How to Make Logos in Affinity Designer

1. Class Introduction: Welcome to your logo design master class. In this course, you'll learn everything you need to make beautiful logos in affinity designer. But rather than doing a bunch of boring technical lessons, this course is all about learning by doing. We'll start off by making some simple logos. These beginner projects are a fun way to get started with the foundational skills of logo design. After that, we'll continue to build our design skills as we create some more advanced logos. We'll be covering a lot throughout this course, but one of the most important things that we'll be learning is how to work with text. Well designed text is a fundamental part of logo design, so we're going to spend a lot of time working with it. By editing text in creative ways, you'll be well on your way to making logos like a pro. I'm super excited to share these tutorials with you. It's going to be a lot of fun, so let's get started. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials, to download the files, come to the project and resources tab. Then click on the Download Link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Researching & Sketching: This chapter, we're going to go over all of the tools that you'll need to make logo symbols. Symbols are the graphic element of a logo and they don't have any text. This can be an abstract symbol or some mascot. This symbol should be simple and make the company recognizable. To start off this symbol chapter in this video, we'll learn about researching and sketching your ideas. Before you can begin making your logo design, it's important to spend some time researching for your logo. There are a lot of different resources out there, and I'll leave links below this video to websites that you could use to find ideas. For this course, I primarily use Pints, type in a word to describe your logo and lots of great ideas come up. From here, you can scroll until you find an image that you like to save an image onto your computer. You can just click on it, then right click and press Save Image As. Once you have a few different images saved, you can put your saved images into an affinity designer document. Use the Place Image tool, then select the images. Then you can click and drag to add them into your document. That way, you can see all of your ideas next to each other and make note of what you like about each idea. Here's the mood board that I made for the bear logo. For this set of ideas, I quickly wrote up what I like about these images. For example, I like how the first two images show a friendly side of the bear and I like the roundness of the bears bodies. Below that, I started thinking about this brand of honey that comes in a bear shaped bottle that got me thinking ahead a little bit to the color scheme of the logo. On the right side, I like the simplicity and the symmetry of these logos on the bottom right, we have the classic smoky the bear mascot. I like that he is clearly identifiable from the other bears and he just happens to already be using honey colors, which I like. Okay. With the inspiration and research all finished, it's now time to start sketching. I like to have this moodboard up on my computer just so that I can refer to it as I sketch. For sketching, I just use a paper and pencil. The inspiration images are a great way to get things started, and now you can get creative and sketch whatever you want. I like to sketch lots of versions until I find one that sticks out to me. Then I'll draw that version a few different ways until I feel like it's ready to go into affinity. For this particular one, I know I want to build this logo using the shape tools and I want it to be symmetrical. I might adjust the sketch to be better for that. Once you feel good about your sketching, go ahead and take a picture of your final sketch and then bring it into affinity with the Place Image tool. I know this was a very simplified quick video for logo planning, but that really does sum up how I came up with the logos for this course. I really want this course to focus on the process of making the logos in Affinity Designer. Now that you know the basic way I designed each logo throughout the rest of the course, I'll provide my sketches for each logo as an exercise file. That way, you can reference the sketch as we recreate the logos together. In the next video, we'll build this bear logo using the shape tools. 4. Using Shapes: This video, we're going to build a bare logo just using shapes. This is a really fun logo to build and we'll use a lot of cool techniques to combine and change shapes. Let's go ahead and get started. First, I'm going to use the Place Image tool to place our sketch into the document. I'll just click and drag to add this in, and then I'll click and drag to make sure it's centered in our document. If you don't see the snapping lines here, just make sure your magnet is turned on right up here. With this sketch in place, I'm just going to adjust its layer. First, I'm going to lower the opacity to 30%. Then I'm going to lock the layer in place so that we don't accidentally move it. With the sketch set up like this, we can build our logo with layers underneath our sketch layer. That way we can always see the sketch on top of everything. Now we can go ahead and use the shape tools to build this logo. To start, I'm going to create the bear's head. To me, this looks like a rounded rectangle. I'm going to use that shape tool. I'll just click on this gray triangle to open up all the shape tools and you can find the rounded rectangle right up here. From here, we're going to use our first shortcut. I'm going to hover my cursor so it's exactly centered in the document. Then I'm going to hold Shift to make sure that this shape is perfectly proportional and I'm going to hold command or control on my keyboard. This makes it, so we're creating the shape from the very center of the document, and it's perfectly proportional. Now, we can't see our sketch, so I'm just going to click and drag this layer underneath. And now we can adjust this by bringing it down to meet the top. You should have a rounded rectangle that looks something like this with the rounded edges of the bottom lining up perfectly with the bear's head and the top just lining up right here. This is a pretty good start, but as you can see, we do need to adjust these side areas right here so that it fits the bear's head a little bit better. First, I'm going to come up to the Context toolbar and I'll press Convert to curves. Now you can see the bear's head has all of these nodes that we can adjust. Now, because we'll be adjusting the nodes a lot throughout this course, I just want to make sure that your nodes behave the same as mine. Up in the Context toolbar, we have these snapping options. These options will make it so your nodes snap to each other in different ways, just to make the whole process easier. Make sure you have the first and second ones checked on. Skip the center one for now, and then check on these last two. That's usually how I have these setting setup, but we may adjust these as we go through the course. Okay, with that all set up, I'm going to click and drag to select these top two corner nodes. In the holding Shift, I'm going to press the left arrow key a few times to bring this inward. One, two, three, four, five, six. Okay, six looks pretty good. I'm going to repeat that the exact same number of times for the other side, one, two, three, four, five, six. Now it's perfectly symmetrical. This looks pretty good. However, because these are sharp nodes, we have a strange corner over here. We have that on both sides. So to fix that, I'll click and drag to select both of these, and I'll convert them to a smooth node right up here. Oh, that looks so much better. We also have sharp nodes down here. I'm going to select both of these and convert them to smooth nodes as well, just to make sure everything looks nice and rounded. Alright, we're done with the bear's head. So let's move on to his nice round ears. I'm going to use the Ellipse tool to do this part. I'll hold Shift as I click and drag to make a perfect circle. Then I'll move this in place. I think I want this to be a little bit larger. So I'll hold Shift as I expand that. And that looks pretty good. I want to duplicate this ear for this side, just so that they're the exact same size. So I'm going to select the move tool, and while holding Command or Control and Shift, I'm going to click and drag to duplicate this over here. You can see in our Layers panel, we now have two of these circles. I'll hold Shift to select them both. Then I'm going to make sure they're centered. That way, everything stays symmetrical. You can see this deviates from the sketch a little bit because my sketch wasn't perfect, and that's okay. It's totally okay to deviate. The sketch is just supposed to be a guide. Now that we have the head and the ears, I'm going to select the top layer and hold Shift to select our bottom layer. Then up here in the color panel, I'm just going to remove the stroke. I'll click this button right here and I'll fill these layers with black. That way, we can just see our layers better. It was getting a little confusing as we were duplicating the ears. Okay, with that done, now we can go ahead and make these inner parts of the bear's head. I'm going to start with the inner ears right here. I think I'm going to use another ellipse for this, so I'll hold Shift as I click and drag. I'll move this into place. You can see this is above our layers. I'm just going to drag this underneath the sketch, and I'm going to make this white so we can see it better. I'll hold shift as I bring this in a little bit to make it smaller. And I'll place this so it's centered in the circle. To turn this circle into a huff circle shape, we can convert this to curves. Now we can just click on the bottom node and press Delete on your keyboard. I think this looks pretty good, but I want less of this roundness on the bottom. So to fix that, I'm going to select this bottom node right here. And while holding Shift, I'll move this handle up a little bit like that. I'll do the same on the other side, holding shift and moving it up until it snaps like that. I think that looks pretty nice. Now I'm just going to grab the move tool and I'll rotate this around. I'll place it like that. I think that looks pretty good. I want even spacing on all sides of our circle here. And with that finished, we can go ahead and duplicate it and move it to the other side. To do this, I'll hold down command or control and shift to move this over and duplicate it in a straight line. Then I'm going to flip this horizontally by clicking this button right up here. These should be perfectly centered, but we can double check this by holding Shift to select both of these layers and then clicking and dragging to make sure they're centered. We're making great progress. Let's make the snout next. I'm going to use an unexpected shape for this because this does look like an ellipse, but I'm actually going to use the triangle tool. So I'm going to click and drag this. For this shape, I want to make sure that it's centered and it's lined up with the top like this. Then I'm just going to drag the bottom up a little bit. It doesn't need to be aligned with the bottom because we're going to round things out and change the shape as we go. Just make sure the top is lined up like this, and now we can go ahead and adjust the triangle. I'm going to convert this to curves. Then I'm going to click and drag to select all of these sharp nodes. And up here, I'm going to convert them all to smooth nodes. So now you can kind of see what I was going for with this triangle shape because this actually looks pretty good for the snout. To make the shape even better, I'll just zoom in. And while holding Shift, I'm going to drag this out. Holding Shift, just make sure we stay in a perfectly straight line here. I'm going to do the same on the other side, holding shift until it snaps into place. This means both handles are the exact same length, keeping things perfectly symmetrical, and we can do the same down here. I'll hold shift to drag this out. Then I'll do the same over here, holding shift and dragging until it snaps. Now, you can see this is a little bit more than I wanted. I'll just back this up a little and I'll do the same on this side. Okay, now it looks pretty good. So let's do the nose next. To make the nose, I'm just going to use a simple ellipse. I'll click and drag to make an oval. No need to hold Shift, then I'll make sure it's centered in our document, and I'll make this black. Okay. Let's make the Is next. To make the Is, I'll use the Ellipse tool. They're more of an oval shape, so I won't hold Shift. Okay. That looks pretty good. I'll just change this to white. Then I'm going to make the inner portion of the eye that we can cut out. To do this, I'll hold Shift to make a circle and then I'll move this into place. I'll hold shift to make it a little bit larger. All right. I think that looks pretty good for the positioning. I'll hold Shift to select both of our eye layers. And then I'm going to go up here and subtract this inner circle from the oval. So now you can see we have that perfect moon shape. To soften the shape a little bit, I'm going to grab the node tool, which you can find right up here. And I'm just going to soften these corner areas. So I'm going to change this one to a smooth node. And you can adjust these handles however you want. I'm just going to bring mine in like this, nice and smooth. And down here, I'll change this to a smooth node and adjust its handles as well. I don't really like this node. I think I'll just drag it over a little bit. There we go. And now we have that nice moon shape. We can adjust any of these other handles however we want. And once you have your eye looking the way you'd like it to, we can grab the move tool and duplicate it for the other side. I'll hold command or control and shift to move it over here. Right now, it looks like he's looking over to the side. You can leave it like that if you'd like, but I'm going to flip mine horizontally to give it this cute cross eye look. It looks like he's looking at you or he's cross eyed, and I just think that looks really cute. Now I'll select both of the eye layers, and I'll make sure they're centered. We're almost done. The next step is making this mouth area, and we're going to use the pen tool to do this. To start, I'm going to grab the pen tool and lining up to the center of the document here, I'll click somewhere in the nose and then while holding Shift, I'll click right here to create this line. I'm going to go over to the color panel and make the stroke black. Then I'll go to the stroke panel and I'm just going to increase the width quite a bit. Okay, to make the curve part, I'm going to do a separate line, so I'll press Escape to end this line. Then I'm just going to make half of the smile. So I'm going to start over here and I'll just click and drag like this, and then I'll click here to end it. Now, this isn't quite the right shape, so I'll grab the node tool and I'll adjust this handle. I want this to line up nicely with this. If I make it to down, then the other side of the mouth will be down like that. I want this to be nice and smooth. So I think something like this will work pretty well once we