Design Your Logo Using Vectornator

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to this course on designing logos in vector Nader. My name is Ben Nielsen and I'm Media Design educator with over six years of experience teaching design both in-person and online. I hope that you're excited to learn more about the APP vector Nader. This app is available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I'm going to be using the iPad version in this course. But the versions for iPhone, iPad, and Mac are all essentially identical. There are just some changes in where the interfaces, so you can follow along on any of those programs that you want. Vector Nader is a free app right now so you can go ahead and download it without any concerns about being locked into a payment plan or anything like that, which is why I think it's a great place for you to start in your vector design journey. We're going to be going along and learning about how to design a logo in this course. And then we'll learn some principles of logo design. Then we'll sketch out some logos. And then we'll get into vector Nader, and we'll actually start designing the logo. I hope that you're ready and excited to learn. Let's go ahead and dive in. And in the next video we'll talk about the project for this course. 2. Project: The project for this course will be for you to create an original logo using vector Nader, either on the iPad, the iPhone, or the Mac. There's just a few requirements for the slower. The first requirement is that you need to sketch it first and I would love it if you would upload pictures of your sketch when you upload the final logo as well, the logo should be done on a 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 Canvas or larger, so that it will be able to appear in a variety of different places. And the logo should use at least one Merge Shape. Now we're going to talk about merging shapes during this course. So don't worry if you don't know what that means right now, but just know that that is something that your logo should include as we go along so that you can show what you've learned in vector Nader. There are lots of other things that a logo could include, including things like texts that we'll learn about in vector Nader. But your logo doesn't have to include all of those things. When you're done with your logo, you can go ahead and upload it to the project section for this course. You know, you learn a lot better if you do as you learn. So do take the time to complete the assignment at the end of each video in this class, so that you can actually learn how to do the thing that you've signed up to learn. You also learn better when you get feedback on your design projects. So please do take the time to upload your project into the project section for this course so that I. 3. Logo Design Principles: All right, Before we dive in and actually start to make a design, there are some points that I want to talk about for logo design. Some things to think about as you are creating your logo. The first one is that a logo should be simple. You don't want a logo that is really complex. Take a look at this logo that was the first Apple logo. It's a little bit complex, right? There's all of these things that are going on. And now the Apple logo that we all know, It's a lot simpler, right? And it's much easier for it to appear in a variety of places. So make sure that you think about simplicity when you are designing your logo. Remember that logos have to appear on things as large as billboards and as small as business cards. And so simplicity is going to be key in being able to appear in a variety of different circumstances. Remember that a logo is really marketing the brand that you are designing a logo for. And so it doesn't need to be a piece of art like a painting or something like that. It really needs to be something that someone can instantly recognize as a piece of that brand. Think about something like the McDonald's logo. When you see that, you're just driving down the highway, right? But you immediately know what it is. You may have positive or negative associations with something like McDonald's, but you know what it is, it has a strong brand and that is because it is simple and clear. Another thing that you should think about with logos is that a logo, while it might include text, should be able to stand alone without text unless it's a logo like the Coca-Cola logo, which is a text-based logo. Obviously, if you took away the text from the Coca-Cola logo, there is no logo anymore, right? So if you're designing a logo that is primarily a mark, like the Apple logo or the McDonald's logo. It should be able to stand without the text, even though there might be text included on some of the official copies of that logo. Another thing to think about is that that logo should you simple brand colors. So it should be able to be instantly recognizable as being associate with that brand because of the colors that it uses. Simple colors are best in a logo design because they're easily recognizable and easily reproducible in a variety of different circumstances. But in addition to using simple colors, you should also make sure that your logo can easily be recognizable in grayscale because there are many places where it might be printed without color. And so you wanna make sure that it can be done in grays, blacks and whites, as well as in whatever colors you are using. Now some logos, like Apple's current logo, are always in gray-scale. Of course, they used to have the logo that was six colors. And they've since moved on into logos that are either just black, white, or gray, but even a logo like the McDonald's logo that we've talked about before is always yellow, right? But it can appear in black or gray as well without any trouble and without losing its meaning. So make sure that you are thinking about that as you're designing your logo, you don't want to get the colors so complicated that if it turns into a grayscale image, it can't be recognizable. And the last thing is you want to make sure that the logo is a good representation of the brand that you are creating it for. This might be a brand that you have, a client who's asked for a new logo. It might be a brand for yourself, for something that you're creating as an entrepreneur or in this class, it might just be a made-up company that you want to create a logo for, but it needs to be a good representation of that brand. There needs to be some meaning behind the logo, okay, so that's just a few principles of logo design. There's a lot more that we could go into on this, but this is a beginner course, so we're just going to start with that in the next video, we're going to go ahead and talk about sketching your logo. If you have any questions about this or at any other point during this course, please feel free to drop into the discussion section and leave those questions for me and I will do my best to answer them. