Iconic Logo Design: Brainstorm & Refine Unique Concepts

1. Introduction: A good logo is iconic and evocative of a brand, and a bad logo is just the opposite. Hi, I'm Will Paterson, I'm a graphic designer specializing in logo design and branding. I first got into logo design, when I didn't like the fonts that I downloaded onto my computer. I started drawing out letters and found hand lettering, I started composing them, and from there I went into logo design. You may have seen my work on YouTube, Instagram, all around social media. I've worked with Instagram, Adobe, and re-branded ScrawlrBox, which is an art supply company. I'm pretty proud of that one. Within the process of logo design, the idea generation bit can be the place where everyone stops and some scratches their head. In this class I'm going to be showing you my simple ways of feeling no pressure, but coming up with new ideas. We're going to be showing you how to mock up the logo, showing you how to actually create the logo in vector format and choosing the right colors. The project that you're going to be doing today, is creating a logo for a fictitious company. That could be any company that you like, or the one that I'm going to be working on today. Something I wish I knew when I first started designing logos was that bad ideas ain't bad, they're good for you. Generating ideas is a very pressured thing, and not always generating the perfect idea as soon as you start sketching, allows you to think outside the box and keep generating ideas. We look forward to see what you guys will create. You can post it down below in the project gallery where I'll be able to view it, comment on it, help you out and answer any questions. Cool, let's get started. 2. What Makes A Good Logo: There are a few different attributes to a good logo. The first one is simplicity. A logo has to be simple in nature for it to work when it's scaled up and scaled-down, you need to be able to remember the design and simplicity is the easiest way of doing that. The next one is legibility. Your logo has to be readable and understandable to people when it is scaled up, scaled small or when it's on different packaging, when it's online, when it's in paper. It has to work if your logotype can't be read, people won't understand what the company is for. The last attribute of good logo design is appropriateness. If your logo doesn't fit the image of the industry that you're working for, then people are going to have a disconnect. For example, if you have a funeral parlor with comic sans as a logotype in hot pink, it's not going to scream funeral parlor. You need it to scream that. Otherwise, people are going to have a complete disconnect, and probably not take it seriously. Although being appropriate is important, it's also equally as important to think outside of the box, so being appropriate isn't a hard and fast rule. Otherwise, everyone will be designing the same exact logo for the different companies that are competing. A lot of designers tried to be original and that means creating completely unique and original logo designs, which generally doesn't work because the more original you go, the worse the work is. Logo design is mainly a system and people know how to use that system to create a good design. How do we create a logo that is unique? I like to say from a book that I've read called "Steal Like An Artist" that you can take inspiration from other people's works and how they've solved problems in logo design. For instance, if you're looking for inspiration and you're trying to steal like an artist, then you could be looking at other people's work such as logo designs, illustrations. You can go on to stock websites to see what other people have drawn and basically taking little parts of their work and being influenced by it. Now by no means am I saying steal any work. That is the opposite of actually why I'm saying it. But the idea is that we're all heavily influenced by everything around us and nothing is original, everything that you create, it as being heavily influenced by your environment, the music you listen to, the people that you're around and what you've viewed online. Taking work from images online, tiny little bits of it is absolutely okay. How do we put all this into practice? Well, the next part is all about researching; researching the client, researching the industry, and researching different logos and different brands around that industry. 3. Research & Moodboard: This lesson is all about researching. That could be if you're working for a client, researching competitors, it could be researching the industry. Today we're going to be researching about an App. Every logo design has a brief, and if it doesn't have a brief, then you've got no direction. Having one, whether it's real or fictitious, is really important to give you direction and to help you solve that problem. We're working with a fictitious company, and here is the brief. Origin Logo Brief aimed at 20-40 year olds. It maps the sky in real time, sharing the names of constellations, planets, stars, and other things, in orbit such as space stations and satellites. You can align the sky on the screen and move around to find out what's going on, both above and below. Feature page it shows information about occurring eclipses, meteor showers, and moon phases. The logo needs to be simple enough for beginners in Astronomy as well as experienced hobbyists. We know the app is targeted towards those who are at 20-40 year olds who love space and maybe who are new to space. So we know from that age range what are style we can use, which is more of a modern art style. The first thing I love to do before I mood board or draw anything is write out some words that I connected. I call them keywords. I did this in an app called MindNode. The great thing about My Maps is that allows us to show our thoughts visually on paper. Origin is just in the middle that and I can try out keywords that come to mind. Space, that's the obvious one right there. Spaceship, stars, planets, and you can keep going. You can keep writing as many keywords as you think you need and you can make connections with them. For instance, with planets, I can say orbit. From orbit, I can say speed. I can start creating all these different connections. What this allows us to do is allows us to think outside of the box. We don't want to just make a one level connection. We want to create other connections between the connections to help out creativity. This will help us with that imagery when we're drawing and writing things down. Say for instance, spaceship, I can have an idea of a pin because of the origin. If I'm thinking of the word origin is where, how? I'm writing all these different words, space, black, void, and anything that comes to mind, I'll just write down. For