duplicate it to the other side. Once this line looks like a good half smile, we can duplicate it for the other side. I'll grab the move tool and hold command or control and shift to move it over. Then I'll flip it horizontally so that it lines up perfectly. I think that looks pretty good for our smile. Okay, this next part is a fancy trick to make the pen tool lines blend together better in a softer way. Right now, we have very sharp corners here and here. I'd like those areas to look more rounded so everything flows together. To start, I'm going to select all of our pen paths over here by holding Shift and clicking on all three of these layers. Then I'm going to go up to the top of our screen to layer, and then I'm going to go down to where it says, expand stroke. Now instead of pen paths, we've turned these pen lines into shapes. That means we have more freedom to adjust the edges of the shapes. So to start with all of these layers still selected, I'm going to add them together, so they're all one shape. Then I'm going to select the corner nodes to make them rounder. But in order to make this area rounder two, we actually need to add the nose to this shape. So I'm just going to drag this up here. I'll hold shift to select both of these, and then I'll use the Add operation. There we go. Now we can adjust all of these corners. To do this, I'll grab the node tool. I'll select all of these nodes in the center, and I'll convert them into smooth nodes. You can see this looks pretty nice. We've definitely smooth things out, but we can go ahead and adjust these however we want now to give it the look that we want. To start, I'm going to adjust down here. I think these two nodes need to move up. That looks better. I want to adjust these nodes. I'll hold Shift and drag this one down, and I'll do the same for the other side. I'm having a hard time seeing if these are adjusting the exact same amount. So I think while holding Shift, I'm just going to line it up with this node just to make sure that they're exactly the same. That's still a very cute shape for the nose. Okay, and with that, we're done building the bear. If you would like, this shape can be simplified even more for our logo. So let me just adjust a few things here. First, we can take our mouth shape and subtract it from the snout. I'll select both of these layers, and then use the subtract operation. So now you can see the snout is all in one piece. We can also add the ears and the head together. So I'll select all of these layers and then use the add operation. Now we can go ahead and group all of these white parts together with Command or Control G. You can see we have a much simpler layers panel. To finish, I'm just going to turn off our sketch and we can go ahead and adjust these colors. I'll select all of these layers. Using the move tool, I'll just move this over here. While holding Command or Control and Shift, I'll make a duplicate copy so that we can go ahead and adjust these layers. I'm just going to make sure these layers are all grouped together with Command or Control G, and I'll do the same for these layers over here just so we don't get confused which one we're working on. Okay, let's start with this one. I want the bear's head to be a brown color. So in the color panel, I'm going to change the fill to a nice brown color. Something like that looks pretty nice. Then I'm going to change the color of this whole white group to a nice golden color. All right. And there we have it our adorable honey colored bear. Great job. You just made the first logo of the course. Now that you have all of these great tools for building logos using shapes, in the next video, we'll learn how to build a logo with the Pen tool. 5. Using the Pen Tool: Let's learn about building a logo with the Pen tool. Go ahead and bring this elephant sketch into a new document, and then we can go ahead and get started. I'd like to prep this sketch like we did for our last video. Let's lower the opacity to 30% and then lock the layer. At this point, you might be thinking, aren't we just going to trace over the sketch? Why do we need a whole video on that? Well, there are a few strategies that I want to teach you. Namely, I want to show you how to add seamless gaps in your pen path like this. And I also want to show you how to set up your strokes so that they don't get all messed up when your client potentially resizes or moves your design around. Okay, with all that said, let's go ahead and begin tracing our sketch. I'm going to go ahead and grab the Pen tool. Now, based on this sketch, we can trace this in two pieces. Let's go ahead and start with the ear first. So I'm just going to click and drag all the way around this ear, you can go ahead and turn on rubber band mode. If you'd like a preview of where your line will end up. That can be helpful. And then after all this, you can go ahead and adjust things with the node tool if you'd like. I think I'll just pull this handle out a little bit more, and that looks pretty good. With that done, we can go ahead and increase the stroke width in the stroke panel. I'm also going to drag this layer underneath our sketch. And now we can go ahead and trace the body of the elephant. So I'll grab the Pen tool, and as you can see, we need to press Escape to end this pen path. Then we can go ahead and trace the rest of the elephant. I'll start by just clicking on this corner point. I'll click and drag just a little bit, and then to change direction, I'll hold Alt or Option on my keyboard to make a sharp node. And then I can continue to click and drag all the way around the elephant. If these snapping lines are getting annoying for you as you're tracing, feel free to turn them all off for now. We can always turn them back on, but right now it was getting a little annoying that everything was snapping to each other. I need to sharply change direction over here, so I'll hold Alt or option over here. Then I'll trace this all the way through the ear. I did not do a perfect job. I need to bring the node tool out so I can make a few adjustments. I'm going to break this smooth node by holding Alt or option and dragging on it, just so we have similar sharp corners on each side of the elephant. Now that we have all of the lines traced, we can work on adding the gaps in between the two paths. This technique is pretty fun. To cut out the path, we're going to use the Shape Builder tool. But for this strategy to work, we need to turn these strokes into shapes. We did that in the last video, but just as a reminder, go ahead and hold Shift to select both of your layers. Then go to the top of the screen to layer and then go down to where it says, expand stroke. Now it's time for the really cool trick. Go ahead and select the ear. And we're going to add a stroke to this ear. I'm going to change the stroke color from nothing to white. And then in the stroke panel, I'm going to increase the stroke around the ear. Now, right now, this is hard to see what's going on. I'm going to place the ear above the elephant layer, and you can see that we're creating a gap. However, it is making our line skinnier, which we do not want. So in these settings, I'm going to change the aligned setting to the outside. That way, it stays the exact same thickness. This stroke is only being added to the outer parts. So I'm just going to expand this until I like the size of the gaps that we have in between these lines. To cut this out from our shapes, we actually need this new stroke to become its own shape. With this layer still selected, I'll go to the top of the screen two layer and then down to expand stroke. Okay, so now you can see we have three layers. We have this new gap layer as well as our two original layers. To make this easier to see, I'm going to change the color of this white stroke to red, so I'll change the fill to red just so we can see easier. Then I'm going to hold Shift to select all of these layers and then I'll grab the Shape Builder tool so we can go ahead and get started with deleting from our shape. I'm going to put this in subtract mode, which means everything I click on will be automatically deleted. So I'm going to get rid of everything red, I see. I'm going to get rid of this middle section right here. We don't need that. And just like that, you can see we have these beautiful gaps here. I'm just going to change this to add mode, so I can add these pieces to the elephant's ear. Just so it all becomes one shape. Alright, now you should have just two layers. If you're like me and you have an extra blank layer, go ahead and delete that. You don't need that. Alright, to finish off this design, we can just use the Ellipse tool. So I'll select that. I'll click and drag out an oval shape like this, and I'll place this over the eye. I'll make the fill color black and I'll remove the stroke. Then we can go ahead and add another ellipse down here. For this puddle down here, I want to remove this section from the elephant's body. I'm just going to drag this down and I'll select the body layer and the puddle layer, and then we can use the shape builder in subtract mode to remove this part. Alright, that was pretty easy to finish our design. I'm just going to select all of our layers with shift, and we can go ahead and recolor this design however we'd like. I think blue would look nice, just to emphasize that this elephant is in a puddle of water, not a black hole, so I'll change this to a nice blue color. And I'll turn off the sketch so we can see that color better. And we're done. To finish, I want to mention that if you were to build a similar logo using the Pen tool, make sure that all of your layers have expanded strokes by the time you finish. If you leave some of your layers as strokes or pen paths, then you might run into issues later as you try to recolor your layers all at once, or if you try to resize your design. In this example, if I select all of these layers and try to recolor them, well, it doesn't go how you might think. I'll undo that with Command or Control C. And if I try to resize this while holding Shift, you can see the strokes grow as I shrink this down. An easy way to combat that is to go into the stroke panel and check on scale with object so that the strokes don't do that. But I prefer just to have everything have expanded strokes. So I'll go to layer and then down to expand stroke. Now, all of these have been turned into shapes, and you can even add them together. Now it's a lot easier to go in here and change up the colors and resize everything. Since everything's behaving as a shape, it just makes things easier. Alright. That wraps up this chapter. Now you have so many strategies to build logos, using the shape tools and using the Pen tool. We learned a lot of different shortcuts throughout this chapter. So to help you remember the shortcuts, there is a handout in the exercise files that you can refer to at anytime if you need help remembering one of these many shortcuts. Great job on this chapter. In the next one, we're going to continue to practice what we've learned with three practice projects. That. 6. Heart Logo: Chapter is going to be really fun. We're going to make three really nice logos together as we practice the strategies that we just learned. My personal favorite is the cup because it's silly. So we'll save that one for last. Let's get started with the heart logo in this video. So I do have a sketch for this design, but it's not perfect. It's more of an idea. So as we trace over it, we can make little adjustments to how things are placed. Let's go ahead and start by selecting the Pen tool. And we're going to trace half of this heart so we can duplicate it and make sure everything stays symmetrical. To start, I'm going to make sure my pen is placed in the very center of the document. I'll click right here at the bottom part of the heart, and I'll begin to gently trace around the middle of our sketch. We're going to finish right here in this corner. So once you have that loop finished, go ahead and grab the node tool and make any little adjustments that you like to make sure everything looks nice and smooth. Then we can go ahead and increase the stroke width so we can see this better. And we can also change the color of the stroke to red. That looks pretty nice. I'm just going to adjust this a little bit more. Okay. Once you like the smoothness of this loop, we can grab the move tool to duplicate this. I'll hold command or control and shift to move it over. Then I'll flip it horizontally with this button. We can go ahead and make sure everything's lining up. And if I'm being honest, I don't really like how this loop looks. I'm going to delete this duplicate and try again with the node tool. I think I just want this loop to be a little bit tighter. Okay, hopefully that helped little adjustments. I'll grab the move tool, and we'll duplicate it again with command or control and shift. I'll flip it horizontally, and then we can make sure everything's lining up nicely at the bottom there. I think that loop looks better. I'm happy with that. So now we can move on to this outer frame. I'm going to use the rectangle tool for this. I'll click and drag to trace out a rectangle. I'll remove this fill by clicking this button. Then I'm just going to make sure that this lines up with the nodes that we have on the bottom here. So make sure that snaps into place for both of these corners. Then drag this down to meet that sketch line right there. All right. Now we can customize the curves of these top areas. I'm going to grab the corner tool. I'll select both of these, and I'll just click and drag to curve this inward. All right. That looks great. To finish this, I want to get rid of this bottom line right here. I'll select this node in the bottom corner. Then I'll go up here to the actions, and I'll click on this button to break the curve. Now this should be split into two parts. I'm just going to take this bottom part and press delete, and I'll make sure this lines up again with that bottom point. And look at that. We're done with the first part of our sketch. To really finish this off, I want to join all of these curves into one shape. I'll hold Shift to select all of these shapes. I'll click and drag to select all of these nodes. And then up here in the actions, I'll click this button to join the curves. I'll make sure all of our layers are still selected, and I'll do the same for this bottom part of our heart, join the curves, and just to keep everything consistent, I'll also join the curves in this area. Now, as you can see, we have one single shape. This looks so good. Next, we're going to create the gaps in our design. If I turn this off, you can see in our original design, we wanted to have gaps right here and right here, on both sides of the bottom of this heart shape, we're going to use the same strategy that we used with our elephant to create these gaps, but it's going to be a little bit trickier. That's just good practice, though, don't worry, I'll walk you through it. To start, I'm going to duplicate this curve with Command or Control J. Then just to see this better, I'm going to recolor it to a contrasting color, and then we're going to adjust this duplicate shape to begin our adjustments. I'm going to click on this bottom point right here, and I'm actually going to go up here to the second option and I'll break the curve. I'll click on this point and