Design a Modern Monogram in Adobe Illustrator – Logo Design for Beginners

1. Class Introduction - Modern Monograms in Adobe Illustrator: Hey, welcome to my class. I'm going to show you how to design a modern monogram and Adobe Illustrator. I'm not talking about one of those fussy things that you see on a fancy hotel towel. I'm talking about something contemporary, stylish and iconic. We're gonna get started by choosing some letters. And then we're going to do some sketches. Take that sketch into the computer, and I'm going to show you a few essentials in Adobe Illustrator so you can design your own modern monogram as a vector illustration and use it for your personal brand or business. I'm Xhico, I'm an artist and designer with over 30 years of experience. I got started in my teens designing logos and letter forms. Now I specialize in branding and surface pattern design. Here's a small sampling of some of my work. I also take my past experience and teach people like you had to level up their design skills and be a better designer. Don't worry, I'm going to take you through the entire process. I'm going to show you how I sketch, take those sketches and refine them, get them into the computer and then draw them in Adobe Illustrator. Then you can export it for any project that you want. By the end of this class, you're going to have your very own monogram to represent your personal brand or business. You're also going to have some design skills to start creating logos and more in Illustrator. So what are we waiting for? Let's get started. 2. Class Project - Design Your Own Monogram!: In this class, your project is going to be to design your very own monogram. It's going to be easy because I'm going to walk you through my entire process. We're going to start out with a few loose sketches of some letters. We're going to combine those letters and then we're going to create a final sketch, will take that final sketch into the computer and then I'll show you how to draw in Adobe Illustrator. And don't worry, I'm going to show you a few essential tools in Adobe Illustrator that'll make it easy for you to draw your very own letter forms and design your own monogram. And you'll be able to take the skills that you learned in Adobe Illustrator to use as a foundation for your next project and continue going as a designer to help you achieve your project, I'm gonna be walking you through my entire process from sketch to finish. And I'm gonna be showing you three different monograms that I'm designing. You'll be able to use these techniques and design your very own monogram. Let's get started on designing your monogram for your personal brand or business. 3. Class Materials: You just need a few simple materials to get started. You probably have some white paper laying around the house and a pencil. You're also going to need access to Adobe Illustrator on a laptop or desktop. That's the version I'm going to be using in this course. It's also good to have some black ink markers on hand, but they don't have to be any fancy art markers. You can just have some Sharpies to use if you want. I like to have a wide variety of widths, so I have different stroke weights and I also can fill in big areas faster with the fatter pens. But primarily I use my gel marker to do all of my sketching. It's also great to have some tracing paper on hand. And some white art tape can come in really handy just to mask out any areas that you might have. We're also going to need a way to get your sketch onto the computer. So the easiest way to do that is with a mobile device that has a camera. So that's all you really need to get started. 4. Choose Letters for Your Monogram: Alright, this is easiest part of the class. So we need to pick our initials. Are you going to use your personal name or your business name? That's the first decision you have to make once you decide that. Write down your initials. So let's see, we're going to make this for a personal mark. You can also do something. Let's say the local sports team for the local school, o m. And let's say, what about for a project I'm working on called multicolor minds, MCM. Alright, so those are gonna be the initials that we're going to work with. Now get out your pencil and paper and write down the letters that you're going to use for your monogram. 5. Sketch Letters from Your Imagination: Alright, for our first exercise to get started on monogram, we need to pick which letters we're going to start working with. And I want you to start sketching from your imagination. I mean, you're probably thinking, how many ways can I draw an L? How many ways can I draw a G? I want you to think of many ways as possible for you to draw these letters. And I want you to start with the most obvious ways. Those are the first two that we know, right? But then I want you to start stretching these objects. I want you to add serifs to the objects. I want you to draw them at angles. I want you to ask "what if?" all the time. Draw them in cursive. Draw them half and cursive. Just look at all the different ways that you could draw the letter L. Sometimes you need to pick up a different type of pen. It might just help you get into a different mindset with it. And I want you to just fill up the whole page with as many different types of L's is you can think of, you might see something that makes you trigger to another style. And you can see, I'm refining this idea and getting this to be more symmetrical. I'm really looking at this as a symmetrical shape now. And that's how I start getting into some of the shapes that I might want to start using in my final piece. What's a lowercase L look like? We start getting a cool loop. So fill up your paper and see what you can do. Alright, now let's start with the letter G and see what we can come up with. So there's all different types of Gs that you can do. Think about what happens when the letter gets square. When the letter gets angular. When you write in cursive, the different types of cursive, the different types of lowercase Gs. Think about all the possibilities. You can think of. All the different ways that your imagination can come up with drawing different variations of Gs, try a different type of pen. Now, don't worry about any of these things being perfect or any of these things being the right answer. It's really about exploration right now. And thinking about all of the different shapes and forms and styles that you can think of a drawing your shape. There's so many different ways. So just fill up the page and see what you can do. There's so many different solutions. You know, when you start thinking about letter forms and the way you can draw letter forms. So I want you to just keep thinking, keep drawing and fill up a page. All right, I'm going to work on some other shapes here. And like I said, think of all the simple ways first that you can draw a shape. The ones that come directly to your mind. And then think about the abstract ways that you can draw shapes. Right now we're just getting some ideas out and nothing has to be perfect and nothing has to be final. This is just looking at some forms and looking at the different ways that we can see letters and the different types of letters that we're gonna be working with. How they might be able to fit together. So just use your imagination. Fill your page up. Just keep drawing. Nothing is final here. Just doodle and see what you can come up with. Think about when you're letters are squared out, when they're angular. There's all different ways to draw your different types of letters. So just keep drawing, fill the page. I'm going to keep doing a little bit of work here. I'll see you in the next lesson. And we're going to start looking at some combining of these different letter forms. 