Transcripts
1. Introduction: Do you want to learn how to create custom logos from scratch? Well, if you're a graphic designer or you wish to become a graphic designer, creating a logo is going to be one of the number one things you get asked to do all of the time. In this course, I'm going to show you exactly how to create beautiful custom logos that will impress your clients and help you land more work as a graphic designer. My name is Derek Mitchell, I'm a creative director with over 20 years of experience working as a graphic designer and a web developer. I've been fortunate enough to work with brands such as MTV, Netflix, Nintendo, Nickelodeon, Discovery Channel, and a handful of others. The project for this course is going to be a ton of fun and probably a little bit ridiculous. Here's what we're going to do. We are going to take a spreadsheet, which I know immediately sounds boring, but hear me out. We'll take a spreadsheet that's got a bunch of different random words on it. We're going to use a number generator to grab these different words and create a completely random, super custom logo. What's cool about this is you can either follow along and do the exact same thing that I do to create the logo and learn the skills you need to do this, or you can create your own custom logo based on the same styles that I'm showing you. Maybe the words that I pick, you create your own custom words that are random and we go from there, or perhaps you already have a client who wants you to make a logo right now, or maybe you know a friend that has a business they're starting and you want to help them out and volunteer and maybe make a logo for them. There's a lot of different ways you can use these skills immediately and follow along with the class. We're going to do a few different things. We're going to be jumping in using a notebook to sketch out some ideas. You can follow along doing that or a piece of paper. We're going to jump in with an iPad for a little bit and show how to create digital art in here. Maybe you know how to use Procreate or Adobe Fresco or even Illustrator on the iPad, there's a lot of different ways you can sketch up ideas and then get them into the computer. We're going to be using Adobe Illustrator in this class primarily, or perhaps you've got a Wacom tablet, which is basically this thing here, so it's got a pen and the tablet, and when you draw on this, it draws on the computer. There's a lot of ways to get your art into the computer. Speaking of art, maybe you're not an artist, maybe you're terrible at art like I was when I first started. I'm going to show you how to use this software to create highly polished, beautiful work, even if you have no drawing skills whatsoever. But if you do have drawing skills, that's a bonus because you'll be able to take those ideas and those sketches and learn how to bring them in and basically make them digital and how to use those in your logo. We have a lot of ground to cover. Let's dive in.
2. Welcome to the Course!: Thanks for joining this course. I'm pumped to welcome you here. I'm really excited to show you everything that I know in regards to creating a logo. It's going to be a lot of fun, but to get the most out of this course, don't just watch me do the work, work along with me because even if you have the knowledge, now you got to convince somebody else that you can actually do the work. At some point, you're going to have to show somebody a logo that you've made. You might as well just do it now. If you can watch this on your phone or maybe an iPad or a tablet or something and then work alongside on your computer or maybe you've got two monitors and you can watch on one and then do the work on the other, I encourage you to try and follow along as we do this because that way by the end of this course, I don't know how long it's going to be because I'm just starting to record this thing, but in the next hour with me, I guess if you watch it at 1X speed, you can also speed it up or slow it down. Sometimes I get really excited and I talk really fast, so click the little button down below to slow the videos down or you can even rewind it if I go too fast on something. Or maybe you're a seasoned pro and you want to skip through to the points that I show you how I do some certain things. Feel free to jump around, however you want to take this course is totally up to you. I'm just here to show you everything that I can and super excited to welcome you along on this journey. Again, follow along. There will be downloads on some of the videos. There should be a link below or somewhere here, where you can grab all of the assets for some of these different sections where there will be an asset provided. I can't wait to see the logos you create. Follow along and then be sure to post the logo you make for this course in the class project area. Thanks for joining. Let's jump into the next video.
3. Project Background and Random Name Generator: All right, are you ready to have some fun? This is going to get a little ridiculous. But let me show you how this works, and then you can take this and run with it and create your own if you want or follow along and do exactly what I'm going to do. Let's go ahead and take a look at this real quick. Two things are going on here; I've googled for random number generator, and this is what I see here just in my browser. Then I also have the spreadsheet open and you can actually download this to follow along if you want to just use this exactly how I have it, or you can go through and add your own adjectives, nouns, and the type. Here's how this is going to work, because we have 22 rows, we're going to make the max number over here be 22, and now we're going to go ahead and start generating. We need three different numbers, the first number if I click ''Generate'' it's 13. I'm going to come up here to this first row, come all the way down to 13. We have, reliable, and let's go ahead and copy this. For now, I'm just going to open a TextEdit Document. I could have planned ahead and opened up an Illustrator document, but I'll just go through it in TextEdit real quick. Just so I don't forget what I'm doing, I'll make a new document, we'll paste that in here. We've got, reliable. We are to generate another number, number 10, clothing. I like where this is going, reliable clothing. Generate the next number, number 20, guild. The reliable, clothing guild. There's one brand idea, what we're going to do is I'm going to generate maybe two or three more samples of this, and you could do this a couple of different ways. You could generate one pass of this and whatever it's going to be, you're going to make that logo and force yourself to find some creativity in that, or maybe we'll do this three or four times and pick one of our favorites. Do whatever you want. Let's go ahead and do a couple of more rounds of this. Let's generate the next number, number 6. We've got mysterious. Mysterious, 12, energy and 22, what do we got? Coalition, Mysterious energy coalition. I like the idea of this and I'm not sponsored by Red Bull, but I happen to be drinking a Red Bull right now, which probably explains why I'm talking really fast. Just a reminder, you can hit that little button down below to play back the video faster or slower, depending on what your needs are. If I'm going too fast or too slow, speed me up or slow me down. We've got the mysterious energy coalition. That could be good. Next, let's do one more just for fun. We've got the peculiar, number 1 snowboard, and society. The peculiar snowboard society. I can't even say that word, peculiar. Hopefully this gives you some ideas on ways that you can use this random number generator and the spreadsheet to create some custom names or random names rather to create your logo. Follow along, not even if you're following along, follow along, do the work, and either do this, either just pick the same words that I did or open up the number generator. If you don't have Excel, I just thought about this, you could pause the video here on the screen and you could see all these words and open up the random number generator and then just pick the words from the list or create your own, organ, username, whatever, pick something. In the next few videos, we're going to start actually creating this custom logos. Let's go ahead and jump into that and start making our custom logo.
4. Brainstorming Unique Ideas: Hi guys. In this video, we're going to talk about brainstorming unique ideas. In the last video, we pulled out a few different random words to create our custom logo with. I actually went ahead, and I thought I would just a couple more here. Let me pull this up real quick. At first, we had the peculiar snowboard company, and peculiar is a hard word for me to say. Let alone if English isn't maybe your first language, I don't know. I thought, well, here's the thing. Going into this, you could decide, I'm going to do exactly whatever the random word generator comes up with, because we'll pretend like it's a real client and if that's their real name, then you have to do whatever it is. Or you could decide to maybe flex with it a little bit and make it something that you're more interested in, because you're going to be putting this on your portfolio. Here's the thing. You're going to be attracting more of whatever you do. As a random example, let's say you're into drawing enemy art, or you're into wedding photography, or you're into making business cards, like whatever specific thing you do, you're going to attract more of it over time. You want to say, get into the outdoor sports world or the X Games motocross, or the Red Bull. I'm thinking about Red Bull because they've got their energy drinks in here, but the downhill mountain biking or something, extreme sports, maybe you want to get into that world. You're going to want to show logos that look like that. What we're going to do now is we're going to brainstorm some unique ideas and how we can use these. I went ahead and added a couple other options. I really like to snowboard and to downhill ski, and we've got a really great resort where I live here in Montana. If you want, check it out. It's called Whitefish Mountain Resort, super cool place, and so I like the idea of maybe making something has to do with snowboarding. I have the modern snowboards society or the sassy snowboard society. I thought that would be fun because it was a bunch of s's here. As we're brainstorming ideas, something to think about is, how to all of the words look together as a whole, as well as maybe we create a logo based on the initials. Maybe it's just SSS or if we did the mysterious energy coalition, maybe it's NEC. Also paying attention to as you're doing this, making sure, if it's spelled something, at least that you're aware of what that might be if you're doing an abbreviation. Something else I want to talk about too real quick, and because I'm my own camera man was going to use my phone here to jump in and show me what it's on my desk. A couple of things real quick. I've got, these are my favorite pens right here. I guess I could just go like this too. Basically jump all over the place, but that's all right. That's how you know that it's real, and I love what I do. I've got a really thick pencil. This is probably like a two millimeter or something or two, I don't know what, how they even gauge that. Yeah, millimeter. I've got a 0.5. Another one that's a 0.5, just like how it feels in my hand. I've got a thicker 1.5. Actually it's 1.3 for being specific and then a 0.7. Collectively, depending on what I'm doing, whether its thicker lines are thinner lines. I have lots of options, so I love using these, and then I'm a nerd, so I have this little pen pouch thing. Again, I guess I could be showing you here. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm just going to show you my sketch up as I was doing it, but I digress. Here's the point. I love knowing that whatever pens or pencils that are my favorite for the time being are in this pouch. When I throw my bag, I know that I've got my pencils and at the lead I've got an eraser. I even have this little metal ruler. I like knowing that if I throw it in my bag real quick, I have everything I need even this thicker pro marker thing. Find what you like and have that because as you're brainstorming, being able to jump right in and not have technology be a barrier, not having to open your computer and then get distracted by messages. Or in my case, its morning opened my computer and things are crashing and things are getting weird and I had to restart it. Then instead of thinking about the project at hand, I'm thinking about the technology, so that's why I don't recommend using an iPad when you're brainstorming because it's just too easy to get distracted by other things like Tiktok or Pinterest or whatever you're into. In that case, being as low tech as possible will really help you focus and help reduce some of the other mental clutter. As we get into this, we got to pick what we're doing. If you haven't picked what you're doing yet, take a minute, pause the video and get those words picked out, and then I'm going to grab this. It's 0.7 millimeter. It's just my favorite to write with. Pick which favorite, it doesn't matter and let's go ahead and pause the video. I'm going to take a minute to gather my thoughts and then we'll pick back up here in a minute. We're back. Let me show you what I did real quick, so I wrote down basically the two ideas I've got, the mysterious energy coalition and the modern snowboard society. Those are the two that were my favorite from the random things that we picked out. I like the idea of the mysterious energy coalition. Again, because I like energy drinks and I like the word coalition and I don't know, mysterious could be fun. It can be something that we have a lot of fun with. Then the modern snowboard society, I really like the idea of doing something for a snowboard company, so to me that sounds like a lot of fun. Those are my two choices, and then as far as brainstorming unique ideas. There's nothing unique about this, but I started writing down like the initials, so in this case it would be MEC or MSS. We've got our initials or the fonts. I can use the fonts. Just more of a mental reminder to come back to the fonts that I choose. We could do symbols. What symbol stand out? We could use Serif, Sans Serif, or capitalized or lowercase. You guys, you can see that my notebook, like this, it's very low tech. It's not super pretty, like it's just starting to get the wheels turning. I'm not trying to filter anything yet. We're just starting to get some ideas. Then the next thing that I would do, and before I jump into this stage, I probably would push this further. I'd maybe sketch out some of these things like some symbol ideas and just refine this process a little bit, but speed this up a little bit, this process up a little bit. What we're going to do is, I'm going to show you some of my other favorite resources to get some logo ideas. Again, major, I don't know if I'd say disclaimer spoiler alert. Approach with caution, but as you jump into this, I don't like to be influenced by other people's art until I have my own ideas in place. That's where there's no book comes in handy. Get your own ideas down, whether it's drawing some different shapes that come to mind are some different symbols are some different ways that you could run with this. Then once you get those, then jump into these websites I'm about to show you right now to get some more ideas if you want to. Again, sometimes I won't even look at this stuff until I've fleshed out an idea, because I don't want any other influence. Sometimes I'm stuck, and so I'll jump right into this right away to get some ideas. Here we go. In no particular order, I really like Pinterest. I think there's a ton of really high-quality graphic design resources on Pinterest right now. Everything from posters to business cards and in this case logos, and specifically I typed up snowboard logo design just to see what was out there, and so as I scroll through some of this, there's some actually really cool ideas in here. Even just using a Goggle or in this case, I liked the idea of this crest and so what I would do, is I would start to gather these on a board and start to get my ideas pulled together. The other sources that I really like are Behance, this is a great website. You can search by creative fields here, you can refine it to graphic design, and you can search for logo. Just to start getting some ideas on how we can present our logo, so we can scroll through here and see a lot of different ideas with logos. Logo pond is another one that I really enjoy. Logo pond and other great spot to get some ideas on logos. Then Logo lounge and also shameless plug. I've actually had a couple of logos featured in their books, which I'm super proud of. I was a ton of fun to be featured, but this is a really cool resource to find even more logo ideas. If you're feeling stuck, this can be helpful to see what's possible to get some ideas as you're sketching in your book. However, it can really quickly, in my personal experience, sometimes you get discouraged like man, that's a beautiful logo. I don't know how I could do anything better than that. Then that's all you can see in your mind and so approach with caution basically when you're starting to brainstorm your ideas. That's why I can't recommend highly enough to start either in your notebook or a lot of times what I do is I jump right into Illustrator because I'm just faster with it. Sometimes I'll jump right into Illustrator, and I'd start typing out ideas or just loosely dropping in shapes and stuff. Go ahead and take a minute here to follow along and start brainstorming. How you're going to create a logo for this, and maybe you're not ready yet, maybe you're brand new, and you want to follow along little bit further. We're going to jump into that here in the next video, but go ahead and take a minute if you can, to start thinking about some different shapes or some different symbols that might work with whatever logo you're working on.
