How To Customize Fonts For Logo Design

1. Introduction: What's up Internet. My name is Jon Brommet, and welcome to How To Customize Fonts For Logo Design. This class is aimed at anyone that is at least a bit familiar with Adobe Illustrator and wants to know how to be able to customize fonts to their liking without being a typographical master. Customizing fonts is actually really easy and allows you to be more creative and not rely on pre-made fonts to dictate how your design works. In this class, we're going to do a case study on a variety of different logos so that we can gather inspiration from their customizations of preexisting fonts. Then we will use that inspiration to complete our class project, which is to customize a word for use in a logo or other medium. If you'd like to know more about me, I'm a graphic designer in Illustrator and I've worked on a wide variety of design work over the past 12 years professionally. I now specialize in branding, t-shirt graphics, and illustration. I've worked with bands like Blink-182, brands like Hi My name is Mark and RPM Training Co, and I've collaborated with a wide variety of companies to produced my own merchandise. I've also taught over 30 classes on Skillshare over the past five years. But that's enough about me. If this class sounds interesting you, keep watching and let's get started. 2. The Class Project: All right. Let's get into the class project. I'd like to say, at the beginning of the video, so it's pretty easy, you can start thinking or maybe even working on it while you're watching the class with me. Then you'll be inspired to actually complete the project and come up with something that you're really proud of and maybe is Instagram or whether you really want to show your friends or share in the class project because that's always awesome. I love seeing what you guys come up with. In this class, what we want to do is I want to pick a word. It can either be for a logo, it can be for a client logo or a personal logo, or it can just be a famous logo, whatever you want to do. Or if that isn't interesting you, it could be your name, or the city you grew up in, or the city you live in, something like that. Just pick a word that is interesting to you, something that you actually want to customize and you want to use. Then you're going to pick a sans serif font. It can be one of the ones in the class or different sans serif font. If you don't know what sans serif is, don't worry, I'll explain that in the next video really quickly. We're going to pick a sans serif font, make some [inaudible] to it, either light ones or really heavy ones. Then that'll be your class project. All you have to do is upload the before the font that you had and what it looked like at the start, and then the after, which is your amazing font. Really good, it's so good that my fingers are moving. All right. Let's get into the class. 3. Quarantine: Is this thing rolling? I think it's rolling. I don't know if I'm in focus. Alright, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to put up a video that is only going to stay for a short while and then I'm going to delete it because this one is actually very time oriented. As in, we are all in quarantine right now. Also, there's a giant truck driving by if you can hear that, I don't know. So while you're all in quarantine and we're all in quarantine, hopefully you guys are really inspired to learn and learning is a great thing to do. I find for me, I make a checklist. I have a big checklist and keeping busy and quarantine is like super important obviously, right? So you don't actually go mental. I've seen a lot of people on Facebook and social media that are just bored out of their minds and I tell them, do a hobby obviously or learn a new hobby if you can without going out and other than that, learning is super useful. Pick up a book, go online, go on Skill Share and learn because for me anyway it inspires me to create more things, it inspires me to better myself as an artist or a person even I guess depending on what you're looking up. I think that keeping busy during the quarantine is going to be super useful. I mean, there's obviously a lot of negatives and a lot of bad things that are in the news and unfortunately people are passing away and sick and these horrible things going on. But for some of us that are healthy and we're just doing our part to try and help stop the spread, we're in our homes and it's an awesome opportunity for us with all this free time on our hands to really do something that we never had a chance to do before or just jump into those things that we've been putting off. So I really just wanted to talk to you guys for a second about learning. I just think it's so awesome and I've been seeing so many more projects coming in and so many people commenting and enjoying the classes and I think that's awesome. Thank you so much for checking them out. At this point, I've got 30 plus classes. So if you've got some time on your hands, I'd love for you check out my profile and see if there's anything interesting there for you to learn. If you want to talk to me, I'm at Jon Brommet on Instagram, DMing me there is probably the best way. I'll chat man, I got some free time, let's chat. Other than that, just check out Skill Share. But there's so many good teachers on Skill Share other than myself, you know like, I'm a decent teacher I hope. Yeah, spend a lot of time on Skill Share and learn. It's not just an ad, this isn't an ad. This is about inspiring you to feel creative and to channel off past all the dread and worry that's going on in the world and actually just enjoy this time as awesome free time for you to create and learn and do those things that you didn't get a chance to do. Again, this video is not going to be up for a long time because once this quarantine world is over, it's going to seem kind of weird and outdated and it's not totally related to the class. So this is a special video for you people that are watching during the quarantine. Thanks so much guys, keep busy, have fun and stay safe. 4. The Key Terms: To get started, I want to go over some key terms that I'm going to be using in the class and just get some legality ideas out of the way as far as using other people's fonts and what you can do. More or less legally, of course, I'm not a lawyer, so you can't take what I'm saying for [inaudible] , but I think that I have the right idea as far as how you can use fonts. To start with, we'll go over some key terms. The first is one that you guys may be familiar with, and that is sans serif fonts. That's what we're going to be using for the majority of this class. I'll explain why in just a moment. But a sans serif font is a more modern font or what they consider more modern font. It's more or less going to have the same weight throughout the letter. There are small differences on certain aspects of each letter, but more or less the weight is going to be very consistent throughout the shape and the character or the glyph. It doesn't have a serif here, the edge of the letters which we'll see right below. This is a serif font. The difference here is that it has the serifs. That's a serif is there at the end of each little stroke here, and you'll see there are a lot of thick and thin points in each letter. That is a more traditional fun. They're used, of course, in all kinds of books and magazines and things. These are great fonts, but they're much more difficult to actually edit as far as customizing a font. For this class, we're going to start with sans serif fonts because they're much easier to work with. Once you've