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and talk about sketching your lambda. 4. Sketching Logos: So now that we know a little bit about creating the logo, we actually are going to start by sketching our logo and we always want to sketch out before we design. And normally I like to sketch with a pencil and paper because I think that's really the best way to get the ideas out there, but I am going to be using today and iPad app called Paper that tries to mimic the paper feel. And this is just so that I can record my screen so that it's easy for you guys to see in this course, I'm going to be creating a logo for a fictional pizza company called PI time, which is Pi like the Greek letter and time like the spice. So we're going to be creating it for this fake pizza company. Now you can try and do that as well and do it along with me. Or you can create for whatever you want. It can be your own business, it can be a client's business, or it can be a fictional business like I'm doing right here. But the idea here is we are just going to go ahead and we're going to start sketching. So the first thing I'm going do is just write down the name. So by time now, you can always start off with a name logo. That's a good place to kind of start from. And I think it could be written in kind of a scripty font. Now you don't need to be good at drawing in order to sketch. We're just trying out some different things. So I'm just trying to give myself the idea of a scripty font, even though I probably can't actually dry scripty font. And you're just generating a lot of different ideas. So of course immediately I think that we probably want to incorporate the letter Pi somewhere in there. So there are several different ways that we could try and do that. Let's think about a pizza with a slice cut out of it, and then the letter Pi there. And as you're sketching, you're able to very quickly look at ideas. And if I want to make that size smaller, I can do that. Then I think, well what if it's just the slice? And you're just very quickly trying to generate these ideas. And then it could be pi, time clock. What if it was a clock and pointing to Pi? And then around the side of it, the word pie time. Whole pizza. We will of course wanted to convey pizza. That's probably the most important thing. We don't want too much going on. We don't want to get overly complicated. So as I'm looking at these ideas, I'm analyzing them for how complex are they? How easy is it going to be? Plane off of the herbs here we might want to do something with like a little leaf. Maybe we could do pizza pie slice the leaf on it. And if something doesn't look good, It's okay. You don't need to erase it. You can just move on, try something else. And you can fill up as many pages as you want as you go along here. So let me go ahead and just make a new page here. And we'll just keep trying different ideas out. I think there's really probably something here. So let's keep going with the leaf idea. And maybe the top of the plant is a pizza. And it doesn't matter how wild they're crazy ideas because you can always throw out your sketches later. Doesn't matter. There's other things that could be involved like maybe a chef's hat. And inside of the chef's hat, elif. The chef's hat kind of looks like the Pi symbol. So I wonder if there's something that we could do with that. Let's see, there are other things like the board that pizzas are often cooked on. Okay, so let's think. Could we make that board look like the letter Pi? Now across the top? Pie time. Trying to get this idea out here where it would be like a pizza crust. Put the letter Pi, and then can be pi time across the top. You can see the idea is just to generate a lot of ideas. And then we can choose the best ones that we like the most. And it's just the idea, not the drawing, so we like the most, but the idea that we like the most and then we can take those in and we can make those inside a vector Nader. And they go on. The promise I'm running into here is there's so much like complexity in the name of this organization. They're playing with the word so much that I want to try and convey all of that, but that is probably too much to try and convey inside of a single logo. Okay. So then I would like to look at them, evaluate them, see what I like. I like this pizza slice with the PI on it. So put stars next to the ones that I like the most. I kind of like this grip D1 words with the pizza slice. I think there's potential with this one to turn the Pi symbol into a pizza slice. And there might be some potential with this one on the board. Anyway, we will keep playing with these different ideas as we go into vector Nader and we actually start designing. But in the next video, we'll just go ahead and start looking at how to make a new document inside of vaccinator before we actually start creating the design. 5. Setting Up the Document: Alright, so here we are now in vector Nader, and we're going go ahead and create a new document. Now that we've sketched some things out, it's time to start designing, but in order to do that, we are do I need to document to work on? The best way to create a document here in veterinary is just to hit the plus in the top right corner of the home screen. So we'll tap on that. There are different things that you can choose. For example, paper sizes that you might be used to depending on your region. Different resolutions, such as like 8, 10 ADP, full HD that you might use for something like a video, different devices that are pre-made. So different iPhones and iPads, well as different MacBooks. Remember that bigger interior is a program that's only built for Apple devices. So you can see they start off with all of the Apple ones at the top and then you get into some other ones down here. And then there are things like icons. So if you're trying to make an icon for a specific thing there we have a template built into here for you. We're going to go ahead and we're going to create a custom size. I'm going to go all the way to the top and we're going to choose custom size from here. We're just going to type in. Mine already says it because I've used it before. 1, 10, 100 pixels by 100 pixels. I'm going choose to use the units of pixels because we're going to be working in pixel unit now it is going to be vector, which means we can always scale it up larger if we need to. So let's go ahead and hit Create. Once we do that, we then appear inside of that document and we can start to work within it. In the next video, we'll go ahead and go over the interface here and vector Nader. 