5. Sketching Quick Thoughts on Paper: We're back. You might be wondering why am I filming myself. Because it works so good the first time, we're going to try it again. I'm going to show you the sketches that I just worked up here. Just trying to get some ideas, trying to get some quick thoughts on this thing. Let's just take a look. Let's see see how we did here. I want to point out a couple of things as we go through this. One is you're not supposed to see these drawings. These are for me, and the same thing for you. It's like your journal. You don't have to show these to your client. They can suck real bad. They can be terrible. As you can see here, I'm just quickly throwing some ideas down, and as I look at this, I don't even want to show them to you because, whatever, I'm supposed to be an artist and it's supposed to be pretty. But that's okay. We're just getting ideas out. That's the point. Let's talk about these ideas here for a little bit. All I could think of, we're working on Mysterious Energy Coalition. That's what we're going with for this. If you're following along, feel free to do the exact same thing or whatever you want. Sketching some quick thoughts. All I could think about for energy were these lightning bolts, clearly. I drew a bunch of lightning bolts. Then I thought about Scooby-Doo and the mystery man. What is it called? The machine? I forget. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I thought about a horror mystery font. I was thinking about the colors green and orange and purple, and even a question mark. The mystery or mysterious having a question mark. I simply love what you've done with this place. Heavy metal meets house and garden. I don't know what this blob is supposed to be, but I imagined it like dripping and a blob, like mysterious or whatever. It's so dark, gothic. Then I thought, okay, that's just an awful lightning bolt, but that's all right. But we've got mysterious energy with a lightning bolt on the middle. Then we have MEC, those were the initials, Mysterious, what was it, Energy Coalition. Then I was imagining it like an energy drink can. Thinking ahead a little bit. If I was just going to be an energy company, is this going to be a power company or is this going to be like an energy drink? It could be a lot of different things. So trying to define the brand and understand who the company really is. Maybe take a minute to create a backstory on your company. Maybe the Mysterious Energy Coalition makes batteries. Maybe they create, I don't know. You make up whatever you want. But here's where I went with that. We've got potentially like a letter with a lightning bolt or a battery or a light bulb, trying to find ways to get away from the obvious solutions of a light bulb or a battery. Did I say lightning bolt? Light bulb and lightning bolt. Basically trying to get away from the very first answer, the stereotypical answer, but I still had to get it down on paper, just to let my mind like, okay, we tried that. What else can we get to? Then I thought, well, we've got a lightning bolt. It could be the N in energy. Then I thought, well, then playing around with the icon, or I don't know if you call it an icon, but the letter N with a little more stuff to it. This is supposed to be a power plug, whatever. Then I thought, maybe I could double it, so it's reversed. So the lightning bolts, whichever way you turn the N, it works both ways. I was playing around with that. Then I thought, well, maybe the question mark is a lightning bolt. Then I thought, maybe we have these all kinds of patterns, all kinds of question mark things. Then I thought of an eyeball. I don't know why but I put it on there because maybe the mystery of it, which made me think of a sleuth or, what did you call him? A detective. We've got a magnifying glass. Then I thought about a bow tie. No, it's not a bow tie. It's a regular tie. But I see him like the Men in Black. I was thinking aliens and mystery. I was all over the place. Then I thought of the cracken, because of mystery or the Loch Ness monster or something. I'm trying to think of ways that I can get away from just a lightning bolt and into something that could have more of a story to it. I was thinking about a skull icon or maybe a zombie. I don't know. This is where my main went, mysteries and stuff. Then I was thinking about, what about a skull on a flame thing? Clearly, I'm all over the place. But that was the point, is to let your brain wander and come up with creative solutions. Now, in this exercise, you can definitely wander a lot further because you can make up whatever you want. If you're working with a real client, they probably have more backstory and have more parameters for you to get going. Take that however you want, whether you define the whole backstory for this logo, or maybe you just run with it at face value and you make it just a lightning bolt and as the Mysterious, what was it, Energy Coalition, or whatever we're doing. That's my approach with a sketchbook, is to just not be too critical. I know I was joking with how crappy my stuff look. But don't be too critical, even if it's just chicken scratch, even if it's just stick figures, trying to get the idea, because the next thing we're going to do is we're going to give it some time to breathe. In the next video, I'm going to show you the same approach with an iPad. But in my workflow, I would get to this stage, and then I would probably give it a day or at least an hour. Go do something, go do your dishes or go clean the house or go mow the lawn, or whatever you can do to let your brain think and continue to work through this. I'm going to actually put that into practice right now. I know I'm trying to record this course for you. We've got a lot to learn, but with the magic of video, I can pause this and go take care of some other things and then come back to this with some fresh ideas, and there, we're going to jump into the iPad and continue down this path and create some more ideas for us to explore. If you're following along, go ahead and continue to refine your sketches, open up that notebook or whatever you're working in, and start brainstorming more ways that you can create this logo.
6. Sketching Quick Logos on an iPad: Welcome back. Hopefully you've had some fun with your sketchbooks, and you've taken some time to really brainstorm and come up with some fun creative solutions for this logo. It's been about 24 hours since that last video. I went home, got some rest, came back, I'm back at the studio here, and now ready to dive into the digital portion of this course. Now, here's the thing; I'm going to show you some different ways that we can use an iPad to create some ideas. But if you don't have an iPad, that's totally fine. Hopefully this gives you some ideas, though, as far as my process along the way. If you do have an iPad, chances are you might be familiar with some of these things, but I want to show you my workflow and how I approach getting my ideas into an iPad and then sharing those ideas with a desktop. Because ultimately, my workflow still very much relies on Adobe Illustrator on a desktop, or in this case on a laptop computer versus an iPad. Recently, in the last few months, I've started using an iPad more for my logo design process. I got to go to Florida for a photo shoot for work while I was still working on a logo project that was due. On top of that, I was recently asked by Adobe to start streaming on behance.net. I've shared my plug there. If you want to join me live, I broadcast my creative workflow live on behance.net, you can check that out. But the point is because of that, I had to use my iPad for all of this, and I loved it. I want to show you three of the apps that I recommend, if you're looking at getting into using an iPad for sketching and drawing as well as creating your logos, and then how I go about doing that. Let's go ahead and jump in real quick. While we're talking about it, I'm just going to jump right into Illustrator on an iPad, and real quick, this is obviously way beyond the scope of this course as far as learning all of the ins and outs. But if you'd like to learn more, come down here to this Discover tab, and you can see up here we can click "View All live Streams." If you sort by featured and scroll down, you can see that I've got a live stream that I did where I showed you how to do logo design with an iPad. Then I've got a few more on here as well. A few more live streams, you can see some magazine ads, typography on an iPad, and then more logo designs. If you'd like to learn more, you can actually look right inside of the iPad for those live streams where I go more in depth on how to use this. For now, though, the way I will get started, just a quick example. I'm going to come back to our home screen, and I'm going to click on "Custom Size." When I make a logo, I like to work with a letter size document. The reason why is because then I can easily print it out on my printer and see it in person and see how it looks on a piece of paper besides just looking at it on screen, or if I want to show a client in person, if I'm going to meet them for coffee or something and I want to bring something with me. Sometimes it's nice to have something analog, like something printed, versus having technology where maybe you get there, and your computer is dead, or your iPad is dead. Having something printed is nice to bring to a meeting as well. We're going to do letter. I'm a click on this drop-down, I'm going to switch to landscape, so it takes up most of my screen, and I'll click "Create." Actually one more thing up here under Unit, I'm going to change this to inches. This is how I would set up my document on an iPad. I would do the same thing if I was doing this on my desktop computer. But now I've got a Canvas that I can create on the iPad and then share it using the Adobe Cloud to bring anything I make here immediately onto Illustrator. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go ahead and jump in, and I'm going to grab this blob brush tool. If you don't see it, you click and hold, and you'll see there's a pencil or a brush tool. Then once you're in here, you can choose, I'm just going to choose a basic round brush. I'm not going to worry too much about it, but there are some more brush settings down here. The smoothness, sometimes it really helps if we have it set lower. It's going to be pretty true to whatever you drew. If we crank this up a little bit, you can see it smooths things out and reduces the anchor points. Maybe I have this backwards. Either way, play with that slider and dial in that brush exactly to however you like it. Then we've got some more settings down here, and we can play around with the pressure dynamics and a lot more things. But for this, for immediate purposes, what I want to do is just quickly sketch out our title here. One of the ideas I had was just to use rough handwriting to get the idea across. Looking one more time at my notes, the mysterious energy coalition. I might jump in here and just start. I want to do a really rough layout here, and I want it to look very handwritten, so I'm just going to go for it. I'm trying to go fast here too. We might speed up the video a little bit. You'll notice that I'm just doing what's natural to my hand. The way this is sitting on my desk here, it is not lining up with the document at all, because later I can select this. In fact, even right here on the iPad, I can select the shapes then I can tweak them individually, however I want, or I can nudge them in place, or I can select the whole thing and move them around or rotate them later. It really doesn't matter because we're working in vector, meaning all of these little points are editable. We've got Mysterious, let's just keep going here. Let's make sure we're on the brush tool. Again, I'm trying to go fast and trying to make it look a little bit sloppy as just an idea. I still haven't decided what this is going to be. If it's going to be an energy drink, I'm leaning towards an energy drink, but we'll see. Mysterious Energy Coalition. It got a little bit creaky towards the end here. I could take some time on the iPad to correct this. Coming back up here to this move tool, or I can dial this in a little bit, but for now, all I want to do is show you how this works. I've got that in there. We could drop some other things, but for now all I'm going to do is quickly show you down here. We've got the shape, the square. If I click and hold, we got square, circle, triangle, and star. With these basic tools that we can create some different looks with, we could add some type in here. We can even import an image if you wanted to by clicking right here on this Image Import, so we can bring in some things if you want to trace over the top of something else. This is really handy if you want to draw something, you want to look good, but maybe you're not very good at free-handing it completely without a guide. It's totally an easy thing and totally acceptable to bring it in as a photo and trace over the top of it and play around with that. Let me jump back. I'm just going to click up here on the very top left, this back arrow. Now, what this is going to do because we are in the Adobe Cloud, this is going to immediately sync with my desktop software. What I'm going to do is open up Illustrator real quick. If this is your very first time in Illustrator, I'm super pumped for you. Don't let this overwhelm you yet, I'm just starting to scratch the surface here of what we could do. We are on the homepage and there's ton of great tutorials here that you could check out. All I want to show you right now is if we come down here under Your Work, I see Cloud documents, if you have the Adobe Cloud subscription. Then down here I see this, Untitled-9. This synced in the Cloud immediately when I close the document from my iPad, which then lets me open it up in Illustrator on my desktop, which is a really nice way to round trip. When I was traveling, I loved having my iPad, but I really missed having a keyboard to use all the keyboard shortcuts that I'm going to show you about here in a couple of videos. What I like to do, I love the freedom that drawing on an iPad gives me, but I really like the speed from being just so used to using Illustrator on a desktop. What I'm going to do now is when I jump into this document here, you can see that if I click on these, all of these are editable. I can click on any of these shapes and I can change the color. Again, we'll get to this stuff here soon, so don't worry about this yet. But I'm just showing you how quickly you can start to spool things up and get your ideas looking a little more polished. I can even grab all of this. I'm going to get my Transform tool. I hit the letter E on my keyboard, it's right here and I just click and drag from the side to straighten this out. Again, we're going to get into how to do all of this here in a second, but mostly what I want to show you is just how seamlessly you can bounce back and forth. Once I've made these changes, maybe I just change everything back to a different color here, then all I have to do is close it. If I look up here, I see a little Cloud icon and it's a dot aic, an Adobe Illustrator Cloud document. If I close this, it's going to save it for me automatically. Then if I look back into my iPad, it's going to take it a second here, but it's going to update automatically without doing anything. Now I can open this right back up on an iPad and pick up where I left off from the desktop. It's a very fun way to work, a very fluid way to get your ideas out. Now there's two more apps that I recommend. If you already have an iPad, I'm sure you're probably very familiar with these. But the other two would be Procreate and Adobe Fresco. If you have the Adobe Creative Cloud, then you should have access to Fresco and to Illustrator on the iPad. Fresco is similar, but it's more of a painting app than it is a vector-based app. Here's an example of something I made recently using Fresco. I was having fun doing this. Actually, when my wife and I were in the hospital waiting for her to have a baby, so I was waiting and I had nothing to do but just be there. I was playing around on this app and it was a ton of fun. I made this while my son was being born. Anyway, all that to say. With Fresco, you can get much more detail in the oil strokes or in the watercolor strokes. An example of that, if I make a new document real quick. I don't even care what size it is. I want to show you this real quick. If I come down here and I jump over to the watercolor brushes, I'm just going to change the color. Really all I want to show you is just how cool this is because it interacts and continues to bleed with other colors as you draw. Then you can even click on this little modifier. You can add just water to it and it reacts, and it's so cool. Fresco is really great at stuff like this. Here I'm going to add another layer over here. I'm going to turn this layer off. I'm going to grab a different brush, maybe a vector brush, down here. Then we can adjust the smoothing and the sizing and stuff like that. But really check it out. Look, it's another app that I can draw and get some ideas with and start sketching out whatever it's going to be and creatively I am going to draw a box. Because why not? Anyway. The point is, one other thing you'll notice in Fresco, I can turn the canvas. Currently, in Adobe Illustrator, you can't. I assume that's probably coming in the next update, but for me as an artist wanting to turn the canvas, that's something I appreciate about Fresco. One more app, Procreate. Procreate is an awesome app, I highly recommend it. It's great at a lot of things. What I love about this, it's a one-time purchase versus a continued subscription. If you're looking at doing this and you don't want to have a subscription to Adobe, and you want a way to illustrate and create things, you could do some of this in Procreate as well. Typically, what you do is you click up on here on the plus sign to create a new document. But I've already done that and I started playing around in this as well. Did the same approach where I drew out a mysterious energy coalition. I had this idea, I was trying to think of the letters here and so I thought, what I could do is MEC, mysteries energy coalition. Then M. If I had an E, it would look like this but I ended up doing was going M, start of an E, and then instead of doing this, I connected it down there. Which I don't know, maybe that's dumb. But you know what? It's another idea to consider. I screwed that up. But that's how I got here. Then I just thought this was cool-looking and devious, I don't know. Then I drew some skeleton eyes that I might play around with. It has nothing to do with being mysterious. I don't know, I'm just really digging this vibe and I think I want to go with that. I drew all this in Procreate. In the next video, what we're going to do is we're going to learn how to take all of this, if you're drawing in something else other than Adobe Illustrator, how to get it out of that and bring different digital artwork into Illustrator and trace it and make it vector, so you can use anything even if you don't have the subscription, and you're bringing artwork in from other pieces. I hope that makes sense. I'm really excited about the next lesson. The next lesson is going to be a ton of fun. We are going to learn how to bring in your original sketches from your sketchbook. If you didn't have an iPad to do this last lesson, we're going to take a picture and bring it in and trace it. Then we're going to also learn how to bring in this other artwork from Procreate as well. I'd love to see what you're working on. Even if all you have are your sketches, go ahead and take a picture of it with your mobile device or whatever you have and post it below, so we can see your work in progress as well. I'd love to see what you guys are working on, and I can't wait to dive into the next lesson. Here we go.