got your feet wet and you've learned how to do that well, then you can move on to serif fonts, which I won't talk about in this class. But they're just a little more complicated. If you want to adjust things, you need to understand the weight of each part of the letter and how to adjust serifs and things like that. It's just a lot more complicated. We're staying away from serifs, for the sake of this class. Another thing we'll talk a bit about it is tracking. Tracking is the space between a group of letters. In other words, this entire word here, is been tracked out. The way that you adjust that I have my character panel open here. If you want to make sure you have yours open, you're going click "Window" at the top of the screen, scroll all the way down to Type, and then make sure Character is checked, and it should pop out somewhere so that you can nicely see that. Right here, that is the tracking. We can do this with our keyboard shortcuts. If I have the word selected, I can hold Option or Alt on a PC and just use my left and right arrows, and you can see that I am increasing and decreasing the tracking along the letters, or we can do that same thing over here just by clicking and holding or clicking this drop-down menu and picking preset amounts for tracking. But I like to use my shortcuts and use the keys as much as possible, but that'll adjust a large amount of letters all at once and make sure that the space is relatively even. Kerning, which is very similar is actually just the space between letters themselves. Rather than a group of letters, it's just individual letters. You will go in here. Once we get that tracking to where you want, then you may have to go in the individual letters and either widen or reduce the size in-between the letters to whatever looks best to your eyes. But that is the difference between kerning and tracking. Those are the majority of terms that we're going to be using in this class that you may have not been familiar with before. 5. Basic Typography Rules: Now we want to get into the do's and don'ts of plane with typography, or fonts, or text, however you decide to refer to it. It is important that you more or less follow some of these rules. It's going to be more important depending on the fonts you're using and things like that. But one of the big no-no's of design or any kind of typography is stretching the text. If I select this text here and I look in my character panel, I can see this is a 132 percent horizontally rather than just vertically. This is properly scaled. Sometimes definitely inexperienced designers or people that aren't designers at all will say, "I want this to be wide or so." They'll just grab this and stretch it out. But the problem with stretching things is it throws [inaudible]. If we look before, see how the weights are fairly consistent. Now if we'd like, you can see that this is fatter and this is thinner, and it just throws off the whole weight to the font and it looks bad. Don't do that. There are alternatives to doing this. One of the ways is to just increase the tracking. That's a great way in order to do that. Another way is to actually go in and customize the font and stretch things out, which we'll show later how to do that properly. Another don't, generally speaking, is putting on a faux bold, that is to just add a stroke and just crank it up. The reason for that is basically that a properly designed font, let's look at an example how that occur actually has a difference between the bold and the regular version. It's not just doing this. A proper font designer isn't just going to put a stroke on it and call that bold and say that is a bold font because it throws off the weight in certain sections. It's not the end of the world. This is like light don't, maybe you can get away with it or maybe you can get away with a small amount, but don't go too crazy with that. If I just copy some commands scene and pasting command V, and it changed the color of this. We will just change this to have Roman, just so you can see the example. As you see here if I zoom in, they've left the height the exact same, but there's different sections of it. They'd been have a wider line on it so that it is bolder, and same with if I go to the O. They've increased the weight pretty evenly but just on the inside. If I go to the L, you can see. So it's not just a centered, straight up bold when you're making a bold font, it's not quite that easy. Be careful if you can use the bold version of the font rather than just adding a stroke to it. Again, if we're talking about stretching, we talk about stretching horizontally. Don't stretch vertically for the same exact reasons as before. Instead, use a condensed version of the font if it exists and if it doesn't exist, then I will show you how you can customize it and make a more or less fake condensed version like I've done here. I actually use the regular font and I made it look as if it was a condensed font. By making some adjustments, it would need some refinement. I didn't perfect it, but this is just a general demonstration. 6. General Legalities: [MUSIC] I just want to talk about the basic legalities of using fonts. I use Creative Market a lot. You might use MyFonts. There's a bunch of different ways that you can buy or purchase fonts. But basically, you just want to read the small print as much as you can. I just went to popular fonts, and we'll just click the most popular font here. It doesn't matter what font you click, but basically you want to look at your pricing options right over here, so it says, desktop. In this case, we're not making an app, we're not making an ePUB basically, like an e-book, we're doing desktop, that's what we want. Then what you can do in order to actually see the license type, it says license type, what are these? You click that, it'll pop up an explanation of how you're allowed to use this font that you're buying in this case for $39, what is allowed, and what isn't allowed. In this case, it's unlimited commercial and personal projects is the desktop version for this font. That is really good. For $40, you now own that font and you're allowed to customize it, or do whatever you want for commercial purposes, you just can't resell the font. You cannot customize the font and then resell it as your own font. You have to build a font from scratch if you're going to sell a font. But just for the purpose of this class, when you're creating a logo, you're welcome to customize that once you've bought it commercially. The same exact thing would go with my fonts if you just click again, whatever, doesn't matter which font you click. Just going to select a random line here. If you go over to buying choices, you'll get the desktop, same idea, learn more. You can take a look at it, make sure that it's allowing the same kind of concept for commercial use. They've gotten a lot more stuff for you to read, but it's the same idea. You just want to be able to make sure that you have a commercial font. From there, you have two more options. You have, of course, the fonts that are installed on your computer. Any fonts that are installed on a PC or a Mac, generally speaking, if they came licensed with the actual software, like not something you've got to download. You should be able to use those for commercial purposes. Those normal fonts, Helvetica, whether it's Arial, or any Brush Script, any of those fonts that usually come their pre-made, those are allowed to be used for commercial purposes. Another thing is, if you have a Creative Cloud subscription, like most of us do, if we're using the an Adobe software, then you can go to fonts.adobe.com, and you can activate fonts. I believe that all of these are allowed for commercial purposes. But again, do a little research, just make sure that what I'm telling you is right, you can't just steal, I'm not a lawyer, but generally speaking, you'll be able to use any of these fonts for commercial purposes. Here it says, licensed for personal and commercial. Learn more, and then you can find out about the commercial usage, and then you should be good to edit stuff for the purpose of creating a logo. Just do not edit a font and then sell it as your own font. That's the only big no-no, you can't really do that. Now we'll go on to case studies. 