I'm looking to do with these two different phases is first phase is I will do about 20 sketches, usually for a client, but obviously in this mini course, I'm just going to do like maybe four or five or something like that. Then once I see potential in one of those sketches, I'll then move on to the next phase, which is, okay, I need to refine this sketch. I need to make it a little bit better, okay? So we're going to start with the cross because that's ultimately what we want to develop our entire brand mark around. And at this point, I'm not trying to paint the mona lisa, right? I'm literally just drawing a really simple shape and just seeing where my hands take me, okay? I know what I want to achieve, but I'm not sure how to execute it or get there yet, okay? So I'm just looking here at this one, and there's kind of like little parts to it. So I'm wondering, Okay, let's try Let's try using maybe smaller squares and then seeing how we can kind of link everything together. And again, this is, like, the quickest of quick at this phase, just to try and get things in place, just to see how things look. Because at this moment in time, we don't even know which approach is going to be best. Okay. I feel like this isn't going to be, like, super, super scalable, right? Like, you can see here, this is a lot of squares, by the way. I don't know why I'm putting myself through this torture. But, um, yeah, I think this looks absolutely horrendous. There's so many squares. I can kind of understand now why they've only did, like, eight by eight. Okay, so this is like 12 by 12, which is far too much, okay? I kind of know that we need to use some sort of element. So, for example, we need something which is going to ultimately, create the shape of the actual cross, but I'm not sure what it is. Let's try again. But let's just try a little bit different. Let's go really light with this, just so we can kind of create some sort of shape. And what if we like, for example, did circles, but like three circles. So three, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And again, these are not supposed to be anything special. And you'll see by the end, once we get into Illustrator, we can actually start to look at, you know, what's working best but I just don't want to spend too much time at this point. I'm just trying to play around with ideas. Don't get too married to your sketches. Some of the best designers in the world have terrible sketches. And I'm not one of the best designers in the world, but I do have terrible sketches. So let's just look at this and then think, Okay, with this one, they kind of have something like linking between them. So I'm not sure if, like, a straight line is gonna work, but what if we did, like, kind of, like, Oh, wait a second. Okay. What if we had something like this? Where we are basically kind of linking them up, kind of, like, like if we actually sketched it bigger like this, it would be like that. It would kind of be like yeah, like a node, like a connector thing, like a data thing. A little bit a little bit like this, almost. Yeah, a little bit like that. But kind of like this. And here, I've kind of got it going like, like, side to side. But what if we did it either up, like going upwards or maybe, I don't know, maybe diagonal or something? Okay. I mean, that's an option. Okay, so we've got that. I like that. Let's move on to another one. We've got this, as well. Okay, we've got this. So let's maybe do something. Can we kind of, like, link two together, maybe. Like link two together just to kind of see what it looks like, and maybe maybe curve this or something? Let's see. So we've got this we can just curve that. Code this. Code this. The, the curve that maybe. Okay. Let's do that. Then here. Curve that. Cove this. There we go. This should be pretty decent, I think. Okay, and then let's just thicken this up a little bit and get this under under wraps. Okay. Okay. Obviously, this wouldn't be in there. Maybe it would. Maybe have a little bit of a tint? I think this is a little bit too similar to other logos and stuff that are out there, so I'm not sure if I want to go with it, but it definitely doesn't look bad. It just doesn't look very unique or distinctive at all. It doesn't really tell the story of data very well, either. Okay. Um, okay, I'm gonna just leave that one. I don't really like that one, to be honest. This is a little bit crazy. I'm going to take this one, and I'm going to ultimately start to look at how I can kind of piece this together. I want to see how it looks when I'm kind of doing it, like, upwards. And I think, like, up to the so improvement typically goes from the bottom left to the top, right, so I'm going to kind of go with that. Now, we've got that. Now let's look at creating a nice medical cross. Just to make things look a little bit cleaner. Okay. And then we basically need to should probably get a ruler for this, actually. Then let's bring a ruler in and then just do some sketches. That's the center. Just do that. Okay. Okay, yeah, yeah. That's good. I like that. Okay. We can just guesstimate at this point we don't really need to be super precise. Okay. And then, so we've kind of got the squares all kind of laid out. Now we can start to put the circles