Create a Unique and Professional Wordmark Logo

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Wordmark logos are a powerful and often overlooked solution for many brands. Some of the biggest, most successful brands in the world have skillfully used them. They can be extremely effective, combining the meaning behind their name with a tone and personality crafted in their design. It could be easy to think that, with less elements to design, wordmark logos are easier. But actually, I think this presents more of a challenge for designers because all of the attention goes to just a few key details which then have to be absolutely perfect. [MUSIC] How can you craft the correct tone in a wordmark logo? How can you ensure your wordmark is unique and memorable without breaking design rule? How can you create a simple but effective sub-mark to give your brand that bit more versatility in certain situations? I'll show you exactly how to do each of those things in this class. [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Jason Miller, I'm a freelance graphic designer based in London. Although I'm London-based, I've had the privilege of working for clients all across the globe, specializing in brand identity design and I've been doing this successfully as a freelancer for over 12 years now, five of those years with no need for any agency work, clients that have been all my own. This class is ideal for designers of really any skill level because we will look at principles that can be applied at different stages in your career. I'll be taking you through my full design process using Adobe Illustrator CC, although, you can follow along in a software of your choice. I will assume you already have a good idea of the design brief, the tone and the messaging that's needed to reach your target audience. Lastly, we need to explore options, and we'll do that using existing fonts from various boundaries as a starting point. Fonts each have a certain tone and personality and so there's a skill involved with picking something that really fits. Then once we've shortlisted our starting fonts, I'll show you a range of different techniques you can use to manipulate and customize these further. If you're doing this for the first time, please be sure to create your own version of a wordmark logo as you follow along. I'm ready for this. When you're ready, let's get started. 2. Course Project: [MUSIC] I believe the absolute best way to learn new skills is to start putting them into practice. That's why you could just watch this course and get some ideas, some inspiration to get the best out of it, see if you can follow along with your own word-mark logo project. Please use either a real brief if you have one that would be great, or you can create a fictional one just to follow along with this project. Either way, try to consider not only the industry of your brand, but its target audience, your key messages, and what this brand will want to convey. The more detailed and realistic your brief, the easier you'll find it to make decisions later on in the class. I'm going to walk you through not just the theory behind creating a strong word-mark, but all tips and techniques that you can follow along with, and hopefully, you can adapt these and apply them to your project to create something really special. When you're ready, fire up illustrator or something similar and I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. Selecting Fonts: [MUSIC] Now, I know some designers prefer to start by sketching out ideas and then perhaps looking for similar fonts or with larger budgets, perhaps even creating their own font from scratch. But that's not what we're going to do this time. We'll assume that for this project, we already know we're going down the route of a word mark logo. Initially, we're going to focus not on sketching, but I'm trying to identify the right style and tone for the wording. Personally, I've found it's much more efficient if I dive straight into shopping around on my favorite font foundries to find something appropriate, make a shortlist, and then refine that later. Before we dive in, let me give you just a quick background on my brief, the brief I'm going to be working through in this class and we'll be diving in and out of the solutions that I develop. This is for a high-end clothing brand, it's called Maison Magrissi. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's an Italian brand. Here we have a brand messages. This gives you some idea and I go in my other classes, if you're interested into a lot more depth about how to put something like this together and how to really nail your strategy before we even get to the designing stage. But here are our key messages, the primary message that really must come across in the logo. We'd hope that the key messages here, they're reflected in the tone for the style, the design solution we come up with for the logo. Supporting messages, those are bonuses if we can get any of these across as well. This is the kind of style and tone that we've agreed on for the brand. I'll be referring to this in your class project, come up with something as detailed as you can. Then at least you've got a benchmark to measure the designs you create against as we come to do this. Let's start sourcing fonts. Ultimately, this is what we want to end up with. Here's one I made earlier, a shortlist. This is to be deleted down. Maybe your shortlist would consist of six, seven, eight fonts that you want to play with. I'd be deleting the weakest ones from here. But basically, we want to go on the web to various font foundries. I've got a few, there's four I'm going to show you and many others you can find, but these are some of my favorites. The idea is to start shortlisting fonts and then testing them out with a brand name. Now, on some websites like this one, now, this is fonts.adobe.com. If you are following along of a class with illustrator, well, then you'll definitely have access to this. The good news is all of our fonts here, you have that as part of your CC plan. You can use for logo design any of the fonts in their library. No licensing issues for you or for your clients, which can be a big advantage. In this box up here, you can put your sample text. I've put the brand name in. I'm just going to focus on the main name of a prefix for now to make it easier. There's a number of tools you can use to actually refine this down and to show fonts that fall into certain categories and formats. Now, did you know there's such thing as font psychology? Well, there is. It's not just down to what color you use for a fonts. I'll include it as a downloadable. There's this quick reference guide I've created here. You're welcome to download this from the class resources. This gives you, I guess just a good starting point, a quick reference to what different font types convey. Serif fonts tend to be quite trustworthy, serious, authoritative, formal, and so on. You get the idea. It's not an exhaustive list, but this is a really useful quick reference if you're just dipping your toes into this and you're not quite sure which form represents which traits. Feel free to download the reference guide. There's a lot of nuance to this and there will be occasions where a font maybe crosses over from one brand to the other. But in general, something like this will at least help get you pointed in the right direction. Adobe has something similar where they allow you to click some of these tags. Some of them are, they just say what the font is, a brush pen or rounded. But sometimes we've actually used a descriptive word, an emotion, so friendly. This starts to give us a look into font psychology. If you had a brand that needed to feel friendly and approachable, or you might click this tag. Then you have some fonts for at least Adobe recommend it feels a quite friendly luxury. That's a title I often click. I don't agree with all of these choices. For example, I'm not sure of this one here, that class as luxurious. But you get the idea. I think there's 12 more different tags. Some of those are useful, some aren't. Then you can further refine this down. If you wanted something that was luxurious but had a script or a handmade field to it, nope, there's nothing luxurious but that's handmade according to this but, yes, there's a few videos scripts. Then you can even further refine by weight, by contrast and so forth. This is the first place I come. I love the Adobe font collection. Added bonus, but it's included with my CC account. To download these, as long as you're logged into your Adobe CC, it's as easy as twirling one of these fonts open by clicking it, and then you simply toggle this button to activate fonts, and that's it. Automatically, that's now usable. If you flick across to illustrator, you'd have access to use about font. Really, really easy. Let's look at another foundry, fonts.com. This is almost not a foundry in itself, but a collection of lots of different fonts. I think I've saved one here to share with you. Beautiful scarlet. You can see you can add it to your cart and you can license it for various purposes. To create a logo, it would just be the desktop license. I wanted to show you the license information page because this is really important. You don't want to open yourself and definitely not your client to any liability by thinking just because you find the font you can download, it means you have license to use it or design logos from it. If you just have a quick look at the license, you can see here it specifically says in this section here, fonts can be used for the creation of print documents, static images, and logos. Not all licenses will be that specific. But I think graphic designers are probably the premium customer, the primary customer of font foundries. It would be quite unusual for them to distribute licenses for desktop use and actually prohibit designing a logo. Usually a desktop font license is enough. But always read the fine print and don't just google a font and use it. Make