7. Case Studies Part 1: Let's start with some case studies. The reason why we're doing this is you may be like me and when you see logos all around you, especially logos that you're used to seeing for a long time really famous, logos you see everywhere, you might not analyze exactly what makes them a good logo, and that may seem intuitive, but sometimes you have to turn your brain off if you're a graphic designer. Personally, I don't like analyzing everything around me and critiquing every design I see. Sometimes it clicks on, but for the most part, I try and be oblivious because it will stress you out and drive you nuts if you're analyzing every little thing, or it'll make you awesome. I don't know, it depends on the person of course. Doing a case study is just a really great opportunity to pay attention and see what good designers are doing. I say good designers, meaning that generally speaking, a famous logo, a really big brand usually paid a lot of money for good logo. Brand that's been around a while, they hired a good design firm and they spent a lot of money to make sure that their logo is going to be able to compete and stand out from a crowd. It's not the case with every famous logo, but for the most part, you've got a safe resource to look at for inspiration or to reference. One of the logos we are going to start with is Netflix, and the reason why we're starting with it is because it is such an easy manipulation. It's such an easy customization to an existing font. If we look here by scrolling down, we have, and I'm going to probably brutally pronounce every single font in this class because I do not know how to pronounce them. I think it's Bebas Neue, I don't know, something like that, but anyway, this font her. Maybe Bebas, I don't know. I go Bebas. Anyways, that is the font that they're using. We're going to see here what is unique about it, and that is just this curve. That's the only thing noticeably unique. They may have made other small alterations but it's pretty easy to see that the letters start at the bottom, they go up, they curve up at the bottom, and then they go back down at this outer edge and the top does not do it. It's a pretty obvious customization that they've made to the font. Let's show how it's made. I've simply typed out that text in the same font, the Bebas Neue as you can see here, and then all I did is I went to effect, I went down to Warp, and I went down to Arc Lower. Then by selecting that, let me just open it in my Appearance panel here. By selecting that I made it minus nine and then I dragged it on top of this font. I'm not showing you all the steps I did because we want to try and cover a few different fonts and I don't want it to be too tedious to get the idea. I have that font over top of this and I've put it to an outline just so you can see the difference. They have made small alterations to weights of things. I'm sure to make it look great to their eye. Those things are really easy to customize, once you've outlined the font which is Command Shift O, or you go to Type and then go down to Create Outlines. Which of course is not selectable right now because I've already done this. It still has that effect on it which is why the letters look weird like they're off place. If you want to go to Object, expand appearance that will get rid of that Arc Lower that we had on it, it'll be automatically applied to these letters. Then if you're familiar with the Illustrator at all which I assume you are if you're interested in this class and you want to customize type, then you just have to use the Direct Selection tool and you would be nudging over points, and making small adjustments like that in order to get these letters exactly where you feel that they should be. That's all the designer of this logo would have done. Just gone along and made small customizations as you can see. Just to make the way that they felt looked best. But I'm not going to go ahead and recreate all that because that gives you the general idea of what they did. All that we're trying to do is build up a library in our head of ideas of things that we can do to customize fonts for our logos or things that we're designing. That's Netflix. Now we're going to move on to Red Bull. We have Red Bull here, it's a fairly easy one again. We're starting with easier ones and we'll go more complicated as we go. This one is Futura BQ Demi Bold, and all they did is add this four stencil effect here where they put in two boxes. This one is really easy to make, I just typed out the font, did the same thing where I outlined it, and then you can adjust these things to make it exact, but they would have just drawn a box on top and then cut this out using Pathfinder. Grabbing this box and this, I'll go ahead and click minus frent, and I'll chop that little box outside of this letter and that's all that they have done. Of course there was if I go back here small alterations to the e and little tiny things they seem to do that. Another possibility is that they had a slightly different version of the Futura font than I'm using, and they didn't even customize all these curves, it might just have had a slightly different piece of software, if you want to call typeface that. That's how you would make that font. That's a cool effect. That little stencil effect, we'll get more to that soon. Discovery is an interesting one. We figured out that the font is Gotham Medium. If we scroll down and look at what's unique, of course we've got the globe here that's cut out of the D, that's interesting. They've chosen to remove what's called, I believe it's pronounced a tittle or title, but it's with two Ts. It's that little dot that goes above the i. Because it may not be as obvious, but this is all lowercase so that i is theoretically lowercase as well, but they've decided to delete that, it's missing from the thing. The other thing I noticed right off a hop is that this r would normally continue on. I'll just zoom in here. This r would continue on here and then go straight down, but instead the y is actually cut out. We have that exact same lines. That's pretty cool. In order to recreate that, I typed that out in the font, this is pretty easy. You just have a stroke on that globe, and you cut out that D, I assume that you'll be intermediate enough to understand how to do that. If I go Command Shift O to turn this data lines, all you have to do is delete that. Again, there's some small finessing here that they've done to make things fit exactly how they want. The other thing that they've done here well, before I get to that r, this bottom in the Y. They selected all of these points minus that, brought it down and then made some refinements there to customize it so that it's more of a square shape. If you have these instances where you try and move points around and you'll see I'm getting these weird lines here, that's these arrows, you can click on the arrow and drag it up of course, or