6. Tips to Design a Good Monogram: As we move into the next phase here, you're going to be taking your sketches and combining them to make your monogram. But before we get into that, I want to talk a little bit more about style and what makes a good monogram. Take some time and think about what the style is of your brand. For me, it would be bold, iconic, pattern, eyes, creative explosion. Just do a brainstorm and write these things down on a piece of paper. And keep this as a guide for the styles you're working around. Style is really important because when you move into the design phase, it really can determine what your design is going to look like. For example, if I was drawing an A and it was going to be bold and angular. And that's what my brand was about. It might look like this. But if my brand was about happiness and whimsy, my A might look like this. So having those words as guidelines can really help you drive the direction of your monogram. Now when you're making your monogram, it could be any letters that you want to choose. It could be multiple letters, it could just be one letter. But what's important is paying attention to your design and what your design is communicating. A lot of people don't realize my logo's a monogram. And it's basically abbreviation for Xhico - XCO. But now it's discovering relationships. How do I make these letters that are so different work together? So when you do exploring and you do the sketching, it can take you to discoveries. And then this is how you start to come up with relationships between the letters. The next thing you want to think about after relationships is thinking about repetition and rhythm. Those design elements can really change everything for you. This is how my logo actually originally started. I was sketching my name. I was abbreviating it like this. And then when it came time for our logo, this was my solution to kind of make this echoing design, this point of origin. And then when I started thinking about it, my logo really does tell the story of my brand. It tells the story of creation from a point of origin, from nothing. As it radiates out. Think about almost like the Big Bang theory. And it radiates out and it actually forms a solid shape. The shape could represent an idea, something that I create. So for me, that's how I bring story, a narrative into your monogram. When you bring narratives into your monogram or any logo, you really can make it much stronger. Here, this is a logo for a company called Body Bar Pilates. And it was a Pilates company that use these special machines. And so it needed to look really contemporary, but it needed to have a sense of balance and yet a sense of movement. And so what I did was take these Bs and turn them on their side with the P on its side. But I found this alignment and the sense of rhythm in there and a sense of repetition that brings some movement to the shapes. And then even if you're doing something as simple as one letter, you can bring a story into it really simply just by adjusting the shape, bringing in dimension. So there's so much that you can do with monograms. Here's a few more monograms that I've designed. Now you're going to jump in and start combining your forms. And as you're doing this, I want you to think about the list of your words that describe your brand. And I want you to think about repetition, rhythm, and relationships. As you build a narrative to your monogram. 7. Find Inspiration for Letterforms: Alright, so if you don't know where to get started with your lettering, it's okay to take a look at some fonts on the Internet so you can check out myfonts.com is a great resource. And you can also use your fonts on Adobe Creative Cloud. Those are both good resources. You can take a look at these fonts and draw from these fonts to get different ideas and figure out how to customize them and make them your own. Another good resource is to look at architecture or look to nature. So here we have some architecture here, and I'm actually starting to see a relationship here to the letter G. So let's just take a quick look at this. So if I look here at my architectural piece, I have this shape, I'm starting to see as a top of the G and the little tail that comes off and then this coming down as the lower bowl. So I'm just going to do a quick sketch from this. Kind of giving me... probably a little bit bigger here. So looking at architecture is just a really good idea and a really quick way to get thinking about new shapes and get inspired. And eventually, you're going to make these shapes your own. There you go. So look for some inspiration and architecture, nature, or even in other fonts. 8. Combine Letters in a Sketch: Alright, so now we're going to look at all of our letter forms that we have sketched out. And we're going to work on combining some of these shapes. So we have our LG shapes and we have some MCMC. And then I have some shapes that I've drawn out as well. But I have an idea of what I wanted to do with this OM, since it's for a local sports team. So let's start with the LGs first. So this one we're going to do more as a personal monogram. And what I'm going to look for is relationships in the letter forms themselves or contrast in the letter forms. So in this case, I'm liking this cursive L shape that I have going on here. And I'm thinking of maybe using a contrast in shape like a very angular G shape, something that is completely opposite and more geometric than this organic shape. So I'm going to take these two shapes here, something like this in this world. And I'm just going to start doodling again and combining those shapes. So you can use any type of pen you want. I'm just going to draw my L-shape first. Alright? And I know I want my G shape to be in here somewhere. Now it's looking a little complicated and my eyes getting a little distracted by having so much activity in here. So maybe I'm going to try it again and stretch that G shape out. Let's see what happens if I bring the G shape out. Now that's feeling a little better. That's feeling like that might work. Maybe I need more contrast. So let me draw my G shape first. How little can my G-shape be? Alright? And then let's see what happens when we put our L in here. I think they're making it too tight in here now and it works better when I draw the L first. So let's go back to join that first. Wonder what happens if I make a round G? That's kinda getting interesting. I liked something in here, maybe. Now's a good time to take your tracing paper. You can just take a sheet of tracing and go in here and now I'll probably go back and use my small pen. So I have a little bit more control. What I'm trying to do is make these two loops match. Because we're looking for some symmetry here. We can create a rhythm. This is also when a pencil can come in handy. You can shade a little quicker with a pencil. Make it a little more sketchy here. I'm just beefing up the line weight all around and making the line weight or even. Alright, now I want a round circle in here, so I'm just going to gently sketch out a circle. I forget it doesn't have to be perfect. We're gonna do this all in Illustrator and perfect it. So here we go. I think I'm onto something, so I think I'm going to use this as my main sketch for my monogram. Let's see what it looks like. And that's looking pretty good. Alright, next I want to use the O M. So this one I want, I already know I want it to be more sporty. And kind of going toward that varsity athletic sort of look. So I kinda know I want this block O-shape and I know I want a M, Now I'm not looking at a font because I just wanted to go from memory and see what my brain can do. And I'm just going to sketch that out really quick there. I'm going to beef it up a little bit with a fatter... pen here. Add some Serifs, make them about too thick here. And what's going to thicken this up with another stroke? I'm just holding my pen and a bit of an angle so I can get a fatter line there. And then let's go for you, flip these. Now you can see I made a relationship here where this M intersects the O. Because they want to have some harmony in there. I want it to end up looking something like this. So I can play with the thickness of these shapes and stuff once I get it in illustrator. So I'm not going to worry too much about it. I'm going to use this as