in the actual squares and start, like, linking things together. So again, just putting the circles in the squares and trying to see how this can make sense. And this could change a little bit when we get to the illustrator stage, which is next. But at this point, I'm literally just trying to feel how many circles make sense for the actual logo. I mean, this is going to be much easier to develop and to kind of refine when we get to the next stage of the process, which is ultimately going to allow us to move circles around pretty freely. But for this stage, I just want to see if it's a feasible concept. Okay. So we've got that. Let's remove all of these lines, just so we've got a nice clean palette to work with. So we've got a nice, clean shape to work with. And then once we've done that, then we can start to kind of look at how we can link all of these circles up to kind of showcase the data aspect. So if we're going to be doing from left to right, obviously, this can't link to anything, but this can. So we can maybe do this. Okay. And then we can link this one to this one. Okay. And then this one would ultimately link to this one. Now, I see at the moment, this is a lot further away than this. So this is just a sketch at this point. But you can see how this could make sense. I'm not sure if that would overlap with that or not. Probably, right? But that obviously wouldn't overlap with that, okay? Okay, I'm starting to see how this could potentially come together. It's actually starting to look not clean, but it's starting to make sense. Okay. There we go. Okay. I'm pretty happy with how this is coming out, so I'm pretty confident that we can take this to the next stage of the process. And I think if we create something, in Illustrator. Using this approach? I think it should look pretty good. Okay, so I'm actually really happy with how this logo is coming together right now for bio Advocate. I think it's clean. I think it's unique. I think it tells a story of both data and medical. I think it's ready for the next step of the process, which is ultimately to take this design and this sketch and take it into the digital format, which is ultimately Illustrator, D Illustrator. So let's take it in there. Let's tie it up. Let's add a word mark. Let's start to add color to the actual brand. I canon't wait, okay? Awesome. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Digitising & Perfecting Your Design on Adobe Illustrator: It's finally time to take the design for bio advocate and put it inside Illustrator so we can really start making it look professional and cleaning and tightening things up. And so with that said, let's dive in Illustrator. Okay, so our sketch is inside Illustrator. How do we create a logo from this? Well, first step is to basically start to create a structure, right? So we want to obviously make it look nice and tidy. So what I would probably do is I would create a cross which isn't difficult even for me. There we go. And then what I would do is I just create an outline and then I'd probably create just kind of like here. I know it might be a little bit hard to see right now, but I will make it a little bit more visible in just 2 seconds. Okay, there we go. So if I just make that red, just to show you and then just heighten up the thickness slightly. All I want are just guides for where the circle should go. Okay. So we've just got a very brief outline of where the circle should go for the actual logo to look and feel tidy. So you can see here, for example. This wouldn't work. It needs to be a perfect balance of each line, right? So here, look. I'm just going to make these here. And by doing this, it's just going to save you a ton of time later on with arranging the circles if you were doing this logo for either a client or for somebody else. All I'm going to do now is I'm just going to add this over this side, add it again over this side, and then we should have the perfect format for this particular logo. So we can build it right first time and then we don't have to do it again and again and again. There we go. I think we just need to extend these maybe a little bit both ways, and then we are good to rock and roll. There we go. Okay, perfect. We've got that. We've got this. We have our red lines showing us where to go, what to do. I got these here. There we go. Happy. Now, what I can do now is I can just move this to the side. I can move my guide over here. Get rid of that square there. Okay. Now, with this, I know for a fact that I want circles in each of these boxes, but none of the other ones. So how am I going to do that? Well, the first way is going to be to basically create the actual circles and figure out how big I actually want them to be. So I think maybe around this size to start off with, potentially. Listen, there's probably far faster ways to do this on Illustrator. But the reality is, I am not interested in being super quick on Illustrator and saving, you know, seconds here and seconds there. It can definitely help. I just want to make sure that the logos are perfect, and I want to make sure that I can earn a really great living from doing logo design. So at this point, I think the best thing to do will just be to marry this on top of you once you do it once, I