if you use your Pen tool, and hover over the point and hold Option or Alt on a PC and double-click, it will delete the arrows that are associated to that line.That's an easy way of getting things to snap down there. They did basically that concept. Again, I'm not going to refine it perfectly. Then from there, in order to cut out this Y, what they probably would have done is just take this Y across to here just like that, or they would add a stroke to the Y. Make sure this line goes all the way up, and then basically done the same thing where we were minusing the front. That's how you would get that r to be on the same line. Perhaps they probably adjusted this to be down so that it snaps. The height is even there across. If you're wondering how I'm getting this to snap, I'm using Smart Guides, you go to View and down to Smart Guides or Command U on a Mac or Control U on a PC. That just makes things snap nicely to other things. There's that pink line popping up, it's snapping right there to that line. I like using Smart Guides, I use them all the time and I've shown them in many of my classes. Continuing on, we're looking at another very famous logo. The logo that probably most of you have seen all the time, and that is the Walmart logo. It's got some interesting little things here that I hadn't noticed before because again, I hadn't analyzed it. Like I'm doing it here. It's just Myriad Pro Bold, really simple font, most of you will have it pre-installed on your computer. If we go down and we look at what's unique, it's got these little rounded edges here, that's interesting on the W. They've decided to repeat that on the As, but they didn't do it to the L, M, R or T, which is interesting, they've thought that this flowed the best. The other thing I noticed is this crossbar in this t does not come across. What they've done is they've tighten up that tracking, they've adjusted the kerning and what would happen is these would run into each other and interfere, and they're not even the same height. If I drag this across, you see how that's not actually, this exact same height as the T, it's just close and it's coming down. So they've just cut that part of that crossbar off. It's a nice little touch because I hadn't noticed it. See here, it gives a good flow. It's got nice kerning and the t is still very legible. That's a nice little adjustment they've made. Once we go here and we type in our texts and I'll create a towlines, that's what we are doing, you can see of course, just like all the other ones, they make little tiny refinements, but more or less they're doing the same thing. The W, they definitely did some extra work on in order to customize it, but as far as rounding it, in the newer versions of Illustrator, all you have to do is select a point and you should see a little circle here, and when you hover over it, I'm using my Direct Selection tool, you'll get this little arc. I can just pull that up like so, in order to make the curve. If I want to do it to more than one point, I'm just going to select Shift, hit another point and I can do it to both at the same time, the same amount. That's the basic idea of what they would've done here in order to make those adjustments. The T of course is even easier. If we just double-click to go into that T and grab those two points with the Direct Selection tool, hit Delete, then I would use my Pen tool to select these two points to put it back together, and I even click them again to delete those points. Then they made these small adjustments. That's the basic idea of how they're customizing a font to just give it something a little more unique than straight out typing the text. Even though I didn't go ahead and make all the refinements that they made, if we just look at the examples that I made right here without properly cornea or tracking it or doing all the adjustments that they made to the stroke weight and things like that, you can still see that this is straight up typed into Myriad Pro, and this is the logo just with those little adjustments I made without perfecting it, recreating it exactly how they did. You could see how this is a little more interesting than just typing it out. That's all we're trying to do. We're just trying to build up all these good ideas. It's not about recreating someone else's logo perfectly, it's about thinking of ideas and analyzing what other people have done, and just trying to build up that library. In this video, we're going to tackle two more Logos quickly. That is this Under Armour logo first, as you can see it is the Eurostile LT Std Bold Extended 2, really long name. We can see the most obvious differences are they've decided to actually round parts of it, but not other parts of the letters, that's interesting, and they've done these little cutouts here in some of the letters, the D and the E. You can see things like this A, they are curving part of it, but not other parts of it. It's an interesting idea. We've got sharp edges and we've got rounded edges. Not sure what made them decide to have that like that, but it does make it unique. I'll give them that. Once I've typed it out, you can see here all I would do is turn this to outlines. Let's drag this down for the sake of it. Using magenta over top of the black so it's easier to see. Then using my Direct Selection tool, I would just go over and grab one of these circles and it should more or less grab them all. That's going to round everything evenly, and then from there I would go back to points that I didn't want rounded, and drag it back out, and that would give that that sharp edge, like they've done there at the end, like they've done with these points of the D. Because more of the things are rounded than not, it's just easier to do it all at once. Obviously, E is a little different, and they've made this cut inside, undo that. Maybe undo this for the sake of it, pull this over first, then round this a little bit. Same idea here. Try and unravel those. All they did is come in here, maybe with the Pen tool, draw a line up to here, obvious holding Shift to make sure the line's straight, and then basically making that cutout box like that, and they're repeating it here. In some of the boxes their exact same, but that's it. That's how they would customize that type. Last one we're going to look in this little video is Rockstar Energy Drink. One thing I found interesting, I don't know which brand came first, I need look that up, but Red Bull uses this fake stencil thing on the R and the B that we just looked at, and then Rockstar has gone ahead and also used this fake stencil effect. That is that, when I say fake it's just not a stencil font, it wasn't designed as a stencil font. They're using Avant Garde Gothic and they've gone in and cut out the Rs, and you can see all these letters. Of course, rather than having A, they've put a star which is a bit interesting. But even letters that don't need a cut out like if you're making a true stencil font, a C doesn't need that and an O definitely does, so that keeps the enter. The R does and S doesn't need it, a K doesn't need it, a T doesn't need it, so they've just added unnecessary stencil look to it, but just because they thought it looked cooler. That one's really simple, just as I did before. I typed the font out, draw boxes, and used that minus frent or divide to cut it out. Of course they deleted the A, and put a star in. But these are just interesting ideas for you to try and think of, so we'll go ahead and we'll try and apply some of these ideas. 