my sketch. And I'm probably going to draw these as two separate shapes in Illustrator when I get in there. So I'm going to probably draw my O separately. And I'm gonna draw my M separately so that I have more flexibility with them. Alright, so this is gonna be for a project I'm working on called multicolor minds. And this projects a little bit more of an abstract project. And I was drawing these Ms earlier, kinda abstract, seeing how far away I can get from an M but still, be an M. And so I was thinking about wavelengths and brainwaves for this project a lot. Because it's really about diversity and groups coming together and a lot of thinking about creativity. So just kinda playing with that idea. I start sketching these kind of wavelengths as Ms. Then I'm just trying to think about how do I make a C can work in this shape. And I had a really hard time thinking about how the C is going to work in here. And then I start thinking, why don't I just play with the same exact shapes and see what I can do. So sometimes all you're looking for is to make relationships between the letters. And don't be afraid about getting abstract and not being literal about your shapes. You can really get out there and make some interesting shapes. Create more original work by thinking from your mind, building from your imagination. I think I'm gonna go somewhere in this direction. And I have a few ideas about how I might build this in Illustrator. Let's take these ideas that we have here. We have a few combinations. So let's take these combinations into Illustrator and see what we can draw in there. 9. Sketch Out Your Final Direction: Alright, now we want to get, maybe refining our directions just a little bit as we get into Adobe Illustrator, you can take a look at your sketches and you have a pretty good idea of where they're going. But sometimes you might want to get in there and refine them just a bit more before you get in illustrator. Don't forget, they don't have to be perfect because once we're in Illustrator, we're going to have a lot of control. We're gonna be able to make these linewidths all exactly the same. We're going to make these Indians all exactly the same in Illustrator, we're gonna be able to control all of this geometry and have everything square up perfectly. We're gonna be able to make a perfect circle here with our G. So we just wanted to get a good idea. While our sketch is going to look like in the end. Here's a good time to maybe combine both pencil for some light sketching and your pen. So I'm just going to square off my shapes here. And I'm going to look at the negative space now. Between my shapes and right now, I'm really mimicking just this shape to this shape here. And I'm going to continue to do that here. And I really looking at this width now, one thing to be really similar. Now I'm looking at my negative space again here. And I'm looking at my, what's gonna be my positive space there. You can see that it's changing quite a bit from my original box where everything goes outline because I'm paying closer attention to my spacing now. We're going to be dropping down just a little bit lower than we expected. And that's okay because we're refining. So this is going to be filled in. Then we have our third area. And I'm not going to do this because we need to make a curve here joining these for our C. So I'm just gonna draw that in there right now. We're going to have this all a positive shape. And then we have this positive shape here. It's gonna look something more like that. Of course, you can get in here and fill it with your pencil. Bit more. You can get your shapes locked up a little bit more. We're looking for is a little bit more clarity here on our idea. And this will be our final sketch so we can take into Adobe Illustrator. So you can see this is more of our ideational sketch here. And then we have more of a refined logo. And this is the one that we're going to use to build our design in Adobe Illustrator. So now let's take these three designs and get them into Adobe Illustrator and see how we can perfect them. 10. Get Your Sketch on the Computer: Alright, now it's time to get our design into the computer and get drawing in Illustrator. There's a really easy way to get it into the computer, just using your mobile device. So you're going to take your phone, get as close as you can, keep your phone parallel to the surface so there's no distortion in your shapes. So keep your phone parallel to the surface. Make sure to tap so you're in focus. Take a photo. Then you can go down to your photo, go to Share, and you can AirDrop it to your laptop. That's how I get my photos into my laptop easily. You can also use a scanner if you have one handy, but this is a quick and easy way. Alright, so let's get our other designs into the computer here. Alright, I think they're already the AirDrop. Let's get them into the computer. And we'll be getting to work soon. 11. Getting Started in Adobe Illustrator: Alright, first we need to launch Adobe Illustrator. Now, when Adobe Illustrator launches, it's gonna give us a pop-up window and we're going to choose New File. You can find a letter preset to start with. It might show you your dimensions in points, but you can also click to inches or millimeters, whatever you're more comfortable working with, I'm working in points. You can also change the orientation of your page here and add the number of art boards, which is basically like the number of pages that we're going to work on. We're just going to keep it at one for now. We can double-click here and type our title Monogram. Let's call it Monogram 1. And our color mode, we want to be RGB, raster effects, 300 PPI. And then we can hit Create. Alright, when your Adobe Illustrator opens, it might look different than mine. So to make sure that we're all working in the same workspace, I'd like you to go to Window > Workspace, and click Essentials. So your workspace might change. And if it looks different also, after you click Essentials, I want you to go to Reset Essentials. Alright, that's what I'm looking for. So your workspace should look like this. The next thing we're gonna do is we're going to add a few tools that we're gonna be working with. We're gonna go to Window, and we're gonna go here to Pathfinder. That's going to pop up. And some other tools might pop up with it. And that's okay. You can just drag this over here into this little bar and you'll have a little fly-out toolbar. So when you click here for pathfinder, you'll get the full view. Alright, we're also going to add our color window. We're going to go here and we're gonna go to color. And we're gonna do the same thing. I'm going to drag our window here till it turns blue and drop it. So now we have the main tools we're gonna be using on this project. Also, the other tools we're gonna be using are the Selection tool, the direct selection tool, the pen tool, and some shape tools. Here we have the rectangle tool, but you can see this little triangle in the corner of my tool. When I click it and hold down, I have a flyout menu that pops up. And I can click other tools such as the elipse and polygons. So we're gonna be using some of these tools to build shapes. So those are the main tools that we're gonna be using in Adobe Illustrator today. A couple of last things I'd like to show you is... I like to work with my rulers. So Command R will show your rulers on top and bottom. And this is a great way to pull and drop out guides. If you don't like where you put it, you can go Command Z to undo. Command Z is a great key to undo any mistake you make when you're working in Illustrator. A couple of other shortcuts I want to show you a working around your workspace. The spacebar will give you a hand so you can drag your art board around or move between your workspace. Option + Command + Spacebar will give you the magnifier, so you can zoom out. Command + Spacebar will give you the magnifier so you can zoom in. Command + 0 will bring your art board back to the center in full view. So those are the main key commands