sure you look into the licensing. Now, does this mean I need to purchase this font for 12 pounds before I'm able to add it to my shortlist and run it past my client and see if we actually need to license it for use? Well, unfortunately sometimes that's the case. You can do little workarounds, like you could screenshot this and then you could just copy and paste it in place, that's a possibility. But some foundries, we'll go to our next one now, which is stereotype. I love these guys. They have some really creative stuff. You'll notice as well as the ability to license, they have this button that says free download for personal use. Or sometimes it will have sampled or trial download. If you download for personal use, just be sure not to forget that if your client picks this font, when you come to package this and put it together, just remember, you've got to purchase a commercial use license before you get started with that. These free downloads will enable you to at least start populating your shortlist playing around a little more, which we'll do in the next lesson. I wouldn't license fonts just to play with them, but definitely license them once you're sure you're going to use them. Likewise, another foundry and the last one we'll look at is Dalton Maag. This is a legendary foundry. The problem with that is many designers will be using their fonts. You may have to customize them a little more just to make sure it's not recognizable, that it looks really unique. But you can see they again have the option to download a trial. Again, they're really trying to work with designers, try this out, see if your client likes it. Only then would we expect you to buy a license, which I think is very reasonable of them. I've already been through and picked what I feel are a potentially appropriate fonts. I would of course be deleting down the shortlist. This is supposed to be quite a traditional timeless brand. That's quite a round it. Ultra modern font, I would delete that. I think I would delete this one. From that shortlist, if you just delete the weakest until you're left with around eight, I think is a good number. Once you have that shortlist of fonts, come and join me in the next lesson, and we'll see how we take this step further. [MUSIC] 4. Taking Fonts a Stage Further: [MUSIC] We're ready to take our shortlist of fonts stage further. Now in the previous lesson, we picked out fonts and we had a very quick look at what we felt might be appropriate or not. But you'll notice in my example here, all of the fonts are uppercase. I haven't explored different weights if those are available. This is something we're going to look at further now in the next stage. It's important to explore different weights, upper and lowercase. Sometimes you really get the best out of a font once you explore those options. To show you an example, if I take this here, which is Lato light, [MUSIC] I mean, that's really nice, probably not appropriate for something trying to be traditional. It's quite timeless, but also very modern. I'm not sure if this brand wants to give off a modern vibe. But look at the difference it makes to do a few things. I make sure I do this every time just to explore the possibilities. I'm going to take uppercase off. You can try a regular case, and you can also try all lowercase. Even the first name of a brand, lowercase, and that sometimes really softens things if you compare the two and the spacing. Now I already had this space quite widely because I know I have a preference for that generally. But that's a regular spacing. Look at the difference, spacing out that makes, maybe feels a little bit more of a theatrical title. Of course, you can try font weights. Completely different impact. That gives you different sizes. When you look at something different sizes, you may realize that a really light font-weight is going to struggle or isn't going to have enough impact, or maybe it's just what you're looking for. [MUSIC] We do have a prefix, which is Maison for the brand I'm working on. If you're working on a brand where there's more than one line of type or perhaps there's a tagline you know you have to include from the outset or a descriptor, then it's quite nice to start playing with that now. It may be that you use the same font with a different variation a different size, of different weight, or it may be that you use a pairing of two different fonts. This is what we begin to explore. Just as I've talked about those options, you've realized that for a page of, I think I actually have 12 here, but say for a page of eight fonts you shortlisted, you can spend a lot of time just exploring all the options and playing with these. I mean, I know straight away that a pairing I like if I grab this one, which is a favorite font of mine, is an ultra-modern with a classic. Something like that is so appropriate for a luxury brand and so timeless. But there are hundreds if not thousands of combinations. You can spend a lot of time exploring and pushing the boundaries of that shortlist you've created. As I go back, this variation we're looking at here just wasn't done justice by this quick version here that I grabbed and put on my shortlist. But make sure you take the time and go on to explore some of the options. You don't have to explore every option. The more you do this, you'll get a feel for what's worth exploring and what's not. A few other tips that can help you. If you pop open the layers panel, I often find on an underlying layer is useful to test for logo out on black or on an off black. This is like charcoal. It's not too harsh and it can be even amazing the difference it makes to compare something on a dark background to the light original. Sometimes you see something different about it. Make sure you try it on light and dark. Something else you can try is turning on the built-in guides that Illustrator has. Sometimes that helps you line things up and can help you better visualize it. To the left here, these are some variations I've explored earlier. Here we are. We have a classic font pairing, which I really like. In the next lesson, we look at breaking the mold and looking for opportunities to create something that's more customized, the more unique. But even now at this stage, there's some really quick variations you can try. For example, here, I've just reversed out a letter and I've done that. You can see that S is floating there. I've just duplicated, deleted away the rest of the type. In the version that's left, I've just added a few spaces. Then this is still a live text. But if you right-click, transform, and reflect this vertically, very often characters that work quite well, they're quite aesthetically pleasing when they're reversed, we can still read them. They're still legible. But reversing something out, especially where I see a double letter like this, I think that can be quite a nice touch in just customizing the brand, giving it something a little different, and also drawing the eye. A few other examples I've prepared to share with you earlier. I like this font a lot actually is a Google font is called Italianno. I think it's a more recent one developed. It's got elements of a script to it, but also elements of a more traditional serif font. I quite like it. It's a classy combination of the two. Rather than just place it floating above or floating center as we often do, I was just looking for opportunities to maybe have it weave in and out to have it interact somehow. We've been below, so you can look for something like this where maybe the A's, and we would tidy this up afterwards. They run together to some extent. That's quite a nice little hook there. You could outline this and subtract and make it look like there's a shadow or actually have one appear to be on top of the other. All sorts of interesting opportunities. I'm not sure this has quite worked, but there's something there. I quite liked that idea of some of the letters almost fretting and weaving through the others. That's quite nice. Scripts will give you the versatility to do that. Because we have such free-flowing letterforms, I find they can work quite well when you really weave them in and out of other characters or each Java. There is a centralized version. Then this is a little more traditional. But if you notice because we've got an M starting off both lines of the brand name, I think this is quite an interesting concept I might explore further. The idea of having one M and perhaps this could even be a different M. Maybe it could be a script if I found something complimentary. I do like that. I like the fact you can have his left-the-line positioning and both lines of texts start off with that character. That's quite a nice touch. Of course, you won't always have brands [LAUGHTER] that begin with two words that have a first same character. But when you do, there's an opportunity and there's a more traditional layout there. Again, we see on the black. That's the level I would recommend. Bear in mind you've not drawn anything by hand. You've just grabbed some fonts from other foundries, you've played with the layouts, the upper and lowercase, contrast for weight, and already some ideas are starting to come together. I think this is a really strong starting point and in the next lesson, we'll look for some opportunities to customize this even further. [MUSIC] 5. Manipulating Fonts Looking for opportunities: What opportunities are we looking for? Well, let's start by going over a few examples together. This is the first example, so tinacleary Photography. It's an appropriate font. I've used a lighter weight here, a bolder weight here so that we don't have to have a jarring space between the two names. You could be forgiven for thinking, that's fine that's as good as it could get, but there is an opportunity to do something a little more special and creative. If we look at this version here, that's something that really excites me. The fact we've got this clever alignment. Not easy to pull off because the first line of this