planets it's round, so circle, bright colors. You can spend as long as you like doing the Mind Mapping section. I spent generally an hour or so when I'm listening to a podcast or whatever, just thinking of different keywords. You'd be surprised how easy it is to generate ideas once you've done this because you just created thoughts and put them on paper and you can start to make more connections with that. I've done some all my mapping and create some connections, taken some connections out. I've rearranged it for you. Again, spend as long as you like doing this is acquire fun part of it. What you can see is all my connections here. For instance, the sun, it's round. I've added shape names to it too. This is personal. This doesn't have to be shown to anyone. You can literally write whatever comes to mind. I've written black, Sun, stars, the beginning of time because it's origin, like an atom or a neutron which is connection to the beginning of time. Maybe we can create a logo space around an atom or subatomic particle, and then also colors. I've written down some colors that I'm thinking of right now, which is a huge part of this, which is obviously space. It's very bright, very saturated colors. So I've written down neon green, modern blue, virbant color schemes. Anything that comes to mind, like pinpoint location, pin. I had no idea of maybe creating a pin as the app icon, as the origin, but maybe making it into something new. These ideas are coming straight from the mind-map. When researching competition, it's fool around looking at the industries similar to the one that you're working with, your logo. That could be checking the website, checking that products, seeing what they do well and why customers respond well to that brand. When researching your competition, it's important not to copy what they do and to solve your logo design problem. With that problem, what we're trying to do, is do one better than them. So we can find points of were, we can make our design better than the actual competition. Once you've done your mind-map, it's really important to start visualizing through images what the vibe is of this logo. That means taking images from Google or other websites. Obviously, you're not going to share them with anyone and just having them in a place to give as a vibe. For me, this is pretty easy for Origin because it's a space company. Obviously, it's all about tracking stars and everything. Over here in my Milanote, which is the app that I use to do all my mood boarding. I've dragged in some images and it's only a few and a few color schemes. But what we can see from these images are planets of space, we've got one illustration in that, is a few connections, again, which is all of the blue for the planet F. We've got some spaceships in there. We can see that the general color scheme is like blue, a green, and a purple. My thoughts are, we're going to go for a more of a green, blue style of logo, to create that vibrant a modern look when it comes to space. Also I've got some crazy cool images on here. So mood boarding generally is just taking any images, not specifically of the logos, or the illustrations, but taking images online that you found that match with the mood of the logo you're trying to convey the logo before you've even started it yet. It's a great way of when we're drawing and designing and creating ideas. To refer back to, are you staying within this parameter? We don't want to go away from this mood board. We've done all about creative thinking in that. A modern aesthetic in this context of origin is generally space modern. So it might not be modern, technologically modern, but we're talking about what we can do in space, that would be lot the colors, that could be creating sharp angles or creating something very clean and minimalistic. Because as we know, space themes, are generally futuristic. When I'm talking about modern, I'm talking about looking towards the future such as like a cool device that no one's ever seen before. A color that is so bright like it's exploding like a nebula. If you to design this in a more of a classic down to earth setting, then the ideas wouldn't be as out that, we want it to be as minimal as in using minimal shapes in geometry as we would do because simply it's not designed to show someone think of space. If it's another company that's doing the same thing but they're tracking cars on the ground, instead of tracking satellites, you wouldn't want to give the neon vibe because that doesn't match with cars. Doing modern in this is more like future modern, not like modern today, we're trying to convey the sense of bright colors, of very high contrasting shapes on a black background. Cool. Now that we've got all our images from the mood board and all our connections, we solve prime doped to start creating some new ideas. We're going to take all of these and we're going to start drawing some crazy cool ideas. 4. Generate Ideas: In this lesson, I'm going to be showing you my process of generating sketches. Don't worry, this is a really easy and probably the most fun part of logo design, and I'm going to make it super easy. On my iPad, you can use paper if you want to. I'm just using an app called Procreate where I do all my drawing. It makes it slightly easier when I'm drawing just so I can undo, and I don't have to use an eraser. Normally you want to use a drawing guide, and the reason why I use a good guide is, logo design is geometric, and if you're using no drawing guides, you won't be as consistent and it can help you match things together, it can help you create symmetry, and balance a lot easier. If you don't have an iPad, get yourself some graph paper, or a dull grid paper. In this process I'm going to give you a rule and it's important to stick by it. That is with every sketch, you have a maximum of 30 seconds to draw it. We're going to do this for like 10 minutes to see what we come up with, but the idea of spending such a little amount of time on the sketch is so that you don't have to perfect each drawing. Don't worry, these drawings will be terrible and some of them might be okay, but towards the end we'll be finding some connections, and I'll be talking you through my connections that I found, and what I'm looking for in a good sketch. I normally start off with the most obvious sketch just to get that out of my mind. That is literally I'm using a really strange pencil here, it's really thick and it's meant to be rough, so I don't become precious towards the design. The most obvious one for me is first off, creating a circle with some planets inside. Now I'm keeping in mind when I'm doing this, not to spend too long on it, even if it is a bad design and don't worry, no one's going to be seeing anything that you've created here. Because that's the fun part, you