6. Vectornator Interface: Now it's time to take a look at the vector Nader interface. And one of the really nice things about vector Nader is that they've really pull off thought into the interface and how it's going to work on smaller screen devices like iPhones and iPads. So of course, things will look a little different depending on the device that you're on. But the icons will all remain the same and you can navigate very similarly in each device. First step, there are tools along this left-hand side. Here you have things like your selection tool, your direct selection tool, your scissor tool. There's a lot of different tools that are here. And you can see that there's this little contextual bar that changes as you switch tools. So when I'm on the move tool, I have this checkmark, this little duplicate option. And so they're adding in the tools that you need there in that little Mode menu next to the tools. So different ones will have different versions of that and some won't have any at all. But here you can see in the pencil you can actually choose your size right there. So a lot of these things that might traditionally have been like in the top bar. Those happened here right next to it. And there aren't a ton of different options, so it's pretty easy for them to include the most relevant ones. Right there at the top of the screen we have a small navigation bar and we can open up more options in it by hitting the little arrow. When we do that, we can see that we have a gear which will give us our preferences or settings. And there's quite a bit of different things that we can do within that. There's also a little share or Export button. And that's how at the end of this course we'll be able to export our final project for uploading to Skillshare. Next to that we have the zoom level tapping that will snap the artboard into place. Then we have the undo and redo buttons. And of course then we can collapse it. This little button here with the checkmark is a select all, de-select, all buy in. If we had any objects on the screen, we could use that to select all of them or dislike them all at the same time. And the x, of course, will take us out of this document and back to the home screen. Next we have a number of inspectors on the right-hand side. So you have things like the Style Inspector, the arrange inspector, the inspector and the layers inspector, as well as this plus button at the very end, which is the importance factor, will allow us to bring in different images. We'll use those inspectors a lot throughout this course. Let me just add an object to the screen so that we can see a couple of things. When we draw an object like a rectangle, you can see that we then get what's called the quick action menu right beneath it. And the quick action menu is more contextual tools that you can probably find in the inspectors on the right. But it allows you to find them much easier when they just appear in the context which you need them. And that's one of the really great things here about vector Nader is just how it works so well on this mobile device, you won't see something like the Quick Actions menu if you're doing this on a Mac, because you can have more of the inspectors open and accessible to you and those kinds of things. You'll also notice that some things have changed at the top. So now we have this little action bar. And this action bar will let us do things like delete, cut, copy, and paste. There's a lot of things that happen contextually here. And if you don't see an option that you think you should be able to see, chances are you're just selected on the wrong object. I'm not going to go over all of the actions that are available right now, but I just wanted you to be aware that that's how they come up and they will change depending on which objects you have selected. There's one more piece of the interface that I wanted to mention before we move on. And that is this tiny little circle in the bottom right-hand corner. It's actually a little nudge joystick. And so you can actually use that to nudge objects in different directions around the screen. That's very helpful if you're having trouble being very precise in placing. You can just use the nudge to do that. If you tap it, it will expand. And then you can do it in tiny little increments. So that's quite helpful. And those are all of the major pieces of the vector Nader interface. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and talk about using shapes to make our logos. Hello. 7. Shape Tools: Now it's time for us to learn about shapes in vector. Nader, shapes are really the basic tool that we're going to use to create logos. All logos are basically made out of shapes unless they're very complex logos, which as we talked about before, we're really going for a simple logo or mark that can be shown in many places, in many different levels of color and detail and be recognizable part of our brand. So let's go ahead and let's just look at the shapes. So the shape tool is down towards the bottom and it looks like a rectangle. And there are a number of different tools available to you. Let me first just show you the rectangle. And you can see there's low context bar here. And this is going to determine how round our rectangle is. So if I pull it all the way up to the top, it will almost be circular. And if I pull it all the way to the bottom, it will be very much right angled corners. So let's pull this up just a little bit so we can see how this works. And then when we draw this out, you can see I start getting a rounded rectangle. Now if I hold down one finger on the screen like I'm doing now, it's keeping it snapped perfect proportions. So it's exactly square. And at that point you can see that I've drawn a square. And then of course, I can come into the Format tab and I can change the fill if I want to. So I just tap on the fill and then I can choose a color. So I can drag on this color bar to switch. And let's try and give this a blue color. Looks like we aren't selected on it. So let's go select it with our selection tool. And now we'll change the fill. Correct? If we close our field tab there just by dragging down, we can adjust our corner radius from here. So if we thought it was too round, we can go ahead and make it less round. Then we have options like Blend Mode, opacity, which will make it more see-through or less see-through. We've got this blur option which will blur out the edges. A bunch of different things you can do here, but here is the stroke. And of course stroke is important because sometimes we might want to make logo that's made out of lines instead of out of fills. And this is where we'd be able to do that. So we can make our color of our stroke to a nice red color here. And then we need to increase our stroke size. So let's drag this down here and let's increase our stroke size right here where it says stroke width. So that we can do that. We have options like adding arrows to the end and beginning. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense with a square. And so that is basically the basics of how you work with the shape. But you'll notice we do have a little contextual menu here as well. And there's a bunch of useful things that you can do, right from the contextual menu if you don't want to go into the Style Inspector. So you've got things like the stroke width that you can just adjust right there in the corner radius that you can adjust right there as well. Some of these other things. So this is an alignment tool. We only have one object, so this will just align to the art board. So if we want to snap it into the center, we can do that very useful. There's the opacity slider, so we can adjust the opacity on the fly. And then here is the stacking order. It's the only object here right now, so we only have one thing in the stacking order. Okay, Let's move this over here and let's take a look at some other shapes and what we have available. When we click on the shape, if we click on the three dots, then we can see the other shapes that are available to us. And the reason it's so important for us to learn about shapes into spend a good amount of time learning how they work is because we're going to need shapes in order to build our logo. So let's go ahead and let's look at the polygon here. So you can see with the polygon you have this slider which goes from 20 sides all the way down to three sides. So that's how you get a triangle. You also can go all the way up to a 20 sides. So let's just say we wanted to do a hexagon here. We can just drag that out and you can see it's maintaining our style from before. So we have our same stroke and fill. So we can draw there. And then let's switch back to our move tool and we can move it around. Let's keep looking at the different shapes. So we also have an ellipse. This ellipse of course, we can draw out in an ellipse form, but if we hold down one finger, it will draw an imperfect circle. So that's quite useful. Then we have the star and the star. You can determine how many points. So you can go all the way up to 150 pointed star. I'm going to do a seven-point star so I can just draw my 7 is star like this. Now while I'm drawing, if I hold one finger on the screen, it will change the radius of the points. So I can make the points come out further or I can make them come in closer to the point where we could actually putting them back in again. So you have that option now if you aren't holding on the screen, it will just make it bigger or smaller. Now there's something else I want to show you here because you can see what the seven-point star, you have the star pointing down. But if we want to make the star point up, we can rotate it with this handle. So let's go to our selection tool here. And I'll just grab that yellow handle and I'll just rotate it. Now while I'm rotating it, I have the option to hold down one finger on the screen and that will snap it into 15 degree increments. So let's snap up to 180 there. And now we have that seven-point star. All right, What kinda any eye room. So I'm going to scale a couple of these down here just by tapping on them with the move tool. And then I can just scale them. Using these handles. Go on, keep him in proportion. Of course I can hold one finger on the screen. All right, Let's see what else we have. When we come here, we have this nifty little line. And this will allow us to draw lines. If we want draw straight line, just hold one finger on the screen. We can draw straight lines in all kinds of 15 degree increments. Okay? Horizontal line. And you can see the line only uses the stroke. So the line only the stroke matters. There's no fill on a line. Lastly, we have the spiral. You have the option to set the dk. Let's just put it kind of in a mid there. And then when you click and drag, you're going draw out. There you go. So there's our spiral. And let me just show you that with more of a decay on it. So if we pull it up, it's going to be much more pronounced over spiral. But the spiral, just like the line, only uses the stroke, there is no fill on it. If we come up here and try and add a fill, it will actually fill in the space in-between, but that doesn't always make a lot of sense. It might work if you're trying to make something that looks kind of conical or shell like, but by default it's not going to use a fill. So let's go ahead and we'll just turn that off by hitting the eyeball. So those are all of the shapes that you have access to by default here inside a vector Nader, Ed's a pretty good set of shapes. It's very similar to what you might find in a program like Adobe Illustrator. And those are the main things that you can do while you're drawing. You have a few simple gestures that you can use to keep things in proportion or not that kind of thing. And as you're drawing shapes, things might start to get a little messy. So I also wanted to show you how to add in a new art board. You can do this by going to the layers inspector over here and hitting Plus. You then have the option to either add a new layer or add a new artboard, and then click Add a new art board. And then it says you can tap to draw, to create a new artboard. Let me zoom out here. And we're just going to make a new art board to hold more shapes. So there we go, we have a new artboard and that's just more space that we can use as we are designing things. So now that we know how to make shapes, in the next video, we're going to go ahead and we're going to talk about how we merge shapes together. 8. Merge Shapes: So the next step is going to be actually merging shapes together to create new shapes. And this is really critical because we don't have enough shapes here to create everything we might want to create any logo. For example, let's say we are trying to do like a slice of pizza. We might want that pizza to be curved at the top. So we can actually do something like that by merging shapes together. So let's go over the ways that we merge shapes. I'll show you how I would do something like the pizza. Let's go ahead and we will grab this and we're going to go all the way down to three on our polygon so that we're just making a triangle, make sense as a pizza slice, right? Then let's go ahead and we'll move that down just in the middle so we have plenty of room to work. And then let's go and let's get an ellipse. And I'm going to zoom in here. I'm just going to draw an ellipse over the top here, selecting our triangle. Let's go ahead and we'll just pull the corner radius in a bit here so that these are