drag it outwards you can see that we're breaking this part of our heart. I'm just going to delete this node. I'll repeat this for the other side, highlighting here, breaking the curve, clicking and dragging to make sure I have the right piece selected and then deleting. In the end, you should have your shape look something like this. The reason I wanted to delete that part is so that this heart would be left behind. That way we can add a stroke to it, which we can use for our gaps. I know that was a little complicated, but basically, I just wanted to isolate the heart for our gaps. And at this point, we don't need this outer outline, so I'm just going to delete that layer. And now we can select this yellow heart and we can begin to create that gap. Before we can add a stroke to this shape, we need to expand the strokes. I'm just going to select all of our layers to do this at the same time. So I'll go to layer, and then down to expand stroke. Perfect. Now I'm going to select the yellow heart and I'm going to add a white stroke to it so that we can visualize our gap here. Once again, this is making our stroke look skinnier. I'll change the align to the outside, and then we can adjust this gapping however we'd like it to look. I think that looks pretty good. Once you have that looking how you'd like it to, we can go ahead and expand this stroke to turn it into a shape. Okay, we now have all of the pieces we need. So we can go ahead and delete this yellow layer. We don't need that anymore. I'll hold Shift to select both of these layers, and we can get the shape builder out and begin deleting different parts of the heart. So for this, I'm just going to click here to remove these gaps. I'm not going to worry about the rest of it because you can see it's crossing over the heart in different areas where we didn't want gaps. I only wanted gaps in these areas. Now that that's finished, I'm just going to select our white shape and fully delete it. You can see we're left behind with just the gaps that we wanted in our original shape. We can go ahead and turn off our sketch and take a look at our beautiful design. I think this turned out so great. What a beautiful logo. That was pretty tricky to make those gaps, but I hope now you feel a little bit more comfortable with that technique. It can take some trial and error to get right. Now that we're done, let's go ahead and work on the fish logo in the next video. 7. Fish Logo: Let's make a fun fish logo in this video. I want to use a combination of shapes and the pen tool to create this fish. Let's start by using the Ellipse tool to create the body of the fish. I'll place this underneath our sketch, and then we can go ahead and adjust this. Then to make this ellipse, so it creates the fish shape, I'm going to convert this to curves. I'll select this back node, and we can go ahead and break the curve using this action. Now we can place each of these nodes at the edge of the fin, and now we can rearrange the nodes, this matches our sketch better. Okay. That looks good to me. Now I'm just going to close this curve by selecting one of these nodes. I'll grab the pen tool and then I'll connect it here. Now it's all one closed shape. I'll grab the node tool and I'm just going to bend this line inward. Now I think our fish looks really good. Over in the color panel, I'm going to remove the fill. Then I'm going to make the stroke width bigger. I think that looks pretty nice. Next, we can make the eye, and we can do that with the ellipse tool. I'll just hold Shift to make a perfect circle and make the pupil, I'll hold Shift to draw another circle. This time over in the color panel, I'll just switch these two colors, so we have a black fill with no stroke, and now we can move this into place. I'll hold command or control and shift to make the pupil a little bit larger. Okay, the fish looks really good so far. So next, I want to add the scales into our design. This is a really fun trick, just to add some texture. So I'm going to grab the pen tool. And to start, I'm just going to draw a little curve right up here. Make sure that this curve has no fill and a black stroke. And then we can go ahead and duplicate this to create this scale pattern. I'll hold Command or Control and Shift to move this over, and then I'll press Command or Control J a few times to duplicate this across. I'll highlight all of these and group them together, just so it's easier to duplicate these rows, and now I'm going to duplicate this downward, so I'll hold Command or Control and Shift to move this over. And I want this to be lined up like this. I think that looks good. I'll press Command or Control J a few more times to repeat this pattern. Now, right now, these just keep going in this direction. I actually want them to line up like this. So they're all offset. So I want those two rows to line up. I want these two rows to line up. So I'm just clicking on them so that they snap to each other. There we go. Perfect. Now we have all of these beautiful scales here. I'll group them together with Command or Control G. Now with all of them in a group, we can go ahead and shear them, which is pretty much just italicizing them or slanting them to one side. Go ahead and hover your cursor right in between here until it turns into two arrows. Then you can click and drag to shear the scales. Then I'm just going to rotate this 90 degrees so that it will fit nicely into our fish. All right. Once you like the placement of those scales, you can go ahead and make it a child layer to the body. That way, it snaps only to the body. We don't need those extra scales on the outside. All right before we finish this design and expand our strokes, I want to add a little bit of color to this design. I'll turn off the sketch. Then I'll duplicate this body layer with Command or Control J. I'll leave the top one alone, and we'll work on the bottom one to add color into the design. First, I'm going to delete the scales group. Then I'm going to remove the stroke and add a fill color. This can be whatever color you want. I think that looks pretty nice. And now for a little added flare, I'm just going to offset this a little bit. I'm going to drag it down and over to the left a little bit. So we have a little bit of a white highlight going all over our fish, and I like the way it bleeds down here, too. That looks pretty nice. But one thing I don't like is the way the fin is sticking out over here. So I'm going to grab the node tool, and I'm just going to bring this one inward. I think I want this one just to be a little smoother instead of a sharp node. I'll click this button to convert it to a smooth node. Then I'm just going to adjust this. We're almost done with the color. The last thing I want to change about the color is I want there to be a cutout for this I right here. I'm going to duplicate the eye layer with Command or Control J. I'll just drag this over the color layer, and then I'll select both of these layers by holding Shift, and then I'll subtract the I from the color layer. Perfect. All right. We're almost done. The last step is expanding the strokes. I want to expand all of the strokes, but we have quite a few layers right now. So here's how I would do this in this case. First, I'm going to remove the scales from this body layer. I'll click and drag them up here for now. Then I'm going to expand the stroke of the body layer and the eye. So I'll go up to layer and then down to expand stroke. Those strokes are set up, they're perfect. Now we just need to work on the scale group. Right now, these are all groups inside of groups, so I'm going to right click on each of these and then go down to where it says ungroup. We grouped these layers to make it easier to place them all into nice neat rows. But for this to work, they can't be in groups like this. They're all ungrouped. I'm going to select all of the scales. Then I'm going to go up to layer. Expand Stroke. This looks pretty chaotic, but just know that each one of these scales is now a shape instead of a pen path, which means we can now add them together using the add operation. So go ahead and do that. Now all of these scales are one shape on one single layer. So now that this is all set up, it will make it easier to do the next step, which is cutting out the scales so that they only show up inside the body layer. To do this, I'm going to duplicate the body layer. Then I'm going to select the bottom body layer and this group by holding Shift. Then I'm going to come up here and click on this option, divide. This option will divide our two layers wherever they intersect. Now we have the task of finding where our scales went, this is actually pretty easy if you just grab the move tool and then click on the scales. You can see their layer is right here at the bottom. I'm going to click and drag this and just place it on top for right now. Then I'm going to select all of these little remnant layers and I'll delete them. So now you can see we have just the scales inside the body. All of these have been expanded with their strokes, so we can select all of these layers and add them together. That was a lot of work, but now that that's done, we can recolor these black lines however we'd like. I think I'm going to make mine a nice dark red to contrast the reddish color of the fish. And now you can see that we're done with our fish logo. Great job. I know that was a lot of work, but this is a pretty fun logo to practice. Now we're ready for our final practice of the chapter, the Cup logo. 8. Cup Logo: This video, we'll finish off this practice chapter with a cup mascot logo. As I was planning this course, I realized that if you're ever feeling stuck as you're designing a logo, you can just take an object that relates to the business and then just add a face and legs onto it to make it a mascot. So easy. I tried this with a cup, panada, a piece of broccoli. You really can try it with anything. Let's go ahead and trace out this cup design in this video. To begin, let's use the Ellipse tool to trace out the top of the cup. I'll click and drag to begin. I'll click and drag to lower this underneath our sketch layer. And now we can adjust how this looks. Okay, that looks pretty good to me. I'm just going to go to the stroke panel to increase our strokes width. Then in the color panel, I'm going to fill this with black. Alright, that looks pretty good. I'm just going to use the ellipse to quickly trace the eyes. With the stroke, this just looks way too thick. So over here, I'm going to remove the stroke. And now we have a little bit more freedom as we make these adjustments. And now we can use the Pen tool to trace the rest of this cup design. So lining up with the edge of our circle up here, I'll lay down my first point. I'll click and drag a little bit for the next point, and then I'll hold Alt or option to change direction. Remember, you can hold Alt or option at any time to change direction. And now that we're done, I'm just going to make the stroke black. It should be the same width as our circle. This all looks pretty good. I'm just going to grab the node tool to adjust this bottom point. All right. That looks great. I'll press Escape to end this line, and we can line up with this edge to begin tracing the handle. I'm going to trace this handle all in one piece. So I'll just trace right along here. Trace the inner curve and finish it like that. Then I'll use the No tool to clean up my lines. All right. That looks pretty good. I'll just fill this handle with black Perfect. And now I'll use the pen tool for our finishing lines here. So I'll just trace out a little smile and press escape. I'll line up with the very edge of the bottom of our cup to begin our leg points. Alt or option to change direction, press escape and repeat this for the other leg. Okay. That was pretty easy. I'm just going to turn off our sketch, and now we can go ahead and finish off our design. So earlier, I mentioned that I always like to expand my strokes before I finish a design. So I'm just going to go through here and select everything that has a stroke on it, which is everything except for these two eyes. I'll just bring these to the top and I'll select everything else while holding Shift. I'll go to layer, and then down to Expand Stroke. Perfect. Now, everything in our design is a shape, so I'll just select all of these and add them together into a single shape. Now that we have that, we can make some adjustments to our design. I'll hold Command or Control and Shift to make a duplicate copy so that I can show you how easy it is to make adjustments now. Now we can super easily change the color of our design, and all of the colors change at the same time. There shouldn't be a stroke. I'm not sure why that's there, but as you can see, it's so easy to recolor everything at once. And if you want, you can also add a color to the inside of the cup. You'll have to do this separately, though. I'll just grab the pen tool and quickly show you how you can quickly trace all along the outside edge. This does not need to be perfect. It just needs to be inside this line here. There we go. Then we can fill this with the color and bring this underneath this layer. So now you have two different ways that you can adjust the color of this design. You would just need to group these two together. And now you can see how versatile this mascot design is. Great job on this practice chapter. Now that we've had practice creating symbols, in the next chapter, we're going to learn all about how to create text logos. 