7. Import Sketches Into Adobe Illustrator: In this video, I'm going to show you how to bring your sketches into Adobe Illustrator. This tip is something that is so much fun. We're going to use an app called Adobe Capture, and I have a full length YouTube video about it. I think I can post the link below, check it out if there's one there. Anyway, it's an amazing app and so, I've got a longer video about that. But what we're going to do right now is learn how to use this to bring your sketches into Illustrator. It's amazing. It's so much fun. It's going to be addicting, I promise. I'm going to show you that, and then, we also are going to learn how to do it just using your regular old photo. Have to take your photo, you can email it to yourself or text it to yourself, or if you're on an iOS environment, you can use AirDrop to share it from one device to the other. Lots of ways to work, so let's dive in and learn how to do this. I've got my phone here, and it turned off. Let me turn it back on. I love this so much. We're using an app called Adobe Capture. I'm going to go back to the beginning here, and first and foremost, what I want to do is at the top where it says currently for me, it says FAB Defense, for you, it probably says Add Library or something if you don't have any libraries. I use libraries to manage all of my clients and keep their colors and their fonts and everything together. What we're going to do is let's make a new library, and let's just call it whatever you want. But for me, it's going to be the mysterious, I had a panic moment there where I was like, " Am I spelling this right?" Mysterious Energy Coalition. I don't know. Words are hard, I think I spelled it right. There we go. Now I have a library where I can start sinking colors and fonts and brushes and patterns and all stuff, and it'll sync to Photoshop and Illustrator, it'll sync to my iPad, if you use Premiere or any of the other Adobe apps, it'll sync to everywhere with your library. Now that I've got that set down here at the bottom, I'm going to click on the Camera icon. It's going to open up, and for you, it might look a little different. There's a lot of different things right here, we can just swipe down here and change it from type to materials, lots of things. What we're looking for here, we want shapes. So cool, I love looking at everything through this filter. It just looks so cool. Here we go. I can even, and I can see my iPad here on the desk, I can even hover right over the top of this and just take a picture of this, so let's just do that. Then I can refine this further because it's just black and white, it turned out pretty great without having to do anything, but I could crop it and get it dialed in even better here. Let's do that. Good enough. The refine is really helpful if you have somebody that doesn't have as much contrast if you need to refine it, or I can delete things. I click on the "Eraser", things that I don't want to bring in. I'll click ''Done'', and then, I'll click ''Save'', and we're going to save it to that library as a shape, I could have renamed it. That's saved. That's cool. check it out, new feature. We can use shapes in Fresco. I am going to check that out later. We'll skip that for now. Now what we can do is jump into our notebook that we had, check this out. It does all the hard work for us. I'm just going to take a photo like this, and I can refine this further. Click on the "Eraser" and I can erase all the garbage that I don't want. I can make the eraser size much larger, and for the sake of time, I'm not going to worry too much about this. You get the idea. Let's see. Good enough. Good enough for today. I'm pretty much erasing all of it. Let's just leave it alone. I'll click ''Done" and I'll click ''Crop'', and I'm actually going to crop out all this other garbage. I'm just going to bring in these two guys. Even though I took a picture of everything, I can get pretty selective on what I keep, which is awesome. Let's just leave those two, and we'll click ''Save''. We'll save it to my new library, and then I can continue this process and go through and grab all of these other assets, and if I want to bring in any of this other artwork here, I don't know, sure why not? Let's do this guy. That looks bad. What we're going to do now, we've got to refine. I did that. Cancel, Undo, let's go back. Let's try it again. Let's adjust this slider right here before we take the photo. I might have moved too soon. That's the slider I was looking for. Right here, we can adjust the contrast. That might help us out a little bit. Then I'll hold real still. There we go. Now I can refine this. Let's crop it first before I start erasing a bunch of stuff, because I might not have to erase too much. Having a hard time getting there, are you? There we go. Now I don't even need to refine it, I'll just click "Save". Yeah, I'll refine right here, I'll erase this little guy. Boom, done. We save that and now, this is also saved. I can go through all of this. Those are pretty much, let's just get this last here. I like how it's looking. We're going to do this with a different approach. Now, we learned how to use Adobe Capture, it saved the library, and you're wondering, how do I get that out of the box? I'll show you in just a minute. Let's jump over. I'm going to jump over to my Camera app, and then, I'm just going to take a picture of this little guy here. Just as an example. Let me hope. Struggling. There we go. Take a picture of that. Then I'm going to grab that photo, and I'm going to hit the Share button, and I'm going to click on "AirDrop", and I see my MacBook Pro right there. It automatically shared it right to my download stack. Now if I click on this, I can see that photo. Now, I've got my photo here to work with, and then we have all the other stuff that we put into our library. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to actually pull these into Illustrator, and then we'll start working with these assets.
8. Image Trace in Adobe Illustrator: I'm pretty sure in every video I tell you is my favorite part, but this really is also one of my favorite parts. We're going to take the stuff that we just captured with Adobe Capture on our phone or the photos that you took, and we're going to bring them into Illustrator and learn how to start working with those images. Let's jump in. We are going to open up Illustrator if you haven't already. I'm on the home screen and I'm just going to grab a letter-sized document real quick to start a new file fast. If you don't see that, over here just click ''Create New'', either way it'll get you there. If you come this direction, we'll click on the print templates, we'll find the letter. We'll come over here to inches. I'm going to change this to landscape. If I'm going too fast, don't forget, you can pause the video, you can rewind the video and you can even slow it down so it plays back really slow. If you are a pro at this and I'm going too slow, just skip ahead or play it back faster. We've got our document setup. I'll go ahead and click ''Create''. Your window is probably like nothing like this, so what we're going to do up here, where are we at, so let me make sure I can see everything here. I'm going to come up here to Window, down to Workspace and I'm going to Reset Essentials Classic, so I use Essentials Classic. If you notice, there are a lot of different workspaces you can work with and play with depending on what is a good fit for you, and actually, I just realized I've never tried this Tracing workspace before, but we're going to do some tracing. Maybe this will help us out here. Now, what we're going to do, up here, I see this Libraries tab. I'm going to jump back to my mysterious energy coalition and you can see the scans or the pictures, whatever you want to call it, the shapes that we took in Adobe Capture already synced right there in my library. If you don't see that Libraries window up here under Window in Illustrator go all the way down here to Libraries and it'll open that up for you. We've got a new document, we have our libraries, and now all I have to do is literally drag and drop right onto my desktop or canvas, artboard, whatever you want to call it. Technically it's an artboard. You can see that it's huge, so one of two things either needs to happen, either I need to scale this down, so I'm going to hit the letter E on my keyboard. We're going to talk about shortcuts here in a couple of videos coming up by I use shortcuts for everything to make everything I do faster and feel more seamless. But over here, I can see I've got this free transform tool. Depending on your workspace, this tool might be somewhere else in this stack, but all I'm trying to do is scale this down and you can see how it skews. I'm going to hold down the Shift key while I click and drag to make sure that it stays perfectly perfect. How's that? It's also sideways.What I'm going to do, I'll sort the scale tool selected, I'm sorry, the free transform tool. I'm going to hover over here and I can rotate this. That's one option. The other option I think I can do is click and drag and then before I just click, I'm going to click and drag again and then let go. That way it forces it to be whatever size I clicked to. Those are two ways to bring in your artwork and get the size right. I'll hit the letter E again and that'll let me scale and rotate or just hit the letter R, and that is my rotation tool, which only lets me rotate. Lots of ways to work as we go. Now I can bring in these other assets as well. Just click and drag, so it doesn't take up all the space. Drag this over, click and drag. Got our rotate tool, rotate this. The next shortcut I'm showing you is that if I add in the Command key it toggles between whatever tool you have selected, or if you're on a PC, if you use the control key, it's going to toggle between whatever tool you currently have selected, which right now for me is the Rotate tool and the Move tool. When I hold down the Command key or the Control key on a PC, it changes to this move tool, which lets you just click anything you want on the canvas and move it around. I'm going to click on this, the letter R to get my Rotate tool and just kind of move it like that. Moving things into place. Now I have all these shapes that I just scanned with Adobe Capture and because I used Adobe Capture, it brought it in as a shape, as an editable vector graphic. Now I can double-click down here on the color, on the fill, and I can quickly change what the color is going to be. To do that, first select your artwork. Then double-click down here on the fill. Or let's see up here under Window. Let's come down to Color. We can have the color here as well. I'm going to click on this little hamburger menu and click "Show Options" and now you can see that as I click here, I can selectively choose to add more of cyan, magenta, or yellow, or black, and I can craft the exact color I want. Lots of ways to work. Hopefully, this inspires you and doesn't overwhelm you. But again, if I'm going too fast, you can always pause it or rewind it. Or again, ask questions if you get lost. Here we go. We've had these in here, and if I was really starting to flash out my logo and get my document, one of the first things I would do before I get too much further down the road is to save my document. Let's come up here to File. Go down to Save. Typically, I'll just hit Command S on my keyboard to open up that save box. I'm going to throw it in here under Exercise Files. I think this is going to be lesson, where are we at? I think this is Video 8. This might have to change. Let's call this, Import Sketches. That's going to be my folder. Then inside of there, let's name this Illustrator file. If I was really working on a client project, I would typically name it whatever the name of the company was. In this case, it's Mysterious Energy Coalition. Pretty sure. It's been a long day. Let me double-check my notes. Mysterious Energy Coalition. Yes. Good. Then I'd say, Logo artboard, board way, no this is me or maybe even Logo First Looks or whatever you want to call it. But this is just me starting to pull pieces together. Let's throw that in here and let's click "Save". All of this should be good to go. Just like this. We click "Ok". Now my document is saved. Now this time it's only saved because of the way we just did that. It's only saved on this machine if I wanted to be able to round trip with my iPad like I showed you in the last video, we have to do that a little bit differently. So this time I'm going to click "Save As" and when