brand name has four letters, the second has six. It's taken quite a bit of playing around than adjusting things to get the weights to balance and to have this line up so nicely. A few nuances like the fact, if this l wasn't exaggerated, I think that doesn't quite do the same. I quite like the fact you've got this deliberate overlap. You can see it incurs into the i that's above. An opportunity I found just by playing, by not stopping at the obvious and having a little play around and thinking, what would happen if these were closer in size, if we could massage that letter into the one below it to get something a little different to happen? That's one example. Here it is on the black background, simple but really effective and for me, this really encapsulates what a word mark should do. It should be distinct. Sometimes just typing something out in a particular font isn't enough. But if you can find something, that's not gimmicky, but it's a clever way to create an interesting, maybe an interaction between the different words in a word mark. I think that can work really nicely. Another example here, so Bspoqe, wheel re-manufacturing. They restore wheels, rims to look as good as new. There's a chrome finish to this. That could be acceptable. That could be their logo. But again, when exploring some concepts and taking things a step further, I had the idea to, why not actually exaggerate that? Why not fill in this o and have it look a little more like a rim? Give it a really obvious shiny finish and part of a brief and the brand messaging was we had to really hammer across that this is going to look as good as new. We wanted a logo that really strongly conveyed a sense of that. Here, was it necessary to do it to two of the letters? Well, no actually, I much prefer this version, and this is the version we went ahead with where we've just filled in the o, no need to do it to the b as well here. That's it. No need to do to every letter and to make it may be difficult to read, just a little touch that gives it that distinctive flare. It gets the message across clearly. You've then customized something and it's not just text typed off a shelf. These are the kind of opportunities we're looking for. Another one here. Again, the Luxury Property Show. The tagline is bordering on the point where I say to a client, "I'm sorry, we can't do this. It's going to be so difficult to read at small sizes." But they assured me this version of a logo would be used in large banners, magazine covers. It wasn't going to be used at small sizes. But this could have been the final logo. I really like this concept to customize it. Just taking the angle of the x of a y here and subtracting away from those characters. There was a concept behind this for luxury sash. Sometimes ribbon go across things, so there was a deeper meaning behind it. But on the surface level, we've just taken something that is fairly generic and we've added something a little more memorable to it without negatively affecting it, without reducing its legibility, and without breaking something that was looking good, to begin with. That's a key. We've got to look for opportunities to enhance, not just to decorate. But this I think works really well. If we come down here, there's a version we've decided to take a second piece out of the l rather than the one just to make it really distinct. You can see actually up here, I've staged that just placing a stroke over the top of the text, and then here this is outlined text. I'll show you quickly how to do this in case it's a technique you'd like to replicate. We'll start with a stroke. We can't see if it's white, so let's use medium gray. Get it to the weight we're looking for. Obviously, I've already reduced this, but let's say we wanted to reduce from this section up here, make sure your type is outlined. The shortcut for that is Ctrl or Command, Shift, and O, and when your type is outlined, you then need to expand the stroke, so Object, Expand, and Okay. Then select those two objects and you can use a shape builder tool, Shift M, and simply hold Alt to subtract portions of your choice that's removed the serif. But if we had done that further down here, a much easier selection to make. That's it. Using that you can quite easily subtract one shape from another. That's another little opportunity you can sometimes look for. None of these are rules. There has to be meaning and something more behind it than just doing it for the sake of it. But these are the opportunities that we are looking for. Let's come on now to the brand I'm working on in this class and that's Maison Magrissi. I've taken this concept where we had the Ss facing. How would I take this step further? Well, perhaps this is good enough. No need to overdo it. I did have a little idea here for perhaps a submark, and we'll come to submarks in a later lesson. It's quite interesting. It's something brands will often need, but you can take whatever distinction you've added, whatever you've included to make your word mark more unique. Sometimes you can just extract that and it may be a few characters and then that can stand alone. In fact, let me just increase the contrast here so you can see it clearly. That's something that convinced standalone on social media. That's simply the i, which I've elongated a little so that it fits better aesthetically, and then those two facing Ss, and that's quite a nice little standalone submark there. The difference, I think, between a submark and let's say this was a permanent fixture of a logo. Let's say this was your logo lookup, well, then that's really your brand mark and there's lots of different names and it's confusing for these things. But for me, the difference between a submark and just the symbol of a brand mark portion of a logo is not included. This is the full logo as it should be used and then separately, this is for submark. But we're going to come to that in a later lesson. This is another way you can customize things. Now, you've got to be careful with this. It's not always going to be appropriate. Of course, you can't always have these textures, although this has been done live in Illustrator. Actually you can export a vector version of this. If I go to, where is my Transparency panel and I release, this is just a clipping mask. This actually has all the properties of a vector graphic. It can be stretched and blown up. The texture is super high-res but you've got to be careful and quite likely you'd have to give your client a version that has the texture but also doesn't have the texture. But because the nature of this brand is they do luxury clothing but specifically this kind of tweed blue clay to overlay the logo in that texture. Is a really nice nod for this particular brand. There was a time you would avoid using texture in logos, but more and more commonly, as long as you're providing a plain color option as well, using a texture is acceptable. It's becoming more and more acceptable. In modern times, there's a version let's reverse them black. If you're interested in doing this yourself. What you need, I'll just release this again. Is a source texture, your logo artwork needs to be outlined. You can't have any live text, and you just drag and it can be fairly roughly and position your texture just make sure there's nothing sticking out that it completely covers it. Drag to select both the texture and underneath. It's important it's underneath. We have the logo artwork, simply in the Transparency window, click Make Mask and that's it. If you click Invert Mask, you can see you've got the option to either reverse it out or have it shine through. Quite an effective way of adding something distinctive. Again, it won't work for all logos, but in certain cases it could be just what you need. Let's spend a little time just looking at script fonts and how we can customize these. Now if you're doing hand-drawn scripts, real hand-drawn logos, then this isn't the course, perhaps to teach you how to expand that skill further. But if you are using existing fonts and you're using script fonts, then perhaps just manipulating them, you might be surprised to learn. There's a lot you can do before you outline the type without having to tweak any anchor points. First of all, glyphs, that's a useful quick tip. If you're not sure what glyphs are. If you select a character, an illustrator will often offer a few glyphs at the bottom here if it has any embedded in the font. By clicking one of these, you can see we can actually switch. This font includes not one, but two different styles of M. It's got quite a few different versions of A here. Sometimes the difference is these little ligatures that join one character to the other. But as you play with these, just selecting and looking at the options. What a difference. Unfortunately, you have to select one character at a time. This one all play together as you want them to. But look at that, what a difference? Even though we're using the same font between that, I think the A is a little much, but look at that. Then if I go back and just compare it to the original. For me that's a great tip. As soon as I discovered the world of glyphs it opened up all opportunities I didn't even know were there. Of course, this is a quick access to the glyphs. You can actually open up the Glyphs panel if you go to Type and Glyphs. Then from here, you'll be able to see the full library, you might have to increase the sample size. There's a lot to look through, often special characters, but it's well worth having a look sometimes, and not all of the variations will come up as these quick suggestions. Glyphs, that's your quick tip. If you're working using scripts and there might be a lot more to your typefaces when you realize were there hidden away in the back-end. Now lastly, because I'm conscious of the time we're spending on this lesson. We just want to look at some existing famous wordmark logos and just identify why they work well and maybe how we can look to do something similar in our own work. This