9. Downloading Fonts: Throughout this chapter, we're going to learn about a lot of different tools and techniques for adjusting text to take it from a simple font to a customized design. And in this first video, I want to show you how to install the fonts that we'll use in this course. The fonts for this course can be found in the exercise files. Here's how you can install them on your computer. If you're using a Mac computer, here's what you can do. Press Command Spacebar and then search for Font Book. Once you find that, just double click to open it. This is where all of the fonts on your computer are being stored. So if you want to install these fonts, all you have to do is highlight all of them, and then drag them into your font boook. Now they're ready to use in affinity. On a PC, it's a slightly different process. Select all of your font files, right click on them and press Install. If you don't see Install as an option, click Show More Options and then press Install. Now, these fonts are ready to use in affinity. Once you have all of those fonts installed, you're ready to continue the course. But if you're curious about finding your own fonts, I'll show you how I found all of these amazing free fonts. To start, I use two websites to find fonts, defont.com and Google Fonts. These sites each have different fonts, so I like to look at both of them to see what they have. On each website, you can filter to search for different types of fonts. Just click on the category on Defont and you can scroll down and see lots of different versions. And on Google Fonts, you can filter for different moods or appearances. So just click on a few of these and you can see the fonts update over here. All of Google fonts are free for commercial use, so you can use any of them for logos. But Defunt is a little bit different. You can see that some of these are 100% free over here, but some of them say free for personal use. So they have a little bit different licensing that you need to look out for. On Defont, once you find a font that you like, you can download it with this button right here for free. On Google, it's a little bit different and actually a little confusing. All you need to do is click on the font that you want. Then click Get Font. This will take you to a sort of shopping cart area, which is a little bit confusing because these fonts are free. Don't worry. They really are free. From here, you can go ahead and download the font with this button, or if you have a bunch of different fonts saved, you might have a few stacked up over here. You can click Download to download all of them at the same time. So that's how you can download and install free fonts. In the next video, we'll use one of our new fonts to learn how to make small adjustments to text. 10. Adjusting Text: Learn how to adjust text. For this video, I do have an exercise file, but we aren't going to trace this file, so I'm just going to stick it up in the corner and we can reference it as we go. Looking at this sketch, you can see that I want to create a logo that has a flowy cursive font. I want the R to scoop underneath the A, and I want the tail of the Y to scoop under the S. I found a great font for this that will give us a good starting point. I'm going to select the artistic Text tool and I'll click and drag to begin creating our text. I'll type out rays. Then I'm going to select the move tool, so all of our text is selected, and then we can go ahead and scroll down until we find the mainstay font You can see that this is a nice font, but it's not exactly what we want yet. We need to make a few adjustments to it, and I'll just say right now, whenever you make logos, you'll probably always want to make adjustments to your default font. That way, it's customized and looks more put together and thought out than just typing a word in a pretty font. So to adjust this, there's two strategies that I like to use. The first is pretty easy, and the second is a little bit tricky but really fun. So strategy number one is adjusting the kerning, which is just a fancy word to say adjusting the space between the letters. I like to adjust the kerning with a keyboard shortcut. It makes the process really quick. Go ahead and double click into your text until you can see the cursor. Then for this shortcut to work, all you need to do is hold Alt or option on your keyboard and then use the left and right arrow keys to move the text. So I'm just going to adjust the spacing a little bit. You might be wondering how to tell if your spacing is correct, and my advice is just to zoom out and make sure that the letters look balanced and readable. We'll practice this a lot throughout this course. By the time we're done, you're going to be a natural at kerning. For now, I think this urning looks good. So let's move on to Strategy two. So for this strategy, we're going to adjust each individual letter to change their shapes. To do this, I'm going to grab the move tool so the whole text is selected. Then up in the Context toolbar, I'm going to click on this arrow off to the side, and then I'll click Convert to curves. Now if you open this group in the Layers panel, you can see that each letter is its own individual layer and we can adjust the individual nodes of each letter. Let's start with the R. As you can see, there are so many nodes, but don't worry, we can actually simplify this. Just highlight all of the nodes. Then up in the Context toolbar, there's an action called smooth curve. Go ahead and click on that and you can see we have a lot less nodes, which is so nice. In fact, we could push smooth curve again and again to make the curve even smoother. I'll just click it again and you can see we have even less nodes. But eventually, as you keep clicking this, the nodes will just dance around. It's not really making it any less, but as you can see, we have a pretty simplified shape now. To begin, I'm going to get rid of this top tail right here. We don't need this for our design. I'll just highlight those nodes and delete them. Then I'll delete this node. I'm going to highlight these two nodes and convert them to smooth nodes. And then we can place them how we'd like them. I think this looks pretty good. I also want to shorten this tale. I think it's a little bit too dramatic for our design, so I'm just going to select these nodes and move them up. Whoops, I got those nodes. I'll press Command or Control Z to undo. Just those nodes. I'll bring them up and then I'll begin adjusting the individual nodes to bring everything in. Sometimes you have more nodes than you need. Feel free to delete nodes as you go. Okay, that looks better to me. I also want to thin this out. This just looks so huge right now, so I'm going to highlight these two nodes, and I'll bring them inward and then adjust everything else so we don't have any weird scoops like this. Okay, and to finish adjusting the R, I'm going to scoop this leg of the R so it goes underneath our A, just like in our sketch. To start, I'm going to delete this extra node, and then I'm going to pull this corner node over here. Then I'll adjust all of the other nodes. Okay. Now that the main details of the R are finished, we can go ahead and adjust anything else that we'd like. Maybe you want to make a little bit more room for the A. You can scoot these nodes over a little bit. Then you could select the A layer and move it over. I'll just grab the move tool and use the arrow keys to nudge it over. And that looks pretty nice. I'm also going to move the Y over a little bit. Then we can adjust the S, moving it over a little bit. That looks pretty good. Let's go ahead and adjust the Y next, creating a tail that goes under the S. I'll grab the node tool and I'll select all of these nodes to smooth this curve. Now we can go ahead and adjust this tail. To give this a little bit more room, I'm going to drag this node downward. Then we can go ahead and pull this over and make any other adjustments we need to make. In order for it to look like it's scooping under the S, I adjust in both of these handles so they point downward. I think this looks pretty nice. I just want to clean up this area that looks a little pointed. Okay. That looks great. To finish, we can adjust the S. Go ahead and highlight those nodes and smooth out the S. Then I'm going to connect this part of the S to the Y. With just those two nodes selected, I'll drag them over. So it looks like it's connected. Right now it looks a little too straight. I'm just going to pull on this to make it more of a curve and I'll do the same for the top. Okay, with that, I think all of our letters are adjusted and they look really nice. The only thing I'm noticing is that the R has a lot of space right here between the R and the A. I think I'm going to adjust that a little bit more by pulling this out to give it less space. To me, that looks better, but we can also adjust this inner part to make it make a little more sense. Pulling this out Okay, to me, everything looks really balanced and nice now. So to finish this logo, we can just add a few more little details. First, I'm going to add this extra text right here that says auto parts. I'll grab the artistic Text tool. I'll click and drag, and then we can type auto parts in all capital letters. This is definitely not the right font, so I'm going to select the move tool. And we're going to use a font called Type wrong. Go ahead and select that font. This is sort of a typewriter font, and I think it looks really nice. We can go ahead and move that in place. Just like with the rays text, we can adjust the kerning of this text. So I'll double click to bring my cursor up. Then I'll hold Alt or option and use the arrow keys to bring these letters closer together. You can also use the arrow keys to move between your letters, and you can even make the space less by using Alter option and the arrow keys to bring the words over. Okay. Once you feel like the spacing looks good, we can grab the move tool and make sure this fits nicely in this space. I want the end of this to line up with the S right here. That looks pretty good. Now we can go ahead and change the colors and play around with that a little bit. For the auto parts, I'm just going to make this an orange color. Then for the rays, I'm going to make this a blue color. To finish, I want to add a text effect to our cursive letters to make this logo stand out a little bit more. To do this, I'm going to duplicate this raise group with Command or Control J. I'll leave the top one alone and I'll select the bottom group. Then just so we can see this better, I'm going to change this to that orange color. I'm going to duplicate this one more time with Command or Control J. Then I'll select this middle group, and I'll change its color to white. With all that setup done, now we're going to adjust these duplicate layers to create a drop shadow effect with this orange group. I'm going to move this down while holding Shift and the arrow keys. Just moving it down into the right a little bit. Then I'll do the same with this white group, but a little bit less. Now your letters should look something like this. If you'd like, you can fine tune this a little bit. But I think this looks pretty nice. So right now it looks really cool. But if you wanted to put this on a different colored background, then the cutout effect won't look quite the same. To show you this, I'll just place a rectangle underneath, and I'll change the color. And you can see the white layer isn't blending in with the background. So if you want it to blend in with the background, here's what you can do. First, select the white group, then hold Shift and select the orange group. Since white is on top, it will be subtracted from the orange group when I use the subtract operation. So now you can see that we have that nice cutout effect. This looks really cool. However, seeing this on the dark background makes me want to simplify the colors a little bit. So instead of orange, I think I'm going to change this to a lighter version of this blue color. And I'll do the same for this auto parts, changing it to a lighter blue. That looks a little bit cleaner, and you can see this looks good on this dark background, and it still looks nice on the white background. I think to make sure we can still see the auto parts, though, I'll make it the darker blue. Okay, and with that, we're done with this logo. Now you know how to adjust the kerning of text and how to take an individual letter and adjust its nodes. In the next video, we'll learn how to put text on a path. 11. Text on a Path: This video we'll learn how to put text on a path. Putting text on a path is pretty easy, but customizing that text can take a little bit of patience. Let's go ahead and learn how to make text go around a circle. You can see in the reference sketch that we'll be making a stamp of approval. Let's go ahead and start by making the circular text that says approved. To put text on a path, first, we need to make a path and we can do this either with the Pen tool or one of the shapes. For this one, I'm going to grab the ellipse tool. I'll hover over the center of our document, and then I'll hold Command or Control and Shift to make a perfect circle. Now that we have our path, I'll grab the artistic Text tool, and I'll hover over our path until my cursor changes to a T with a squiggle. Once you see that, click on the path to begin your text. I'm going to type the word approved six times. By default, the text is super tiny on this, so I'm just going to triple click to select all of our text so that we can adjust it. First, I'm going to change the font to one of the fonts that we downloaded. This one is called Stat leashes. Then we can go ahead and increase the size of our text. To quickly increase the font size, I like to use a shortcut, press shift, command or control, and then the less than or greater than sign on your keyboard. These symbols will decrease or increase your font size. I know this is a lot of keys to press, but it's actually really fun to use this shortcut to quickly increase and decrease the size while you're in the middle of designing. I'm going to use that shortcut now. Shift command or control, and then the greater than sign to increase the size. You can see the size looks pretty good, and this is also a beautiful font. But some of our text is on the outside of the circle. While some of our text is on the inside of the circle. This isn't usually what you want, so I'm going to show you how to change that. So you can see we have green triangles and red triangles on our circle. So as I move these around, you can see that this green one represents where the text begins on the outside. It's right below that line showing that. And this other one represents where the text begins on the inside of the circle. And the red ones are similar showing where the text should end. So as I move this over, more of the text goes inside the circle. So if we want to change this, we can drag this one all the way around. Now all of our text is on the outside of the circle. Just so that everything lines up nicely, I'm going to drag both of these so they snap to the edge of the circle right here. So now all the text should be on the outside of the circle, and we can continue with our design. So the next thing I want to do is I want to make all of the texts go perfectly around the circle without a gap at the end. One way to help fix this is to adjust the kerning of our text. I'm going to do this by holding Alt or Option and using the arrow keys to make the space larger on each one of these spaces. So I'm just going to keep **** and do this the same amount for every space. I think I'll do it ten times. Okay, we're almost to the right spacing. I'm just going to triple click to select all of this. And then up here, I'm just going to increase the font size a little bit. It's one oh four now. I'll change it to one oh five. One oh five looks pretty good. Let's try one oh six. Nope, too far. All right, one oh five, it is. Now our spacing looks really nice all around the circle. So now that we have our circular text done, we can go ahead and continue with our design. So next, I'm going to grab the Ellipse tool so that I can make an inner circle right here in the center. So I'll hold Command or Control and Shift to add this circle, and then I'll do it one more time to create an outer circle. And I'll make sure the text is placed on top. The inner circle should also be above the outer circle there. With all of that arranged, I'll select both of these, and we can fill this with whatever color we'd like. Then I'm just going to add a white stroke to both of these circles, and I'll increase the stroke size. Then to make the text look a little bit better, I'm going to select the text and change its fill color to white. I sized both of these circles so that the text would have similar headspace and foot space right here. I think I actually need to decrease the size of this one a little bit. I'll grab the move tool and hold command or control and shift just to bring this down a little bit. So you can see that space and that space look pretty similar. To finish the back part of the stamp, I'd like to give this fancy edging to the outside of the stamp. To do this, I'm going to go