8. Applying What We've Learned: To start with, I have my class cover here. What I want to do is use some of those ideas that we just looked at in the case study and apply them to my class cover just as an experiment to see what I thought looked good. The key when you're customizing a font, I think for the most part, at least until you get more experience, which I'm going to show you in another video. But essentially you want to try and not go too crazy. If you use too many different effects and too many things going on, it's going to get ugly. It's not going to look nice. I've maybe pushed it a little too far here, but since I wanted to show the examples in practice, I pushed it a little further, but I tried to keep things a little settled. That's what you're going for generally speaking. We'll start with the how to up here. I've typed everything out in the same font as Netflix that debits knew, if I'm pronouncing that right, I don't really know. But I've typed it out and then I've created it to outline. I just again "Command Shift" or "Create Outlines." Then all I did was grab these two points. I'm just double-clicking to go into the layer here. I'm grabbing these two points and they were like that. I just grab those points and then I drag them over just to get them to have that nice rounded edge and that is referencing what Walmart did and what parts of Under Armour did where they made certain points kind of rounded and they didn't do it to other points. Then another thing I tried to do with the customizing font is I actually rounded all of the letters. If we go in here, you can see all of these letters would have been nice sharp edges. Instead I just rounded all of them. Just gives a little tiny bit of a softer look. I thought I was more interesting and again, it's a small, easy customization. Then the last thing I did was I dragged over this Z, so the Z was unconnected. All I did was grab these points, drag them over into the next letter, and then I merge them or united them together, which is why the Z is connected to the E. Just small things to try and make it look a little bit more interesting. The other thing I did do with customize too is I actually shrunk down the text. Let me show you exactly how I did that. Here's what customize looked originally. That is using just the [inaudible] New and then turning it to outlines. In order to make it look like this, all I did here and this is what I was talking about earlier, is instead of stretching or skewing it, the proper way to do it would be to try and grab the points, as best you can just like this, and then nudging them down because this keeps the weight consistent across the letter rather than stretching and pulling part of the letter. I move it down, let's say I'm holding "Shift" and I clicked one down. Then I click here and do the same basic thing. I want to grab these letters here and I think I'm going to grab that and basically pumping that up 1, 2, push that back down. Then that gives you the basic idea and then from there on I had to go in, I had to customize how the C fit roughly. I'm just going to do it quickly and then I'll show you the S in a second. The S is probably going to be the hardest letter to work on whenever you're doing any customization. You can see that it got really messy here and that crazy things happened. Generally what I would do with the S is I would break my little rules. Let's go back here for a second until this font was just normal, just like that. In order to get the S, what I'd probably do, I'm just going to drag it over top my current one and see. I'll make it magenta again, put it to the front. Is I did stretch it, so I did grab it and I did pull it down, and get it to roughly where you want. Another little key with any kind of thing that has a rounded top or rounded bottom, is it usually goes a little bit beyond a flat letter. If you take a flat letter like a T, the S actually doesn't snap way to the top or way to the bottom, it goes just a bit beyond. Same thing with an O, that's something you'll learn as you're customizing type, you see that. That's usually a rounded letter, goes a little bit past those sort of baselines in the cap height and stuff like that, those lines that go across. If you want to learn more about typography, there's so much to teach, so I'm not going to go into all of that right now, but that's the basic idea. Then the problem is now, as we've done that, we've stretched and skewed it like I was telling you basically not to do. I'm going to hit "Shift X," which turns it to strokes and you can see that I've played around with some parts. I've brought this up a little bit, I've brought this down a little bit. Then from there we need to do is try and customize this because you want this weight to be very consistent, so you're going to bring that up. You can even delete this point and then start playing with these anchors. You want to try and get it so that this weight is more consistent and this is where you can go crazy finessing things, and you can bring these points up perhaps. It's going to take a lot of finessing to get the S to look exactly right. That's going to be more experience and just more practice and even I didn't get it perfect for the sake of the class' one small letter this grand scheme of things but I got as good as I could so that it didn't look at a place in like imperfect to the average eye, when they're just glancing at it. On fonts, I definitely use the Netflix idea. I arc the bottom just like I showed you before by using that Warp tool and then I added these little cut-out marks and I rounded them and I like those. Those are basically the same idea that they use in the Under Armour logo with that little cut-out, the little notches. I think what's interesting about it is it almost gives it like a 3D looking on, I mean, as if somehow this part of the T is hovering over and it's shadow cast on the stem. It's an interesting look, just gives it that small customization. Again, because this has a group of different words, I didn't want to go too crazy on one word versus a different word, it would just be inconsistent. Again, once you know how to customize thing, it's up to you to try and figure out a way to do it. It looks good with minimizing it so you don't go too crazy, too many fonts, too many different effects, that kind of thing. I didn't do anything too crazy for the For Logo Design part. I just slightly rounded the edges very slightly. It's super subtle if we zoom in here and I put them on a semicircle just to make them more interesting. If you do not know how to do that, all you have to do is grab your "Ellipse" which is L on the keyboard, drag out a circle, and then I'm using T to get my Type Tool and I'm holding "Option" on the edge of the line. From there, you can just type out for Logo Design. Use that same font. Usually what I'll do is I'll set it to the center, blow it up. Then the key to get things to line up nicely, for one this font has a really tight space between words, so I've actually double-spaced it, just to type for my liking. Then with the selected, I'm going to grab my Direct Selection Tool and I'm going to grab this line. There's a big one you see there's a double line up here and a single line here. Grab that single line, I'm going to snap it to the bottom here, and it'll snap just like that. We know now that that is basically directly centered in this text. You could snap these two points if you wanted to right to the edge and now your type is exactly centered in the type. Now I'm just going to undo for a second. I still have this big line to look at. If I were to grab this big line and pull it directly upwards, it'll snap inside and now my text is going the way that I wanted to. It's inside that circle. You could have clicked inside the circle too when I was originally typing it, but basically I just did that and then adjusted the tracking slightly and that's how I made that text. Now we're going to go on to see some of these other logos here as more case study references because it's just important to try and build up as many ideas as you can, and build up and as many reference points as you can before you go crazy with your own project. Let's look at a few more case studies before we do our project. 