that I use to get around. Another thing I want to show you about key commands is if you click any of these tools here, you'll see that there is a letter right here. That letter is the keystroke that I can type in and that tool will come up. You can see here for ellipses L and rectangle is M. So right now I'm on the Rectangle tool. Watch right here in this space. If I click L changes to the ellipse tool, now I'm working with an elipse. So as you work more in Illustrator, you can learn about the keyboard shortcuts to work faster and make your workflow more efficient. Alright, that's the basics of getting your Illustrator space setup. Now in the next lesson, we're going to bring our sketch in and get ready to draw. 12. Import Your Sketch into Adobe Illustrator: Now that we're in Adobe Illustrator and we have our workspace all set up the way we want it. We're going to bring in our sketch. So we're gonna go up here to File. And we're going to go to Place. Now you can see next to place, there's characters here. That's a key command, Shift + Command + P will bring us to place in the future. So if you learn these key commands, it will help your workflow being much more efficient when you're working in Illustrator. So we're gonna go Place. And now this is going to bring us to our sketches. And let's bring in our varsity OM first. So I'm gonna go place. Now when you bring it in, you can see it shows me a thumbnail. And wherever my little arrow clicks is where the top corner of that is going to be. Now, if I click, it's just going to drop the full image at full resolution in here, watch. Click. Alright. Now to zoom out, we're going to use our key commands, Option + Command + Spacebar. We're going to zoom out my hand tool to scroll over. You can see how large this photo is compared to our art board. Well, there's a couple of different ways we can reduce it. Let's zoom out some more. I can use my selection tool. I can click the corner. And I can hold Shift, which keeps the proportions constrained. And I can drag it so it's really small and fits on my page. Once again, if we do Command + 0, that will bring us to a full-page view. Alright, so that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is to go to File > Place. Select the same file here. I'm gonna go place. And this time instead of clicking, I'm going to click and drag. And now I can make the image as large as I want it to be. So wherever I drop that, that's how big the image will be. Alright. So that looks like a good place to get started. We can click this one and click Delete. And now we have our starting image placed and imported into our file. 13. Vector Basics in Adobe Illustrator: So when we're working in Illustrator, we're working with what's called vectors. Vectors are basically some line shapes that are drawn with points and handles. So let's just draw a circle to illustrate that for you really quickly. If I click the ellipse tool and I hold shift, that lets me draw a circle that's constrained within proportion. If I don't hold Shift, I can draw any ellipse shape. But if we click this circle with the direct selection tool, you can see that we have a point and we have a handle. And here we have a point and a handle. This curve right here is described by this handle and this handle. And you'll notice that these handles describe about one-third of the curve. If we go from this point to this handle, from this point to this handle, and then in-between those are each about a third of the curve. That's a good rule to keep in mind when you're drawing in Illustrator, you can see that this curve is different. But this describes a little bit less than a third. This describes a little bit more. But the third is the good starting point. That gives you a perfect curve. You can see that when you start to distort it, it changes the shape of the curve. We can drag this handle in and out while I'm holding Shift to keep it locked horizontal and we can unlock it and twist it and drag it different ways to. Now let's talk a little bit more about the Selection tool and Direct Selection tool. The selection tool lets you click and drag an entire object around. The direct selection tool lets you select part of the object and work directly with one point, drag a handle. Or you can hold shift to select multiple points. Now I can move these two points together. So that's the difference between the Selection Tool and Direct Selection Tool. The Selection Tool moves the whole object. The Direct Selection Tool lets you work on an individual part of the object or the detail of the objects. Lastly, I want to show you outline mode. If you press Command + Y, this shows us the outline mode. This is the underlying architecture that's used to build our drawings. If we press Command + Y, this is a preview mode. This is what we want our artwork to look like. So for example, if I draw, if I make this one color and I make this another color, and I make one go in front of the other. We can see here that this is the way our artwork looks. But when we press Command + Y, we can see the full shapes and where all the underlining shapes go because this is the underlying architecture that builds our work that we're seeing. So just understand that there's Outline Mode and Preview Mode, and these are two different ways to view your artwork. You can also go to View > Outline. You can toggle on and off here or Command + Y. 14. Basic Shape Tools in Adobe Illustrator: Okay, In this lesson, I'm going to show you how we're going to draw with some shape tools. So this is a really basic, easy way to draw with simple shapes in Illustrator. We're going to use the rectangle tool. And with this tool we can make a letter T. I have it colored blue. So once again with the selection tool, we can select both of these by holding Shift and clicking and dragging to select two shapes. Oops, there we go. And if I want to align them, I can use this great Align Tool and align them to center. Now you can see they're both filled with a cyan color. We can go over here with our color and click black. Alright. Now to make this a proper T, I probably want to make this a little bit fatter here. Alright. Now, you can see if we go to the outline mode like I just showed you Command + Y, that we have two shapes that make up this T. We want this to be one complete shape. So let's go to outline mode again. Click and drag. And now we selected both of our shapes. Now if we go over to the Pathfinder Tool, we can go to the first tool which is Unite. This is going to unite both shapes. Now you could see that disappeared. If we go Command + Y, we can see this is all one shape. Now, we're able to use the Pathfinder Tool to draw our shapes and combine them to get the one desired shape we want in the end. You can also use it to remove shapes. So let's draw a circle really quick. And I'm going to draw another circle. And I'm just going to make it another color really quick. So you can see here. Once again, we can highlight these and use the awesome Align Tool To line them up. And now we can go to the Pathfinder Tool and use that Minus Front. And what that's gonna do is it's going to remove the shape that's on the front. It's closest to us. And behind it we have this black shape. So right now we have two shapes. Alright? And what we're gonna do is remove this shape. So this is becomes a see-through negative space. Alright, we've removed the shape and now you can see it's see-through. So those are the ways we're going to use the shapes and the Pathfinder Tool to build our own unique shapes. 