can just do whatever you like. I've got another idea of creating a backwards crescent inside of the design and inside of this creating another one. You can see how fast I'm actually drawing these, I'm not really caring how it looks or where I'm going with it. I just wanted to make sure that the idea is just on paper for me to use later if I deem it to be suitable enough. The brush that I'm using in Procreate is a very rough one, it's not sharp. If I'm drawing on paper, I'll generally use a blunt pencil because it allows me just to quickly sketch, I'm not really bothered. I'm getting thick lines on paper is more important to me for the speed factor. As you can see there I can just draw quick lines rather than doing it really small and having to build it up and spend time on it, I just want to create really quick sketches. If you're drawing, make sure you use a rough pencil. Don't worry about what you can use, you can use any instrument really to do this. I had this idea as well of an atom, I don't want it to look like a flower. But you can see how fast I'm doing this, I'm just getting my ideas out on paper. If I see one that I like, I can keep drawing it, I'll just keep drawing it and keep drawing it. The mistakes that you make when designing or drawing in these sketches can actually be, as someone would say, "Happy accidents." I have this idea of orbiting lines. That was from the mind map process. I have this idea of a pin, because although it's space and there's origin, the connection that I made was that obviously the origin was some way. You can pin it down like a geotag, a little geo sticker that you can pin down. I like the idea of a pin because not only that, I can actually make this into a rocket. When you find a connection when drawing, which is time when you will most likely find another connection, write it down. No one's ever going to see this, start scribbling ideas because I can just write down here really quickly, rocket, and down here I can write the pins, could be flames off the rocket. Now, we've got another problem here of how do we make a pin look like a rocket? That's what we're going to find out as we go through this. Create another version of Hayek, something like a rabbit hole. I'm going to thicken this side to prove it. I'm using the eraser here to create negative space in this because I've got an idea that I like but I don't know if it's useable yet. You probably looking at this and going, "What is that?" Obviously the sketch is not going to look good. I like to call this part failing to success. You just sort of keep drawing bad things until you get something. Let's put a pin in that. I'm going to move onto my next idea that I had in my mind map, which is a planet. Obviously a planet is generic and we don't want to be generic, we want to be minimal, we want to be modern and look to the future, but we want to create something that will scale down really well. My first thought is obviously going to be a circle, but we're going to not fill it in, we're going to keep it as just one stroke on the outside. I'm just going to start trying to make it a planet. The orbiting lines like in Saturn are iconic part of a planet. I want hobbyists, as in the brief, to understand what this is. Instead of having maybe an atom which might be too far, distance away in the connections, I want to create something that might be a bit more logical. I think that's bio hazard right there, don't want to have that. Anything that looks similar to another logo, which is like a bio hazard symbol or a road sign, you might want to stay away from. I've got some ideas there for some icons, now obviously if we were to do a logo type design which involves more drafting letters, we can start drawing some letter forms to make that work. The cool thing about using their name origin, and using a planet is the first letter of the company is an O. So we could take full advantage of that easy access to a connection there. What I'm going to do, first of all, is write out some other ideas for a logo type that we may or may not use. A lot of companies use vintage modern logo types, such as scripts. You've got Instagram, that company look, it's vintage modern because of the brush script that's in there, but again, when it's in space, we don't see that often. Another idea that I've got straight off my head here, is a monoline version. I've changed the brush because it's a monoline which means that we don't get thicks and thins. As you can see in this one, you've got thin line and thick line and that has a bit too much contrast and funkiness. We don't want that, we want something a bit more modern, and refined and generally, brush typography, all monoline typography that has just got the singular stroke is scalable and it looks more modern as well. I'm going to try and give this a go, I want it to look less fun if that makes sense. Going to look a bit more serious, but that you can see here. Something that just pops into my mind straightaway when drawing a logo type is this looks way to fun. This descender of the G, this is going to be a problem throughout creating the script because we have such a low descender. It means that the balance of the logo type is off. When I speak of balance, my thoughts go straight into creating a box around the logo. Every logo should have a box around it. If you were to put an imaginary box around it, you'd see here, there's loads of space here and here, which your brain is not seeing as a balance. But if I was to put a box around, let's say this logo, there's evenly distributed space which creates the balance needed for a good logo. Instead of doing a monoline version, which still looks a bit too fun because of the descender right down there, we're going to go for a sans-serif version. I'm just going to map this out. I don't need a font to do this. Again here, it's very hard for me to show you my exact thought process, but if we were to tidy this up, and bring it into Illustrator, and to start vectorizing it, it would look 10 times better. It's all about the concept that I've got down. Looking back, all my ideas, I'm not spending more than 30 seconds on each one. You can keep going for as long as you want. I would say you can do this for an hour, and you'll be bursting full of ideas and notes. But the icon or the logo here that sticks out to me the most from what the brief is set out is this one up here. Although it's generic, it fits the best. What we're trying to do now is not make this generic. We need to find something we can do to this to make it unique for this brand. All I simply do now is I'm going to create a new layer over the top. Get rid of the old one because I just want to focus on this one idea that I've got. We're going to repeat the process, and we're going to make some subtle changes. The definite