9. Case Studies Part Two: This is Case Studies Part 2. We're just going to learn some more ideas and more reference points. Some of them will be similar to what the other logos were that we looked to, but again, it's always great to try and get more inspiration, more reference points. I encourage you to look up your own for your project too. You can, of course, definitely use the case studies in this class, or look at your own and upload those to your project. If any of you find that I'm talking too fast, you can in the bottom-left, adjust the speed of the video. If I'm talking to slow, which seems unlikely, you can also speed it up. Obviously, since it's video, you can also play and pause and rewind and that stuff, so that's why I talk pretty fast because I talk fast naturally as well. Hopefully, you can follow along and let me know what you think of the class so far. I really appreciate it. Leaving a review is super helpful as well. We're going to look at Visa here. Visa is an interesting one and again, it's basically just Myriad Pro and then they did some alterations. The most obvious things that I noticed is they've got this interesting little tail to the edge of the V. Again, they chose to around one little part of the latter. This is something I hadn't ever occurred to me. I guess it's an OCD thing. I feel like if I'm going to round one thing, I need to round either every point or at least every top left point or something like some consistency, but I'm noticing a lot of these logos aren't doing that. It's really interesting. It's given me an idea of I guess I can do that, something new to try. That's the beauty of looking at other examples for reference and of course look up all the other great designers or firms, and they'll give you an idea. Using Myriad Pro, I've put it over top of this. You can see that they definitely went a little bit crazier with the alterations. Lots of different things going on and they took this font and they played with it quite a bit. It's actually not that difficult to do other than of course that pesky S. That pesky S is a little bit of pain in the butt, so I'm not going to show that. But you get the idea of how they adjusted that probably., Just lots of little refining. That's some expert level stuff. I'm going to turn this to outline as I've been doing with all these videos, and you can see just by selecting these points, I can quite easily drag these out to get them to about the same thickness. I could do the same things with the A. Before I go too far with that, you'll notice that the angle of the italic letter is actually different for their logo. There's a really easy way to adjust this. All you have to do is go to Object and then go down to Transform, and then move over to Shear. That is going to move the angle of the letters. It's going to also allow you to make something that isn't italic, actually italic or in this case, is italic and change the angle of it. You can see that just playing with this, I'm getting different angles now. I've almost got that V pretty close and the A looks about right. The S, they've adjusted it so much, but for some reason this I is different. I'm going to go ahead and click "Okay," and then I'm hitting Command Shift G to ungroup the letters. I'm going to do it again to the I, but go the other way. I'm just holding my arrow keys, I'm pushing it too about what looks right, and then we can pop that over. So now we have the I about right. The A, again, that's going to take some refining, but basically, you would just grab these points and adjust them like so. Then the V is interesting, they've added this point. What I would probably do to create this, I don't know if this is what they did, the basic premise is I bring these over here. You've got these unnecessary points in the center. I'm just going to delete those. Bring this up. I'll just bring these over real quick, so there you go finessing a couple points. We've got it much closer to what they had. Then probably what I would do is just draw a rectangle because I have my smart guides, it should snap nicely to that corner, just like so. Then what I'm going to do is grab both of these objects that I've made. I'm going to use that Unite button to combine them nicely and switch back to outlines. I'm a little bit OCD with unnecessary points. I'm going to use my pen tool and click on these two points I don't want, then I'll delete them. Then using my direct selection tool, I'm going to grab this and I'm going to pull on that to get this angle. You can see it's not really exactly what I want, so I'm going to have to adjust that further. See how that's not really working? We'll undo that and then this point, we'll try it and that point, we can get pretty darn close. This point then what I would probably do is grab the pen tool and add an anchor point, maybe roughly here, and then delete that one. Now with my pen tool, I'm holding Alt or Option. I'm going to drag out an arrow over here and then zoom in. Direct selection tool, I'm going to grab that point of the arrow and just snap it right back to the box. Direct selection, I'm going to drag this arrow here that we don't need. It's getting all twisted. Let's try to get that right. That's one we don't need snapping into that box. Then trying to keep that angular belt the same, we're just going to finesse these. This is more or less what they would've done to get that angle exactly how they wanted it. Again, not going to refine every single thing. I'm just giving you ideas in case you don't know how to build something. This at least shows you how to build it. The last thing I do want to show you, just in case you don't know how to do this either, is this A and here's how I would do it. There's obviously so many different ways to do it. There's a bunch of different ways. I'd probably just draw a box here, grab this letter in my box, use my divide Command Shift G to ungroup, and then I'm holding Shift to deselect the main part of the letter. It's going to get rid of this weird transparency box and that box, and now I would click on this and using my pen tool, I'm just going to delete these points that I don't want. You can see this line is not even consistent, it's up to you whether you make it. I'm just going to delete all of these points like so. You'll find a lot of letters do this. Instead of actually having a point, they have two little boxes so it's a little edge. But it looks like they didn't do that, so I'm just going to delete one of those points, drag this to here, bring these over, and you can probably more or less get the idea now. Then you would just use a rectangle and draw a box here to fill that letter, and that's how you would make that A. Of course, turn around that edge would just be the same thing wherever we're dragging it. That's the basic idea. Then refining this acid S is going to take a lot of twisting and tweaking and moving things around. Because I don't want these videos to run too long, we're going to move a little faster from here on forward as far as the case studies