15. The Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator: Alright, another tool we're going to use in Illustrator is the Pen Tool. I love this tool. It takes some time to get used to, but once you get it down, you're going to love it. Alright, just some basics to get started. When you start drawing with the Pen Tool, you click and then click another point and click another point. And you can see it's filling in because I have the fill set over here. I can switch it out just to look at the stroke for now. But as you can see, as I click, it's creating a shape. When I go here you can see next to the Pen Tool there's a little circle that pops up. That means my shape is going to close and I'm going to have a complete filled shape. Whenever we're drawing in Illustrator, we want to always close and have a completely filled shape. So now you can see this as one solid shape. I can switch out the stroke and the fill, and that's our shape. Now also, in drawing with the Pen Tool, you can keep your points aligned by holding Shift. And that keeps it on the horizontal axis. Or holding shift will also keep it aligned on the vertical axis. Now when you're drawing with curves with the pen tool, what you're gonna do is you're going to click one. And now you're going to click the next point. And you're going to drag, you can see it starts to bring out a handle and a curve. You can turn that curve any which direction. But as we learned, we want to watch our handle and describe about 1 third of the curve. And then go down to our next point here and click and drag. Now you can see that by following my one-third rule about that, I already start to get a really nice curve. I can always go back in and tweak any of these things and clean them up and get really precise. But just to get a quick drawing, you can see how you can draw a wavy line very quickly. Let's switch that stroke view. So you can always go in with your Direct Selection Tool and move your points. You can go with your Direct Selection Tool and move your handles. There's all kinds of ways you can edit, but those are the basics of drawing with the Pen Tool. And as I said before, keep your points when you're drawing curve at the apex is of where your curves are. And make sure you draw with as minimal points as possible. That will make your files and drawing much more enjoyable. 16. Using Strokes in Adobe Illustrator: Another way we're going to be drawing is with our strokes. We're going to use our strokes to actually create shapes. So really quick, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our window here. Scroll down until you see stroke. And that's going to pop up another window. You can put that over here and dock it in your toolbar. So here's our Stroke Window. Go up here to the little stacked menu and go Show Options. When you go to Show Options, you can see that it gives you some weight options. The cap options, which is here is the cap of your stroke, some corner options. So if you have a corner, different ways to corner can round off or blunt out. And it also gives you some Align Stroke options. So a line means if the stroke is made to the center of the line or inward or outward. So let's see what I mean by that. If we go to, let me draw a circle to best demonstrate this, draw a circle. And we have a stroke. We're going to change our weight of our stroke to ten points. You can see that this blue line is our path. That's our vector line. If we click Command +Y, That's all we see. But the stroke is what illustrators rendering for us at ten points wide. It's aligned so that the stroke is on the center of this blue line. If we click here, the stroke will go inward. So now the blue lines out here. And if we click the other one, the stroke will go outward. So now the blue lines on the inside. So that's another way that you can align the stroke. Now when we draw with our stroke, we can make this a shape. What do I mean by that? So let's go back to this curvy shape here. Let's make this a fatter stroke. Now let's make the cap on this round. Now you can see it kinda looks like a wiggly snake. Now if I wanted to make this into a shape, let's go Command + Y. You can see that it's just this one path that we have drawn. But if I go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke, It's going to create a shape that looks like the stroke that we're actually seeing here in the black. So now if we go Command + Y, that one path is no longer in the center. It's actually a shape. So we have a full outline shape that looks like this snake that we want it to look. And that's really what we're going for in Illustrator. We want to convert all of our strokes into shapes and have some really beautiful clean files built with nice clean shapes. Alright, now we get to the fun part and we get to learn all these little techniques that we learned to draw our own unique monograms. 17. Drawing Your Sketch in Adobe Illustrator - Example 1: Alright, here we are in Adobe Illustrator. We have our sketch brought in, and I also brought in this piece of reference material. So we can just get a better idea of this kind of varsity collegiate sort of look, we're going for. So to start out drawing this... oh, I think what I'm gonna do is just start with a basic shape. I'm going to start using a rectangle. And I'm just going to click and draw a rectangle. Now I need to make little angles here in the corner to give this octagonal look going on. So what I'm gonna do is let's zoom in. And if we click the Direct Selection Tool, we can see that we have a point here, point here, here, and here in the four corners. What we need to do is put another point where we can create a joint to create that angle that's going to happen. So what I'm going to do first is we're going to bring a guide over, just drag it from the ruler and drop it at the point of this stroke here. And I'm going to drop it here. The center point of this stroke. While we're at it, we might as well go ahead and drop one on the top and bottom. Guides are very helpful for getting your work done in Illustrator. Alright, now we're going to use a little cheater method. I'm going to just take another rectangle and I'm going to draw it out just a little bit. I'm going to swap out the fill and the stroke. So right now it's filled with black, but let's just fill it with a different color so we can see it really easily. And I'm gonna go and put another guide out to this edge. Now we're going to use this little guy as a measurement. We're going to drag it over here. Now what I'm gonna do is rotate it. If you see when I go to the corner here, any corner, my cursor will turn into a little rotation. I'm going to hold Shift and that's going to keep it locked. And now I'm going to rotate it this direction. And let's go and pull a guide down to here. Down to here. Alright, so now we have all these guides. We can delete our little cheater. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to each of these intersections here. On the Horizontal. Go here and go to Add Anchor Point. We add an anchor point at each of those intersections. Let me zoom in a little bit more so you can see what's happening. I'm going to add anchor point right here. I'm going to add an anchor point right here. All right. Now, if you go Command + ; it will hide your guides. We're going to select with our Direct Selection Tool. You can see I have an anchor point here. I have one here now, all I have to do is click this one on the corner. And I'm gonna hold shift and click this one at the same time. So these will now move together. I'm holding Shift to keep him constrained. Alright. Now if I go Command + ; I can see my guides again. I think it got locked right and where I want it. Let's go to the top corner. Make sure to click off and then click back on and hold Shift and click your other corner. And I'm going to hold Shift to constrain them and pull them to the corner where I wanted. All right, so there we have a block O going on. If I go Command + ; I can hide my guides. Now we're going to draw an M. So our M is going to look like this. And what I'm gonna do first is draw the main structure of the M and we'll worry about the serifs last. Let's turn our guides back on. And our M, we want it to be at the same height as our O. So I'm just gonna go to the Pen Tool and I'm going to click down at the bottom, the baseline here. And I'm going to hold shifts to the line goes straight upwards to the next point and they're aligned perfectly. The next line, hold Shift. Now I'm going to hold Shift and go just a little bit over here. And now I'm gonna go down to where our M is going to meet in the middle. Alright. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a separate shape for this little serif here. And I'm gonna make a separate shape for this serif here. That way we have a little bit of flexibility with our shapes. So let's go here. I'm going to click on the line and go shift. Now, I might need to align this a bit better. Alright, and then down here I'm going to do the same action. I'm going to go and take my Pen Tool and I'm going to hold Shift. Alright, so now we have half of our M. So what's next? We got to make this a full M. What I'm going to do for the moment is I'm going to select all of these together with the Selection Tool and click Command + G, that's for Group. You can also find that under Object > Group and Ungroup. Alright, what I'm gonna do now is go over to the Reflect Tool. Double-click. And I'm going to keep my axis vertical. And I'm going to click Copy. Now, if I go back to my Selection Tool, I can drag that. I can drag that over and get this pretty lined up the way I want it to be. Alright, so now I have two different sides of the M and they're each a group of different shapes. What I'm gonna do right now is I'm going to group these together one more time. So I'm going to select both of these groups and go Command + G to Group. Let's go Command + ; to hide our guides. And now you can see our monogram is starting to come together. Alright, so now if we select both of these shapes, we can scale them together. I'm holding Shift + Option and that's letting me constrain and scale them from the center point. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. I like where this is coming through generally. But I think we might have to visually cheat this and give the o a little bit more space at the top. So I'm gonna go to the Direct Selection Tool. And I'm going to highlight all of these four points here just by dragging over them. You see these four not highlighted. So I'm going to now click and hold Shift to constrain that and just pull that up a little bit to give it a little bit more space. And now I'm going to click and I'm going to drag and just go over the four on the left side. And I'm going to hold shift and open the O, up just a little bit more. Alright. I think it's feeling a little bit better. We could do some adjustment like that, which will make it really easy to clean up the center spot. But I think it's good to see the M. But I do like the M coming through this corner access here. I think somewhere in there is a good place to start. We can also see what that looks like if we select everything and we go over to our stroke. And what happens if we beef that up? How does it look? What happens if we take down the weight? How does it work? So there's all these different options we can look at. Now. So let's take this to about, let's say 50. Alright. So now if we do go Command + Y, you can see we just have one stroke because all that's describing Command + Y, this space. So we want to make these shapes. Now, in order to make these shapes, we're going to select everything here. I'm going to go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke. Now you can see that these are all shapes. So let's make our O one color. It could be any color. And then we can see our M very clearly. Now the M is the one that we're going to have to work on a little bit. There's some really easy things that we can do to clean everything up here. So first I want to make sure that there's no weird little hiccups on this line. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull our M over here. I'm going to go to my Direct Selection Tool and I'm going to highlight all of those on the line. We're gonna go to our Alignment Tool here and go align to top. And that's just going to make sure those are, all, those points are all in the same spot. Now I'm going to select this edge over here. All the way down to this edge. I'm going do the same thing. I'm going to align them to the left edge to make sure these are line. Now I'm going to select these on this side and I'm going to pop them out and make sure they align to the right edge. Alright, and then lastly, we need to line up this point. I think I'm just gonna do that optically by dragging this one-point down a little bit and drag this point down. And I think it's just going to have to be something optical like that for now. Alright. Now it looks like I could use a little bit more extra link on this serif here. So I'm just going to select both of these. So just these two points on the outside are selected on the top and bottom. And I'm going to nudge it out ten nudges just using my keyboard, 12345678910. And I'm gonna do the same thing on this side. I'm going to highlight this. I'm going to nudge these out to the right, 12345678910. And now we have a pretty good-looking M here. So what I'm gonna do now is highlight this M. I'm going to go over to pathfinder. First. Let's take a quick look. I'm gonna do Command + Y. And you can see these are all multiple shapes that are making up this M. Go Command + Y again. When I do the Pathfinder > Unite. Now this is all one shape. Let's look at a Command + Y again. And you can see this is all one shape. Alright. As you can see, we're really close to pulling our monogram together. So I am just going to pull this over here. And I'm gonna make this black. And I think this is looking... I'm going to line that up right in there. I think we want to have some negative space in there. I think something like that's looking good. That way we have the energy of this O and M coming together there. Alright, that does it. That gives us a monogram for a varsity team with the O and M. You can delete these files. We no longer need 'em. And that does it. That gives us a monogram for our varsity team or the local school. 18. Drawing Your Sketch in Adobe Illustrator - Example 2: Let's work on a second monogram. Let's import it using Place, but we're going to use Shift + Command + P. Start using some of the shortcuts we're learning. And let's bring in this sketch. I'm going to drag to place it in here. And as you can see when I go up to this corner, I have a little angle. So I'm going to rotate this. All right, so that looks about where I want it. Now. I want to draw on top of the sketch like a piece of tracing paper. So I'm going to use my Layers for this. So I'm gonna double-click and I'm gonna click Dim Images to 50% and go, okay. Now I'm going to lock this layer. I'm gonna go down here and go New Layer. Now I have a layer above this layer. So when I draw on this layer, all the images will be on top of this layer. Alright, so I have a G here. It's basically a circle with a line. So we're just going to start with a circle. I'm gonna go back to the center. I'm going to hold, click and hold Shift + Option and drag out. And that lets me drag a circle out from the center. I'm going to get my radius about where I want it right there. And I'm going to put my fill at none. Go over here to my stroke. And let's make that about 16 for now. Alright, so my G needs to end about here and about here because I need to make the tail come off here. So what I'm gonna do is go over here to the Scissor Tool. You can easily find that group with the Eraser. So I'm gonna go to my Scissor Tool. I'm just going to clip it here and clip it here. Let's zoom in a bit. Now, when I click my Direct Selection Tool, I can click just this portion of the segment that I clipped out and delete it. I'm going to hit Delete twice to make sure to get rid of those extra points there. So now what we're gonna do is we're going to go to our Pen Tool and we're going to click here on our point. And that's going to connect it to our curve. And let's just click up to here. And that looks like a good G to me. Don't forget, we can click here and change the cap to make this more rounded on the tip if we want to. And I think that looks good. Alright, so now let's draw our L. I'm going to use the Pen Tool for this. I'm gonna go up here and start at this part of the tail of