you do it, instead of, let me just click right here. Instead of just clicking and saving in your computer's window here, what we want to do is click down here which says "Save Cloud document", so I'll click on that. Now it's going to save it to my Cloud documents. You'll notice up here this changes to a Cloud icon and it's a.aic file instead of a.ai file. Now if I open up my iPad, this will be there for me immediately to start playing with. The next thing I want to show you is how to bring in that photo that we just took and it's as simple as this; right now, this is in my Downloads deck. But you could navigate to this in your finder window or wherever it got saved. If it's in your email, sometimes it works differently. I'm going to show you two ways to do this. The first, just drag and drop and throw right in there. Because I use the HEIC format, it didn't like that. That's all right. Let's try and see if it's going to break this way too then. This time, I just want to see if this is going to work for us here. What was this called? IMG_1575. It's not even going to let me place this. It doesn't like this.hiec format. You're going to want a JPEG or something else, like a PNG or TIFF. There's a couple of ways for me to do this. You could bring it into Photoshop, save it as a JPEG from there. What I would do to work fast because I'm just trying to grab this little piece here, I'm just trying to grab right there, so you could take a screenshot of your screen. You knew the print screen command on your PC or on a Mac, Command, Shift, and then the number four on your keyboard. You're going to get these little crosshairs and now I can click and drag anywhere on my screen. Before I let go with the mouse, if I hold down the space bar, I can move this exactly where I need it to be. When I'm all ready to go. Before I let go of the mouse, hold down the Control key, then let go of the mouse, and it's going to take a picture of anything on my screen and save it to the clipboard. It saved it as a PNG, not a JPEG, but that's okay because in Illustrator, I can paste a PNG file, so I'll just hit Command V to paste this. Again, if the shortcuts are too much for you and your brain is melting, I get it. That's how it was for me too when I first started learning. But you can see the shortcuts below. Then also, we're going to go over more shortcuts in the next couple of videos here as well. Even as I was talking to you, I don't know if you noticed, I was using the space bar and using the Control key and hit the letter E to rotate, I did all kinds of stuff there. That's years and years of practice. But that's why I learn shortcuts because then it's just fluid and it lets me just get into a flow as I'm building logos. Now I brought this in here as well. The problem you'll notice right away is I can't edit this. This isn't a vector, this is totally uneditable. What we're going to do is we're going to trace this. There's lots of ways to do it. Because we are in the trace workspace, Tracing. I have this Image Trace box over here on the right. But anytime you select an image in Illustrator by using the selection tool up here, we just click on it, you'll notice in the Options bar across the top, I also have the option to click Image Trace here as well. It's going to get the same result, It's the same thing. I'll click on that. Then I can change the options over here. Or I can click over here on this little box across the Options bar. I can open up that image trace panel, which is this over here, if you didn't see it before and I can change the threshold, this is going to be one that you don't want to play with right away. It's going to really change how much of the image is shown or hidden. We'll get that threshold slider wherever we want it. We've got some different presets here as well. Lots of cool things to check out here at some point. But right now all I'm interested in is the black and white logo. I literally only want this to be black or white because I'm going to take this vector data and use this here in a minute. Now that I've got that, I'm happy with how it looks. Well, I still can't select any of these points. Well, what's going on? What we need to do now is expand it, so with this still selected up here in the Options bar, I see this "Expand" button, I'll click the button. Now it's getting to break apart the image into vector shapes. Now I can click this, but you'll also notice, well, I still can't select just one or the other. There's a couple of things going on here. This is still grouped together, so there's a few ways to work. We can hit the letter A to get our direct selection tool, which then will let us click on specific things. I can hit the letter Q, which will get my lasso tool, and then I can draw around whatever shape I want to color. Or I select this. I can come up here to Object, and we can ungroup it. Or I can drill down by just clicking a bunch of times and you can see over here, we're drilling down. There's a lot of ways to start grabbing into a specific piece of artwork. What we're going to do is, in the next video, I'm going to explain all of these shortcuts a little bit better and we're going to dive into learning how to work fast and efficiently, and some of the most important shortcuts that I use as I start to navigate to create my logo.
9. Get Comfortable (and FAST) With Shortcuts: All right, before we go any further, I want to take a minute and talk about keyboard shortcuts. You've already seen me use them in the last few videos where I show you how I quickly changed the tools that I'm using simply by clicking on a key on the keyboard. When I design, I really like having a keyboard that's got the 10 key next to it. I use some of these shortcuts, mostly in Photoshop. I can do some different things with the number keys but for everything else, almost any application you use, even outside of Adobe simply by hitting a letter on your keyboard, you can have some different shortcuts available. A simple one that you probably already know is if you hit Command C or Control C on a PC, it copies something. Command V, paste, Command X will cut it and take it off of wherever you're at and then paste it when you hit Command V. Those are some simple shortcuts that are pretty much universal but as we look at everything in the software, everything can have a shortcut applied to it. What I mean by that, if we jump in here and I go down and click on any of these drop-down tabs here, you can see over to the right what all of the shortcuts are to do this action. For example, another simple one that you probably already know, Command S to save or Command Shift S to Save As. Typically, what's happening when I'm designing and hopefully this camera up above you can see what my hands are doing, but basically, my hands pretty much live on the left side of my keyboard. I'm alternating between the space bar so by default right now, I've got my move tool selected. I've got this black arrow, which means I can click and drag things around and move them around. Then if I hit Space bar, it changes to the hand tool. Then as soon as I let go of the Space bar, it goes back to whatever tool I was doing before. I could also just hit the letter H, and now I've got the hand tool or any of these. Literally, every key on here has a shortcut. The way you figure that out is by hovering over the tool and you can see, for example, the Eyedropper tool in parentheses, that's the letter I. If I hit the letter I on my keyboard, it changes to the Eyedropper tool. The Eyedropper tool samples whatever it clicks on. In this case, I click on this color here and it's going to change my fill to that color. Then if I wanted to quickly move my canvas, I can hit Space bar again and then move it around. Now if I hit Space bar and then Command changes to the zoom in. I could also hit Z to get Zoom but it's faster to go Space bar to move things around and then throw in that Command key. Then I can click and drag to zoom in real close or I can click and it'll jump to wherever I click at. Then if I want to zoom out, my thumb's down the Space bar, my first finger is on the Command key, and then I can add my middle finger to the Option key so I'm holding down three keys. It changes from being a zoom in to now being a Zoom out. That's how I quickly move through things just like I was designing with my hands on a piece of paper and painting something or drawing, it becomes an extension of my hands. That's why on the one hand, I loved Illustrator on an iPad because of the drawing, but I didn't like it because I couldn't feel these keys because these keys are my lifeline when I design. It's really important to learn your shortcuts because as you get better as a designer, I think about it this way, if you could design a flat rate for a project, let's say you're going to design a logo for $500 or maybe a couple thousand dollars. If you could do that project in one hour and make $500 in one hour versus making $500 divided by ten hours or 20 hours or however long it takes you. The faster you get, the more money you can earn if you charge a flat rate for your work. We can talk a lot about that later and I talk about that in some of my live broadcasts, but the point is, the faster you get, you have potential to earn more money. Now, if you're an employee working in hourly job, it doesn't matter how fast you are, you're still going to make X amount per hour, but you'll become more valuable the faster you can get. I really encourage you to go through and learn all of these different shortcuts, or at least the ones that you use often. If you find yourself using the same tool all the time, take a minute to learn what that keyboard shortcut is, and then also take a minute, go through every single, what I mean by go through, literally click on every one of these tabs and then visually just read every one of these things. I'm not asking you to commit them to memory but just by knowing that something is there later, you might be like, "Oh, I know there's a place for this. I know there's a spot where I can export things," or whatever, and even that export for screens. This little symbol is the Option symbol, this little butterfly looking thing is Command and the letter E. For me, if I hit Command or Option Command doesn't matter which order, Option Command E. If I'm back here and hit "Option" "Command" "E", it'll open up my export for screens dialog box and I can export my assets and share them or send them off and I'm all done. Very powerful stuff. Then you can even go so far as to set up your own keyboard shortcuts. Maybe one of these menu items, for example, Find and Replace, doesn't have a keyboard shortcut, but you can assign one. We're going to do under the Edit menu, I'm going to come down to Keyboard Shortcuts and this might be in a different place on a PC, I forget, so comment below if it is, but you're looking for this Keyboard Shortcuts and even that has a keyboard shortcut, it's Option Shift Command K. If I go "Option" "Shift" "Command" "K", here's all of my keyboard shortcuts. I forget which one we were looking at, I think it was Find and Replace, which is under the Edit menu, Edit, Find and Replace. I could come under this tab. Let's go to Menu Commands. Then under Edit and down to Find and Replace. I can click right here and I could type in anything I want and it's going to save that as a keyboard shortcut. Incredible time-saver and it will help you become just such a better designer and it'll also make you more comfortable in the software as you think things and as you start working through it, it just becomes fluid. It becomes natural to just grab something and start moving things around and rotating it or scaling it up. Struggling here as I'm trying to show off how fast I can be but you get the point, it's really powerful. I encourage you, when you get a minute, take a minute to really study those keyboard shortcuts that you find yourself using all the time. Those are the big ones for me that I just showed you. The Space bar for the hand tool, zooming in, zooming out, and then just holding down the Command key to switch to a selection tool. If your move tool is already selected and hit the Command key, it switches to the direct selection tool, which lets you grab specific pieces separately. Those are the big ones that I use all the time. In the next video, what we're gonna do is we're actually going to jump into fonts and typography and actually start working with our logo even further to finish the mysterious energy coalition. All right, guys, thanks for watching. We'll catch you in the next video.