go. Rather than me recreating little bits and pieces of it, I'm just going to fly through them because I don't want it to get boring. But it is interesting to look at these case studies, I think anyway. I think it's pretty good. Gillette here just use Futura Std. It's an extra bold oblique, which is just italic, the fancy word for italic, basically. The most noticeable thing is they've got a really tight Kerning and sections. They didn't do it here because it would probably make it hard to see these L's. They tighten up so those crossbars are connected. You can see the E is connected here. The most obvious thing is they added this cut here. Probably some fancy person would have been like, that's a razor blade slicing through that kind of rationale, but it is cool imagining a unique thing to it. You can see that overlapped the letters pretty closely and it would need some finessing. Then from here, you would delete that, put that to that, delete that, and then bring up the box and just do the same minus front thing where you add a cut that goes across. It's pretty cool and pretty unique. Amazon's another interesting one. Amazon's a pretty cool logo. It's got this meaning of A to Z, that's everything they sell. I think that's a pretty clever thing. It's Officina Sans Std Bold. The most noticeable is this Z here where it's actually going up on the angle to match this arrow, so that's pretty cool. What they've actually done is this Officiana font is exactly what they used in the old logo, and then they've customized it quite a bit in the new logo in order to make it a custom typeface to them. But you can see they don't even say in this new font it is based on this. They say it's a custom type, so you can see how you could create your own custom type referring to another font and it can be fairly close and still can be considered like a completely unique font to you. You just have to build the letters yourself. You can't use another other font's letters and change it legally. I don't think it's a real gray area, but you can see how you would get there. Wrangler is a really interesting one as well. They went a little bit crazy. I think it is a good logo, but I don't know whether I love everything. There's some weird things going on here. The W just looks wrong, it's Kabel Std, and the most notable thing is this A having these really straight lines instead of the curve. But then the G's got the curves and then the W, you can see they've actually chopped these parts and changed it a little bit. They've gone a little crazy here. I don't know if I love it. I'm on the fence about it. At first, I look at that and I think it's a really unique, cool logo. But the way this R doesn't line up with the A and there's weird things here that I would want to tweak. I'd spend some time tweaking on this, but you get the idea of how they would rebuild that using that font. Last one we're going to look at is Facebook. Once again, we don't know the original font because this is considered a completely custom, unique font. What's interesting about that is the most noticeable things that I see, being not a type designer per se, I'm sure there's lots of little things. But these angled outside edges, see those? That's not a straight line there, that's an angle. The same thing with the K. These aren't just straight lines, they're actually just slightly angled. But what's interesting about this is, again, this is considered a completely custom unique typeface. I looked up the rationale on it and they're saying it's not referring to any font, but if we actually just take Gotham, which is the font that I used before, you could see how just making small furnaces, you could basically build this font pretty darn close. It's another example of once you start getting into type design, if you ever have an interest in it, you can definitely refer to other fonts and make your own based on another one. With some tiny tweaks, it just gives it that little extra character. Because the Facebook logo is cool. It's really basic, it's really plain, but adding those little changes to it does give it some character. I hope you enjoyed the case study parts of this class. Hopefully, they weren't too boring and hopefully you are learning something. Of course, let me know in the description so I know when I'm building future classes. Now we're just going to go beyond and we're going to use these ideas that we've learned and create our class project. 10. My Class Project: Okay. So now we are moving on to my class project, what I'm going to do, my type. Instead of making an actual logo per se, in the future I like to do another Adobe Illustrator Speed Course. I've already done one, and it did really well and have ideas for what I'll do for the next one. So I thought I would use this opportunity to make a custom word that says speed using the same Bevis font that I've been using for all of the class and just customizing it to the point where you couldn't even tell the font that I referenced to make it. I think this turned out pretty cool. It's looking super fast, super speedy. I'm going to show you exactly how I created this just so you can understand how to use these effects. Again, I showed some of them in class, but hopefully this will really drive home exactly how I made this font. I should always say, "I'm not perfect at this. This is just something I've been learning, I think it's really cool and gives you much more unique characters, much more unique-looking type." Whether I need to finesse some of the kerning and things like that, I'll have to adjust. Turning's a little bit tricky. You kind of just have to use your eyes. There's not a great mathematical way to do it. Just use your eyes and make sure that those letters feel good. Sometimes you're better off to actually walk away from the screen and come back because you'll start going cross items. I can't add it all, what's wrong. So just go back and take some time, take a break or whatever. It's always good. So how I made this is pretty straightforward. I'm going to drag this down here. I'm just going to make it a light color so it's not super obvious, and I'm going to grab this font here as Bevis, a mispronounced font and we're going to make it larger obviously. I'm just holding Shift and Option, and going to bring it into there. I'm going to adjust that afterwards. So now is when we start to go crazy. Hitting command Shift O, I'm going to turn this to Outlines and Ss are such a nightmare and I decided, I don't know you want this kind of S. I wanted to totally change it up. The other type of S is actually easier to make. It's kind of based on like the NASA logo and stuff like that. So I'm just deleting that S, forget about it. It doesn't even exist to me now. What I want do is I want to grab these upper points. I want to get all the ones in the curve and sort of all these top points. I'm holding Shift and dragging it down. That's a pretty big jump but something along those lines, and then here I wanted to kind of do it again and hold it, Shift and cup, pop that up, something to that effect, and now I'm just going to play around with that a minute so I can get it exactly like it did the last time because I didn't write down exactly how long, how many steps down and things I did to make it look the way it did. All right, so the power of fast forward and skipping ahead here, I've got these finesse to be exactly where I had them and that's just on the E, the E and the D just by moving things up and up and down, and then the P I ended up customizing further. So let's take a look at how I built this S first and then of course we