thing is the circle has to be in that, but what I want to do is see what I can do with the orbiting line around the circle. I'm not going to fill-in this because I want it to be a lined logo. I'm just going to go crazy. I'm going to see what works and what doesn't work. The great thing about doing this is that when you show your client at the end, if it's a real client, you've literally explored every avenue of the shape. It's so much faster to do it while sketching than it is in a computer. To make the circles and shapes perfect in Procreate, I just draw generally a normal circle as good as I can. Up here, it's a "Edit Shape" when I hold it down. I'll just press "Circle". You can now change the size, bring it down, and it will hold the same width. That's how I do it, and it works with squares, which is a really good thing. Edit shape into an ellipse. If you have lines that you want to create a straight, you just have to hold it down like this. This is a really great way of getting your logo refined. I found a connection here that I like again. You can see I'm just refining an idea in my head. I'm going to keep refining this idea, which is the orbit line on this planet, it's got a wiggle in it. I normally say to the client, this is a unique identifier. Each logo, if it is a planet, for instance, if it's a company with a fruit in it, they've got something inside of the fruit like a bite that will identify that fruit to that company so it's not so generic. People can instantly recognize it, but it's also the identifying line. While they're nice, I'm just seeing if there is any other wiggliness that would be better placed inside of this design. Remember, this is just an idea. Even if it's bad, and you found the connection, you can keep doing this. I'm going to go ahead and number them, the ones that I think are the best or just mark them. We're going to use a red pen here. Reason I do this is just when I'm going back to it later, or if I want to start sketching and evolving another pretty sketch that I've done, I can come back to know which one I was thinking about so I don't confuse myself too much. It's between these two. I'll mark them with red. I've chosen this concept for a couple of different reasons. One, obviously it fits what a good logo is, which, number 1, is scalability. It scales really well. If I ever see it when it's big, you can identify it. When it's small, you can still identify it. Obviously, we can add some negative space inside this logo to make it work even better like so to further illustrate the idea, but this is like an orbiting line of some sort. This is just another idea, sketch that, but the idea is that it's simple. You can see it when it's scaled up. You can see it when it's scaled down. If you're to rip this in half, you would still be able to identify it with the color that we're going to put on. The reason why I've chosen this, it's the simplest, and it just works the best. It's the most functional for the company, yet original too. The other ideas that I thought would work really well, but I haven't chosen, is the neutron and the pin for the rocket. Reason being, I think the pin for the rocket would look too much like another app that's on the App Store, which I don't really want to compete with. I don't want people seeing the circular head here, and thinking it's a pin for something else. It didn't really identify space too much, although I could have made it be more identifiable with the pin here being rockets. The other ones are light, obviously with the neutron, which again makes sense to make because I've made so many connections to the word origin and space. But the problem is when you see it in the App Store, when you see it in its place, its home, where people will find it, customers or people who download the app may not make that connection straight away. It'll be harder for them to make that connection. What we're trying to do is in an icon or in a design, instantly grab attention, and identify the company as much as possible within this app icon. Now every logo has to do this though. There's so many logos out there where they use logo types. They actually use the brand name written, but the reason for this logo specifically is because the application I've used is on the App Store. Now that we have an idea that we like, we can take it into Illustrator, and continue refining it. 5. Refine Your Sketch: Now that we've got the sketches and we refined a few of the ideas that we like, we're going to pick the one idea that we think is the best and we're going to sketch again, and this time it will be under a layer and with a new layer over the top where we continue to refine it. This doesn't take too long, but you can repeat this process as often as you like or as much as you like even if you have tracing paper, just to make it a bit better. Certain logos take longer, this one is going to be super easy. What I generally do is take this first layer and we're going to merge it down because these were both on the same layer. I'm going to change the opacity here of this main one. Then I'm going to duplicate this because I'm going to be scaling this whole image up. I'll hide this back layer here, which is the duplicate and I'm going to transform the whole image really big. I can fit on the screen the one here that I wanted, right down here. This is just so it doesn't look too pixelated when we bring it into the iMac and we start sketching out. Create a new layer over the top and we're going to choose a bit more of a sharper pencil. Now this is just the standard technical pencil inside of Procreate. The first thing I do, I'm just going to do the same thing, draw a perfect circle, like so. If you have a compass, that's probably better. If you don't have an iPad, but in Procreate, you can just create the perfect circle pretty easily. Let me just repeat the process again. What we're looking for here is to make it as perfect as possible. We want all the lines to work pretty well together. For the orbit part here, I'm just going to roughly sketch first the outline, and make sure it's not too jaggedy. This just makes it easier when you're inside of that layer to see where your points should be. Again, it's not supposed to be perfect, but just a better indication. Let me go over the lines again, makes life easier. The reason why sketching over again is important, specifically for general logo it's not just this one, is that there are tiny little mistakes that you might want to fix. For instance, here on my screen you can see this wave. I wanted that to be a bit smoother, but also a bit thicker to optically balance against the circle and the outside. You can't really do that inside of Illustrator very easily, it's just easier just to draw it, so you give yourself more accurate image. Also, because if you see