10. Fonts and Typography with Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, we're going to learn about using fonts inside of Adobe Illustrator. The subject of typography and fonts and all of that is a massive topic that could take lots of courses to cover or dozens if not hundreds of books to contain all of the information. Really, we're going to look at in this course is how to find fonts, where I find my fonts, and how to get them into Illustrator to use them in your logo design. If you're anything like me, I struggle to make up my mind with fonts and I have a hard time picking them out. I'm also going to show you a few of the resources that I use to find good font pairings because all fonts belong together. Some of them don't look good matched up. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. I'm really excited about this topic. I really geek out over it, even though I don't think I'm very good at it. But I'll show you some of my secrets and some of the tips that help me come up with a good design almost every time. Let's go ahead and jump in. The first thing I want to show you right away is fonts.adobe.com. Basically, this is Typekit. This is Adobe Typekit. What that does is it immediately syncs all of these high-quality fonts to any of the Adobe software, whether that's Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, any of them. You can sync with Adobe Fonts or with Typekit rather. This is a great place that I start with. Some of the other libraries that I really like to use is Font Squirrel. I like to use Google Fonts, especially when I'm designing websites. Then dafont.com is a source that I used to use a lot when I was in college. I haven't used it as much since Adobe Fonts came out. Part of the reason is twofold. One, with Adobe Fonts you can use them on commercial projects so meaning with businesses and professional projects without having to worry about getting any kind of an extended license or anything like that. Well, you're not free, you're paying for this with your subscription to the Adobe Cloud, but you're free to use this on any project you want. But with the font, for example, I saw this Shadow of the Deads font and I thought, oh, this will look perfect for my Mysterious Energy Coalition, which I might use it here to show you how to do that. But right here you can see it says free for personal use. If I click on that, the fonts here are free, but technically they're the authors' property. It's freeware, shareware, or whatever. But the license mentioned is just an indication basically saying you can only use it for personal project. Depending on the font you find, you might not be able to use it for a business. Just something to pay attention to before you jump in. Some other places that I've used is myfonts.com, and then also Lost Type. I don't know if I spelled that right. Let's see, there we go. Lost Type is another fun source that I use for my font. Pretty much these six libraries. I don't think this one loaded. Still loading myfonts.com. Anyway, these are the six locations that I source almost all of my fonts with. Again, I'd say 90 percent of them come from Adobe Fonts. Let's jump into that, I guess, secret or that tip I was telling you about. Let's take a look at Adobe Fonts up here. We've got two options. Both are incredible. We've got Browse Fonts. What's really cool about this is when it loads, and I hope my Internet didn't just go down. There we go. You can search by all of these categories right out of the gate. If you know there's something specific you're looking for, like horror. Look at this. I was thinking about that because of this whole mysterious thing we're going for. Look at that. There's some really cool, potentially great options in here like that. That's almost exactly what I was thinking of. We can refine our sources that way. There's a lot of other ways to do it too. If I scroll down further, we can do different classifications, whether it's a San Serif or Serif, Slab Serif. All of these classifications again are way beyond the scope of this video. But if you're going to jump into graphic design, definitely take the time to study typography when you get a chance. We've also got properties like how thick is it, the weight of it? Is it a thin stroke or thick? The width? Is it narrow and squished together looking or have a wider stance to it? We have all these different ways that we can really narrow down the exact type of font we want to use. The other, I guess, I wouldn't call it a secret, but a fun resource that I've found. I'm going to hold down Command and click on this link. That's not the secret. But by doing that, it opens up a new tab, that way I don't lose my place here. So Command-click or Control-click on a PC. The other secret resource, whatever, are these font packs on adobe.com. If I scroll down, I can see all of these expertly curated font packs. I'll scroll down and you can see we got a Build a Brand Pack, that looks interesting. I'm going to Command-click on it so it opens up in a new tab. If I scroll down, you can see there's a lot of really cool. Here's a Retro Glamping Font Pack. That looks cool. I'll Command-click on it to open it in a new tab so I don't lose my place. Let's keep scrolling. Yeah, lots of cool stuff. That looks actually really creative too. I'm going to view that one. Honestly, all of these, they're all amazing. Everything's amazing. I love it all. As I click onto these tabs and I scroll down, you can see the fonts that they've picked out for this font pack, what they think, they meaning whoever curated this collection, in this case, this one's by Tad Carpenter. These are the typefaces that were selected. Some really cool stuff. A little bit of a description about why they were chosen. Then also you can see more details about them. Super cool. What I could do is I could go through and I can be like, hey I really like this Mongoose font, so I'm going to click on it. Well, it's not linking up tonight, so let's just scroll down this way. Let's find that Mongoose, here it is again, view family. I want to view the font family. We'll click on it. Again, Adobe Fonts is by far the simplest way to sync up with Illustrator. I can either activate all 12 fonts by simply clicking this guy right up here. Or I can go through and select the exact font that I want, the weight or whatever that I'm looking for. This is Mongoose Bold. As soon as I did that, if I jump back over in my document and I'm just going to grab all this stuff, got my move tool selected, and I click and drag up here all the way down to the bottom and just scrunch this down. I'm going to hit the letter T to get my type tool. There's a shortcuts again. We're going to type in the Mysterious Energy Coalition. Then I really have to mentally slow down here because I try to work as fast as possible. What I was about to do that I've got my type tool selected, so I'm going to hit Command real quick. I can quickly click and drag that up here and then let go. My type tool comes right back. Then what I'm going to do is hold on Command, and then Option. You'll see I get the double arrow, which means I can click and drag down a copy. The reason why I do this is now I always have this text to come back to when I want to drag down more copies and change fonts and stuff. I've got this here. I'll triple-click with my text tool to highlight it. Then I'm going to come up here to my character window. I think it was Mongoose or something like that. Mongoose. There we go. You can see all of these fonts are already synced up. I could click on this. We'll close this, and there we go. It's already selected. Let's go ahead. I'm going to click on this. I'll hit the letter E. By this I meant the move tool right up here, this little arrow. To get my Scale Tool now, hit the letter E and then I'll click and drag. Then I'll hold down Shift. We're just going to get this lined up here. I've got that as an option. I'll drag another copy down and I'm holding down Option and Shift to drag it straight down. Triple-click in there and now I'm going to come up to type, change case, uppercase. Now I've got a version that's all capped. Now, with it still selected, I'm going to hold on Command, Option, and the right arrow to track this out. What that's doing, if I come up here to, forget where it's at. You guys use a shortcut Command T to open up my character window. Let's make sure we can find that. It's under type. I can't remember where it's at. That's how much I use shortcuts. I don't even remember where the stuffs at in the menu, but let's make sure we can find that for you here. I'm going to go to "Help" and type in character. Type, character, there it is. Okay. We'll go to Window, down to Type, and then Character. Command T, there is a shortcut. That's one of those things that when it gets buried in a menu like this, you don't want to try and come down and find it every single time, you want to know that shortcut. Command T, and now I've got the character window. Now I can see right here, if I triple-click in here, I can dial in the exact number I want for the tracking here. But that shortcut was our command option in the right arrow or the left arrow. That might not work on a PC, it might be control option, the arrow keys. Leave a comment below if that's a different shortcut for you guys on PCs. We can dial in our optical kerning here so that way our letters line up better, we can change the lettering. Lots of terms I'm throwing out from typography, so make sure you study that when you guys get a chance if you're not familiar with what I'm saying. But right here, this little touch-type tool is so cool and we'll get into this more here in a little bit. But with this still selected, I can click on this, and then I can select an individual letter and I can modify one at a time. I can literally drag this wherever I want. What's cool about this is technically it's still a font, it hasn't broke anything yet. It's just adjusting, let me show options up here, all of these settings, whether it's the rotation or the lettering or the kerning, the tracking, or whatever to get these to line up wherever you want. That's one way to work. Another way to work when I'm ready to start designing things and I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but my mind is here, so let's keep going. I'm going to drag a copy of this down. If I come up here to Type, down to Create Outlines, shift, command O. Now, these are all shapes, so there no longer a font I can't adjust it with this character menu, but I can adjust it with other tools, like the lasso tool. I can grab just part of this, and then grab my direct selection tool and maybe drag it down like this, and I can start to really make this custom. That's where you might find a font as you're looking for things, you might find something that's close, and then you can create outlines with this. Then you can really start having fun and creating something truly custom and unique. Let's jump back in, this is all great, this is super simple if you're using Adobe Fonts, but what if you're not using Adobe Fonts? Let's pretend that you wanted to use this shadow of the deads font in the font.com. Well, all you have to do is download it. I'll throw out my download stack. I'll unzip the folder. There's the fonts. I'll highlight them all on a Mac and I command O, or triple-click to open it up. Then it's going to open up Font Book, which is how a Mac manages its fonts. I'll just click "Install Font" if I want it. But let me see, we've got a few different things going on here. I didn't mean to close that. What I'll do is I'll click "Install Font," give it a second there, there's that. I will install this font. It's got three different versions that we can play with here. Now, it's installed and I can use Font Book to manage this if I want to. I can come down to this font that's now installed, and if I wanted to, I could uninstall it or I can manage my fonts that way. But on a PC it's a little bit different, it's not that much different though, but that's how you just grab a font and install it. Then now I can come back into my document, zoom in out, and I'm just going to fly it through here. Let's grab this and let's look for that shadow of the deads. We've got the Over, Under and whatever. We'll click on "Under". Clearly that didn't work at all. Let's see what's going on here. Well, this looks like a font, and this is another reason why I like Adobe Fonts better than anything else. All of those fonts are very professional, and all of the glyphs, all of the individual characters, typically are designed in a way where they all work. In this case, this font only works with capital letters. If I triple-click this, I'll come up here to Type, Change Case, I'm going to to make them all uppercase. It didn't work either. What's going on? Let me see here. Lowercase. That didn't work. I have no idea what's going on. When I watch the replay, maybe I'll have a better idea of what's happening here. But clearly, there's an error and that's just proves my point why I stopped using the font.com, is because I would run into this stuff all the time. That being said, I know I could figure it out, but for the sake of time, there is a perfect example of why I like to stay within the Adobe Fonts family if I can, between that and knowing I can use it commercially without running into any problems. That's a perfect example. Real quick before we wrap this video up, the only other thing I want to do is I will probably jump in and drop in a few more fonts here that I wanted to play with. Real quick, this Shlop, I'm just going to view the family. Look at this, this is going to be perfect. Let's activate it. Interesting. I don't know if my computer's frozen or if the website's frozen. There we go. We've got a couple of versions of this, and then we also have fonts like that. If that's not a good fit, I can see there are some other options as well. Fudge brownies, look at that. It even shows some font pairings. How cool is that? If you're brand new to typography, and you're not sure what to pair with, look at that. Shlop and Neusa Next, hope I said that right. Look at that, great font pairing. What we're going to do, we'll turn that on. Let's jump over here and turn this into shlop instead. I can spell S-H-L-O-P. There it is. Boom. Look at that. Perfect. That's pretty much it for this video. Now you understand how to bring a font into Adobe Illustrator, how to create outlines so that way you can manipulate the shapes. We haven't learned about how to adjust individual letters. There's one more thing I want to show you real quick actually, now that I think about this. This has nothing to do with our logo, but this is an important thing to know. We're going to pull up a font called Bickham Script, even though this is absolutely the wrong font for this project. But if you're doing a wedding invitation in the near future, this will be great. What I want to show you, one of the menu for typography. Up here come to Type, I'm going to come down here to Glyphs. A glyph is the individual character for the entire font. This window is going to show us everything we have with this font. Well, what's cool about this, there are other fonts that do this as well. But I know that this fonts specifically, what I can do, I've got the letter M highlighted. I'm going to come up here where it says, Show, and I just want to see alternates for the current selection. Right here, this is the one that's currently selected, it's got this light blue color. But if I click over on this other one, I might have to double-click. There we go. It changes, it's got multiple versions of the same glyph, of the same character. Now what I can do, this letter E, I can come over here and I can grab different Es, but this is lowercase. Let's make that a capital real quick. Then let's change it to this version that's much more scripty and cool-looking. Let's make a C and I want one like this that has more going on. Maybe the letter Y needs a different tail. We've got a few options here. Look at that. How about the letter N? I want something's going to swoop up a little bit. Well, doesn't seem to have an option for me there. Letter S, let's change the alternate here. No, that's not working. There we go. No, That's better. What I was looking at, it's difficult to see. Let me zoom in. Is the tail on this, see how it wasn't connecting right. That's what I was looking at. You get the point, glyphs are another fun way to take what would be a regular font and potentially change it and craft it and make it exactly what you want it to be. Hopefully that helps. Again, not every font has glyphs like that. I just happen to know that Bickham Script is one of them that does. That was a lot of content. Don't forget. If I went too fast, you can always re-watch that content, it's a video. Then you can also play it back and half the speed if it gets going too fast. Go ahead and take a minute. Go ahead and jump through, maybe find a few fonts, three or four of your favorites that you think will work for the logo that you're working on. In the next lesson, we're going to be looking at how to build shapes now and how to push this even further.