is a very famous and successful script logo. I don't think they use the font. I have a feeling this one was hand-drawn for Disney, but it's simple and it's unique script handwriting, with some very positive symbolism behind that. Facebook, when you look at it, not much customization at all. I believe they have leaned away from the closest matching fonts. But it's quite a basic logo when you look at it. Yet look how successful this has been. You don't always have to add something fancy, or clever or unique, sometimes the strongest wordmarks, they just have really subtly perfected detail or completely custom font. Google, likewise, although the color is what really makes this feel unique. This is the latest iteration of their logo. Kellogg's is another very big brand. Again, I have a feeling this was hand-drawn type created just for them. In fact, I think it's got almost a 100 year history with the brand. Subway, this is a more recent iteration, and they've included these little arrows were part of the previous iteration of their logo. They simplified and flattened it now, but the arrows are still there. Zara, again, this had mixed reviews, but it's simple, and quite clever. They've chosen to overlap. The A gives it a contrast between these thick portions of the characters and these thin portions. That creates quite an interesting overlap. No spacing there at all, negative spacing. Now we touched on sub marks and we're going to come back to that in a future lesson in creating our own sub marks. But let's look at the theory behind it now. For Disney, although they rarely use it this is actually a standalone D, they use to represent the brand. That is of course, simply taken from the first letter of the word Disney. The same for Facebook, it's just the F. They often reduce that from a color block. Google, it's for G from their regular wordmark. This doesn't sit in addition to Google, you don't have a G floating above the logo. It's interchangeable. It's a sub mark, they divided it quite interestingly with a brand colors, but it's quite simple. The subway sub mark, so that's something new they've created that gives them some additional opportunities. We will circle back to look at sub marks again in that lesson. But for now, let's go back to this process of manipulating and looking for opportunities. This is something I've created here. I'm going to take in the next lesson into Adobe Fresco, and I'll show you another interesting technique you can use to explore customizations on your wordmarks and your fonts. 6. Manipulating Fonts Adobe Fresco: [MUSIC] This is almost a bonus lesson because it's not a method you have to use, but I really like it and enjoy working this way. It's perhaps a little backwards to the way you've been taught or some designers work. But I really like to start first of all with the fonts and I'll explain why I've arranged these here like this in just a few moments. But we begin with the fonts and then the sketching comes afterwards. For me, the advantage to that is I've picked my fonts. I've got a good idea of the tone of 80 percent because this is a word mark, maybe 80 percent of the detail that's going to really make this come to life. Then I'm adding these fine touches and that's why I want to sketch. I want to sketch with a little more accuracy. We're going to take this page I've created here, simply export it as a JPEG or a PNG is even better than you've got transparency. In Adobe Fresco, which we'll jump over to in the tutorial now, you simply import that image as a layer, which is very easy to do. Let's do that now and I'll show you how we can work with a text I've prepared here. Something I found to be a great way to further customize type when I've locked in a font, maybe a font pairing that I really like is to pop this open. This is in Adobe Fresco. All I've done is import a photo. You can use the little photo import button and I just start duplicating that a few times. This layout I've created for myself, it's to allow me to explore the concept where we have an M at the beginning that links both of the letters together. Then I want to see if there's anything we could do further with this nice semi serif font at the top. Popping open in Adobe Fresco, it just gives you the ability. I'm just transforming these in place of PNGs. I think free should be more than enough. As long as you have a drawing layer. I'm just going to move this to the top of the stack. You can scribble and sketch over the top and it's completely non-destructive. You can have a little play. You could even erase away bits of the image and see how things might look. I was considering maybe some sort of flourish here. No, that's too much, so we can go back. That really [LAUGHTER] hasn't worked at all but you can see how easy it is to draw on top of what you have and just to explore ideas and it gives you the ability to look and think either, yeah, that's a great idea or no, this really isn't going to work. Let's try a few more. In fact, this is another great thing about Adobe Fresco, you can just do a new layer and try to get this M right. I think maybe something that's quite scripty and exaggerated, that actually [LAUGHTER] isn't legible but something along those lines maybe, yeah. Or let's leave that the other way. I like that. It's miles away from an M, but if we can bring the legibility back, I really like the idea of that kind of shape. I keep going the wrong way with this. It's getting there. It starts light, it's going harder, and light and harder and around. Maybe something like that. This is where because we've got a new layer, we can just drag and put that in place. Erase away the ones we don't want without erasing my one as well. I quite like that. Something else you can do and this isn't supposed to be a Fresco tutorial, but really is useful. Under the layer controls, you can just lower the opacity back. I'm going to give myself a faintest of outlines, then another new layer. In this layer, I'm going to try to do it a little lighter. I'm not someone skilled at calligraphy, but I can do enough to get by, then digitally refine it to take it where I want. For me, having that guide makes it so much easier. I've got this moving quite. Well, actually it's not too low, but I'm going to knock this moving right up. Just to leave, I want to try again, I think I can do better here. It'll just give us something to import and to work with. We've got to stay light and there's the pressure, light again, pressure. I'm liking that. I may perfect that off camera, but I think we've got something really strong there. I really like that concept. In fact, one last thing we could try, we duplicate this, hit Transform and we'll take it to our last little area here. I wonder if it could actually interact in some way. This is really close to the A. I wonder, could I actually have this flick out and form the center of the A? That could be a really nice touch. Let's lower the opacity here. Another new layer, same brush as before because I'm looking for similar results. I really like the look of our figure, we're really getting somewhere here. You can see how useful it is to have this and to combine the precision of starting with your fonts with the ability to draw and decorate, and of course something else you can do, I've focused on scripts here, but you could actually look at manipulating the type itself. You might decide you want to exaggerate the serifs for particular form. You could do that, here I'm doing it very roughly. But you could begin tweaking and see how that would look and I said you could erase away portions of a letter. Well, to do that, I'm not sure erase works on an image, but server it's non-destructive and I still have all my layers. I simply go to white or whatever the background color is, and then I use that to just paint over the top. Let's turn down the smoothing because that does lower frame rate. Just like that, especially if you're someone that prefers to work with your hands, you can fly in and you can test out some edits and especially if you're not as familiar with Illustrator. If it takes you a little while to construct and deconstruct things if you're starting out, this is a really quick and easy way to make fairly advanced changes to the letters and to see if they work before you commit the time to doing them digitally. Technically [LAUGHTER] we are working digitally, although on the iPad with the Apple Pencil. I really like this technique, I think it's a great way of exploring the possibilities, I hope you enjoy it too. We've imported these concepts from Fresco into Adobe Illustrator, there's a simple Export button for that, and now we're ready to start refining and taking things a step further. I did indeed work on this flourish style M, which I really like and I was able to refine it to this point here, which I'm really happy with. This is embarrassingly, I think as good as I was able to do in the app with a pen but thankfully you are able to digitally refine it so that it looks far more professional, so find goodness, for possibility. I'll show you just quickly how I achieved that in case you want to do the same [NOISE] with a locked layer here, and the best version I was able to create. You then want to open up your brush tool, and the shortcut is a memorable one is b and you want to double-click [NOISE] it from the toolbar and make sure that fidelity is overweight to its smoothest option [NOISE] and select Okay. Then, and I haven't even plugged my graphics tablet in for this so I'm going to do this freehand using a mouse because the digital smoothing is really quite impressive just to show you how easy it is to accomplish something professional from a rough sketch. I'm just going to click and trace as carefully as I can but not too carefully around that sketch and you'll see in a few moments we're going to have the opportunity to digitally refine this. [NOISE] There we are, hide [BACKGROUND] the underlying layer, and it's done a fairly good job smoothing that out with the fidelity to