into our tools and I'll select the Cloud tool. I'll hover in the center and hold command or control and shift until we have it looking about like that. I'll place this underneath everything. Then I'm going to change the number of bubbles to 18. I'm also going to increase this inner radius. I think this looks pretty nice. With all of this done, I'm just going to select all of our shapes to make sure they all have the same stroke size. We resize the inner circle, so it might not be quite the same to finish our design, we need to make the center text. To do this, I'm going to grab the rounded rectangle tool and I'll just click and drag to create that rectangle. I'll make sure it's centered. And I'll drag it above everything. I'm going to go to the color panel, and I'll switch these colors like this. While holding command or control with the move tool, I'm going to shrink this down a little bit like this, and I'll do the same on the other side. There we go. Now we can add our text to the center with the artistic Text tool. I'll click and drag to begin the text, and I'll just type out stamp of approval. Hopefully I spelled that right because I can't see it. I'll highlight all of it and we'll change the color to orange. Oh, I did not spell it right. There we go. Then using the move tool, we can adjust the size of this and the position. Okay, I think this looks pretty good. Now, before I finish with the text, I think I want to give it a little bit more spacing. I'll hold Alt or Option and use the arrow keys to adjust the tracking a little bit. So now all of it is a little bit more spaced out. And then I want to show you a little trick to make the text bolder. I want this to be bolder so it stands out apart from this approved text. But there's no bold option up here for this font. So to make this bolder, here's a little trick you can do. Go up to the color panel and change the stroke color to the same color as your text. Then in the stroke panel, you can increase the width of the stroke and you can see how the text begins to get bolder. Now, you do need to do this subtly for this trick because if you take things too far, it bleeds into your text and you start to lose some of the shape of the letters. But if you just do this a little bit, you can see how our text looks a lot more bold and nice. Okay, we're so close to being done. I just have a few more finishing touches. First, I want this front text to stand out more from our stamp design, and to do that, I want to add a white stroke around this rounded rectangle. Unfortunately, right now, we already have a stroke on this rounded rectangle, so we can't add another one until we expand the stroke. I'll go up to the top to layer, and then down to expand stroke. Now we can give this shape a stroke. So I'll change the color of the stroke to white, and then we can increase the stroke, and you can see now there's a stroke, but it's encroaching on our original stroke. I'll set this to the outside. Whoops. There we go. I'll set it to the outside so that we can adjust this. As another finishing touch, I'd like to realign the text up here in the circle so that you can see two of the word approved, like in our sketch. I'll select that layer, and I'm just going to rotate this around until you can see two of them. Now you can see two, but it looks like the rounded rectangle is a little bit too large. So I'll select both of the rounded rectangle layers, and while holding command or control, I'll shrink it down until you can see both of those words. I'll hold command or control and make it smaller the other way, as well. And then I'll take the text and make it smaller. I'm holding command or control so it stays in the center, and I think that looks a lot better. Okay, we're almost done. I'm just going to select all of our layers, and I'm going to rotate them all to the side. So it looks like someone just stamp this on a piece of paper without aligning it properly, and I think that looks pretty nice. And with that, we finished with our design as finishing touches, feel free to expand all of the strokes and group your layers. And once you're done with that, this logo is good to go. Now you know how to put text on a path and how to adjust it. In the next video, we're going to learn the basics of warping text. 12. Warped Text: Learn the magical skill of warping text. I have to be honest, warping text is one of my favorite things to do with text. I just think it's so fun. We'll keep it pretty simple in this video, but in later projects, we're going to warp text in some pretty groovy ways. I'm really excited to teach you this. Now, the sketch might just look like a word inside of an oval, but I actually want the text to perfectly fit the oval by having the words get bigger, where the ovals edges are bigger and smaller where the edges of the oval are smaller. So let's go ahead and start with the Ellipse tool. I'll click and drag to create this oval shape for the ovals background. I'm going to change the fill to a dark reddish orange color. There we go. Then I'm going to change the stroke to a gold color, and I'll increase the stroke. Just like in the last video, I want to add a stroke to our stroke. I'll go up to the top of the screen to layer and then down to expand stroke. Now I'll just add another stroke to this. I'll change the color to the red color. Then I'll increase the width, aligning it to the outside. Now that our background is all set up, we can go ahead and begin with our text. I'm going to take the artistic text tool and I'll click and drag to begin our text. I'll type the word Grand. Then I'll select the move tool so that we can adjust the font. I'm going to change the font to a font called Lato. I'll make sure this is centered in our oval, and then I'll change the color of the fill to this gold color. Before we warp our text, I want to make sure that I like the spacing of everything. So I'm going to adjust the tracking and the kerning to make sure everything's lined up properly. You can see that the space between the R and the A is pretty tight at the bottom, but it has some space up here. I think I'm just going to make these letters a little bit closer. Then I'm going to highlight everything by triple clicking. And while holding Alt or option, I'm just going to space everything out a little bit. I'll make sure everything's still centered. Then I think I want to make the text a little bit bolder. Now, luckily, we do have a bold option up here. If you go into this area, you can actually see there's a few options for bolding it. I'll stick to normal bold. But remember if your font doesn't have this option, you can always add a subtle stroke to it to make the text bolder. Now that I like how everything's spaced, we can begin warping this. Now, there are a few different options with warping text and you can find all of them right down here. I'm just going to click through these, and then I'll press Command or Control Z on my keyboard to undo the warping each time. The first option is the mesh option. And if I'm being honest, I don't like this option very much because it only warps small areas at a time, leaving a lot of the rest of your text alone. This can look fine, but sometimes it creates some weird waviness to your letters that I don't really like. But here's the mesh option. Okay. Next, we have quad and perspective, which are honestly the exact same thing. I've tried to find ways that they're different, but they really are the same. They both appear like this with four points on the edges, and then you can click and drag to expand or contract the text however you'd like. This is the one we'll be using throughout this course, and I'll dive deeper into this one in a minute. But let's check out some of the other options. Next, we have arc vertical and horizontal, which both give you a pretty good starting point for arching your text. The vertical one is a little bit crazier, but you can see the horizontal one is pretty nice for creating this arch shape. When you first select this option, up in the Context toolbar, you can actually change the amount that this is curving, which is pretty nice. Next, we have bend vertical and horizontal. You can see that this is changing the perspective, again, up here in the context toolbar, you can change the value of this. This is pretty nice if you want to bend your text, so it looks like it lines up with a three D object. Next, we have Fish eye, which bulges your text from the center, and again, you can adjust this up here. Last, we have twist, which is a pretty wild one and you can adjust it to calm it down up here. Those are all of the options. But like I mentioned, even though there are a lot of warping options, I really just like to stick to quad and perspective. Since they're the exact same thing, I would just choose whichever word you can remember better and stick with that. For this course, I'm going to choose quad each time. Okay, for this design, I want the text to get larger in the center of the oval. So I want to show you two options to do this. Before I do that, I'm just going to select all of our text and group them. Then I'm going to duplicate the group. Now that we have two copies, we can go ahead and adjust the text with our two different strategies so you can see which one you like better. Okay, on this top one, I'll double click to return to our perspective bending here. I'll show you that this is the easiest way to line up the text. All you need to do is click and drag on the center of the text and line it up with the edges of the oval and just do the same thing on the bottom. Very easy. But there is one downside to this. It's hard to make sure that you're in a straight line as you're clicking and dragging it downward. You need to eyeball this. So if you want it to be perfect, I'll show you the other strategy. This one, you're going to click on the line to create a new point. Then while holding Shift, you can move this in a perfectly straight line and you can repeat this on the bottom, holding shift in a perfectly straight line. Now that you know it's perfect, this seems like a really good strategy, and I really prefer this one, but there is a downside. You can see the whole thing isn't bending quite the same. Once you do this strategy, you do need to click on the corner points and drag these ones upward so that it matches the bend. I'm just going to do that. Looking at these two options, I'll be honest, I can't see much of a difference, so it really is just a matter of whichever one you prefer to get the job done. To finish this video, I want to fix the R in the design, and I'm just going to delete the top group and we can just focus on this one. Right now, the R has a really big space right here, but we can fix this by adjusting its nodes. I'll select the group and then convert it to curves. Then we can select the R, go ahead and highlight its nodes and smooth the curve, and now we can click and drag to bring this out. This is filling the space nicely, but you can see it's not shaped perfectly, so I'm just going to shape the individual nodes now. I think that fills in the space a lot nicer. Also, feel free to adjust any of the other letters if you'd like. I'm going to highlight these nodes and just move them up with the arrow keys. Okay, now you know how to warp text. It's a really fun technique to play with, like I said earlier in the video, we're going to use this technique to create some really cool designs later on. In the next video, we're going to finish off this chapter with hand drawn text. 13. Hand Drawn Text: Learn about hand drawn text. Fonts are great, but sometimes you have a certain way that you want the text to look and it would just be easier to draw that text yourself. This is especially true if the text is very short like a monogram. In this video, we're going to take a hand drawn monogram for my business, Affinity Revolution and trace it out and customize it. Be we're going to be tracing it, go ahead and place the exercise file in the center of the document with 30% opacity and the layer locked. Let's start by tracing this design with the Pen tool. I'm going to trace each of the letters separately. So let's go ahead and start with this part of the A. At the top here, I'll hold Alt or option to change direction and I'll hold Shift to lock it into a straight line. Then I'll release my cursor, and then I can lift up on Alt or Option and Shift. Now while holding Shift, I'll place the final node right down here to make sure that these are at the same height, I'm just going to grab the node tool and while holding shift, I'll bring this up until they're both even. For this line, I'm going to go to the stroke panel to increase the stroke quite a bit. Then in the color panel, I'll change the color of the stroke to a nice light teal color. Now we can continue tracing. I'll grab the pen tool and I'll make sure to press Escape to end this line. Then I'll line up my first point right up here. I'll just click there, and then we can bring this loop all the way around. I'll line it up with this line and click here to finish this. I'll just press Escape to end this line, and then I'm going to make some adjustments. First, I'm going to make this a darker teal color. Then I'm going to drag it underneath the A layer. Using the node tool, I'm also going to adjust where the A crosses right here. I want this to be straight, not at an angle like this. Because of that, I'm going to adjust these nodes a little bit to straighten that out. Let's finish the shape. I'll grab the pen tool and then I'll line up my node right here. I'll just press Escape one more time to make sure that line is fully finished. Then I'll line up my node here and I'll click and drag down here, lining it up with the other lines. I'll press escape, and now you can see we're done tracing these lines. This already looks nice, but I think it would look better and more stylized if parts of the line were thinner and some parts were thicker. To do this, I'm going to select all of these layers by holding shift. Then in the stroke panel, we can adjust this to adjust the pressure of these lines. I like to have a very thick stroke to start. Then come down here to where it says pressure. An easy way to adjust the pressure is to click in the center of the line. This will just add an anchoring point and then you can click and drag downward, and you can see that the beginning and ending of each of these lines have become skinnier. I think this looks pretty good, but I'm going to select just this loop layer, and we can customize this a little bit more by moving the midpoint from side to side, and you can see where the thickness changes in the center of that loop. Maybe you want the top to be thicker. Maybe you want it more toward the bottom to be thicker. You can choose to change this however you like. I also think I want this leg right here to stay thick at the top. I'll click on its pressure graph, and I'm going to hold Alt or option as I click and drag this one side right here. Now you can see it's returned to its full thickness. Maybe that's a little bit too much. I'll just lower this down a little bit. I think that looks pretty good. Now that we've adjusted all of that, I think it would be a good idea to grab the node tool and just make sure everything's arranged properly. I didn't like how that was sticking up at the top there. There we go. Now these two aren't lined up, so I'm just going to raise this until they're lined up again. Changing the pressure is such a fun way to customize designs. So I'll show you one more way you can use the pressure as we make these little star designs. I'll grab the pen tool, and then I'll press escape, and we can start a new line right here. I'll click and then hold Shift to make a straight line. I'll press Escape. Right now, you can see the pressure looks strange, and that's because it's adopting the pressure of whatever our last line was. We can change that in a moment. I'm just going to make the cross of the star now by holding Shift and clicking to make sure all of this lines up properly, I'm just going to take this line and make sure it's centered with our other line. Then I'm going to select both of these layers and with the pressure graph, I'm just going to reset this. I'll add a point in the middle and then I'll bring both sides down. Now you can see we have this really cute star shape. This star is so cute, I'm just going to change this line. I'll move it down while holding shift just a little bit. Then I'll select both of these layers, and I'm just going to make it overall a little bit smaller. So cute, I'm just going to duplicate this. I'll hold command or control, and I'll drag it over here and I'll do that one more time to duplicate it again. Then I'm going to take these two layers, and I'm going to make them the lighter color of this A right here. Perfect. I'm just going to turn off our sketch, and now you can see the completed design. It's pretty easy and fun to customize monograms like this. Changing the stroke pressure is so fun. Now you're done learning about all of the tools you need to make beautiful text based logos. Just like in the shape chapter, we learned a lot of different shortcuts throughout this chapter. If you need help remembering these shortcuts, you can use the text shortcuts handout in the exercise files. There are less shortcuts for this chapter, but they are more complicated, hopefully this handout helps. In the next chapter, we're going to practice all of these text techniques as we make three beautiful logos. 