matching up better. And now we want to turn them into one shape. Right? Now before I ever merges shape, I always, always duplicate it. And the way that you duplicate is select over everything you want duplicate. So I've selected over both of them and then choose this little copy icon in the little menu next to the tool. It looks like two sheets of paper. Then when you drag, you're just going to duplicate it. And I always like to duplicate before I merge so that I still have the original shapes in case I want to try something different down the road. Now a two shapes selected. You can do your merge and this is going to happen over here in the path section. And under the path section, there's a lot of different options, but really boolean operations are the ones that we're looking for right now. Let me just show you the first one which is Unite. We want to bring this triangle and this ellipse together. So we unite that. And now we have one shape that is the two of them merged together. Select these again and let me show you what happens with the other operations. So I'm just going to drag this up here and I'm going to duplicate it four more times. Okay, so we have our original and now we have this one. Let me turn off my duplicate and let's go ahead and do the next one. The next one is called Subtract. So you can see that a has now erased everything that was the ellipse there. Let's select the next two. This one is called intersect. So you can see we just get that middle part where the pieces were intersecting. Next we have one that's called divide. And this one's really interesting because you can see nothing changed except you can see some more lines there now. So when we tap on these, we can actually separate them. So now we have each of the individual shapes that were overlapping there. So this is a really great way to get a bunch of different shapes out of one. Let's go ahead and select these last ones. And here we have what's called the difference. So when we do that, it looks a little bit funky, right? But you can tell better what this is doing if I actually give it a fill. So let's go ahead and give it a fill. You can see that there is no shape in the middle there. So it's taking the difference of the two and wherever they overlapped, instead of making a shape like it did with the intersect, it actually took that part of the shape away. So hopefully as you see this, you can start to see how you can make different shapes by combining the basic shapes together. And this is really the crucial part of making a logo, especially if your logo involves something that's a little bit more complicated than just like a square or a circle or a diamond. You're going to need to be able to merge the shapes together. And one more thing just to show you when you're here, if you're on the iPad or the iPhone, you're going to get these options from the Quick Actions menu. So right here, you're going to have all of these options. And so that's how you're going to merge shapes together to create new shapes. In the next video, we will go ahead and use what we've learned about shapes and merging shapes in the last two videos. And we'll actually start to create the lower. 9. First Logo Design: All right, Now we're gonna go, hey, I'm actually going to start making this logo. So let's go ahead and add a new artboard. So in the layer inspector hit plus and then new artboard, just like we did before, only this time we're just going to tap on the screen. And this will make a new art board of the size that we started with. So that's a pretty useful trick if you just want artboards of the same size. So let's go ahead here. I'm actually going to place the images, the sketches that I did so that I can work off of them. You can do this as well, but you don't have to because you could just set your sketches beside you, but so that you can see what I'm looking at, I'm going go ahead and place the images from what I was drawing earlier to put an image in. I'm just going to hit the import inspector with the little plus icon. And now we have a lot of different things we can do. We're going to use photos because that's where I have them saved and camera roll. And let's go ahead and let's place it doesn't need to be super big, so I'm going go ahead and make it smaller. Holding down one finger allows me to adjust that in proportion. You just put that there and then I'll add the other one, it and again, I'll just adjust that in proportion, bring it down just so I can see what I'm working on. So you can do this or not do it as you prefer. Next, let's go ahead and zoom in here. Go ahead and hide my inspector for now. I'm just going to look at the ones that I chose to star. So those are the ones that I thought had potential something to start with. And the first one that I'm seeing is the one where we actually have the word pie time and the pizza slice in the middle. And I want to do this one because I think the pizza slice might figure really importantly into the logo, whatever ends up being so creating the pizza slice and then learning how to work with texts will also be useful here. So let's go ahead and we already did this a little bit. We know what we need to do that we're going to start with a polygon and we're going to make sure that it's at three sides. And then we're just gonna go ahead and drag that out. Now, the first thing I'm going do is I'm going to change this to black. I'm just going to go to my stroke here and I'm just going to go all the way to black. And when we design is great if we just design in grayscale, so blacks, whites, and grays, when we're first doing it, we don't want to complicate things with color right now because we really just want to get the ideas out there and be able to iterate on them without worrying about color. Color has a lot to do with emotion and it can affect the way that we design to early on. So later we'll think a lot about color, but right now, we're only thinking about the shapes that we're creating, making the logo. So let's go ahead and we will rotate this with the little rotate handle 180. And so now we have our triangle. And I'm going to try something a little bit different this time. I think I'm going try a rounded rectangle. And this is the process of designing, just trying out new things. So I think I'm going to try a rounded rectangle for the crust this time. One thing that I keep giving is making new shapes by tapping. So I really need to always switch back here to this, to my selection tool when I'm adjusting things. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to lower the stroke on these objects. It's going to go to five. I think that'll be easier to work with than these really big strokes. See better what's going on here. And so I've just adjusting things a little bit as I go. Changing in my corner radius a little bit here. And it looks like my snapping does not turned on. So I'm going to go up to my gear and turn on snap two edges and points. And we'll see if that helps me get things better where they need to be. So now it's time to merge these together. And whenever we merge, we're always gonna make a duplicate. So select both of them. Turned on the duplicate and just drag down. So let's select these. I'm going to do this from the quick menu, choose Unite. Now you can see I've got these little corner deal going on here. And so I'm going to go in and work on that. Just taking my direct selection tool here. I can go in and I can tap on those. Again, I can choose to delete them using the delete key at the top. So we're going to delete some of these extras in here so that we just have a little bit of a smoother transition in there. That looks great for our pizza slice. So the next thing that I know we need to do is actually add in some pepperoni. Let's go ahead and let's do those with ellipses. And then I just wanted to duplicate that. So I'll switch to my selection tool. Make sure I'm still on duplicate. One here and one here. So we've got something that kinda looks like a slice of pizza there. And obviously when we adding color, we could totally make that look more like a slice of pizza. But remember, this has to be able to appear in grayscale. So let's go ahead and let's just add in a fill to this. Now, that's just going to be gray and we'll go in here. Let's make that white, and then we'll make the pepperoni is gray. And if we want to select multiple without dragging over them, so make sure I turn off my duplicate here and then I'm going to turn on my multi-select, and I'll select all. Three of these, so that I make sure I give them the same gray color. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and make another new artboard. We're going into layers plus new art board and tapping. Because I need more room to be able to work on this with the words. Let's drag that into place there. Now let's select our pizza slice. Flip the pizza slice, and we'll duplicate that over to the new board. Let's turn off duplicate. And then we'll just use this little button here in the contextual menu to group them together. So now whenever we select it, we select the whole thing together. So that's a group. For the sake of work here, Let's snap it into the middle and let's go with text. Now we haven't worked with texts before, but text is pretty simple. We bring that in and then we go click and drag out, and that makes a textbox for us. So the first thing we need is pi. And then if we want to edit that text, we use our selection tool. And we now have our topography controls over here. So we have lots of different types biography control. So let's just go ahead and of course, make this a lot bigger. And let's change the color. So let's go to our fill color. Change that to black for now. Go ahead and duplicate this ticks. We now finger will keep it in alignment for us. Turn off duplicate. Let's get in here and edit our text. And our text box is not big enough. So let's go ahead and make that much bigger. And we can see that it, we're making this too big now. So let's go ahead and scale down the size of our font. Meeting you tap on, you can just type in number. Say okay. Now again, these in the same spot. And we'll go ahead and use the alignment control here to just center this text in the text box. And this one as well. They'll make it a little bit easier I think, to work with. Just shrink the text box down to the size of the text. So a lot of logo creation is just arranging different elements together to create what you want. Alright? And we want to make sure that we get these aligned together. So let's do multi-select on them. And then we'll use the alignment tool right here to align their middles together. Okay, so now we have the beginnings of where we are going with this. So we've got pi time and we've got this idea from our sketch. Now the next thing that we might want to do is just look and see if there's something we can do to adjust the font. Let's multi-select these textboxes. Go to Font and see if there's something that might be a little bit better. This one's a little bit more playful and we do that. We might want to do something about the way our icon looks, right? So they may matches a little bit more. We need to raise up our stroke maybe a little bit so that it looks more in line with what we have here. Anyway, there's a bunch of different fonts that you could choose to go with here. Probably something that's not too crazy. Just that. Perfect. Okay. So that's actually bad. That so that's how we would go about starting to take whatever idea we had and turning it into a logo. Okay, I'm going to try another one and I'm going to speed it up so that you can just watch me do it and you don't have to hear me talk through the whole thing every time, right. 10. More Designs: What? Okay. Welcome. Hello. Right. Now we have a few simple logo constructions done. And we could go on with this for a long time and we'll talk more about iteration in a couple of videos. But right now we're going go ahead and we're going to do a couple of versions of these with color. So we've tried out some different years and we're going to try out some colors here That's working for us. And if that gives us any new ideas or anything like that. And this is the way logo design goes into long process where you're just trying different things and really trying to determine what the best thing is going to be to represent this brand. 11. Adding Color: Here we are now at color dot adobe.com, and this is one of my favorite places to find colors, even if we're not using an Adobe program, as in this case, we're using vector Nader, but it's just a great place to be able to come and find colors. Now you can use this color wheel tool that is on the homepage here to do AUC, different types of color themes, right? So you can do like a monochromatic color theme, and you can do triadic. There's all different types of color themes that you can do here. But my favorite thing to do is just go to the Explore tab up at the top and then search for kind of a theme that you're looking for now if you were creating a logo for an existing brand, chances are they have brand colors and they're going to give you those colors going in this case, I don't. And so I'm just going to search pizza and I'm going to see what comes up, see what other color palettes other people have made. Oh, I do like that one. And you can see a lot of times they're pulling these from different images. And I like both of these from Adobe stock here kind of in the middle, but I'm just going to scroll through and look. I