right here, I can bring this line in, right there, instead of it coming around like this. If I was to just sketch it as it is, that would be good as well. It just gives you a cleaner image. But it's quite important, especially for logo type design when you working with words to keep refining it so that you get as clean of a line as possible before bringing it in so you know where the anchor points should be placed. For instance here, I'm just going to make that a bit thicker on the outside there. Sometimes there'll be big changes that you'll want to make, sometimes you might repeat the process a few times. But we're just trying to keep things consistent all the way throughout with that extra level of detail. Now that I've done that, it's simply you don't have to color it all in. But we're going to just fill it in like this. The reason we fill it in just like this is to add color to it, which will change the way it looks to the eye. The strangest thing about the human brain when you looking at words, or shapes, is if they're not colored in like these lines, you may think parts are thicker or thinner. You are not seeing the positive image, you're just seeing a few scraggly lines. It's important to have things colored in roughly just so it gives the appropriate image. For instance, when you've got, let's choose a word called air here. I've just brushed that in, that's my normal drawing. If I go ahead and refine it, I want to make sure each of the lines are consistent so that the points where too too sharp, I'm getting rid of the sharpness, and where I want it to flow, it's all correctly spaced. On the left, I've actually got the image of a not colored in and on the right I'm going to color it in, and you'll see there's a bit of a difference to the way that it looks. Not just because it's obviously being filled in, but optically when working with full words, your brain will be able to see this a lot clear and you'd be able to see mistakes in it, whether there's thicks or thins are correct. It works in icon design as well unless you working with a line out drawing where you might want to have nothing colored in there it's just very thin. To my eye, I can see that this one over here look a little more consistent all the way around than this one. Over here, I'll be thinking this is too thin, but in reality it's not actually too thin, it's just perfect. If you don't cover it in and you don't add the color inside, your brain will look at it different. It's having just outlines on text, but it works for icon design as well. That's why you'll find a lot of the sketches they don't bother neatly filling it in the center of it. They just want to get the overall gist before we bring it into Illustrator. Then the wonders of the iPad to allow me to quickly just cut parts out that I wanted to cut out. But you can do this with an eraser. Perfect. Right now it doesn't look anything impressive, but that actually helps me when I'm inside of Illustrator. The next part of what do is I'm just going to hide everything. I just want this little part here, I just want to bring this into Illustrator. What I do is I just bring it up into my settings, I got to Share, I go to JPEG because I don't need it in any of the format. I'll just air drop it across to my iMac as an image. Now that we have our refined sketch, bring it into Illustrator, and we're going to start creating the vectored logo. 6. Perfect in Illustrator: In this lesson, we're going to be taking that logo refined sketch that we made and bringing it into Illustrator and making it a real logo. First thing that everyone needs to do, make a new document, and it doesn't really matter the size of document that you have. I just go for a 1920 by 1080 because we can transfer it to different documents later. Because we're still just working on this, it doesn't matter. I brought my blank document here and the settings are pretty normal. I'm going to drop in my image that was just in my downloads folder over here. Just drag it in, and we're going to scale this up. Now, in Illustrator, we can crop this down. I'm going to go to the top-left and just crop. I'm just going to crop it all the way so we get rid of all that whitespace. Now, remember this isn't a vector image. This is just like a pixel-based one. In Illustrator, we'll be creating it as a vector and giving ourselves the ability to add color and stuff. Take this image, we're going to make it even bigger. In the Layers panel over here, and if you can't find layers it's New Window and you go down to Layers. Anything that's ticked is on your screen. I'm just going to go ahead and rename it by double-clicking right template. Then I'm going to write vector on a new layer. We're just going to change the opacity of this because it's like the tracing process again, we're just going to change the opacity. Something like 20 percent or even lower. I'll do 15. We're going to lock that layer by pressing the little lock symbol. Now, whenever we try and click on it, it's not going to move around. It's just there as a reference for us. I'm going to unlock this and I'll just move it slightly to the left so I don't have to work directly on top of it and we're going to carry on working on the vector layer above. Now, the logo is pretty simple in nature, so you don't always have to bring it into Illustrator, but it's always a good idea to. If you're working on a logo type with lots of anchor points and stuff, then that's when you'll start to need to work with a tracing method. But for me, I've just got this image here as a reference for me to use. We're going to go ahead and bring up the circle. This is the basic one, hold Shift, and it's in white right now. I'm going to change that to black and then I'm going to press "Shift and X" and that's going to change the fill to a stroke, which is just a vectored line around it. I'm going to bring this just around here or so. I want to change the stroke because that's quite thin. You might think there's white in between that, but there's not, it's just a black stroke as you can see. I'm going to thicken the stroke up to, let's say 20. That's not enough. We'll go to 40 and we'll go to 50 but I'll just type in 50. As a rule, working on a logo in black means that the logo will work in black. It doesn't have to have colors in there. The colors just add that extra brand of assets wherever it's a color for the brand asset or a color of the brand. Generally, working in black gives a better results in the end. The next problem I have is making this squiggly line around it, the orbiting line. There's a few methods of doing this in Illustrator and in any other vector program, there are multiple ways to achieve a different effect or the same effect. The first way is we can simply use the pen tool to do this. But I don't like this method