max and we can smooth it further if you again have a brush tool selected, but you hold the Alt key and that brings up the smoothing tool. [NOISE] As you draw over these lines it just moves them and refines them even further. Again, I'm doing this with a mouse, so [NOISE] this tool doesn't work based on your control, just as you give it a rough idea what you're aiming for, it does that for you. Lots of clicking later, I did arrive at version that was nicely smooth, but you'll notice this has got differences in weight and the way to accomplish that is using the line width tool and 'Shift W' is for shortcut for this. If the line width tool and I'll just show you on this version I created earlier, allows you to create width anchor points. As you drag, you can see you're able to manipulate the width of the shape. It takes a little bit of playing with and you've got to carefully place your anchor points, you can see I've placed one just here, so that it transitions rounds into something nice and thin, and then at the very end we've got an anchor point where it reduces almost to nothing and almost fades right out. Another little thin anchor point here, you can see the difference between that and this, which looks far more elegant. Using that technique, even with no natural calligraphic skills, I was able to create this kind of abstract M flourish, that I'm really happy with. If we look at the results, when I combine this, because I had the benefit of that sketch, I was able to position it in such a way it would intersect for crossbar of the A, so another advantage of using this method, I think that looks stunning. I'm not sure about the end of it into setting the S here and in hindsight, that almost forms $ sign, so I think I may have to remove that maybe I'll just have it taper off here just after VA [NOISE] but I'm really happy with that and on black that looks equally stunning. That's my concepts, a little bit of manipulation [LAUGHTER] and some time spent in Adobe Fresco, but not massive changes to the core font, but we've created something that looks really unique by focusing the attention on one letter and on layout and composition. As you're following along in your class projects or perhaps you even have a real-world project to follow along with, try to look for those opportunities, not to go overboard and not to break what's not broken in the first place, but for opportunities to add some flair and some creativity and to create something that is really unique. [MUSIC] 7. Manipulating Fonts Secret Techniques: Secret techniques. Well, maybe not so much a secret, but these are techniques I've collected over the years and I'd be absolutely lost without. These are my go-to techniques that I most commonly use when I'm working on manipulating type. Adding serifs to a sans serif typeface. It seems counter intuitive, but I absolutely love this technique. It gets you some really interesting results, and because you've had a hand in crafting this yourself, it makes sure it's truly unique. This isn't something someone else can download and type out their brand name using. Here's one I've created for a client in Colorado. I really like it. The base I can show you here in stages, how I've done this. The base is actually Futura, Futura PT, which is super modern, very crisp geometric hard lines, and viscera is really, I think, compliment this nicely. I've chosen to do a really simple serif. This is literally what you get if you take a square and when you take a circle, and you subtract one from the other. Once that intersects, you're left with this shape here, and then I've just manipulated ever so slightly from that starting point. You could use the shape builder tool and subtract away to leave yourself with something like that. Using that as a base, I've positioned it. You can see just where you'd expect for serifs to be. You have to be fairly familiar with the anatomy of type to do this. As you can see, it's placing them as you'd expect. When you are happy and using a different color at first I found makes this a little easier. I made a few tweaks. If you compare the top to the bottom, I realized the N it didn't work to have serifs on every corner. In fact, that's not what you would do traditionally. For VN instead, we've got the serifs on both sides of the flatter legs and the stem that sticks up here. VE, I believe we've just reduced via for way too further little. It was looking a bit clunky, and some of the tweaks and changes. But this is the result when you now combine the color, trying to select these, I've got something in the background. There you are. You can see I've not yet merged the objects, but because the color is the same before it's committed, you get to see how this looks. There was still a fair bit of balancing and fine tuning, I needed to do here. Something you might notice is VR is really narrow compared to something like VN, which I wasn't happy with. I did quite a bit of tweaking and fine tuning for my final iteration. But by the time it reached this point here, I was quite happy with it in concept. I won't show you the my new changes I made, I widen VR using some anchor points. But we're safe to select and even had to rebalance it. But on the surface, you can create something really stunning using that technique, and then the more familiar you are with type and balancing, the better you are able to fine tune that. But maybe that's more than a quick tip. Maybe a subject for a future lesson. Our next tip is using the shape builder tool to create circular curved portions of type. To show you a problem, first of all, and then the solution. In this case here, my client really liked this Trajan Pro typeface. He really liked for look in the form of it, and especially how you've got this smooth little portion of the G here. If you compare that to this alternative, there's almost a little serif there, and a more pronounced serif there, and they really like this smooth transition. But when you position the S and the G together, the S is far, far narrower than the G. There wasn't really a way to make them sit nicely. Where if we look at this font, they sit and they look much more balanced when they're overlapped. The challenge was we needed to create this. To turn the typeface we have here into the good things they liked about Trajan Pro, to manipulate it and give it those properties, which was this smooth, less detailed curve. How enough do you go about doing something like that and keeping it looking smooth and professional? There's a version where we've done a cut-out. You can see an overlap. Well, by using circles, and at first this might look very confusing, but actually it's quite a simple technique. If I select this, you can see here, I've got the opacity down just so I can see the overlap, and I've just dragged these ovals in and I've tried to position them. They don't have to be perfectly equal circles, you can elongate them, that's absolutely fine. In some cases that's what you need to do, and you just want to drag them into position. Make sure there's a slight overlap that your base shape sticks out and see if there's a gap. You'll see why in just a second. Let me do an exaggerated example. Just so I can show you quickly. You can position it better than I have. But when you are sure that one is inside the other because you can find tune that, use the shape builder tool and you want to combine. Just remove that so we can see what we've done. You're combining the circle with the top of the G rather of this shape. Then if you go in as close as you can, you can then manipulate the anchor points. So for this one here, I think I would just delete that and it can end following that curve. Then up here, this needs to be a little smoother, so you can always select the anchor point and just drag it across. You get a sense when you look at the preview of where that's going to blend more seamlessly into what's already there. There will be some little artifacts you need to get rid of. I have this artifact here from something underlying, but you get the idea. Using that technique, I do the same here. Here's my oval that I've positioned and I'm going to use to add and follow around the curve for the G and you just keep working your way around. Eventually, we've ended up with this. You could use any shape using something circular, lets you do a nice, smooth, gradual bend. But really you can use any shape and place it over existing characters, and then that way you manipulate them and you create something that's really unique. I'm quite proud of this one. It's got the traits of Trajan Pro, but it's most certainly not Trajan Pro. Another tip. Now, the new Zara logo with its negative spacing caused quite a stir in the industry. Some love it, some hate it. If you did want to do something similar, a few issues you can run into and some tricks to solve them. As soon as we go into negative spacing, you'll notice that while some letters transition really nicely, so there's no problems here so far, but you can just see the R and the I. There's this horrible overlap. If we close that up even more, then you might get it to a point there where one bleeds into the other. But let's say it was at this stage here. We want to do something about this traffic jam going on with the type there. You've got a few options, but I would definitely outline your type, so "Control" or command "Shift" O, and I'd use the shape builder tool. With both selected shape builder, there's no need to have this sticking up here. Simply hold "Alt" and remove it. Then you could even have maybe extend the anchor point and drag that there so you've got a smooth base. I would even be tempted, I think, to just carry this anchor point over way across. Open the shape builder again and then subtract. We just lose the natural end of the R, but when it blends so much better into the I. Those are the small tweaks and manipulations that I think make the difference between something that looks professional and something that looks quite amateurish. Here's another