14. Grow Logo: This chapter is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to go step by step to create these three text logos. Each one helps us to practice the skills that we learned in the last chapter. This is a great refresher. To start, we're going to create the simple and professional looking grow logo. This is a pretty easy logo, so I think this is a great place to start. I'll grab the artistic text tool and we can begin by just typing the word grow. To edit all of this text, I'll grab the move tool and we can go ahead and choose the font that we're going to use. Go ahead and scroll down until you see cool Vertica. Go ahead and select that. To customize the font, I want this to be italicized to create forward movement in our logo. And while I like this, I don't think it's italicized enough for my design. So I'm going to go right here and I'll click and drag to shear this. That looks more like what I had in mind. Very nice. And now I'm just going to change the fill color to a nice green color. Okay, we'll come back to editing this grow word in a moment. But next, I want to add the rest of our text, garden designs, just to get everything in place. I'll click and drag with the artistic Text tool and I'll type that out. This has already been italicized like our other text, but we still need to share it so that they match. So I'll just click and drag right here. And you can see that looks pretty nice. I'll place this so that the G lines up with the edge of the R and the S lines up with the edge of the W. That way, it's nice and contained in this space. I'd like to give it a little bit more breathing room, but you can see now this is lower than this G. In a moment, we're going to lower the tail of the G to give this more space to sit down here. For now, let's continue to edit the garden designs words. I'm going to make this a darker green. Then I'm going to adjust the kerning of these letters. Now, the spacing already looks pretty nice, but I think it would look a little nicer if we just customized this a little bit more, maybe making the space a little bit smaller. I just want everything to look really tight but still readable. This looks really nice. Now we can go ahead and come back up here to adjust the grow word. The first thing I think I want to adjust about the word grow is I want it to be bolder. Now, this font doesn't have a bold option, so we're going to use the stroke trick for this. In the color panel, I'll make sure our stroke is set to that same lighter green color. Then in this Droke panel, I'll just increase the width. And now you can see our text is more bold. Now that it's bolder, I can see that we need to adjust the kerning of these letters. So I'll just click right in there. And while holding Alt or option, I'll use the arrow keys to space that out. Okay, now we're ready to drop this tail of the G a little bit more. In order to do that, I'm going to grab the move tool, and with all of that text selected, I'm going to convert it all to curves. I'll click on the G, and we can go ahead and adjust these nodes. Luckily, there aren't many nodes here, so I don't even think we need to smooth this curve. We can just click and drag to select these nodes and then move this downward. And now I'm just going to adjust these nodes. You can see because we have a stroke here. I'm not adjusting the very edge, so I'm just paying attention to how the edge falls. Okay. That looks really nice for the G. Now, as you might have noticed, because these letters all have a stroke, it makes the letters look more bold, but it makes it a little bit harder to adjust the very edges of our text. And this isn't too much of a problem right now, but in our next step, it will turn into a problem. So I'm going to expand the strokes of all of our letters. I'll hold shift to select them all. Then up here, I'm going to go to layer and then down to expand stroke. The strokes and the inner letters are now all separated. I want to add them together using the add operation. I'll hold Shift to select both of those layers and then I'll add them together, and I'll repeat this for all of our letters. Now you can see all of our letters are one shape. We can adjust the very edge, which is perfect for our next step. Our next step is to add the little flower detail into this O. I'll just click and drag to select the inner O nodes, and then I'll delete them. Then we're going to create our flower shape. I'm going to use the Cloud tool to do this. In the center of the O, I'll hold command or control and shift to create a perfect little cloud shape. Then I'm going to change the number of bubbles to eight and I'll adjust the inner radius. This looks more like a flower. I'll just select the move tool so that we can adjust this flower. I'm going to shear it so it's sheared similarly to the O. Sometimes it can be tricky to get the shearing arrows. One moment, please. There we go. Okay, that looks really nice. I'm just going to make sure this is centered. Then I'm going to remove this flour from the O. I'll select both of these layers. And then I'll subtract it right up here. This looks so good. But I quickly want to show you what this would have looked like if the oh still had a stroke on it. If we still had a stroke on this oh, this is what the flower would have ended up looking like after we cut it out. The stroke would be transferred to the inside like this and the flower would not look the way we want it to. So it's a good thing we combined the shapes and the oh doesn't have a stroke so that we don't have that weird bleeding into the flower shape. Okay, let's finish this flower design. I'll grab the ellipse tool. And while holding Shift, I'll make a perfect circle. I'll just change the color of the circle, so we should have no stroke and a dark green fill. Then I'm going to share the circle just as an added detail so that everything stays consistent. Okay, with that, we can go ahead and make any final adjustments to our letters. I think I'll make this a little bit larger. It has pretty good breathing room up here and down here because we stretched out that G. I think this all looks pretty nice. I'll just select our garden designs layer and the inner circle by holding command or control and clicking just on those two. I'm going to make both of them have an even darker green color to contrast with the lighter green. To finish, I just want to quickly show you why we cut the flower shape out of the O. It's a good idea to keep logos very simple with the colors, usually only two colors. By removing the flower instead of keeping it white, this logo can be placed on any color background, and that flower detail will recolor with the background, keeping the colors all simpler. All right. Great job on creating this super simple and professional logo. In the next video, we're going to combine our monogram skills with our circular text skills to create a very cool logo. 15. JB Monogram Logo: Let's make a monogram logo in this video. Looking at the sketch, you can see we're going to make a monogram and then surround it with a circular text. Let's go ahead and start with our monogram letters. To begin, I'm going to grab the Ellipse tool and I'm going to trace out ellipse while holding command or control and shift. This will work as a guide as we create the letters with the Pen tool. I'm just going to bring this underneath our sketch, and then I'm going to remove our fill and create a nice thick black stroke. Okay. And now we can go ahead and grab the Pen tool and trace out these letters. I'll begin here. I'll hold Shift to create a perfectly straight line and trace this here. Then I'll press Escape. I'm going to trace all of the loops and extra pieces of these letters separately just to make it easier to adjust later. So for this next one, I'll click here and trace this B around. I'll press Escape. I'll begin my line and do the same for this one. Then I'll just grab the node tool and we can adjust this. I want these lines to line up to the center of our sketch, and I think they all look pretty nice. Now I'm just going to select all of those pen lines, and I'm going to duplicate them over for the J. I'll grab the move tool and I'll hold Command or Control and Shift to move it over here. Then I'll flip it horizontally. Once that's lined up with our J, we can go ahead and adjust the loops so that we only keep the parts that we need. I'll just grab the node tool. For this top loop, I'll delete that node. I'll add a node right here and I'll delete this one. And I'll do the same thing over here. That node already looks like it's in a good spot, so I'll just delete this one. And there we have it. Our JB letters are now traced out, so we can go ahead and customize them. To start, I'm going to join our curves together. We trace these pieces separately just so I could customize the J. But now that that's finished, I'm going to select both of these two lines. I'll hold Shift and click. I'll highlight these two nodes, and then I'm going to join the curves together using this operation up here. So you can see in the layers. Now that's one curve, and I'm just going to do the same thing holding shift to select this curve, highlighting those two corner nodes and joining them together. So now the J is all in one piece, and I'm just going to repeat this for the B now the B is a little bit different because we have multiple points right here. I'm just going to make sure these are joined as well. With that finished, I'm going to select both of our pen lines and we can go ahead and adjust a few things. First, I'm going to change the color of our stroke to a nice orange color. Then in the stroke panel, I'll increase the width of the stroke quite a bit to make it nice and thick. I don't like how the end of the J is rounded. I'm going to change the cap to the butt cap. There we go. Now it's nice and sharp. And I think this looks pretty nice. As a next step, I want to add a stroke to our letters. Now, right now, they're already a stroke, so I can't we can go ahead and expand the strokes. Now, since they're shapes, we can go ahead and go to the color panel and add a nice dark brown stroke. I'll increase the stroke width. And I'm going to turn off our sketch layer so that we can see our colors better. Okay. This looks pretty good. I think I'll lower the stroke width a little bit. All right. As a next step, I want to emphasize these letters with a drop shadow effect. To do this, I'm going to duplicate these letters. I'll press Command or Control J. Then with those duplicate layers still selected, I'm going to drag them underneath our original ones. So you should have the two duplicate copies underneath the originals. While holding Shift, I'm going to use the arrow keys to move these down and to the right to make sure these letters look good for our drop shadow. I'm going to go to the color panel, and I'll change the fill to that brown color just so the orange doesn't peek through behind these letters. As I zoom in here, you can see this drop shadow effect looks really nice on some parts, but on others, it's not lining up properly. To fix this, I'm just going to click to add a node and then I'm going to drag that node until it snaps into place. You can see that before and after, much smoother. I'll go around to all parts of our letters to make sure everything's nice and smooth and in parts where it's not, I'll just add a node and line it up. In some parts, you might just need to move the node. Whatever works to create a smoother outside edge. Okay, with that done, I think this looks really nice. So as a next step, I just want to make sure everything's nice and centered in this circle. I'm going to start by holding command or control to select both of the J layers. Then using the move tool, I'll hold Shift and move this more toward the center. So there's less of a space. Perfect. Now I'm going to hold Shift to select all of our letters, and I'll just make sure they're centered in this circle. Okay. And with that, our monogram design is finished. I think this looks really nice. So our next step is making the words going around the circle. We already have a circle that we can use as our guide, which is nice. I'm just going to duplicate this with Command or Control J. And then I'm going to resize this one with command or control and shift. So we should have two circles like this that we can use as our guides. The smaller circle will be the baseline for our top letters, and the larger circle will be the baseline for our lower letters. So let's go ahead and start with our smaller circle. With that selected, I'll grab the artistic text tool, and I'll click on the wine. Then I'm just going to type Jules Burgers. I'll triple click to select all of our text, and then we can go ahead and change the font. For this one, we're going to use the font Amerante. Go ahead and select that, and then we'll use our shortcut to enlarge the letters. So that shift, command or control, and the greater than symbol. That looks like a much better size. Now to make sure this is centered at the top of the circle, I'm going to click and drag until this snaps to the edge, and I'll click and drag this ending point until it snaps to the other edge. Then up here in the Context tool bar, I'll center the text. Now, no matter how I change the