because sometimes it takes ages to get a nice line and as you can see there, it's not the nicest of lines. To make it easier for myself, I'm going to be using the pencil tool, which is the same as the pen tool but a bit more free flowing. The great thing about Illustrator is that you don't have to pay taxes on any vector products here because you can just keep repeating and rinsing and repeating. By that, I mean we can just do this and it will smooth out the line for us. I'm just drawing this with my mouse. I'm just going to keep doing this until I get the right shape. Once I've got that actual line that I want, I'm going to just bring it over here. Now, the great thing about it being vector is that we can use any point in here. We can change it and manipulate it. But I've done a good job here making sure this line works pretty well. Generally now this is just one part of the logo that will work nicely, but we need to do a few things to make it work well, and still in black and white. What we're going to do is create a new Artboard, and this just gives us more room on the screen to do stuff so we can keep copying and pasting the design. I'm going to go ahead to Artboard, just create another one. It will pop up. I'm going to select the logo and hold Alt or Option, and just drag it along and that will just duplicate it for us. What you don't want to do with this logo, especially when it is based around just one path, is destroy it by outlining it straight away. We want to keep an insurance policy of us being able to go back to the original logo and change any of these points easily. We do that by selecting it and obviously copying it and pasting it every time we make an edit. I'm going to take this, I'm going to highlight it and I want it to become a real shape. I don't want it to be a stroke. The way that we do that is highlight the whole thing. We're going to go to Object. We're going to go down to Path and then here's an option called Outline Stroke. As you can see, the outlines have changed. If I was to go into, this called, Outline view, which you can get to by pressing "Command and Y", you can see this is the Bezier strokes, which is what vector is all about. Here on the original one and over here it's been outlined to become real shapes. Now that we've got the shape outlined, it means that we can actually edit it a bit more add color and we've got a bit more control over the finer points. Now, obviously I'm going to go ahead and copy and paste this again. I'm going to scale these down now because there'll be a lot of copying and pasting. If you notice, I haven't got any of this negative space here. Now, it's important with negative space in logos like this, to have it, to give context, and also just for it to look better. It's quite difficult to work out how to do it but the easiest way is using something called the shape builder tool and the offset path function. Here, I'm going to go ahead and click on this line here, which is separate. We don't want to merge these together yet. We're going to go to Object, down to Path, and we're going to press "Offset Path". Now, what that's going do is it's going to create an offset of that exact same shape around it and we want to use that offset as a part of cutting out the original circle around it. I'm going to press "Okay" and you can change the values if you want. I'm going to press change the color to white. You'll see that it looks like it's cut out right now. Now, what I want to do is go ahead and not use all of this. I only want to use this part down here, this section to cut out this part and the rest of it we can delete later. We do that by selecting only the white, which you can see there. I'm going to press "Shift and E", which brings an eraser tool. I use my left and right bracket keys just to increase and decrease the bar size. I'm just going to erase some of that white away from up here. Then I'm going to put a massive eraser line there which will separate the whites. You can see there we've got an effect already but the problem is if we were to just leave it like that, you've got a huge white thing sticking there and we don't want that. We want it to actually cut in the shape and we use other shapes in Adobe Illustrator to actually do this. The way we do this, is we'll highlight everything and we're going to press "Shift and M". Now, this is the shape builder tool and it's quite a new feature over the past few years Adobe have put in. It's replaces the path finder function and it makes it super intuitive and easy to get rid of shapes. You can see here, as I'm scrolling and panning on top of this, you'll see that Illustrator is finding different shapes and they're based upon the shapes on top and below it. If I go ahead and let say dragged, this will be created as one shape. But if I press "Option", it will get rid of it. You can build shapes with this tool to make sure that you get the negative spaces that you want. The reason why I'm trying to knock a part of this out and create this negative space here is because when you scale this logo down, which is what it will be into an app icon, it will just look like a line in front of a circle. But we want to illustrate the point that it's a planet. We can do that not not using colors, but by showing front-to-back through negative space. We can see here that because the plan has been knocked out, or it's showing that it's knocked out, that the orbiting line is in front. Now that we've cut out that area of the circle or the planet, we've got to do it for the other side as well. I'm going to see whether it works better or not. We just basically repeat the whole process. I'm going to go ahead, same again Object, Path, Offset Path, press "Okay", change it to white, use the eraser again, but this time we're going to mirror it background. I'm just going to cut anything that I don't want out. Select everything, "Shift and M" and with the option for all tool. The problem that we have now is that we've got loads of little shapes in here that we need to get rid of or merge together and there's a couple of ways of doing it, but the safest way of doing this is by going ahead and with this line, just drag a line all the way through the shapes till they grayed out. That means that we're joining them altogether like so. What I don't want to do yet is cut out anything up here or merge them together because I don't want to destroy the original artwork. I'm going to highlight this Shift, Option, drag over. We've got a separate version. Then I'm going to "Shift and M" and unite all together like so. Now, I've got one logo without the white, but it's all cutout and it looks nice and it's got lots of depth in it. Ninety percent of the logo design process is on paper when you're generating ideas and it's not on the computer or on your vector