will show the P. I basically made a rectangle, and I made it the same size as this type here. So we have some consistency, and let's just make it another color and then I put it here, and the S is a little bit of a wider character so I would drag it out, and you can see I have these little extra rectangles in here, the white ones so I have a cut-out. They're basically just repeated those up, and then I use them again and rotated them. In order to copy-paste I'm doing is selecting it, I'm dragging it over and holding Option or Alt and when I let go, it duplicates it. So then I would bring that over here, snap it down and that's the base idea of how I got that letter, and then all I had to do is [inaudible] it and then get rid of the extra points that I don't want, and then from here I grab the inner points, drag them all the way so they've got a nice shape, and then I grab these outer points and basically just drag them to where I think it looks good which is pretty much where it snaps. Now the only thing, other thing with the S, is that right now these points is if I drive them down are exactly in line with the outer edge. Ss don't look good like that so just snap it in roughly, something like that. So that's how I made the S. So then in order to make my P shape, this usually comes down further than when the S is here as you can see. I just actually made a rectangle, and then I rounded those corners in nicely. So by grabbing those corners, just these two corners here, I rounded and brought those in all the way and then if I put that to the bottom, I made another rectangle and I grabbed those two points around and those in all the way to make that way and then I just have this on top, and that is how I made the S and the P. So now I have my font built. I then used shear, of course, because nothing makes fonts look faster than making them italic and then as I showed before in class, I made these little cut-out on edges based again on things like the Under Armour logo. I liked how that cut-out is. In order to get it consistent, what I did is I would take this point and snap it to that intersect. So that when I went to the next letter, of course is an E, so I just duplicated it but it would basically snap into place, and then I did it again on the D and the P but eventually I ended up deciding to customize those even further and I just cut out the whole actual chunk. So you can see there that's all I would have done. So basically I take all of this here now, and I use the divide key like so, ungrouping with command shift G and holding Shift and just keep D selecting all the letters I want to keep, delete there you go. Then the next thing I did is I want to continue this on as if the letters like kind of blurring it back because of that kind of extra fast-looking. That's all about speed and I did basically the same here, or I just do these triangles and then I duplicated them along like so trying to get those to snap and then I just have the kerning as needed to get to where it is, and that's how I customize the fonts to make it look a little more unique for what I wanted. So you can see that's the before, that's the after, and it looks totally different, and I definitely don't think you need to make your class project as different from the original font. If you want to you can do small customizations. But hopefully this is giving you the inspiration you needed to try and make your logos more unique when they has type in them, and I'm really excited to see what you guys come up with. As far as your texts, you don't have to use Speed. I did it so that it's a word that I can use in the future. I like creating class projects that are actually going to be useful to me to use rather than just straight up practice. So I encourage you to do that. If you can use a logo that you're actually going to be making for someone or for yourself, go ahead or anything that you can use it for in the future. Otherwise, just pick a random word and do it and maybe avoid that S because the S is a pain in the butt. Super excited to see your class project. 11. Outro: All right, thank you so much for taking my class. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I hope you learned something and that you're are inspired to actually create the class project to be awesome if you do, I really love to see what you guys come up with and I will like and comment on every single one. If you'd like, I will give you a creative critique in order to help your design to if that's what you're interested in just let me know. Be sure to check out JonBrommet.com. It is the home for which everything I do so you can check out my digital shop, Etsy shop, Threadless and you can check out my Instagram. Thanks everyone. 12. A Message From Future Jon: Wait, one more thing. I'm adding this. This is future Jon Brommet talking to you. I hope you enjoyed the cast that you just watched. Some of these classes have been recorded a few years ago. I just wanted to give a little up-to-date on what I'm doing now. You can see that I've put out a ton of classes potentially from the class that you just watched as you may have been watching one of my older classes. If you go over to my profile, you can click it somewhere on the Skillshare website or go to skillshare.com/JonBrommet. It's spelled just like that with no h, just Jon. You'll see here I've got things broken down in my newest classes. This may even look slightly different for you because I'm putting out classes once a month. Right now I've got my most popular classes, illustration, efficiency in illustrator, photoshop stuff, and then all of my other classes and make sure that if it's not already selected, you click see more to see the rest of it. So many different classes. I hope you guys will be inspired to learn lots more and hopefully you'll enjoy my classes and want to see more. If that's not enough, I'm at Jon Brommet on Instagram so you can check out my Instagram as well to know what I'm doing. I post all my new artwork there and, of course, let you know when I'm doing new skill share stuff. I've started a YouTube channel where I put short videos that are instructional and I obviously advertise it with my skill share class, but short videos that I can't really put a whole-class out. I put here on YouTube. I even do things like have conversations with other teachers, like Tabitha Park, plan to do that kind of stuff more often. If you head over to JohBrommet.com, I've newly updated my website. I have a digital shop where you can grab my procreate brushes or other things like that. On top of seeing that my different portfolio elements and things like that, I've also got a Etsy shop, which I'll click here and it would open this. You can buy all of my pens and different art things that I've created. I will ship them to you from me. I've gotten them all produced here in my home and they look awesome and I know that they're cool. I just recently started a Threadless shop, which you could click here. Of course this is about and skill sharing and contact.Everything's linked from our website, and this new Threadless shop has all my merch that can be printed on demand on a really weirdly wild variety of things like, I don't know, let's just click one of these things here. It's going to open a t-shirt, but let's just say maybe instead of a t-shirt you wanted, I don't know, what, a duvet cover or shower curtains? Why wouldn't you want those things? I don't know. Anyway, I've got lots of different things going on. If you'd like what I'm doing and please check out more of that and I'll keep making more things. Thanks everyone. Bye-bye.