the L. I'm going to click and I'm just going to follow around to the lowest point on the apex. I'm going to click a point there. I'm going to hold Shift to keep my handles perpendicular. And I'm going to drag the direction I'm drawing. Now I'm going to follow out and click on the next apex out and do the same thing. Click and drag the direction I'm drawing. Don't worry about this curve. We're going to come back and tune that up. But as I go, I'm going to keep it my handles about one-third whenever I can, the one-third rule. So we're going to click and drag the direction we're drawing. Come down to where the curve stops about. Click and drag, go down. I'm going to hold Shift. So we have a perfectly straight line here. And then I'm going to click and drag, go down to the apex. Hold Shift, click and drag, and follow your entire shape around. Alright. Let's go back and click and drag. Now we have it basically plotted in. And we're gonna go back to our Direct Selection Tool. And with our Direct Selection Tool, we can move these points and really get them on the point of the apex where we want and we can tune things up. Remember the third rule. So I'm going to click this handle and I'm going to pull it back in. And at the same time I'm going to come in, pull this one down a little bit. So it's just a little bit of nuancing. But with a little bit of nuancing, you can get some really beautiful curves going on in your work. So this one's coming out too far. And this one, I might need to bring this down a little bit. Our anchor point, same thing here. Bring this anchor point up. And we're just doing some new on the scene. And once you think you have it looking good where you want it, we can go here and take a look. This is looking a little square, so I'll probably go work on this a little bit. Similar that squareness out if I can. Let's usually bringing in some of these handles just a little bit. All right, that's looking pretty good. So let's go over here and unlock our sketch. And we can just drag it over and take a look. Now, we can see that there's a little bit of a kink in here. So we're gonna go back up into here and use our Direct Selection Tool. And just work that out a little bit. And you'll get the hang of it. What needs to be pulled in? What needs to be pulled out a little bit as you work a little bit more. So let's say this is looking good and we're ready to maybe add a little bit of dimension. So let's look at adding some layers. And how are we going to create some of these intersecting and interlocking shapes coming in front of each other. Let's take a look at that next. Let's look at adding some dimension to this monogram. Now, this might get a little confusing, so stay with me. First thing I'm gonna do is show you a tool called offset. So what we're gonna do is we're going to draw a circle. And let me just reverse this. So all we have is a circle with a fill. I'm going to go to Object > Path > Offset Path. What that does, you can see another circle came around it. All that's doing is creating a path that's from this distance to a new edge, whatever distance you put in here. So it's creating a path that's offset from our original path. So we could put in ten points. Make sure you have preview clicked. And if you press, go into the next field, you'll be able to see how far offset that path is. Alright, so that's the tool that we're going to use here. If I click Okay, you can see if I go over here to my color palette, I now have two circles, and this one is offset ten points from this one. Alright? So that's the basic tool we're going to use in this exercise. Let's go down here. And the first thing we need to do is we're going to set an offset path to this shape. However, this isn't a shape yet. This is just one stroke. If we press Command + Y, we can see this is one stroke. What we want is we want these outer parts of the stroke to be our shape. So we're gonna go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke. And you can see that created a shape. If we could press Command + Y, we now have a shape here. It's no longer just that one stroke. Command + Y again, back to our preview. And let's do the same thing with this. We're gonna go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke. Alright, so now we have two shapes here. The first thing we wanna do is we're going to offset our path. So we have a little bit of a white edge. So it looks like that the L is coming over this in some places. You can see our little messy sketch here is we have the l coming over here and then the G comes over in this spot and the L comes over in this spot and so on. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to Object > Path > Offset Path. I'm going to put in a smaller number. Let's go Three. And that looks good to me. And I'm going to click, Okay, and now I'm going to fill that with white. Alright. Now you can see that this looks like it's starting to come over that edge. Well now we need to make the G look like it's coming over the edge in some locations, this is where it might get a little confusing for you. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do the same thing with the G. We're going to go to Object > Path > Offset Path, and three points and go, okay. Now I'm going to just fill this with a color because it's just going to be a little bit easier for us to see what's happening. Alright. So I want to bring the G in front of the loop here. And I want to bring a G in front of the loop here. The way I'm gonna do that is let's zoom in. I'm going to click select both of these G shapes. I'm gonna go over here and we're gonna go to the knife tool. With the knife tool, I'm just going to quickly saw down through both of these shapes on each side of where I want it to overlap. Now, I'm going to come here and I'm going to get my Direct Selection Tool, I'm sorry, my Selection Tool. And I'm going to click both of these objects so you can see that they're both selected. And now I'm going to go to Object > Arrange > Bring to Front, which is also Shift + Command + (right) Bracket. Now you can see that's coming in front of this shape. All we're gonna do is fill this with white. And now you can see that illusion starting to happen here. Alright, we're gonna do the same thing here. We're going to select both these objects. We're going to go to the Saw. We're just going to saw through both of these shapes here. We're going to click our Selection Tool. We're going to click both of these shapes. We're going to go Shift + Command + (right) Bracket to bring to front. Now, I'm going to color this with white. Now these other green shapes, we don't really need them. We just really need that white shape for the illusion. So I'm just going to delete those groups. Alright. And now we have our monogram. And here's our sketch. We have our monogram with some dimension. 19. Drawing Your Sketch in Adobe Illustrator - Example 3: Okay, let's go to our other monogram I'm trying now. Let's do Shift + Command + P to Place our sketch. We've got our sketch here and let's go Place. We're going to drag. There we go. So we basically need for wavy lines that repeat. And then we need to join this one is a C. I'm kinda thinking this C might be squared off. I'm not sure yet, but I think that's what I'm going to try. So the easiest way for me to think of to create this is to maybe use one of illustrators effects. So let's go over here and let's just start with four wavy lines. So how are we going to get those wavy lines? I'm going to draw a one long line here, a stroke. And that looks pretty good. We're going to do a thick stroke like 40 points. And then what I'm gonna do is hold Option. And when you hold Option and drag the object in Illustrator, it makes a copy of it. I'm also holding Shift so I keep it locked in place vertically as I drag it. Now if I press Command + D, that's going to duplicate that action. And I'm going to get another bar exactly where I made the other bar and the same distance. And I'm going to do that one more time. So now I have my four lines. Here, we have four