want you to do it perfectly. There we go, take this away. Then you can just duplicate it. It should be the same for every single logo. It should be the same for every single square that you do afterwards. There we go. Second, there we go. We're going to know if I do this, then that should give me the logo exactly where I want it to be. You can do this as being transparent or something, but, you know, it doesn't really make a whole lot of difference as long as you've got a decent IPO it's just literally a case now of adding that to the other sections, making sure it's even, doing it again. There we go. And again, there's going to be faster ways to do this. But to be completely brutally honest, I do not care. Okay, let me go. Do that again. Not that I should probably just get these ones, to be honest and just save myself a time. There we go. This one here. Now we are. So we now have the circles in the right place for this particular logo. Now, I'm going to save this because I know for a fact that I'm probably going to either have to change the size of the circles or do some other crazy stuff. But basically, all I need to do now to finish this logo is create the kind of the connection between them, and then I should be pretty much good to go. So I'm going to get rid of this because I don't need this anymore. All I know is that the actual connectors need to go from the bottom left to the top. So I actually don't need these boxes anymore, either. Let's start getting rid of these. Should give us a little bit more space to work with. There we go. So now it's just a case of actually getting these elements in between. So how do we do that? Well, there's a couple of ways that we could do it. One of the ways that we can do it is to basically get two circles cause everything's going to be the same, ultimately. If these two were connected, then these two are going to be connected, the exact same. The shape in between them is going to be the exact same. So the best way to do it, I think, is probably going to be to get those out here. Then we might have to make them a little bit bigger potentially. I'm not sure. Let's see. But then basically just get a longer version of that and then just create a connection using this. There we go. That's one. Here's two. Now, I think this is going to be a little bit too much, to be completely brutally honest? Because if you can see how thick that is, that's quite thick, and that is not a lot of space. So, for example, if we put this in here, it doesn't leave a whole lot of space for everything else, right? So we need to make it a little bit smaller. So let's tighten this up a little bit. Tighten this up. Tighten that up. There we go. So I just take this replicate this. Now you can see, it's going to be a lot nicer. See here? See how the difference in space if this was colored in. Okay. So we got that we got that we got that. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to at a circle around. I'm going to make everything. And again, I'm just saving myself here because I know for a fine fact, I'm gonna end up making mistakes, and, yeah, it's not gonna be pretty guys. I'm telling you. So we've got this, we've got this, we've got this. I'm gonna divide everything, then I'm gonna tie you up afterwards. Again, there's probably fastest ways to do this. I genuinely do not care. Okay. Got that? That's decent. Okay, there's this little bit like just popping out here and I'm not sure where it's coming from. But I'm not sure. Okay. I'm just going to try and get this away from those because that's where things are playing up a little bit. Okay. Whatever. We've got this here. At the moment, it needs some tender loving care, basically. So now we've just united everything using the Unite tool, and now we're just going to get in there, check the edges and tidy things up. So I'm not actually sure. Oh, that's the reason why it's a little bit weird. Okay, fair enough. So it wasn't actually wasn't actually there wasn't actually anything wrong with it. I just looked a little bit weird because of that. Okay. There's a little thing here? That is getting pulled out to smooth it off. Here we go. No, that's pretty much perfect. This here is perfect. There we go. And we literally just have to do the same with the other side, and then we are ready to rock and roll, I think. There we go. Okay, so now we pretty much have the actual shape ready. It's now just a case of getting the shape and put it inside the logo. Now, you can watch me do this, but it will be 1 million times easier if we just cut this out and just showed you the end result because it's not going to be anything super duper interesting. It's literally just going to be me adding the shape to every single circle. In this logo. So yeah, I'm going to connect everything, and then I will probably see you in a couple of seconds through the magic of time travel. Okay, so by the power of time travel, we are now back in to the process. I've managed to bring everything together, although it didn't take as long as I thought to be completely honest. Now we have the icon. I mean, you could go into, you know, the fact that these could be a lot smoother. You know, the balls could be exactly the right size to fit inside these little crevices. 