definitely do want one that includes green specifically because we are dealing with a green plant in the time plant, right? So we want something that does include green. We look at these, we see there's a bunch of different kinds and we can just choose one or we can always change this later, but I do like this one, so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going make this palette in sight of vector Nader. So let's go ahead and jump over to vector Nader. And we'll be making this palette. First. We're going to copy this code. So just select that code, copy and we're just going to jump to vector Nader. And in the color section under style here, we're just going to go to the hex code. We're going to delete that and we're going to hold down and choose Paste and then go ahead and hit Enter. And you can see we get that red color. Now that's not all we have to do down where it says palette. We actually have to tap on one of those to put that into our palette. So now we have that color. Now let's go back again. And we'll do the same thing with this darker gray color. Comeback. Same thing. Lead it. Hold down, paste into here. Excellent. Then we'll put that in there. We just do this for each color. Okay, and now that we have our color palette all done, now we can go ahead and start to add color. So I'm going to go ahead, I'm just going make a really big art board for this one. So I'm just going to go to Layers plus new airport. And we're just gonna make a big art board with plenty of room. And I will just copy things down from above to be able to add my color too. So let's go ahead and start with our first one. We'll just go ahead and we will multi-select all of these and then duplicate it. Down here. This is where it will start adding in some color for say, I know I'm going to need to do is ungroup those so that I can add an individual colors to them. And then making sure that I'm here on my color palette. Let's do this. And let's change this to this color. And these two this red color. So we're just playing with this, seeing what we get. This dark green here. We're just going to iterate just like we've talked about. We're going to iterate, iterate, iterate, and we're gonna talk about that a lot in a second. But right now I'm just want to look in iterate with the color. Let's go ahead and select all of these and make sure we're on duplicate. Just drag it down. And let's try to just get rid of our stroke entirely. So no stroke on any of these. See what that looks like. We'll just keep trying a few things here and there as we go along. Lot of different colors we can try. So we try these different colors. We see where it kind of speaks to us here, what we like based on what we're looking at. So let's try coloring a, another one now. We can just come back and try some of these things later. And whenever we're designing, we always want to be thinking about the principles of design and see here we're losing contrast between these two diamonds probably not going to work out very well. Just try another one here. And as you gain things that you can iterate on different stuff, I just wanted to see what this will look like with less of a corner radius there. So I like better. I think it might duplicate this again, this timing when read down here so I can try the other color. I'm actually liking that one quite a bit, a little bit rounder, little less harsh on the corners. They're still having this PI feeling to it. Next, let's try this other one. Always bearing in mind, of course, that these might appear in black and white. So we already worked with them in black and white. So we know that they can function there in black and white. But we want to keep in mind that as things get turned black and white, if they're kind of turned black and white without a designer going in and actually doing it. And it might look weird if the tones overlap. So the tones of the orange and the red are very similar. So we might want to avoid anything that is like that. Let's try this a little bit different here. I'm just trying the orange and red and I don't think that works, but I think that might work. You don't want to have too many colors in this single logo, just looking what this might look like with the grayish blue color on one word and the green on another word. Might be adding in too many colors. Okay, so that's how you go about starting to add in color to your logo. So go ahead and adding colors to your logos. And in the next video we're going talk more about iterating on design outside of just color. But we're going to try out a bunch of different iterations of these designs to get to a point where we feel like we have something that could really work for us. 12. Iteration: I've gone ahead and I've made this art board much bigger because this video is all about iteration. We've already done this iteration thing a few times where we've iterated with colors and for that we were iterating with shapes and we iterated with our sketches as well. But now we're really going to get in and we're just going to start iterating. And this is one of the critical processes in design, not even just in logo design, but in all parts of design. But it's especially important when we're designing logos because it's so important to get the logo ideas right. So we're just going to keep trying different things iterating until we come to a design that we really feel like is the right one either for the brand or for the client. And so you're going to see me do a whole bunch of this and I'll speed up most of this, but I'll come in and I'll tell you different pieces as I'm going along, different parts that I think are important for you to understand. So I'm going to go ahead and jump over here to the one with the words. And I'm just going to try out some different iterations on there. So there are things that I think could be done to change the layout to iterate on that things that could be done to iterate on the logo mark itself, maybe some different color variations or different parts of colors, or changing it out to be just a stroke. There are some different ways to go about doing this and this gives us different ideas on the way that the logo can look in the way it could be used. Let's go ahead and just duplicate this, just like we've done before. And first, I want to get in and do a little detail work with just the direct selection tool here because I don't love the way that these angles are. And you can see there's kind of a funky point off by itself here. So I'm wondering if we can just get rid of that. Shameek those two sides match. Message has been a little bit different in the way that we had them Ingold and then we actually, I think want to soften them up. So what I've done here is I've created outlines from these ticks