kerning or anything about this, we know this text is centered up here. So speaking of adjusting the kerning, let's go ahead and do that next. I think all of the letters are too spaced out. So with all of them selected, I'll hold Alt or option and then use the arrow keys to make them closer together. Then I'll go in between the individual letters to adjust the kerning. To me, that looks really nice. I do want the text to be bigger though. I'll triple click to select all of it, and then I'll hold Shift Command or Control and the greater than sign to make all of the text larger. To finish with this larger text, I'm also going to change the fill color to the brown color that we used for the monogram. Then I'm going to copy this with Command or Control C. Then I'm going to select the Move tool. I'll click right here to select the outer circle. Then I'll use the artistic Text tool to start some text down here. I'm going to press Command or Control V to paste this in, and you can see that right now it's on the outside edge. We need to adjust this by bringing the endpoint over like this. I'm going to line it up with this edge right here. I'm going to drag these green triangles over. There we go, so that our starting point is here and the end point is here. So you can see now it's perfectly centered. The text is the exact same size as this one. We just need to adjust the tracking and urning a little bit because the letters are pretty smooshed. So I'll highlight all of these. I'll hold Alt or option and use the arrow keys to space everything out. That looks like a pretty good starting point. So now I'm just going to adjust the kerning in between each of these letters. Alright. To me, this looks pretty good. But you can see that the letters are right up against the baseline here, and these top letters have a little bit more breathing room. So I'm going to grab the move tool and I'm going to resize this outer circle. Make sure not to use this outer knob, use the inner one and hold command or control and shift to bring this in until it looks like it's touching the top letters. The reason why we don't use this one is because if you use this one, then the text will resize and get smaller as you bring it in. I'll just undo that. But now you can see the letters all look like they're perfectly going around the same circle. Let's go ahead and finish our design by adding a little detail to separate the text here. Using the Ellipse tool, I'll hold Shift to click and drag out a circle and I'll just place this it's right in between these two words while holding command or control and shift, I duplicated across over here. To finish with this design, let's go ahead and make sure all of our strokes are expanded so the logo is ready to send off to our client. First, I'm going to expand the stroke of our drop shadow letters. And then I'm going to add the letters back together, so the Js are added, and the Bs are added. I'll also expand the strokes of the J and B that are orange. But I won't add these together because the stroke is brown and the letter is orange, and we'd like to keep that separate. So I'm just going to select all of our letters now and group them. Also, I believe these circles have a stroke. We can just remove that stroke, and I think that still looks good. And with that, everything has expanded strokes. Okay, so I'm noticing a weird area right here in our letters. I don't know where that came from. Let me just go in here and see what's going on. Oh, I see. When we expanded the stroke, it looks like these letters need to be on top to cover that up. Okay. There we go. With the J and the officially on top, that looks a lot better. With that, all the strokes are expanded and it's ready to send off to our client. Great job on this practice logo. In the next video, we're going to do a groovy logo with warped letters. 16. Book Club Logo: Let's make a logo with warped letters. We're not going to trace the sketch for this logo, but we can use it as a reference for the placements of each of our letters. You can see we have the word book, nice and bold and big in the center, and the words and club are tucked away neatly in the corners. To begin, let's make the frame that goes around the outside edges of our design. I'm going to use the rounded rectangle tool for this. Go ahead and click and drag one out. Then remove the fill color and change the stroke color to a nice red shade. Then we can go to the stroke panel and increase the size of the stroke. Very nice. Now that I can see it, I'm just going to brighten up the color a little bit. And now we can type the words. With the artistic text tool, I'm just going to click and drag for each of these words separately. Then I'll hold Shift to select all of their layers, and with the move tool selected, I'm going to change the font. We're going to use the font coaster for this design. Then I'm going to select the words to change their colors. The word book will have a red fill. I'll hold command or control to select the other two words and these words will have a nice rosy pink color. Before we begin warping, I'm just going to place the text so that all of the words are about the right size and placement the word book should stretch across the entire design like this. So once you have your text looking like this, we can go ahead and begin warping it. So in the warp options, I'm going to select Quad. Then to make this easier, I'm going to divide this word in half by clicking right here. I'm going to bring this handle downward. Then I'm going to make the line bend this way like this. I'll bend this line as well. And then I'm going to raise this node up and this node up. So it creates a nice bended curve shape going this way. Maybe all lower it on this side as well. Okay, this looks like a really good start. Now we can go ahead and warp the other letters. So for the word T, I'll do the quad warp. First, I'm going to select all of the nodes and move them all over so you can see the whole word. Then I'll select these two, and I'll stretch it this way. For this one, I'm going to click in between each of the letters, and I'm going to drag this node down and this node up. Okay, let's do the last word club. I'll give it the quad warp. I'll move the whole word over just a little bit to give space right here, and then I'll click and drag to select the side of the word. I think I'll move the entire word down a little bit closer to the edge. And then I'm going to add a node in between each of the letters. Okay. After twisting things around a little bit, I think this looks pretty good. There is some overlap that we can solve in a moment. But for now, I think these letters are warped pretty nicely. So now I'm just going to convert each of the words to curves. So I'll select each of their warp groups in the layer panel. And then in the context tool bar, I'll convert it to curves. Now we can go ahead and move each individual letter. Now, because this part is very free form, our logos won't look exactly the same. I'm just going to give you a few tips for arranging the nodes of these letters, and you can apply those tips to your design. The first thing I want to mention is that you can smooth each of the curves for the letters to make them simpler. This font has a lot of nodes for each letter, select them and then go up to the actions and smooth the curves to make the curve simpler to work with. Another tip is to convert your nodes to smooth nodes as needed. A lot of these nodes automatically are set to sharp nodes, even if they don't need to be. If that becomes a problem as you're moving these nodes around, feel free to select the node and then convert it to a smooth node to make everything look smoother and nicer. As you're moving the nodes around, you can also feel free to delete nodes. Sometimes there are just way too many nodes on the design. Feel free to delete nodes, smooth nodes and change them however you need to get the letters in the right shape. As another tip as you are arranging these letters, I would encourage you to try to find ways to make the letters fit together in creative ways. For example, I think the top of this B could fit nicely right in here, but we'll need to arrange it a little bit. I'll smooth the curve. And then I'll move the entire letter B up a little bit. Then I'll select these top nodes and move them in place. I think I'll simplify this shape up here. To do that, I'll delete this node. I'll turn this one into a smooth node, and then I'll delete these nodes and turn this one into a smooth node. Now we have a much simpler shape that we can manipulate and place right there, and now you can see the letters fit together a lot nicer. I have one last weird tip for you as you're arranging the letters. For some reason with this font, if you try to smooth out the letter E, the inner part disappears. I'll undo that with Command or Control Z. So if you do need to move the E around, I would just say to try to move the nodes very carefully because there are a lot of them and you don't want to mess up the shape too much. But again, you can delete nodes, smooth nodes, and try to get the shape looking exactly how you want it to. I know it's a little annoying. It has so many nodes, though. Okay, so those are all of the tips I have as you're arranging these letters. Go ahead and apply these tips to your logo and keep working on adjusting the nodes until everything is evenly spaced and curvy and readable. I'm just going to continue working on mine until everything looks good. Okay. Once your letters are all adjusted, you are finished with this logo. So fun. Just make sure to finish everything off. You expand the stroke of the rounded rectangle. That way, there's no strokes left behind, and you're done. Great job on these practice projects. You now know everything you need to know about symbols and text logos. To review everything we learned in this course, we're going to do three final projects in the next chapter to finish this course. 17. Tennis Badge Logo: For these final projects, we're going to make three really beautiful logos, combining our skills of making symbols and our skills with altering text. All three of these projects will allow us to practice what we've learned. For this video, we're going to make the tennis badge logo. We'll reference this sketch as we work. We're going to create a tennis ball design and then surround that with rounded text. So let's go ahead and start by making the tennis ball. I'll grab the Ellipse tool and I'll line it up right in the center of our document. I'll hold Command or Control and Shift as I trace this out. Then I'm going to fill this with a nice lime green color. And I'll change the stroke to white. I'm going to increase the stroke width, but we can't really see it right now. We can go ahead and change that in a minute. Before we do that, let's make the lines for the tennis ball. I'm going to duplicate the tennis ball with Command or Control J. Then using the move tool, I'm going to hold Shift and move it over like this. I'm going to remove the fill color so that we're only left with the white line I'll duplicate this again, Command or Control J. And then while holding Shift, I'll move it over to the other side. This looks pretty nice. I'm just going to select both of these layers, and I'll make sure they're centered with the tennis ball. Then I'll select all of these layers so that we can increase the stroke width then I'm going to make both of these line layers, child layers to the tennis ball. So I'll click and drag it down like this. And now it's inside of the tennis ball, so we won't see those outer lines anymore. Okay, now that the ball is finished, we can continue to build out the badge. So first, I'm going to grab the Ellipse tool, I'll line it up in the center, and then I'll hold command or control and shift. This circle is just going to go behind our tennis ball like this. In the color panel, I'm going to fill this with a dark green color. I'll place this behind our tennis ball layer like this. Okay. And now with that done, I'm just going to repeat this again. So in the center of our tennis ball, I'll click and drag again to create another circle. I'll drag this underneath everything. This is where our circular text will go, and I'm just going to repeat this one last time. Command or Control and Shift to make an even bigger circle. So you should have a badge that looks something like this, and we can use the move tool to adjust the sizes of everything. Okay, I think this looks pretty good. So to finish, I'm just going to make sure everything has the exact same stroke size. So our tennis ball has a stroke of 20. So for all of these circles, I'll select them all, and then I'll type in 20 just to make sure they all have the exact same stroke size. Okay, the base of our badge is now finished. So we can go ahead and add our text. I'm going to add a new ellipse. So from the center, I'll hold Command or Control and Shift, and this circle will be the baseline for our text. I'll grab the artistic Text tool, and I'll click right here to begin our text. This will say junior tennis. I'll triple click on this to select all of it. Then I'm going to change the font to this font Avia Serif Libre. I'll hold Shift command or control and the greater than sign to make our text a lot larger. Then I'll hold Alt or option and use the arrow keys to make the tracking a lot smaller. I don't want the text to go around the circle like this, so I'm just going to make sure everything fits. The beginning and end should be lined up like that. And I'll make sure the text is centered. Maybe I made the text too big, so I'll hold Shift command or control and the less than sign to bring that back a little bit. I want there to be the same amount of foot space and headspace. So I think I need to make this circle a little bit larger. I'll hold command or control and shift as I move this up. And I think that looks pretty nice. Okay, now that our text is in position, I'm just going to select all of it, and I'll change the color to the color of the tennis ball. Then to finish with this text, I'm just going to adjust the kerning in between each letter. Okay. Next, we can do the bottom text. We're going to need a new ellipse to do this. So from the center, I'll hold Command or Control and Shift. And this will be the baseline for this text. So I'll make it a little bit larger like this. I'll grab the artistic Text tool and I'll click to begin our text. And then I'm just going to type Denver, Colorado. I'm going to make sure that everything is nice and centered down here, so I'll drag the triangles over, and then with all of the text selected, I'll center it. Because this is sort of extra text, not the main text, I'm going to make this a bit smaller than our main title. Then while holding Alt or option, I'm going to increase the tracking so that all of the letters are more spaced out. I want there to be the same amount of head room and foot room. So with the move tool, I'm just going to hold command or control and shift to bring this in. Okay, to me, that looks better. So now I'm just going to adjust the kerning between each of our letters. Okay, our text looks really good, but I want there to be more contrast between the lime green and the dark green background. To fix this, I'm going to hold Shift to select all of these green circles, and then I'm going to make all of it a darker color. Okay, I think that looks a lot better. Something was just off about the other color I chose. We're almost done with this design. I'm just going to create these little star details to separate the top and bottom text, to make these stars, I'll grab the pen tool, and I'll just build them over here. I'll hold Shift to make a straight line. Then I'm going to change the stroke color to this lime green color. To make the star, I'm going to grab the move tool. Then I'm going to duplicate this with Command or Control J. For the duplicate copy, I'm going to hold Shift as I rotate this around until you see it, say, negative 150. Go ahead and release your cursor and then press Command or Control J one last time and it should power duplicate into place. Now that we have the star all finished, I'll just group these layers together with Command or Control G, and I'll place it right here. I'll make this a little bit smaller. And I like that placement. So I'll just press Command or Control and Shift to duplicate it for the other side. It should snap into place, so the spacing is equal. And to finish, I'll just select both of these groups, and I'm going to change the stroke width, just making it a little bit smaller. Okay, and with that, we are done with this design. So now we can go ahead and expand the strokes of all of the layers. So I'll just quickly do that. For the layers inside of the groups, just make sure to open up the group to select those layers to make sure everything becomes expanded. And we're done. Great job. I know text on a path can be pretty tricky, but now you've done it three times. You've had a lot of practice. I know you can do it for yourself. Let's take a break from all of this tricky text stuff and do a logo based off of a sketched design in the next video. 