11. Draw Vector Shapes in Illustrator: The next thing we're going to talk about in this video is building shapes. We learned how to sketch and how to draw and how to get our work in just getting ideas going. We learned how to bring in fonts and some different topography tricks. Now we're going to learn about shapes because if you're building a logo, you're going to be using one of those elements, whether it's a shape or a font or the word or whatever it's going to be, we have to learn how to manipulate this artwork. Sometimes you're going to build a logo that maybe can't be as loose as the, I can't remember the name of this to save my life, the mysterious Energy Coalition and let's chalk it up to notebooks, to keep our mind straight. Especially in a world with so many distractions when our tools have instant messaging where we're getting texts and all stuff while we're trying to work. A notebook, I can't even tell you how awesome this is. Back to what we're talking about, we're talking about shapes. When we're doing shapes, like I was starting to say, for the mysterious Energy Coalition, not everything can be so rough and distressed and loose. Sometimes we want our work that's very precise depending on the brand you're working with. That's what we're going to learn right now, is how to create very precise art using some of the tools in Illustrator. In this specific logo, it maybe doesn't make that much sense depending on how we're going to go about this. But typically for me, even though I have all of these tools done the left-hand side that I can work with, and there's some really cool things in here. I would advise that when you get a minute, go through and experiment with all of these. But for the most part, I'm usually building with a rectangle, which is the letter M. I don't know why, but it is. If I click and drag, I get a rectangle and it's either going to have a fill or stroke down here. I see this stroke with a red line, meaning there is no stroke. But if I swap this, now it has a black stroke and no fill. We can modify these and adjust colors obviously. Pretty straightforward with lots of ways to do it. I like to use the Eyedropper tool and I can sample a color from somewhere else. You'll notice that picked up the actual fill, and I'm getting ahead of myself. This is in the next video. Let's jump back to shapes. The rectangle tool, the letter M, or the Ellipse tool, the letter L. The letter L on your keyboard and you can draw an Ellipse or you can hold down Shift and it will be a perfect circle. Or you can hold down Shift and Option and it'll draw from the center outwards instead of from the top left down to wherever you draw to. Same thing with our rectangle tool, back to the letter M. If I click and drag, I can drag any shape I want. In fact, I could even turn this into a line, maybe a divider or a decorative element or I could hold down the Shift key, and now it's a perfect square again. There's lots of ways to use this. Let's think of a few creative way, some pretty basic ones that come to mind if I come back to my Ellipse tool, and I draw a bunch of circles over and over, all of a sudden, this could be a lot of different things. Depending on the color right now, because it's blue, it looks like a cloud. If I highlight all of these and I change the color maybe to green, maybe all of a sudden, now it looks more like broccoli or something. The other thing we can do here, if we're going to make a piece of broccoli which has nothing to do with the Energy Coalition logo. I'm just trying to show you how to build shapes for your logo. Now I could jump back over to the letter M for my rectangle tool, and this is one terrible looking piece of broccoli, but that's all right. Look at that though, we're headed the right direction. But let's go back to clouds. I'm going to highlight all this and I'm going to get my eye tool, change the color, we'll delete this guy here. If you're watching the camera with my keyboard shortcut, you see my hands are just danced on the keys to get all this to happen as fast as possible. Now if I want to drag it though, each piece is still separated, so I'm going to undo this. There's a few things we could do. There's literally two approaches that I take. One would be to group everything, so I highlight everything, and if I come up here to Object down to Group, I would just hit Command G, but there's a shortcut, and now if I click off and come back, no matter which object I grab, they're all still grouped together. But if you know that this is the shape you want, it's better to clean up all of these lines because we don't want to send a messy logo off that has all these extra anchor points. I'm going to drag a copy down by holding down the Option key and then clicking and dragging. That only works if you've got the Move tool selected. Now that I've got that, I can merge all of these shapes together. My favorite way to do that is to hit Shift and the letter M, which will select our shape builder tool, and now what I can do is I can click and I can drag over these selected images, and as I do that, you'll notice that it merges all of these together as one shape now, and this is a difficult color to see. Let's change this to something brighter. Now we can see all of the shapes better. Let's highlight all of them again, Shift M to get my shape builder. Now I can click and drag over these to make them merge together as one shape. I can also hold down the Option key to remove pieces from it. Or I'll leave it alone to get the plus sign or I could even hold on Option and just click to delete parts. I don't have to drag, but I can, drag over the top of these. Now if I've got all of these, I could just scribble all over this or I'll come up here to Window, and we want to go down to Pathfinder. Your Pathfinder Window, is a way for you to control how shapes interact with each other. These different shape modes all do different things. Right here, this is going to unite, it's going to merge everything together. This one is going to minus the front. If you have two shapes, it's going to cut the top one out of the bottom one. These are pretty much the two that I use the most out of anything that I do. I'm just going to unite all of these by clicking that one button, and now I have one shape. This started as a circle and now it almost looks like, I don't know, this could be somebody's hair. Let's grab my Ellipse tool just for kicks. Let's make this look, I don't know, like skin tone. Let's bring this to the front, so Command Shift and the right bracket Key. I don't even know or arrange. Where's that at, at my menu? Arrange, Bring to Front, it's under Object. Object, Arrange, bring to front, learning shortcuts. That's where that is, Shift Command and the right bracket or left bracket. Then we could color this like hair or something. I don't know. I'm totally off track. I'm hopefully inspiring you though to just jump into Illustrator and start building shapes and just seeing what you come up with. Now what was a cloud turned into broccoli and is now somebody's hair. You never know where these shapes are going to take you, and that's part of the fun in Illustrator is exploring and maybe you're coming into this with the purpose of, I need to design this exact very thing, or maybe you're coming in and you're just seeing what happens and how you can manipulate shapes. Here's another extreme example. Let's come over here there's these tools down here, this Pucker tool or the Crystallize tool, or the Wrinkle tool, and again, depending on which workspace you have shown, up here Window down to Workspace, depending on what you have shown over here, these tools are going to change. Experiment with that a little bit, but we can make it do some pretty crazy stuff. Now in regards to designing a logo, and I'm holding down the Option key and dragging my mouse to change the size of this brush. In regards to creating a logo, simple is always better. They have all these anchor points doesn't make sense. But who knows? Maybe it gives you an idea of what to do for your logo. We've learned how to build some simple shapes. The very next tool that I would encourage you to learn as soon as possible is the Pen tool. If you don't know that already, hit the letter P to get my Pen tool selected. Typically when I'm drawing, I like to draw with a stroke, not a fill. I'm going to make sure I swap this to be a stroke, and I'm probably just going to change the color to something bright here so you can see it better and see the lines as well. Go back to my Pen tool. With the Pen tool, if you just click, you're going to get right angles. But if I click and drag, it's going to bend. What's cool about this, I'm going to hold down Command and click to deselect that, spacebar to move. What's cool about this, let's say I want to trace this little guy. I can start tracing this shape here, but I can also apply the Pen tool to a shape that already exists. Let's see here, let's grab this guy and I'll get the letter P. I can hold down the Option key and click on the circle or on this point, and then drag, and now I can modify that corner. Now I've got these handles and I'm just swapping between the Pen tool and the Anchor Point tool. There's your shortcuts right there. But I'm holding down the Option key, and now I can use what was the Pen tool to create even more custom and unique shapes. Literally these are the only tools that I use for 90 percent of when I'm designing a logo, I'm either using a shape to start getting it close or I'm using the Pen tool to refine that shape. An example of that real quick, and then we'll move on here. Let's say I wanted to start working on this stuff. I'm going to get the letter Q to get my lasso tool. I'm just going to click and drag around this guy, Command C to copy it. Using my shortcut key to zoom out here. Command V to paste that. Maybe we'll rotate it. Then I want to lock this so I don't mess up with these points. I'm going to come up here to Object, Lock, Selection. Now I can't accidentally move this around. I'll come back to my Pen Tool. I'm going to get a different color here on my fill or my stroke, just something bright that I can see. Turn off the fill, and now I can trace this shape. The other thing I like about the Pen tool is it makes really smooth curves. Hold on the Option Key to drag this handle back down this way. Click and drag to make a round curve at the bottom. Click and drag, option, bring the handle back this direction, and the Pen tool can be a little bit difficult. It took me a long time to get used to it. You hopefully are probably faster than I was getting used to it. But what's cool about it is now maybe I wanted a simplified version of this or maybe I wanted to have a filled version of that. I hit Shift and X to swap between my fill and my stroke right here. Right there, that little double arrow, that's how I learned that shortcut. With the Pen tool, that's how you can get some really cool smooth things. I know that in this video, I basically made zero progress on my logo. But hopefully you're going to make incredible progress. If you're following along, take the time try and design some different shapes that go with the logo that you're making. In the next video, we're going to start playing with some color, and I know I did some of that here. But we're going to show some other ways to find color. Typically when I'm working on a logo, before I do any color, I work in black and white, and the reason is so I can look at it and make sure that the shape makes sense first versus say, if I look at this and I don't like the color yellow, I might lean towards a design that's blue, that doesn't make as much sense for the design. I typically work in black and white first. Work on your sketches, try and work in black and white as you're doing this, as you're making your shapes, and the next video we're going to start playing with color a little bit.
12. Working with Color in Adobe Illustrator: All right, guys, here's the deal. In this video, we're supposed to be learning how to work with color in Illustrator, and we're going to do that. But as I look at my dumpster fire of an artboard, this course is supposed to be about how to make logos and we're learning how to do that, but I'm realizing I have a long way to go still on this thing. Hopefully, you haven't just been sitting down watching me throw things on a Canvas, you've actually been following along. Please, if you haven't done this yet, I want to see what you're working on. So post your sketches or post your mock-ups, or post your working on the shapes and what you're coming up with. The goal is not for you to copy exactly what I'm doing and to come up with the exact same logo, I want to see what your creative brain can come up with. Hopefully, you're able to take these tools and be inspired by the fact that you can do so much better than what I'm doing right here. I know you can, so I want to see what you're up to you. Now that we've got that out of the way and you're pausing the video to post your work, come back after that and then let's jump in here and let's play with color in Illustrator. Pause it, post it, and then come back. Welcome back. What we're going to do is we're going to play with color. A few different things that we can do, lots of different things. I'm just going to jump in and show you some of my favorite resources and then how to apply that in Illustrator. One of the very first things that come to mind that I have a lot of fun with is called Adobe Color. We go to color.adobe.com. We have some fun new things here that I get to check out. This is an amazing tool that you're going to need to spend more time with than just this video, but when you get a minute, check it out, go to color.adobe.com, and it's an amazing resource where you can define all kinds of colors for your brand. There's all kinds of color harmony rules that we can play with here to come up with some really creative and really beautiful color themes for your brand and for your logo. At this stage in the game, technically my logo is no where near ready to start applying color, but yours is because you've been designing some cool stuff, I know it. Now that you know that, we can jump through and we can look at right now we're in the color wheel, this is cool, this is new. We've had some accessibility tools to make sure that the colors you pick work well for people who might have colorblindness or other things like that. We can even save this color library. If I go through, this might be one I want to save, I can save this to my library here. Let's go back. Let's name this something else. This looks green to me. I'm going to call it greens. Why not? I'm going to save it to my library, to the mysterious energy coalition library and I can also publish this to color. I'm going to turn that off. But you could publish these color schemes that you pick out for other people to use as well. I'll save that real quick, and then we can go back and we can create more things here and really dial this in. But what's awesome up here, you almost don't even notice it because it blends in with the menu. But we can explore all kinds of other color resources and what other people have used. We can look at trends and discover current trends and fashion. Here's a fashion sample. Here's some in graphic design. We can click down here to view more and see what trends are happening right now for some different colors. One thing that I do, even though I have all of this at my disposal to immediately save this and throw it into my library, let me show you what I mean. If I jump in here and we open up our libraries, look it right away, this mysterious energy coalition and here's my color theme right there for me to start using. That's amazing. I'm still used to doing it the way that I had to before. We had library sinking, and for me what I would do if I found something that a I liked, for example, this color scheme, check it out, I can immediately just click add the library. How cool is that? That just makes it so easy, and it immediately added it. That's amazing. So easy. But what I would use to do is I'd take a screenshot of it. So Command Shift and the number 4, click and drag, hold down Control, save it to my clipboard, come back over here, Command V to paste. Now I've got the color right here that then if I wanted to sample, I can get my eyedropper tool, sample, hit Option and paste. I can start fleshing out colors in my artwork that way. That's how I used to work. Having this save as a color theme is an awesome time-saver. Explore, see what works for you, but that's how I grabbed some of my color samples. The other thing that I'll do is, let's say I did a Google image search or I found an image that I was really inspired by or that I wanted to copy, the color is from this guy right here. Because I'm on Adobe Color, it makes it easy when I hover over this, the colors you pulled out for me. But what I could do, again, take a screenshot Command Shift 4, click and drag, hold down Control. Then let go the mouse, saves it to my clipboard, paste it in here. Then what I would do is I would start to flesh out, oh, I forgot to unlock this, object, unlock. Here we go. I would start to flush out some color ideas. Letter M to get a rectangle, Shift to make it square, V to get my move tool, option to make it a double arrow so I can click and drag, Shift to make it straight in line, then Command D to step and repeat. I know that was a lot, that was a ton. We'll get back to that. But basically, that's how I start to make my own color chips. Then I get my eyedropper tool and I can start sampling colors from this design that I might have been inspired by and work that way, so that's another way to work to grab colors. That's my favorite way to grab colors. The other thing you could do is you could just go full customs. Let's drag a clone of this over, grab this color, and over here on the color window, and if you're not seeing that go to Window, down to Color. Then you can start dragging these sliders. If your sliders don't look like this, there's probably a couple reasons why. One, let's run the Color window. Let's just tear this off so we only see that. On this hamburger menu over here on the side, I'm using the CMYK sliders, I like those better. You probably are seeing RGB sliders if at all. If I click Hide options, this is what you're seeing. What I do is I click "Show Options" and then I come down here to CMYK. Now I can drag these sliders to adjust this color and get it to be exactly what I want. Now I've got a little bit more of a muted tone. The last thing I want to show you as far as working with color inside of Illustrator is let's say you've got a color you want to work with. Let's see, let's clean up things a little. Actually, you know what we're going to do? Yeah, we're just going to do this. Let's say I've got this color right here. Select whichever one you're interested in. There's this color guide, and if you don't see that, come up here to Window, come down to Color Guide, and it should open this Color Guide window for you. Now click here and click "Show Options" just to see everything that I have at my disposal here. With this Color Guide, I can click on the main color that I have selected and it's going to flesh out these other colors based on whatever rule I have selected in this drop-down. I could do shades, and now it gives me all these different shades. Maybe I drag a copy out here and then I select the Shade as an option, or I'm going back to my main color and I see all these different rules. Maybe I do something that's high contrast. Let's drag these copies down. I don't know what my deal is tonight, but I'm working very messy on my Canvas and I've got all kinds of crazy going on. I think my hope is as I'm doing this, my hope is that you don't take it too seriously, that you don't get to hung up on like, oh my gosh, that actually look perfect. Nobody has to see this. You're seeing this, but when you're making your own stuff, nobody has to see it. You can explore, you can break things, you can try stuff, it doesn't have to be perfect along the way as you're designing it. Nobody's looking over your shoulder right now, and guess what? When it comes time to send your final logo, let's just pretend here that I've got this big old mess going on. Don't forget to save, Command S. Let's say I've got this big old mess. I can easily make a new document. Command N, creating document. Jump back over into here, and let's just pretend this was my final logo, and I'll copy it, Command C. I'll jump over here, Command V to paste it right in the middle. Check that out. Let's just pretend that that's my logo. Nobody has to see all of the other process for you getting here. So as you're working, don't feel like you can't move things or you can't create something on your Canvas because it might mess it up. That's what Command Z or Control Z to undo, or just remember this is digital art. Fill up your hard drive, you can create as many copies of this as you want. Don't feel like you have to get it right in the first shape. Hopefully, that helps you out here. I just realized that this looks like how garbage, but it doesn't matter. Nobody's going to see this work. You are, but when it comes time to send your work, you'll send them something pretty, and we're going to show you that here in a couple of videos. To finish this up real quick, this color guide, explore those options, see all these different things that will help you find a color that works well, and that's my process. That's how I go through finding colors. I just look at something that I think is pretty, or I jump on Adobe Color and see what's trending, or I'll grab an image and sample from that image if I'm feeling inspired by it. Now that you know how to do that, go and spend some time exploring color, and don't forget to post your work so we can see what you're working on.