one. We've got a choice here. We could subtract that. Nice. But I think if we also lose that, that's even better. Here I'd be inclined, I think, to just nudge this S so that that runs seamlessly. You can see by zooming right in and making these very technically basic changes, it makes a big difference to the overall professionalism of the logo. That's my third tip. The last tip comes when you want to mix and match elements of two similar but different typefaces. This is similar to the one I did with the Trajan Pro just now. But in this case, we have this here. Well, I won't tell you for background of a brand. It doesn't really matter, but we have this version and then this version. You'll notice for wavy L comes under the O and the R comes under the S. In this heavier fonts is quite nice, quite well-balanced, where in this one it's almost touching and is susceptible, but it's a shame we can't have a best of both worlds. Well, we can have a best of both worlds, so it takes quite a bit of patience. You will see these of a stages it went through before I arrived at something I was happy with. We'll come back to this. In fact, in the next lesson, we'll look at some common mistakes you can make. In trying to combine these different fonts, there are lots of potential pitfalls, and I'll highlight some of those in the next lesson. But if we look at what has worked, ultimately, manipulating existing letter, it doesn't work really well. It's got a very spindly form. It's quite hard to make that flow fluidly. Instead, we've taken the L and the R from this bottom fonts and we've placed them here along with the other font we want. If it was left like this, maybe you could say they act as bookends. Maybe it's a creative way to vary the weight, but I don't think that works. I think really they need to be better balanced. If we come down here, you can see in this version we've kept the R, but I've manipulated that to make it suit better. We've actually taken the bottom part of the L and use the shape builder to combine or rather reduce it from this here. It's going to be difficult to select the two with an unlocked layer underneath, but let's give it a try. There we are just to show you roughly what we did. Something like this to remove the top half and then some fine tuning here to keep the bits we wanted of a bottom half, and you can see that's exactly what I've done. A little portion of each of the letters and then just making sure they flow smoothly together. That needed a little bit of further fine tuning. With the R, we've done the same thing and that needed a lot of fine tuning. We've just used this portion of the R. In fact, you can see here, if I drag it off, that's the portion of the other letter we've used and then use the shape builder to delete away. But this needed to be much thinner as it is here. Exactly, how I made that thinner without losing the shape and the form. A lot could go wrong there and actually we'll focus on that in the next lesson for common mistakes. But those are a few quick tips that I think will give you a lot of joy when you're trying to customize word marks. These tips should allow you to create something that's unique, but in a subtle and tasteful way. We've covered a whole range of opportunities to look out for and some great techniques to help us take advantage of those. But next, we need a few boundaries, so we're going to look at some of the rules that can help us ensure our type looks at not just creative and attractive, but most importantly professional. 8. Avoiding Common Mistakes: Unfortunately, the things we're going to cover in this lesson are common mistakes in the sense that once you begin looking out for these, I'm sure you're going to see them start popping up everywhere. Mainly, it will be local businesses, perhaps your local bakery and it's made a few design mistakes. But every now and again, you'll actually see a larger or high-profile brand that makes some amateur mistakes. Now, I'm not saying you have to read and memorize a whole book on type design before you're ready to make even simple changes. Although if you do want to read a book on type design, this is my absolute favorite. It's Designing Type, and it's by Karen Cheng. This will really teach you all of the hidden rules and nuances that make type look beautiful and make it professional. If you have the time to study a book like that, fantastic, that will really improve your design. But in the meantime, there are just a few rules that you'll want to at least be aware of so that your logo design doesn't look wrong in some way. As promised, we've returned to this piece of artwork, and done the wrong way, there's a lot of mistakes that could be made here, trying to stitch together these different fonts used for these different characters. First of all, let's look at this poor attempt to just manipulate the L. Now, you can see in the original, which is from the original font, it has a certain profile, and it's got a certain curve over a set space of time. It curves just like that. When you try to extend that, even though if you zoom in and you were to look at the anchor points, they've got quite long transitions and there's no kinks in it, it just doesn't feel right. It feels very different to the profile of curves in the other characters, and it feels a little bit unnatural. We have a version we've stitched together below, although it comes from a different font we've kept for profiles. It's got a more natural curve to it. To illustrate the difference, if we were manipulating something like the E from this font. I'll just outline this. Let's highlight that, put it in a black so we can see a bit better. If I just select the anchor points here and hit my arrow key a few times, we can quite easily elongate that or we could make it a little narrower. If we wanted, we could select like this and just reduce the weight of the stem. It's quite easy to make proportioned changes. Because we've selected the entire curve, this isn't changing the angles at all as we manipulate this. Now, there is a better way to edit and alter curves. We don't have time for it in this class as a quick tip, but just take care when you are manipulating curved portions. This R, if you're manipulating this S, you can't simply grab the anchor points in the same way we did as the E and start stretching things because you get these. Even if it seems to follow the same form, it's very easy to get bumps or kinks. That would be much better, and again, I'm not going to attempt to show you this right now. Maybe we'll do this in a future class, but it would be much better to pull in a geometric shape and position it, and then subtract, and add, and use a geometric shape as a reference so that you avoid those kinks and uneasy, unnatural warps. That's the first mistake to avoid. Another is consistent weight. Now, if we were manipulating this, you can see this has a little bit of a [inaudible] style, which is where some of the strokes have a thicker weight than others. But even where that's the case, we want to be consistent. We can see the A and the V. One stroke has a certain weight and the other has a certain weight. Let's do this maybe with an easier character with an E. Let's select this. What would happen if, selected too much, if we did this so that the line at the bottom is heavier? Well, that just doesn't look balanced and that shouldn't be done. Usually, all of the horizontal strokes are even in width or even in weight, I should say. Usually, the horizontal, the stems or strokes, they'll follow some consistent weight. You should ensure that something is either for weight of this stem here and here over weight of this one, but it shouldn't be something in between. I'm going to lose my curve, I think, to try to manipulate this. But I can try to show you. I think I've got it there. Yes. If I bring this across and let's say it was there. It's not a big difference perhaps, but that is now not consistent with the part that should match the weight of this part of the A here and the weight of this part of the O. Now, how do we know this? Where do these rules come from? We have our resources. There's a book I alluded to earlier. There are lots of rules that you can spend the time studying and learning, if you want to. But an easy rule of thumb as you get started is to look for consistency. Try to follow the form of other characters, and particularly when it comes to weight, it should always match its partners. You should see a consistency in the widest weight and in the narrowest weight for a font. Next comes spacing. We're going to jump over to this artboard. This is a little technique I like to use to balance my spacing between characters. If I just grab these placeholders and remove them, you'll see that looks quite well balanced. The spacing is consistent. Yes, you can achieve this just using your eye, but I like to put these placeholders down, and they use the golden ratio. They're quite close to rule of thirds as well. But you can see here they step up in line with the golden ratio. As long as a space, it hits one of these points, one of these widths, then it should look pleasing to the eye. The space here, it uses that width, which is the same as the space here and here. The smaller spaces are all the same and you're taking into account a curve that I don't think makes a big enough difference for me to, for example, move that whole line down there. I think you've got to use these as guides, but balance it optically, not metrically. You've got to, to some extent, trust your eyes. The space on the edge here, it could be that I used this. Let's just shrink this down and then rotate it in place. It could be that I thought, let's use that space up. But for me, that doesn't quite look balanced, because it's a wider logo than it is tall, I wanted it to reflect that form. So I wanted it to have a wider space there. You can see that space, this one is almost exactly double this space it has above. When basic math behind it and you can read up more and use