100%, you can fiddle around with that as much as your heart desires. For this particular lesson, I want to keep things as short and sweet as possible so that we can move on to creating a combination mark. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a really quick just like a navy color maybe someone like that. Okay, perfect. And then, obviously, we know that red and blue go really well together. Just kidding. Let's do something. Bum, bum, bum. Let's just oh, yeah, it looks fine. Okay, perfect. Maybe do that a little bit darker, just create a little bit more contrast, actually. Perfect. So now we have the actual logo there. Now we need to ultimately pair it with your wordmark, right? So by your advocate. Obviously with a word mark, you can make them as complex or as simple as you like. For this, I'm just going to create something that's pretty simple just so we can understand how to merge them together. So for this, we're just going to create something really simple just so we can merge things together. So we're going to use Montserrat, maybe. Use Monserrat. Okay, we're going to use two different thicknesses. We got B on advocate a different words in the name. Looks cool. Perfect. Let's do that. Now it's just a case of actually formatting this logo with this word mark. Let's do that. So how do we do that? We take the actual logo. We will save it, put it at the top, so we can edit it if we need to. We then create a outline. And then we also make it 20% because then we also make it 20% because then I can show you why I'm doing what I'm doing. We do this, we do this, we do this. I'm just putting the Ds on top of each other so it's all consistent. I'll do it once more. So what you want is you want to have three times the word mark for the icon. So this is the actual size of it here. You'll do the size is about three times the gallon. I'm just doing it kind of really quick for you. So that's the first thing. And then in regards to the height from the word mark, you would literally just that's what it's currently like now. You can see it's a little bit far away. What you want is you want it to be basically half of this. So what you want is you want to take this and then essentially half it. It's about here, right? If we half it, that will give us pretty much the perfect space for this to go above this. We've got the perfect space and the perfect height. There we go. You can see here the difference basically. I mean, it could kind of come down to personal preference as well, I suppose, but I just think this one looks a little bit better. I think it looks a little bit closer. It feels like they're more together. This one it kind of feels like the icons kind of floating away. Do you have to do it with this exact formation? No, you don't. But you can use this as kind of like a guideline, right? Now, what if you do here kind of a horizontal version of the logo? That's another story, right? Okay. So the best way to do it in my humble opinion is to take the word mark again. I think you did. And we'll just get rid of that for the moment. And we will stack them on top of each other until we've got four. There we go. Then all we do is usually use boxes, but I actually just want to show you using the actual word mark itself just to get the message across. So we've got this here. I'm going to put this as 20 just so you can actually see what's happening. So you've got these here. I'll use the D because then the Ds kind of a little bit easier to manage. There's kind of like a straight line there to use. Okay, so now we've got that. Now we're going to do it this way and basically create different sections here. So we can get the lines. Then this ultimately gives us the boxes to create our sizing. And you don't actually need to use them, to be honest, you can just use this, but all I would do is I just put it from the D here to the D here, and this is square as well, so it makes it a little bit easier. But I'm basically doing is the exact same thing. D to the top of the D, there's another one here, which is the gap, then afterwards, you can see that if we took this and this, not this and this, but this and this We have that there and it looks not bad. All we would need to do is just basically center it. It looks pretty good. But then if you just literally take it halfway, and again, I'll just do this by eye just to respect your time. And you can basically get it to a point where it just looks a little bit closer, a little bit better. And a little bit more together as a combination mark, ultimately. There we go. Now you have the combination mark as a horizontal and also a vertical format, which, you know, they both look good. You can use the word mark by itself if you want to. You could also make the word mark a little bit more distinctive if you really wanted to. You could add some little, you know, frills or curves or something to make it look really good. But ultimately, both can be used pretty effortlessly, either together or separately, which is ultimately what a combination mark is. And yeah, I hope you enjoy this lesson. I hope you took away some value from the lesson, and I look forward to seeing you in a future one. So on that note, I'll see you soon. Bye. 6. 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.