software. For this specific logo, I don't have to edit it very much inside of Illustrator because I know exactly what I want. Now, that's different for other logos, and each logo will be different. You might have to spend more time finalizing certain points of the logo, maybe editing or changing the position or the composition. For me, I don't really have to do that because I know exactly what I want. But just keep in mind that you can spend as long as you need making a logo better inside of Illustrator. Now that we've got an icon we need to have a logo type with it as well. This icon really doesn't suggest what the app does and if you go to a website, anyone with an icon logo generally has a logotype with it explaining the company name. Is part of the functioning aspect of a brand and the visuals for it. We need to choose a typeface that works well with this, and there are many to choose from. But what I'm looking for is a sans-serif version to create this clean, modern logo. 7. Add Typography: I'm going to go ahead and choose some good typefaces that I can use with it, making sure that the license is correct, that I can actually use it with this logo and not get into trouble. The style of typeface that I'm looking for is clean and modern, something that is scalable, something that I can edit easily. We're not looking for burst typography because during the sketching stages, we realize we didn't need that. I'm not looking for serif typography because serif typefaces normally speak of old, so we don't want this to look old. We want it to look fresh, bright, modern, and Sans-serif is always a good choice for a clean logo. What I normally do, it might not be what everyone else does, but it helps me, is just write down Origin. It's just the company name in the standard font. In a separate board which I'll just create over here, I'll drag it in. I'll go ahead and find a font that I like, like this one called Visby, and I'll just duplicate that font. Maybe go for another one that I know of, called Montserrat. We repeat this process until we've got a few typefaces that we can use. For instance, if I was to put Times Roman in there, these look completely different in two different worlds. You've got something from the 1920s or Roman period, they looked old. It doesn't fit the brand, like what we talked about at the start. Then we've got something that is really modern here. I'm going to find one that I know that will work called Lockdown Sans. In this one, I've got the options of changing the weight and we have a slide which helps me and the italicized version of it too. I'm going to choose this one here, I think. But generally speaking, if you've got an idea of a font that you want to use, make sure the license is correct, that you can actually use it, but also put them out onto an art board. Don't be afraid to just fill your art boards and your Adobe Illustrator with loads of different fonts and ideas. Now is the fun part where we can start composing it. You can compose an icon with the logo type pretty easily, and there's only a few ways you can actually do it, that works correctly. What I'm going to do, is take in my icon from over here, then I group it together to make sure that when I move it, it's not going to go crazy on me. I'm going to highlight it, copy over. I'm going to drag over the typography that I want over here, which is my Lockdown Sans. I'm going to scale the icon down. Now, the important part of this is consistency within the typography and in the icon. What a lot of logo designers miss out on, is the weight of the lined icon. Now, obviously if you've got an icon that isn't line out, this line out, then this doesn't really apply. But because we're working with specific lines and a lot of negative space in this logo, similar to the typography that we're using, we need to make sure that these lines roughly are the same thickness as the lines in the typography as well, so that it remains consistent throughout the brand. I've chosen this typeface because I know personally from experience that this logo will work well with Lockdown Sans, and you may be thinking, should I know this? Generally speaking, it takes time and experience to know what typefaces work well with what icons and what typefaces to use. But there are some general rules, such as not using a serif version of the typeface. For instance, I'll show you. If we were to put these together, you can see there's a massive problem with the way this is. It looks unprofessional because it's not looking consistent to the icon. The icon looks modern, but the typography looks old and we don't want to have that. But generally speaking, if you're sticking with a Sans-serif font for a icon or a logo like this, then you can't really go wrong, but you can spend time looking at different fonts. You can just keep copying and pasting different fonts down in a line, so you can see which one works best. Here's a logo design process that I've done for a client in the past and over here you can see I've literally gone all the different color combinations for the icon, and I've also gone ahead and made loads of different combinations of typefaces that we could potentially use. This was for the client, more so, for me to show them why something like this wouldn't work well against something like this, like a typeface, and you can see there's a massive difference. You can tell which one's better straight away because you put them altogether and you just find the one that fits with the icon. Now that we've got the typography of choice, all that, and we've got the logo here, it's time to outline the typography, and a lot of people forget to do this, but it's super important. Now, type there is vector but it doesn't act like a vector because it is in just the typing mode. So I can carry on writing words inside of that if I wanted to. But what we need to do inside of the illustrator is create outlines of this, which will make it as a shape. Just right-click it and press "Create Outlines" and now the word is just a shape. All the letters you can edit and you can see how it's actually constructed as well, and you've got all the points to change it in any way that you need. This is great for when customizing typography if you need to, and it also gives you the ultimate control of the spacing it as well. Once you've got your typography there and you've outlined it, it's just laid out, you'll notice that there might be some differences and some problems inside between the spacing of the letters. Now, if you can't see it, that's absolutely fine. It takes again, years of experience of designing typography and also being a designer to really see problems inside of letter forms, the kerning. What I'm going to do, is show you and I'm going to correct the kerning inside of this word to make it look