pieces in order to be able to edit all the points individually. This makes it so the techs can't be edited anymore, but it does make it so you can tweak it more. So what I'm hoping to do here is turn the ascender on the H into the I n pi to kind of tie them together. This may or may not work. And then it's always good to zoom out. Take a moment, look at the whole thing. Kind of see where you've come from, what you've changed over time and see what you still think looks great. And while I kind of like the direction nerve being going, I feel like I've kind of lost some of the feeling of the pizza there. So I think I need to do something to work on that. Okay, So now as I'm iterating, I've made tons of changes, of course, done tons of things, and the next thing to do if I think I'm kind of on the track that I want is to check through those things that we know we need to do when we are making a logo. So first is to make sure it can be in grayscale. So I'm just going to duplicate it again. I know there's a lot of duplication that goes on in here, but that's very important. And I'm just going to change this all to blacks, whites or grays. A. Now that we've seen in black and white, the next thing to do is see could stand on its own without words. And this one's going to be a little bit trickier because it's hard to determine if the symbol for pi a word or not. But I think we need to think, Can this stand on its own without any of this text? So we're just going to duplicate this. And it's very simple. And it could be that something very similar is used other places. But a think that a is pretty good. It would be recognizable in the context of where it was like if you start on a menu or on a social media post, you'd probably be able to understand what it is not perfect. And I'm wondering if there's something more that it can do it, it's always worth doing a little bit of iteration to see this. So when duplicate it again, I think we're ready. I think we have this black and white one. When we have this green and orange one. And I think that's probably good, but it's always good to just take a step back, look at what you've done. Just zoom out, take a look at it and see where you've come from, see if there's any ideas that you've left behind that you think you really need. And I think there's been a lot of good ideas here. And ultimately, I think that this is the right way to go. I think that what we've developed here is probably the best option coming from the sketches that we started with way back here. And just bring that forward through all of the different logo designs, merging the shapes, doing these iterations on it, trying different things with the text and with the icon, we really think this is going to have fluorescence. So in the next video we're going to talk about exporting. 13. Exporting: All right, So hopefully you've been following along with your own project and now you also have a logo that you feel ready to export. And so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to create an artboard for us to export front. So let's go ahead and we'll just zoom out. We'll go back to our layers here and we'll click Add new art board. So let's go ahead and we will just copy over this like that object. Let's go ahead and duplicate, drag that all the way over here. Go ahead and select all of these, and we'll just group them together so we can scale them together. Now we can scale holding down one finger, of course, we'll keep it in proportion. So we just want to make this as big as we can within the pixel range. So that's pretty good. Now we're ready to go ahead and export. Let's go up to the top here, open up this menu and choose from the Share icon, which is the arrow coming out of the box. And what we're gonna do is we're going to do this as a PNG so that we have transparency and this is where we get the preview. And so you can see it's showing black because that's transparent so that could sit on anything. Make sure transparency is checked if we uncheck that, show white, but we want that checked, it tells us the file size will be 105 kilobytes. So it's very tiny, of course. But remember, we can always make this as big as we want because we've designed it in vector. So the PNG, if it starts looking pixelated, we can always go make a larger artboard, say 2000 by 2000, and export that to give it even higher resolution. Then let's go ahead and click export. And then it's immediately going to give us a bunch of options for things that we can do for our purposes. I'm just going to click Save Image and that will save it into our photos. But if you wanted to, you could also come down to save to files and you could put it into your file somewhere or you can share it to another app. Let's just go ahead and save image. And remember, you will be uploading this as a PNG to your Skillshare project. If you have any trouble at the PNG, you can always go ahead and export as a JPEG. Sometimes the Skillshare projects like those better, but try PNG if you can, so that you keep that transparency. Let's go ahead and save the image and we should be ready to go. So we'll just hop over to our photos and take a look at this, export it. And here it is. When we tap off of it, you can see that it's all black around to show that it's transparent. There's our final logo for this project. Go ahead and share yours in the project section for this course. And I'll be happy to answer any questions or give you any feedback that you might want on those. And in the next video, I'll just take a moment to talk about next steps and wrap up the course. 14. Next Steps: Thanks so much for taking this course on creating logos using vector Nader. I hope that you've learned something valuable and that you've enjoyed taking this course. I'm so excited to see the projects that you create and put in the project section for this course if you haven't already done that, Hey, time to do that now. Now as far as next step goes, there are a number of other teachers here on Skillshare that have courses on vector Nader that you might want to look into to learn even more skills with it. This is the first class that I've done using vector Nader. But if there are other things that you would like to learn in vector Nader, go ahead and drop those in the discussion section for this course. And I'll see if I can get to those in a future class if you're looking to take your design up a level, I do recommend if e1 designer for either the desktop or the iPad, it is a great vector editing app and it has more features than vector Nader dies. So it's a great way to take your design up to the next level. I have many courses on a theme designer that you can take here on Skillshare as well. Thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next course.