13. Putting it all Together: All right, guys. In this video, we're going to be putting it all together. I realize as I look back at this, I've shown you how to make some cool stuff and I've loved getting to see you guys' work. Now it's time for you to see my work. What we're going to do is I'm going to put it all together. I'm going to let you look over my shoulder as I knock out a quick look an idea at something. I'm not going to get too picky about it, I want you just to kind of see my process without this being a 40-minute video. I'm going to create a quick mock-up in black and white so that way we can see my thought process towards the shape. Then I'll throw some color to it. Then after that, we're going to create a couple of variation. So there's going to be a lot of fun. The purpose of this specific video is not for you to follow along really at all. I want you just to kind of see my process. I'm going to go fast. I'm not going to try and explain every little detail. If you want to capture those little details, maybe play and pause, just to kind of see what I did. But my hope is that hopefully, this goes how I hope and that is to be designing at speed, at full speed, creating some things real quick. So that's enough talking. Let's get after it. I'm just going to jump on in and I hope this works out. If you liked this approach, comment below, let me know if you liked this. Hopefully it's inspiring and hopefully I don't suck. I'm going to grab this new document that I started because I wanted a clean slate without all these extra practice we were doing here. I really like the shape of this. It's different, it looks like nothing else that we were doing. It doesn't mean anything. To me it looks kind of like natural gas. I'm thinking energy. I've decided I want to make an energy drink brand and I wanted to be edgy. To me, it's random. I don't know, but I like it, so I'm going to go with it. I throw something on here and right away I'll save it. Command+S. I could save this in the Cloud because then I can pop it into illustrator, but for now I'm going to save it on my computer just so it syncs with Dropbox for some other things I'm doing. I'll throw this in here. I've been totally focused on this, so I've completely lost track of everything. I'm putting it all together. What is this called? This is mysterious energy coalition. I really hope I've been spelling this right the whole time. I've been too focused on producing this course. We've got this shape. It is saved. I've got this extra little thing here I'm going to get rid of real quick. Let me go ahead and grab this text that we had started. I don't know if I'm going to use this version. I'm just copying and pasting real quick. I noticed right away that these are different black color. With this selected, get my eyedropper tool, sample that so it matches. This first version we're going to work in black and white. I'll probably make a few different copies here. I noticed these aren't grouped anymore, so I'll highlight this and group it. We've got this basic shape, we've got this basic font we're going to work with, so let's go ahead and build something here to the right size. I like to separate my texts, so highlight that and Command+X to cut it. Delete that extra space. Click paste. Again, I hope I'm not frustrating you by saying everything I'm doing or maybe by not saying enough as far as shortcuts. Let me know in the comments what you prefer. But again, you can watch the replay and just see how I'm doing things. I'm liking where this is headed. The next thing that I use a lot is the alignment tool. I'll explain them more as I get into it. Let's find another font that pairs to this, I'm thinking something Sans Serif. I can't think of anything off the top my head. Let's jump into here. Let's click this little drop-down and let's go to filters. Let's grab a Sans Serif. mono-spaced, something like this. No, I don't want mono-spaced, I want this instead. I want Sans Serif. All right. Let's see what that gives me. Basic Sans. Sure, let's make it basic. No, let's make it Bebas Neue, which is really overdone but that's all right. I like it. I like it as a font. Space this out a little bit. Command+Shift and the comma key or Command+Shift and the period key to make it bigger or smaller. Command option, left and right. Awesome. Cool. This is a great time to just triple check my spelling. Coalition. Got it. Mysterious, just making sure I could spell check too. I know I should have done this a long time ago. But again, I was focused on other things, energy. Why did that highlight it? Because it's all caps. I don't know. Edit, Spelling, Auto spellcheck. Let's just turn that off. Cool. That's looking good. I'm digging the direction here. Now let's just play with spacing and alignment. Too many copies, I don't even know what I did there. All right, there we go. Let's play with this as a little guy down here. Coalition. I don't know, just making stuff up. Let's make this drip even more drippy. So what we're going to do is go Command+Shift+O to make outlines. Now I can drip this stuff further down. Let's see, if I align this to here, make this drip from this R start to interact with the line below it. I don't know. I'm not going to spend too much time making this perfect, just hoping that you can see my thought process. Let's align this guy too, Command Shift O. I'm going to select out and then come back and click in here with the Direct Selection tool, letter A, just highlight that one letter, I might delete the whole thing because now, I'm going to grab this guy, and we're just going to warp it, warpy warp. Let's nudge this with the right arrow. Too much nudge. That's cool. There's a look, there's an idea. Now for spacing, I like to use shapes as guides. I'm going to hit the letter M to get my Rectangle tool. I'm just going to click and drag from here to here. I'll change the color to something bright so I can see, not the stroke. The backslash question mark key, it removes the fill or the stroke, whichever one of these is in front. X swaps it, so now this is in front. Now, I can click, there we go. Now, I can drag this guy out, and I can tell that visually, this is perfectly spaced. Even though it's perfectly spaced, I might nudge this in just the tiniest, it doesn't matter, but visually, this space here felt bigger than here because there's more going on, on this side so I just crunched it over a little. It doesn't have to be perfect, at least not for this. Mysterious Energy Coalition, I really like the look of this. Let's outline this. Don't forget to save. There's a look. Let's push this further. Let's grab the Lasso Tool, letter Q. I want to drag it around here, Command X to cut it, Command F to paste it right back in place, and front. Command B would paste it behind. Command V would just throw it wherever the heck Illustrator feels like throwing it on the canvas. If I hit Command X Command V, it just throws it wherever it feels like, so we're going to undo that. Command F pastes it right back in place. The reason why I did that is because now, this is all grouped together, and this is isolated. Let's grab these, Command G to group it. Now, I'm just getting crazy. This inspiration for the crazy and it's still pretty lined and balanced. If you have never heard of David Carson, check him out. In fact, he's got an awesome masterclass out right now that I highly recommend, and what I love about his work is he would hate this, the fact that this is all lined up left and perfect and balanced and whatever, he likes to just go crazy with stuff. Super inspiring though. Check him out. Here, we're going to save it because I like it like this. Let's throw a copy up here, Command G to group that. I'm going to grab this in honor of David Carson, we're going to start getting cool with it and just go nuts. This little guy, I see this as a mischievous flame, like a little flame with character but he's got Marshmello eyes because why not? Marshmello's cool. Let's smash this stuff together. Group it, Shift Scaley Scale. I'm digging this. What I like about this is it could be a lot of different things, it could be all of these versions and it's still going to work. One thing I want to point out is, really this is one look, this is one idea even though there's multiple things on my canvas, if I was going to show this to the client, they'd be like, "And?" You've given me basically one choice, one font and one icon. I'm just playing with the layout. Ideally, you would create three or four variations of something totally different and you would do this after having a discovery phase with your client where you learn about what they want and try and get them the number one thing, but there might be a couple areas you explore. Anyway, this is me just totally unfiltered, just playing around with it to see what happens, and I'm really happy that I went David Carson on this, just a little bit. I'm having super second thoughts about spelling, I don't know why. Out of control. We've got this guy. I'm really happy with that. I feel like this is a good luck. We'll bring that down, just mentally nudge and stuff down here to come back to. Then, I feel like we need to do one with the icon on the left. There we go. There's an idea. I just really like this and how it's coming together. Something else we could do for what we would say continuity is bring over some of these drips. What I'm going to do, it looks like any of these will work, but the O from that font is going to work. What I'm going to do is come back up here, drag a copy of this guy down, and I'm just going to highlight this, and I just want the letter O. Command Shift O to turn it into a shape, then, I hit Shift E to get my Eraser tool and just knock some of that away. What I just did there at the letter O to get my Reflect tool because I just wanted to flip it from one side to the other, because I didn't want this erased edge, I wanted it to be like that. Drag a copy, O, flip from one side to the other. Something like that, I don't know, close. Now, this little flame guy has similar drips to it. Looking cool. I'm digging it. I'm actually really happy with this. I can't decide if I want to clean up this little sketch or if it adds character. This is the little details that I agonize over. I'm going to select this with my direct selection tool. There's a lot of ways to do this. Now I'm going to get my letter P to get my Pen tool, and then, when you hover over a point that's selected, you'll notice the little minus next to it, which means if I click there, it's just going to delete that anchor point. The reason why I'm doing it this way is because I'm going to get a smooth transition where that goes away. I could also have just used my Eraser tool, Shift E, and gone that route, but then you can see it leaves this when you zoom in real close, so that's why I like to do it this way. Looking cool. I dig that. I'm going to save it. I think this is going to be an awesome brand on an energy drink can and on apparel and stuff. I'm digging this. What we're going to do now is in the next video, I'm going to create some design variations with artboards and start playing with color a little bit.
14. Create Design Variations with Artboards in Adobe Illustrator: I had a ton of fun in that last video. I hope you enjoyed it and we're inspired to jump in and create your logo. So what we're going to do now is take whatever you've done in this case, I'm going to work on this mysterious energy coalition logo and I'm going to create some variations. Now variations can mean a few different things depending on which stage of the logo design process you're in. A variation might be where I was telling you you have completely different looks, whether it's a different icon or a different font, or just some different variations to look at. In this case, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start working with the color and we're to use artboards to create a few different looks for this. Let me show you what I mean. We're going to go ahead and jump in here. I love working with artboards and the reason why, is when it comes time to export this, it makes it super clean and you'll learn that here in the next video. Right now what I want to do is hit "Shift O", which is the same as clicking right right on my artboard tool. I already know that this is an 81/2 by 11, and I can verify that up here in the options. It's 11 inches wide by 81/2 inches tall. So this will print nicely on my printer at home or at the office, wherever you want to print it or send it out to press whatever. The point is, it prints nicely. So what I'm going to do is hold down the Option key with my artboard still selected, and I'm going to click on the name up here and drag towards the right. Then I'm going to add shift to it and it's going to snap perfectly horizontal. Depending on your settings, you can have it copy the artwork or not when you do this. I'll go ahead and click the move tool to deselect my artboard. Now I have two distinct artboards. The way this works is, you can have artwork wherever you want. I could have this up here, off the Canvas, and whatever. But when it comes time to export this, only the artwork inside of this artboard will actually export. That's why I really enjoy working with artboards because then I can create a frame or a window for the client to see only the stuff that I want them to see. Now what I want to do is just play around a little bit with creating some variations. Actually, let's take it back a step. Typically I would define colors first. I'd start to play with colors, but I'm just going to jump into making this look cool just because it's fun. What I'm going to do is grab the rectangle tool and click and drag. Remember those colors we sampled a few videos back that were in our color themes library? Well, this rectangle selected, I can just click on this and it'll immediately apply the color to that shape that's selected. Now what I want to do, this is still selected and I want to send this behind the artwork that's still sitting here. So remember the shortcut is Command, and then left or right bracket here next to the letter P, will either send it one step at a time or Command Shift, and then the bracket will send it all the way behind or bring it all the way front. Now this shape is sitting behind my logo, and I can do a couple of things here. I'm just going to click it, "Letter I" and then just click over here on the Canvas to make it white. Just a quick shortcut, I guess I could have double-clicked over here, drag this to make it white. But just trying to work fast. I've got this letter E to get my scale free transform and let's scale this up. Then here's the alignment tool I was going to show you. If I shift-click multiple shapes, we'll start with this guy here, I've got two selected, I've got the rectangle and then I've got my logo that's grouped together. Now if I click one more time without touching anything, whichever one I click on, you'll notice it gets a little bit of a thicker line around it, and that means that's the key key. So now with my Align window open, and you'll probably see it across the top, we've got these little icons here. These are all the different ways we can align our objects together: with a left edge, centered, right edge, top, middle, or bottom, where we can distribute the objects. If you're not seeing all of these, come up here to Window and then down to Align. We also have it here, the exact same stuff. So right now if I click this little "Align To" option, let me click "Show Options" here, make sure you guys are seeing everything. It's aligning to the selection. The selection being whichever object I I on last to make it the key object. In theory, this main rectangle will hold still and this shape will center, or left edge, right edge, or center. So it's centered and then we're going to go vertical and it looks like something got left. Oh yeah, those little shapes that I had here, the little paint drops, let's step back. This is a perfect example and it's easy to see now of where once you get something how you you it, shift-click on all the pieces and then we're going to use the shape builder tool "Shift M" to combine that shape. That way it doesn't accidentally get left behind if I move it around. Let's change this back to white. Let's scale it up. Shift-click our shape, let go, click one more time on our shape and align it. There's one idea. I'm just going to quickly just keep going here. "Shift O" to get my artboard tool. Let's drag a copy down here. Let's grab this and this time I want to apply a gradient to this color. So what we're going to do is hit the letter "G" to get my gradient tool selected. Up here in the options, the gradient type, I want a radial gradient. I'm going to click from here and just drag down that direction. Then over here on the right side, I want to open up my gradient window. Again, if you don't see it, all these windows that I mentioned, you can find them under the Window tab. There's the gradient window. Oops, I just turned it off. I want this lighter white spot. I'm going to click on it and get my eye Dropper tool, and then hold down Shift and click on this purple color so that way if I just clicked on it, it would remove the whole gradient and sample this color. Then I'm going to hold down option and drag this color as a copy. I'll click and drag on this black and drag down to remove it. Then I'm going to double-click on this to open up my color picker. We'll change it to this, and I'm going to add some black to it just to darken it up a little bit. So not too much, just enough and I could even redraw or move the gradient so it's more centered and it feels like it's more like a vignette. So whatever you want to do, but just an easy, easy way to add a little bit of visual interests without doing anything. Honestly, my logo is just white at this point with a colored background. So that's an easy way to start seeing how a brand might look with all of the colors. Let's push this a little bit further. What I'm going to do now is play a little bit more with these colors, maybe you drag a copy down, maybe sample a lighter version of this, maybe lighten it up a little bit more just to start to see how this works on different colors. Now, how do we make this all aligned and make sure that we note exactly how we want it? Well, what I'm going to do, I'm going to use this rectangle behind it as a way to align everything. So we'll click here, we'll center everything, and we're going to highlight this stuff. Hold down Shift, click to get rid of our rectangle, so now we just have this shape selected. I'm going to make sure that they are vertically distributed and now I know that they're centered there, I'm going to group them command G. Now I can shift, click this guy back, click one more time, and then I make sure they're vertical and horizontally centered without them snapping or without them overlapping each other. So same thing here, I'm just going to use this rectangle as a guide. They are horizontally centered, let's group them so that I can make them vertical, centered as well. All right, so now they're all aligned up looking good. There's another idea. Now let's totally flip the colors and there's a few cool ways we can do this as well, and one of which is just to highlight the artwork you want to change. Come up here to Edit, Edit Colors, and we can Recolor Artwork or we can Recolor with a Preset. Let's go over here to our color library. My window just froze, let me try that again real quick. Make sure you have your artwork selected, we're going to come up here to Edit, Edit Colors, Recolor with Preset or you can do Recolor Artwork, play with that if you want. But I'm going to come over here to Recolor with Preset or choose a color library. Right here, we'll click on this little drop-down. There's all kinds of cool options. I'm just going to click on kids stuff. I will click "Okay." Now it gives me the option for what the color was and what the new color will be. So to see this take effect, make sure you click down here on "Recolor Artwork" and now you can see what it did to the logo. We can even play with it further and try some other things, clicking on these bright colors and you can see it's pretty crazy, pretty fast. Let's go ahead and maybe we can try gray. Let's see what happens there. That doesn't work. Let's go for the bright crazy colors. Then if we want to, we can redefine these colors. Right now, the green to the orange isn't working so well here. So let's maybe change this, we'll click on this drop-down and we can even select, let's see, that's going to be orange, let's grab something close. That's not bad. It's still a little crazy, but you get the idea of how you can go through. No, don't save. We just want the color to apply. So that's one one to quickly get something crazy that might spark some other ideas for you. Let's do one more, and then we'll wrap it up here for this video. So let's go and make another copy of our art board one more time, there we go. Then let's go ahead and work with these colors. Ungroup, and there's so many anchor points in this logo, I'm having a hard time seeing it. So what we can do is hit "Command H" and that's up here under View, we're going to be hiding. I remember where it's at. Hide Edges, Command H. So under View, Command H, Hide Edges. By doing that, it's still technically selected, but you don't see the edges of the artwork. So now as I pick different colors, I can see exactly what's happening to my artwork and if it's the change that I want to make. So let's turn the edges back on "Command H" so I can see what's selected. All right, that's cool. So in the next video, we're going to learn how to package and export all of the logo files that we've created.