rule of thirds or use the golden ratio. It tends to also help you balance things are optically, and it feels pleasing. To show you how easily this could be done the wrong way. If I just select this and we don't give it enough space. It can feel very tight and constrained or some of the spaces were large and then some of the spaces were small. If we had perhaps a really small space at the sides. This is extreme. You'd have to have quite a bad eye, I think to position it that badly. But when you're trying to line elements up, I find that this really helps. You can easily create these little guidelines for yourself. Another common mistake is mismatching fonts which don't necessarily pair well together. This here at first glance, it may look okay, over similarities in before. We've got serenity light and Warren Gothic. But when they look this close together and they're are different, it can look like a mistake. Contrast can be a good thing. This can just look like someone's accidentally used the wrong fonts. If you use something that had a much lighter weight, maybe a very different form, then you get something more interesting. When it looks like you've maybe accidentally mismatched fonts, it just confuses, it doesn't quite sit right. I think sometimes going for contrast makes a better pairing than going for something that's similar but not close enough. There's another example where it's looking much better balanced. Here, you can do something like this, but a script won't always work nicely with everything. You can't always run straight from a script into any other style of font. This here I think is quite a bad pairing, even though we've tried to match up the size and the positioning, this doesn't flow very smoothly to me. You want to look out for clashes where fonts look like they've been shoehorned together, but they don't quite share the same characteristics. They don't really flow together, or they don't contrast each other enough if it's on two different lines of type. Our last mistake to look out for is visually aligning rather than geometrically aligning. You may not notice, this has already been done to many of the fonts you're using, V's are not geometrically aligned. If you look at VV, if you look at VA, I've added some lines here to show you. They actually stick way over for baseline and the cap height. The O because it has a curve, we often have the same. When we zoom out and we look at that type, it looks balanced but we couldn't trust our eyes. If you did reduce VO and V so that they were sitting perfectly along that baseline or the cap height, then it would seem like they were too small because our eyes make those smaller elements shrink. Where you've got something coming to a point, it seems to be smaller and where you've got a curve, especially a thing curve like this, it seems to shrink to our eyes. This is even more obvious example. This is using the font Futura. Here you can really see this almost looks badly misaligned when you zoom in. But when you look at that from a distance or at lighter weights, it's properly balanced. Now, this is where if you decided to use this font, which fave balance over at very small sizes, it reads okay. If you decide you're going to use it at this size and you've got this obvious tip of the end sticking out, this is where you might want to address that to manipulate it so that it suits your purposes and it suits the size you will be using it at. You might decide you need to manipulate or trim that. If we outline the type, you'd have to take great care as you do this. This could be another mistake. If you select those anchor points and drag them up to those baselines, you've now actually changed the angle. If I copy just that character, we'll go back, and then I'll superimpose it in a different color. You can see you've actually changed the angle of the N. So that might not be a problem, but again,it's something to be aware of when you begin manipulating type, you've got to really pay attention to the balancing. As you've probably realized, to improve fervor, you really want to practice and familiarize yourself with the anatomy of type, the components that form it, and a lot of nuances that make type appear balanced and these little rules you could accidentally break if you're not careful. You can download if you want this quick reference guide that I've created. This is in a class resources. This helps get you familiar with the different components of type. The more you practice, and there's lots of more in-depth tutorials out there. You can begin to safely make some pretty extreme manipulations and keep the form, keep the balance as you do that. As with most things in life, practice makes perfect. The more you begin closely looking at type, understanding how and why it's been designed in a certain way, the better your design will become and the better position you will be to safely manipulate type to suit your needs. 9. Add a Tagline: [MUSIC] Adding a descriptive tagline can be the perfect way to tell potential clients or customers, consumers know exactly what a brand does without having to create a clever symbol or an abstract way of communicating that, you can just say it. If you look at this example here, here we have the deliberately, I might say misspelled brand Bspoqe. You might get a hint of what the brand does from the styling of its logo but why leave that to chance. You can remove any ambiguity by simply adding a descriptive tagline. Now, everyone that looks at this logo, will know exactly what this brand does, which definitely in terms of advertising, can be the cost-effective way to go. Now, larger brands like Apple and Nike, they've been able to with their budget and time and create the recognition that everyone knows what their brand stands for and what it is they do. But if you're working with smaller companies, perhaps local businesses, or those with smaller budgets, this can be a very powerful approach to just make a brand say what it does on the tin. Another advantage is using this approach, you haven't got to try to create something gimmicky. Like perhaps we've all seen a logo for a bakery and it's got a loaf of bread as the symbol. It's really not a need for that. It could just say that it's a bakery in plain text. Speaking of Nike and Apple, here is the Nike logo and its tagline, just do it. This is perhaps one of the most successful taglines ever created. Almost everyone can associate that with Nike and the e-force behind their brand. At times, it's okay to do that. Use the tagline to communicate a mission, statement, or an e-force. But I've found that with small to medium-sized businesses, it can really be a powerful approach to use a descriptive tagline. 10. Creating a Submark: [MUSIC] We touched on sub-marks in a previous lesson and why they can be needed. If we look at Facebook as we example here, here's their word-mark logo, but they're well-known sub mark and I think perhaps even their brand mark now, is this where we've just taken the first f of a logo, it's on the same background. It follows the same style and aesthetic as their main logo, but it's able to be used as a substitute and here there's even a variation on that. Sub-marks are a useful thing for a brand to have, and if we look on Instagram, Facebook, Instagram account, I'm sure enough, they've not used their full logo, they've used the sub-mark here. Sub-mark is just one word for it. It's sometimes called different names. But it's substituted in situations where the full logo perhaps wouldn't fit as well. Now, not all brands use this approach. If we search for Disney, you'll see that Disney, across its official channels, it still uses its full logo. Perhaps they've decided it's still legible, but on my screen at least, it's quite blurry and I think they'd do well to make use of just the D from the Disney sign, which I've seen them use in other places. Where does sub-marks get used? While sometimes your browser bookmarks. If you bookmark a website and you go to visit it again on your phone, often a little symbol will show that can be a great place to use a sub mark, and there are all sorts of useful applications for these things. How do we create one? Well, I'll give you a few examples in my project and for your class project of course, this will be different, but a brand I've developed here, I can simply take VM, separate to the rest of the logo, and that's for perfect symbol of a perfect sub-mark. You can see there can be reversed out, that can be used really effectively to represent the brand. Now this won't be shown alongside this. There's no need for me to do something like this but it is a core part of a logo and then it can be used as a sub mark as well. I'll provide my client with both files with a logo and then with a sub mark. I can show you another example. This is the luxury brand I created and you may have guessed what I'm going to do here. What could I do if I would create an effective sub-mark. Well, again, we'll just take VL will use the same colors, same exact form, and it's just a standalone symbol. And because of the customization, the part we've reduced from VL, it's unique enough to represent the brand and certainly with this color scheme, VL, via unique touch, I think that's enough for sufficient recognition. Let's look at one more example. You remember when we looked in the earlier lesson at this brand, and I decided I wouldn't fill in VB in the logo itself. This is our logo, but it's not shown in the logo itself. This is where we've decided to use with field B. We're using the first letter, which is always useful if you're going to use a letter to represent the brand is common to use the first one. We didn't think just using VO by itself would be recognizable enough. But adding that treatment to the B, that's definitely an effective sub-mark. In some cases, we can just use a full logo. In other cases, separately use the sub mark. Have a look at your logo that you're creating in your class projects. Look for those unique touches you created. Perhaps it's her first letter, perhaps it's some other design detail, and see if you can extract something to create a custom sub mark as this is a useful thing your client will no doubt want to use for their brand in future, perhaps alongside, or I should say, substituting for the word mark in some cases. 