18. Wild Duck Logo: In this video, we'll make an adorable duck logo. To start, I have a sketch that we'll use to trace the duck design. So let's do that first using the Pen tool. I'm just going to click and drag to lay down my points. Feel free to turn on rubber band mode to see where your next line will lay. If you're getting some annoying snapping lines as you're trying to trace this more free form duck, these snapping lines are more useful when you have a more structured design. So in this case, I'm just going to turn off all of the snapping settings up here, and I'll turn off snapping right here just to give us a little bit more freedom to lay down the points wherever we want them. And now I'll just use the no tool to adjust these points. Okay. Once you're finished with your tracing, we can add color to our design. So up in the color panel, I'm going to remove the stroke, and then I'm going to change the fill to a nice yellow color so that we can see our sketch layer again. I'll drag this layer underneath the sketch layer. And then we can finish the symbol part of the design by adding the eye into the duck. I'm going to use the Ellipse tool. I'll just zoom in and click and drag to create a nice oval shape. I'll rotate it and position it. Maybe you'll make it a little bit smaller than the sketch. Okay. Then I'm going to hold Shift to select both of these layers, and I'm going to remove the eye from our duck shape using the subtract operation. Okay, the symbol is finished, so it's time to add our text. I'll grab the artistic text tool and I'll click and drag. I'll type out wild and all capital letters. Then I'll drop down a line and type out Duck. Then I'll grab the move tool so that we can adjust our text. First, I'm going to change the font for this design. We're going to use a really cute font called Irish Grover. Adorable. Then I'm just going to change the font's color to white up in the context toolbar, I'll center our text. And I'm also going to turn off the sketch layer so that we can actually see what's going on. Much better. Okay. So this font is super cute by default, and I think the spacing between the letters is actually pretty good. I'm just going to click in here and adjust a little bit with Alt or Option and the arrow keys in a couple of places. If the letters are touching in some areas, don't worry about it. We're going to fix that toward the end. But for now, just look at the gaps in between the letters and make sure you like how that's spaced. Another thing I need to adjust is the line spacing between these two words. This hasn't actually come up in any of our designs yet, but it is on the text shortcuts handout. So the shortcut for this, let me just grab the move tool is alt or option, and then the up or down arrow keys, pretty similar to kerning with the left or the right arrow keys. As I'm adjusting this, you'll notice up in the top right that we have a number changing in the Context tool bar. That's where you can actually continue to adjust this if you want to fine tune it a little bit. And this number is actually a little bit deceiving. Right now, it's showing the number, which is the font size of this line spacing. If that's a little confusing, just look over here. Our font is currently 209.4 for the font size, but we have a smaller number right here, meaning that by default, this space is smaller than it technically should be. Anyway, that's the technical reason that that number says that, and this gets even more confusing if you click in the box. Now you can see it says 0.79. It's all a little technical, but basically, click in the box, see what the number is, and then you can adjust it from there. Maybe you want it a little larger. You might do 0.82 for that, or if you want it a little smaller, you could do 0.68 or something. I'm just going to adjust this a little bit. I thought 0.8 looked pretty good and that's line spacing, a little bit complicated, so I usually draw my words separately, but that's how you use it if you need it. Okay, with all of that kerning and line spacing done, let's go ahead and convert these letters to curves. Before I do that, I'm just going to share the text a little bit, so I'll click and drag it this way because the duck is slanted when you look at its body. So I think slanting it just makes sense. With the whole thing selected, I'm going to go to the Context tool bar and convert these letters to curves. And now we can go ahead and adjust each letter. So with each letter selected, there are 1 million nodes. So go ahead and smooth the curve for a much easier time. I'm going to highlight these top nodes and use the arrow key on my keyboard to bring this downward. The shape still looks good. Let's do the W next. I'll highlight this, smooth the curve. I'm just going to highlight these top nodes and with my arrow keys, I'll bring that up. Okay, I think that looks pretty good. We can go ahead and continue to adjust any other areas where the letters are touching. I'll just do that quickly. Okay, I think the text looks really nice with those little adjustments. So now, I'm going to cut these letters out of the duck. To do that, I'm just going to select the duck group and then I'll hold Shift to select the duck, and then I'll use the subtract operation right up here. So now in the layers, you can see that the duck is all on one layer, as we've seen before. Now this means you can put this duck on any colored background. And the cutouts will automatically adjust to the background color, which looks really nice. With that, we're done with this logo. Great work. I can't believe this, but we only have one more project left in this course, and it's my personal favorite. Let's make a majestic mountain logo in the next video. 19. Mount Shasta Logo: In this video, we'll finish the course with our final project, the Mount Shasta logo. So let's start by looking at the sketch. First, I want you to notice this bottom line of our sketch right here. I looked up the silhouette of Mount Shasta and simplified it for this design. So this will be the base of the whole design. On top of that, I want the blocky letters to follow the curve of the line, and we'll warp the text to do that. And last, you can see this little circle over here representing the sun. I added this. So the whole design would be balanced and we don't have a blank area over here. And one last thing I want to point out is the weight of the line. I want to adjust the pressure of these lines with the pressure graph so that there are different thicknesses throughout the line. Now that you know what we're hoping for, let's go ahead and start with the base of the whole design, the mountain silhouette. I'll grab the pen tool, and then we can begin tracing this out I'll hold Alt or Option to change direction. Now I'll just increase the stroke width so that we can see the line better. Then in the color panel, I'm going to change the color of this line to a nice golden yellow color. I'll drag this line underneath our sketch. Then before we change the pressure of this line, I want to draw out the sun. Let's go ahead and do that next using the Ellipse tool, I hold shift to make a perfect circle, and I'll place this right here. It looks like the sketch isn't a perfect circle, so we could make the choice here to not make it a perfect circle or keep it perfect. Either way, I think it'll look good. With that drawn out, I'm just going to remove the fill of this circle. Then I'm going to select both of these layers with shift and I'll use the shape builder to remove the part of the line that we don't need right here. I'll use the subtract operation, and I'll just click on this line. With that finished, now we can adjust the pressure of both of these lines. I'll just grab the move tool. I'll go to the stroke panel, and we can go ahead and adjust these pressures. I'm going to do this one at a time. So with the circle selected, I'll look at the pressure graph. Let's add a point in the middle and bring this down. And I think that looks pretty good. We could also do the opposite if we wanted to, keeping the line thicker, closer to the mountain. Either way, I think this looks really nice. Okay, let's do the mountain next. For this one, I think I will just keep it higher in the center and lower it down so that it gets skinnier towards the ends of the lines. Well, I like the pressures of both of these. I think I want to increase the overall width of both of them to make the whole lines thicker. At this point, and let me just turn off this sketch so you can see this better. You might be noticing some strange glitching on your line right here. This happens when you adjust the pressure with sharp nodes. And while it does disappear as you zoom in, sometimes when you export your designs, this does show up. So I want to quickly show you how you can fix that. I'll grab the node tool and I'll select this sharp node, and I'll convert it to a smooth node. Then I'm just going to tilt it this way, making this handle a lot smaller and this one longer. I'll turn the sketch back on so that we can see the line. So with that one done, I'm going to go to the next node. I'll convert this to a smooth node, and I'll turn it like that. So the line matches up, and I'll make this handle shorter. Again, I'm just going to repeat this process, making the nodes smoother and tilting it one last time, smooth node, tilt the whole line, and for this last one, we can just pull this handle out again. While we're here adjusting the nodes, I'm noticing that we can see the edges of our sun right here and right here. I'm just going to tuck this in like that so we can't see that edge anymore. I'll do the same over here. Okay, now the lines look really good. So we can move on to our letters. So let's grab the artistic text Tool. I'll click and drag and type out Mount. Let's go ahead and change this first top font. So I'm going to change this one to bulb one. Then I'm just going to resize this. I want the T to line up with the edge of the mountain line, and I'll place this so it lines up with our sketch. That looks pretty good. Now, I'm just going to duplicate this with command or control and shift. I'll triple click and type Shasta and I'll arrange this. Our letters start and stop at the same points of our sketch. I'll also align this so that our text starts at the top of the word like that. Shasta starts right there, and as we warp our text, we can drag the letters down. Once you have everything lined up like that, we can go ahead and turn off the sketch layer, select both of our words and recolor them. I'm going to change this to a dark teal color. All right. We made it to the fun part. It's time to warp the letters. We'll start by lining up the letters of Shasta with this bottom line. I'm not even going to worry about changing the kerning, because these letters are about to become extremely warped, and we can adjust that later anyway. So let's go ahead and warp this with the quad option. To adjust these letters, I'm going to add a node in between each letter. That way we have more flexibility as we arrange them. Okay, now that the bottoms of each letter are separated, we can go ahead and begin. I'll hold shift to start as I drag all of the handles down to line up with the line. Then I'm just going to go in here and adjust the handles of the lines to make the line smoother. And just for fun, I'm also going to warp the top of this a little bit to give these letters a place to warp into. All right. With that, I think this is a really good starting point. I know the letters are pretty warped right now, especially the A right here with its stretched out mid section, but we can go ahead and worry about that later. For now, I want to get mount warped, similar to Shasta. So I'll select its layer, and then I'll give it the quad warp. And we can go ahead and begin by adding a point in between each of our letters. To start, I'm just going to begin with the bottoms of these letters, holding shift to drag it down here, and then lining it up with the tops of these letters. And just for fun, let's warp the tops of the letters as well. I want the M to be more rounded, so I'm going to click and drag in the middle of its line. I'll drag this down while holding Shift. I'll drag this one up a little bit while holding Shift, and I'll drag this one up a little. Now that the letters are in the right positions, we can fine tune each letter by adjusting their nodes. So with the warp group selected, let's convert each of these words to curves. And now we can go ahead and go through each letter to fill in any strange gaps or raise the openings of the middle of the letters a little bit, fix weird corners. We're going to do all of that. So go ahead and take your time adjusting nodes. Remember to smooth the whole curve before you start to make things easier. As I'm working on this, I just want to mention that this font had the perfect blockiness and cuteness for this design, but it sure is tedious cleaning up all of these nodes, even after smoothing the letters. So just take your time with it and do your best. I think this design is so cute once it's finished. Okay, once you finish adjusting your letters, you should have a design that looks something like this. I think this looks so nice. So to finish, I'm just going to expand both of these strokes right here. Perfect. And with that, we're finished. Amazing job with this final project. I think this turned out so great. 20. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. I know we covered a lot in this course, but I hope you enjoyed the projects as much as I did. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.