15. Export Logo Files: Now that you have a logo that you're proud of and you're excited to share it, or at the very least, excited to share it with us here in this class. Don't forget to post your work. I want to see it. I want to see what you guys are up to. In this video, we're going to show you how to export your logos. So we're going to jump right in and I want to show you something right off the bat. Typically what I do when I work with some of my, I wouldn't say best clients, but the clients that I've worked with the longest, that I have a long relationship with. A lot of times I'll just text them a quick image of what I'm working on. Here's what I mean. For example, this is a real message window to my wife. You can see that I already did it. I was showing her exactly what we're working on here in this class and she says, ''Hey, that's fun.'' So if I wanted to show her another look, here's how I would share this with a client. I would zoom in, get it close Command Shift four to take a quick screenshot of it. Hold down control. It'll copy it there. Jump back into your messages and paste it in there and hit ''Send.'' Just like that. I just sent it to my wife or to your client or to whomever you want. That's a really fast way to send a look and you can position it and send just a piece of the artwork or the whole canvas or whatever you want. Sometimes I'll zoom out, I'll just send them a picture of everything I've done. So for example, if I wanted to show them like, hey, look at all these different looks I'm going to hit the letter F on my keyboard once and then once more to toggle my view to where it just has everything on just the artwork, none of the tools. Then I can get it positioned right Command Shift four. I will take a picture of it like this. Hold down control to copy to my clipboard. Then I could jump back in here and look at that. My wife already gave it a thumbs up. Then I could paste that in there and I'll send it, but I won't spam her with this. Anyway, the point is, that's a quick and easy way to just quickly share artwork without having to go through the full process. You're probably wondering, well, is that a high enough resolution for using a logo? The answer is no, actually, it's just a quick way to share it with people on your phone or to get quick feedback. Or maybe to share with somebody if you're stuck and trying to get some ideas. So what I want to show you now though, is how I would actually export one of these if I wanted to save it or use it. So what we're going to do, I'm going to hit Shift O to see all my different artboards. I'm going to click right here on this artboard title, let's start with this guy. I can see that this artboard Number 7 and the title is called artboard one copy six. I can change that name by clicking up here. Let's just call this Mysterious Energy. I'm just going to call it green, makes sense to me since it's green. Then the other thing I want to point out is I have actually got quite a mess here. So let's change my workspace. Workspace, let's go back to Essentials and just reset everything. Let's actually go to Essentials Classic because that's what I'm used to. There we go. So with this artboard selected, I should have an artboard, there it is. This little box down here is my artboards window. So artboard seven I can see it's the one that I'm working on right now and you could see that I changed the title. So I can go through and double-click on any of these. As I do it, you'll see which artboard I'm working with and I can change the name right here. It's pretty simple to just go through and change things so I could call this Mysterious Energy Coalition white on purple. So the reason why I'm doing it differently is so you can see it doesn't really matter, name whatever makes sense to you. You can name it based on the color. You can name it based on the variation. There's a lot of ways to do this, so hopefully, that makes sense. Now what I want to do is I can rearrange all these. I can move them up or down or whatever you want to do. But pay attention to whichever one you're exporting if you're not going to do all of them in this case, this is Number 2. The other one I did is Number 7. So if I wanted to export these, there's a few ways to do it, if you haven't picked up on that yet already in Adobe, anything, whether it's Photoshop or Illustrator, whatever, There's 100 ways to do the same thing. So what we're going to do is export artboard Number 2 and Number 7. So I'm going to come up here to File, I'm going to down to Export. We're going to go Export As, right here we're going to click on Use Artboards. I'm going to actually come back. I'm going to make a new folder so I keep things nice and tidy. We're going to save it in here. Let's just call it Exports. We're going to use artboards and you can choose whatever format you want. I recommend a JPEG if you're doing a full image or PNG, those are the two I recommend for this specific purpose. Again, I have a course that goes in much more depth about this. There should be a link below, but for this purpose, for right now I'm just going to use a JPEG. We wanted, let me just confirm artboard Number 2 and Number 7. So instead of doing all of these artboards, I'm just going to go range, I'm going to click on 2, 7. I could also go two, let's say I also wanted five through seven. So this would Export Artboard Number 2 and then skip three and four, and then I will do five, six, and seven. But I just want five and seven. Let's click ''Export.'' Depending on the end usage, if it's going to be printed, do it as a CMYK. If it's going to be onscreen, do it as RGB. We will make it a large file resolution. I'm going to crank this up and make it high. We'll click ''Okay.'' Then I'm going to jump over into my finder window and come up here to our exercise files, go to our exports, and there they are already. If I hit the space bar and do a quick preview, I can see it exported those two artboards. Not only that, but if we look at the filename, it gave it the name. Let's change our view here as a list, it gave it the name of the Illustrator file, which is Mysterious Energy Coalition. Then it added the name of the artboard to it. So we can actually use this to quickly batch export, all of these artboards if we wanted to. Well, what if we wanted to use this logo and just have the logo, but have it be transparent behind. Let me show you how to do that real quick. So let's go ahead and grab a logo, whichever one we want to use. In this case, I'll use this guy. Let's just duplicate this real quick. Let's delete our background and now we just have this piece of artwork. I notice I've got an extra anchor point hanging out, so let's just delete that real quick. So this is a green color. I can make it black or I could make it any color I want. Doesn't really matter for the sake of being right and obnoxious and easy to see. Let's change it to this brighter green color. So now what we're going to do is a couple of things to pay attention to when I export this, all of this extra space around it is going to go with the file. So it's kind of a lot of extra space. So you might consider scaling this up. Or changing the size of your artboard to snap it down to your artwork. Do it like that. So now I've got that set where I want it. Don't forget to save. Now from here, there's two different ways we could go about this. One is just like we did or I can click right here on this little Asset Export window. Again, if you don't see it come up here to window down to asset export. Now I can actually click and drag this whole thing right into here. I didn't even have to mess around with the artboards. I could have just done it like this from the beginning. Before I did this, I could even grab a different asset. I could come up here to this red version, and I could throw this in here as well. Let's try that again. Let me back out and ungroup this. There we go. So now I've got two different ones and I could rename this one light green, and I could name this one red. So I've got two different ones. I can select both of these. I could tell it to do just the regular scale at 1_x at exactly that size. Or I can add a scale and make it 2_x. So if we're doing something with a retina display or something where you need double the size, you can do that as well. So now let's grab this one and hold down shift and click to get both of these. I'll come right down here to Export. I will click on that. Go to Export over to Exports, I'm going to make a new folder in here called Asset Export Window, just so I know which one this was, click ''Create'' and I'm going to click ''Export.'' Let's see what it does. Let's go check that out. We'll go back to our Finder window, go to the Asset Export Window. Now we can see we've got the light green version. Let's see what our sizes are. There we go. So we have the light green version and we have light green version at twice the size. We can see down here, it's got @ 2_x on the file size. More importantly, it exported as a PNG with transparent background. We can see the dimensions here of the original 433 by 215 and the 2_x size 866 by 429. We also have a red version, the same thing. So that's a really fast way to export artwork with his asset export. The other we can do, come back here to my artboard, this is our board Number 8. Remember, just come up here to File Export, Export As, we use artboards. We're going to grab just the artboard Number 8. We're going to change this from a JPEG to a PNG. Let's throw this in here with the others we'll click ''Export'' this time because the PNG, we have some different options. So we want to leave this as a high resolution. I'm not worried about the anti-aliasing on this, but what I am worried about is the background color. Make sure instead of it being white or black, that you change it to transparent. Then click ''Okay.'' Now if we jump back into our exports, we can see we have our JPEGS from earlier and then we have this new PNG file. It's huge. But you can see as I move it around, you can see it blurs the background behind me. That's how the macOS does it. If you're on a PC, it might be a little different. But now I can use this artwork anywhere and it's going to be transparent and it's going to have just the image behind it. So that's how you export your artwork from Adobe Illustrator.
16. Next Steps: Congratulations on making it through this course. I'm so pumped for you, and I'm so thankful that you spent this time with me. I hope it was valuable and that you learned a ton of great things about creating your own logo. Speaking of creating your own logo, I want to see what you did. I'm pumped to see it. Make sure that you export that thing and post it in the class so we can see what you're up to. I can't wait to see what you're working on. I'm really excited to see what random words you got with the random word generator if you follow it along. So be sure to do that. The next steps, check on my website at derekmitchell.com and @derekmitchell.com/resources. I have a ton of great resources for you, for graphic design in general. I also have some other advanced training to help you on this journey to become an amazing graphic designer. I've also been live streaming a lot lately. You can catch me to for Adobe over at Behance.net or on my YouTube channel at youtube.com/DerekMitchell, you can follow and subscribe on both platforms so that way anytime I go live, you'd get an immediate notification and you can join me in the chat and say hello, or you can go to my website at @DerekMitchell.com and subscribe to my newsletter. I send out an email before most of my live streams. That's another great way to stay in touch, as well as to get some free resources and some additional tips and tricks, and other tutorials that I post along the way. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for going through this course. I hope you loved it, and I can't wait to see you in the next one.
Derrick Mitchell, Designer | Teacher | Artist | Innovator