11. Selecting a Colour Palette: [MUSIC] We certainly don't have time to have an extensive look at color theory. That could be a whole class on itself. But we do have time to just look at a surface level, some of the choices we make and some of the tools you can use to pick fitting color palettes for your brand, particularly where it's a word mark. First of all, a little bit of color theory. There's an excellent page and I'll put the link up here. This is by 99designs and its tips on color meaning. This just gives you a really good overview of different colors and the popular meanings behind them, at least as they're used in Western culture. You've got a little bit of a meaning behind red, orange, and some real-world examples of brands that have used these and the way they've used them. It's not an exact science. There's often brands that use these colors in different ways for different reasons. But this is a really useful guide if you're just dipping your toes in and you want to head in the right direction with which colors to use. Now over to the project that I've been developing and your class project will be different to this. But you can see we have our word mark logo, which I'm very happy with and I'm showing a reversed version of that, an irregular version and then I'm showing the sub-mark we've created, regular and reversed. Then I pull in just a little something, maybe some body text, some texts for the headings and I put something like this together, just two pages, one that's reversed and one that's not. I find that helps me to be a little bit more confident with the color choices than if I just made the color changes to the logo itself. I feel like these pages, you're making those choices in a little more of a real-world situation and it helps you to compare the way these are balancing and working. If I zoom out, I tend to duplicate that row of examples and then I'll start tweaking the colors to create different color roots. Actually a great quick tool you can use to do that if you select, and I'm going to be careful to avoid this title I've got at the top. You select all of the artwork on a row and click on this ''Recolor Artwork'' button, ''Advanced Options'' and you can pick any of the colors that are currently showing and you can change them on the fly to another color of your choice. Just as easy as that. I've got two slightly different shades of gold here, so that one shows better on white and one shows better on black. But it's really easy to try out different color roots and color harmonies using that tool. A few quick tips you can use when it comes to color and I'll just talk about a few of the most common options. Monochromatic means the hue is exactly the same. This has no color at all so this is technically monochromatic. But if I changed, let's say the background blue to this, then I pick the same color for the logo and I'll double-click the color palette there. Using this HSB area in particular, you want to leave a hue as it is, that ensures it's monochromatic and then I'm going to increase the brightness. You could lower the saturation if you wish, that's okay, it's just for hue has to stay the same and there, that is a monochromatic palette. Again, I could slip for background, and this time I could bring the brightness down so that there's more contrast. Both of those options are monochromatic. You could change the hue for both of these and explore other monochromatic options. That's probably one of the easiest color routes to choose because you're guaranteed that it looks fitting, there won't be any clashes. It's quite an easy and potentially effective route to use. Something else, you can use are complementary colors and Illustrator has a tool to help you with this. If I select my logo and I click up here this color guide, I just need to click the base color here to set it to the color I've got in my logo. You can see now if I click the drop-down, it actually has pre-programmed for us these different harmony rules and if I click on complementary, that gives you different shades and tints of a color to complement that blue. If I click on my background, and then I select one of these, you can see it gives me a complementary color. If I open the color wheel the best way to explain it is the complementary tool, it gives you options that come almost within a certain cone. A color harmony is always a color of directly opposite on the color wheel so you can see how blue would sit just here, and directly opposite, that's our complementary color. The wider harmonies was an acceptable cone around here. Either side of that, that technically complement that color. Let's come out of that. Let's revert back to something that's a bit easier to work with. In fact, if I pick my switch as a purple, then I'll put that in here to the base color and then I look at complementary tool, select for backgrounds. Straightaway, perhaps that reminds you of a famous basketball team. This is my problem with complementary colors, I think because this became very popular and very well-known in recent decades, almost every complementary color harmony has been used by a major brand. To that point to me, these harmonies sometimes look a little dated, and I favor the monochromatic harmonies or the harmonies with a little more subtle so perhaps one strong color that can pop and then something much more subtle or almost a tint to go alongside it and not necessarily a complementary tint. Perhaps even a gray. For me, something like that is much cleaner than the traditional complementary color harmony. But you can play with these options. It's good to understand the theory behind this. There's a few other color routes I came up with here, I'll show a bit more new ones. This one's quite nice with red and gold. One that uses a dusty rose, gold with a green and you won't find that on the slide of the color harmony rules. Of course, you could look online, you could look at Pinterest to get ideas, you can look at other brands, perhaps look at brands and different industries and color harmonies videos, and then try something similar to manipulate it yourself. But have fun exploring the different color options. In the next lesson we look at making a final presentation of your new word mark logo. 12. Presentation: Presentation is so important. Showing a logo in contexts can bring it to life and can make all the difference in a client size. Often in a real-life project, presenting the logo, creating some fitting mockups would be one of the last stages in a design project. You can see why this is such an effective way to showcase your final logo, seeing it living and breathing as it would be used. For this clothing brand, I'm showing the logo on a clothing tag, is one option I've created, and another where we've actually mocked this up as if it was stitched in, engraved into an item of clothing. For one of my other brands, this one, BSPOQE, we've actually got this rendered as it would look if it were cutout in metal against the background. Then this version here printed in silver foil, which the client actually had for their business cards. These mockups are really powerful way to present the concept. They make it jump off the page, and I think they catch the eye and capture the imagination. Everyone likes to see a logo as it looks when it's being used. Where to find a way of creating mockups like this, well, it's quite easy for a lots of different places you could look. Here's one I'm quite happy to share with you. This is graphicburger.com. Most of the options here are free to use. Occasionally, you get perhaps a sponsored product or something you have to pay for, but most of these are completely free. You've got everything from, you can mockup the logo on the side of a van, to t-shirts, to packaging and devices, so lots of templates to play with there. Really, this is the best way to present your work in your portfolio. If you look at my own Instagram page, you see that most of the work I showcase, I'm doing that inside a mockup so that you can really see your product come to life. If you compare, just looking at this flat dieline, well separated dieline for this piece of packaging to actually seeing it rendered in 3D. This is something I did in Adobe Dimension, but there are mockups that can do this thing too. There's just no comparison, is a much better way to show off your work. Make sure you do the same. Have fun finding some mockups and create some stunning examples of your word mark logo. Then you are ready to share and present facts of a weld. 13. Conclusion & Thanks for Watching: [MUSIC] Well done. If you're watching this now it means one of two things. Either you're someone who likes to click through the chapters and watch them in a wrong order, and why would you do that, I don't understand. Or you finish the class and if you've followed along closely, you will have your own wordmark logo to proudly display in your own portfolio. If that's the case thank you so much for watching the class. I really hope you've gained something useful from watching me share my process. Building a professional portfolio can take time and it can be quite good to show range and versatility. You've got a strong wordmark logo example now, if you'd like to widen your portfolio in other areas, why not check out some of my other courses on Skillshare and see if you can widen your portfolio fervor in a certain direction. Please don't forget to upload your creations to the class project area. I absolutely love looking through and seeing what you're able to create by putting your own spin on things. Lastly, please feel free to leave a review if you enjoyed this. Follow my profile and that way hopefully, I will see you in the next class. [MUSIC]