lines, and now we need to make them wavy. So I'm going to highlight these and we're gonna go to Effect. Let's try Zigzag. I'm going to click Smooth. And I can see already right here I'm getting in shape that I want. Okay. So I think that's enough space right here. And I can cut this off somewhere over here. I'll have my four wavy lines, so I'm going to click, okay. Now remember these are just an effect and Illustrator's rendering that if I click Command + Y, I just have straight lines there. So you click Command + Y. Again, we want these to be shapes. So we're going to go to Object > Expand Appearance. So what this did was this expanded our stroke to be in the wavy line. Now we need to make an outline of our stroke. If I go Command + Y, now you'll see that we have a stroke, but now it's in the wavy line. So now we're gonna go to Object. I'm going to go to Path. I'm going to go to Outline Stroke. And here we go. Now we have Command + Y. We can see we actually have shapes. Alright, so that's where we're going to start. Now I need to figure out where I want to cut this off. I think I'm going to cheat by copying one of these. I'm just going to hold Option and drag and make a copy. Then I'm going to flip this. I want this to be lined up right here in the center. So I'm just going to go here and I'm going to go to Reflect Tool and double-click. And I'm going to select vertical and click. Okay, let me use my Selection Tool and I'm just going to drag this down so I can get an idea here of where I want this to flip. Where I want us to cut off. I think it's about right here. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm just going to delete this. And we're going to get rid of this whole edge over here. And I'm gonna do that by selecting all of these. Go into Object > Compound Path > Make. Now, all of these are basically one shape together. It's different than a group. These are more than grouped together. They're actually one shape, but I filled them, they're all going to fill with the same color. So now I'm gonna go to this shape that's in front. And I'm going to select both of these groups and go to Minus Front. And now I have my basic shape. Now I'm going to just take a rectangle here. Zoom in. Let's just draw...sorry. Let's just draw an edge here. Alright, that looks about right. I'm gonna make it maybe a little thicker. Alright, now I'm going to ungroup these shapes. Shift + Command + G to Ungroup. And I'm going to select these two center wiggles and this one part of the site of the sea. And I'm going to Unite them. Now. I have all the shapes. Alright, there we go. That looks pretty good. That's our MCM monogram there. That's for our more abstract version of a monogram. A monogram can really be anything you want it to be and there are no rules, no limitations. Use your imagination and have fun with it! 20. Exporting Your Monogram from Illustrator: I've shown you some different ways of drawing a monogram. We've done an abstract monogram, a script version of a monogram, and a more classic varsity version of a monogram. Don't forget, you can choose any letter style to draw your monogram. I want to show you in this lesson, how to build your monogram and get it ready for professional use. So we have all of our shapes here, but now we really want to eliminate any extra shapes that we don't need and only get it down to the essentials. So right now, if we zoom in here, we can see that this white shape is a shape by itself. Alright. What we wanna do is we want to erase that white shape and eliminate it from this black shape. So the only we have the black shape. So we're gonna do that by selecting this white shape and black shape and go to minus front. And that's going to eliminate the white shape because it's in front of the black shape. It's now eliminated. You can see there's just this black shape. But what it did was it brought this shape down here in front of where our white shape was overlapping. So let's just drag these to again. Select those two. And I'm going to go Shift + Command + Right Bracket – Bring to Front. So that's the illusion we're going for once again, really quick. These are two different shapes here. So I'm going to go Shift + + Command + G for Ungroup. And now we have now ungrouped these shapes. I want to do that because when I minus the front, if I have a group, it's going to eliminate a lot of things and it's going to look weird. So we don't wanna do that. So now I have this shape and this one shape by itself. And I'm going to go minus front. Alright, so now we have this black shape as one shape, and we have this as one little shape over here. And we can group these two together. Command + G to Group those two together. Now we need to eliminate this white part on part of the G here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to copy this Command + C. So we have this white part of the L copied. And the reason why I'm going to do it is because when I use minus front, It's going to eliminate it. But I'll show you what we're gonna do. We're going to select both of these objects and I'm going to go minus front. Now it left this part of the G, But, uh, eliminated our white part, but we need to eliminate that around here on this edge too. So I'm gonna go Command + F – Paste in Front. And it brought it exactly where it was before and pasted it directly in front. So we're going to grab our G one more time, that part of the G on this side, and we're going to Minus Front. Now it did our trick again. Now we're going to Command + F paste in front one more time. And we're going to eliminate this part of the G hold Shift. Now both of those objects are selected and minus front. And now we have this piece of the G, this piece of the G, and there are no white objects. If I go Command + Y, everything is a shape. But now I want to bring all these shapes together for the G. So Command + Y, let's go shift, shift, shift. I want to bring these altogether. So let's go shift, shift, shift, shift. All right, I think all the pieces are selected and we're going to go Unite. And that brought everything together. So now our G is one shape and our L is one shape. Oops, oops, I thought we'd group that. Let's grab that and go Command G to group that. Okay, so our L is one shape or G is one shape. Now if we go over to our colors, we can give these two different colors. And that is one of them go. Now to export it. Let's say you needed your logo to be exported at 400 by 400 pixels. You can take a square here and click and enter 400. By 400. It says 0 points, but pixels and points are about the same. And now we have just a rectangle. But if I go Command +9, That's going to make an artboard. You can see it's black, just like this. So now we have a new artboard shape here. You always want to keep one file with your master logo. And then you can make a new file with your artboards that you want to export. So let's say you're going to export this for use on social media. Now you go to File > Export > Export As. We're gonna go to JPEG. Use Artboards. I'm going to put range 2, I just want to export the new one which is page two that I just made. And I'm going to export it into my monogram class folder. And when I click Export, it's going to give me a couple more options. I want RGB for the screen. I want 72 PPI. And I'm going to click here and go Art Optimized. Keep that checked. And I'm going to click, Okay. Alright, so now we have an export, a JPEG of our file. Let's go take a look at it. And as you can see here, we have our export, a JPEG file. Now you can open this up in Photoshop or use it on your social media wherever you need to use it. 21. Thank You!: Thank you so much for joining me here. I'm so excited to see your monogram. So please share it in the class below. And if you have any questions, please leave them on Discussions page. And love to hear back from you and know what you thought about this class. So if you can leave me a review, that'd be very helpful. And if you share your posts on Instagram, make sure you tag me at @studio.xhico – that's Xhico with an "x".