altogether nicely, so it doesn't just look like someone's written the word origin. I'm going to highlight this. I'm going to ungroup by right-clicking. Now it gives me access to each one of these letter fonts. What I'm looking for is to have an even spacing throughout, optically, not mathematically. If you do it mathematically, you'll go wrong because the way that our eyes look at typography is completely different to what Maths would say we would look at. For instance, the R needs to be closer to the O, because right now it's way too far away. Although mathematically it's in the correct position, we need to bring it over, otherwise, it will just look when it's small, strange. We'll do the same for the I, would just bring it in by one point, and I'm using my arrow keys here just to bring them in. It's more like trial and error. The only thing I can see here is the I again, it's origin is a bit too far away. I'm going to pull this out again by one. I'm scaling in and out because I want to see what it look like when it's small, and I also want to see what it looks like when it's big. It's really important when trying to decide for if a logo works, especially a logo type, if it works when it's small. If we crumble these letters too close together, when they're small, they'll just merge into one, and we don't want that. We want to give each letter form its space around it so it can be viewed big and small. You might not notice a huge difference, but over here this is the correctly canned, the right position of each letter form, version of the logo and here is the non-correct version. Now, when I zoom out, it might exaggerate it a little bit, but you can see the I and the G, in the non exaggerated version of the original version is space, very strange compared to the one over here because it creates a logic gap than the reality. Zooming in and out actually helps you to see whether the kerning is correct. Because you can see here on the original version which I've highlighted there, the R, I and G of the Origin logotype looks too far out, it doesn't look like it's all together. But on the newly canned one, so the correct version, the R, I and G and the O, are all tightly put together, so it looks like one nice logo. It's all correctly and optically canned to what the human eye would see. If you're a new designer or someone that's just getting into logo design, don't be put off by kerning. It's something that takes a lot of experience, it takes a lot of looking at typography to master, and I'm not even a master at it. I always make mistakes at it, as well. If you think there's something wrong with your logotype or the actual spacing between the letters, just play around with it and see what you can do. We have the logo all set up and it's all been [inaudible], now it's time to add the color. 8. Choose Color: In this lesson, I'm going to be showing you how to pick colors and the best practices of putting the colors on your logo. In the interest of time, I've already got my color sets, I've previously chosen. I'm going to show you how I chose them and the reasons behind it. Over here I've got a picture of some color swatches from my mood board. I really chose the colors from the mood board because it gave me all the inspiration I needed. As we said at the start in my mind map, I was talking about colors being bright, neon-like, a sort of a nova explosion. Here's my mood board and I've got my colors there and we've got codes underneath the colors. These are just called hex codes, which are little bits of code that you put into the color picker inside of any app, and it will give you the exact same color. From here, what I decided to do was pick obviously the blues, and the pinks, and purples. As you can see here we've got a blue and a purple from this image because this really showed me how bright neon I want it to get the design and it has to be bright to fit on this app icon and for it to stand out. As you can see in the mood board, the main color that you see is blue. I don't want to steer away from that too much. We've got blue and then we've got this sort neon green. The reason why I know that this light green will work with the blue is not just because it's close to the blue, but also mathematically, it just works well on the color circle. You can see here if we go into the teals, we go into the greens and it's like this teal, more greeny teal. It works well against the blue and the purple. The idea of what I'm going to be doing in this logo is creating a gradient to add the extra modern depth to it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight my artboard, keep on pressing "Shift" and "O", I'm just going to, like I would normally with a shape, press "Alt" and drag down and that will copy my artboard over here. I'll delete all the other stuff I don't need. I just need the logo by itself. I'm going to just copy this logo again because I want a black version. I always want to keep a black version there to make sure that when I add color, it's not going to influence it too much because I want it to work in black and white super bad. I'm going to take my colors over here and this is just an image. If you're in Adobe Illustrator, what you can do is create some color swatches very easily from this image. So what I'll do is I'll press "I", which brings the eyedropper tool up. I'm just going to click on the color and you'll see that in your swatches panel that the color has shown up. I'm just going to go ahead and press "Plus", press "Okay", and it'll create a swatch for that color. Let me repeat it for the other colors that we've got here. Alternatively, you can actually take each of the codes and you can input them into the color picker down here, and you can see that each of the codes are perfectly set to what it should be. I want to create a few different variations of the color. I think it's really important to make sure we choose the right color and to decide whether a gradient would work best. I already know it will, but again, I'll explain why. I'm going to highlight my whole logo here. I'm just going to press the teal, that's very bright. Press the purple and I'll come down here and press the blue. These are our main colors. Obviously, I prefer the purple as a base color, simply because it's not as normal as blue and it's not as bright as the green. The green is too contrasting of the background. It makes your eyes squint. We want a color that you can read when it's big and small, which is sort of blue and the purple, and the purple just looks the nicest. For the gradient version of the logo, I'm going to, again, duplicate the whole design. There's a lot of duplicating in this and I'm going to select it and go to my Gradient box. If you don't see the gradient box, you have to go to Window and make sure you've selected Gradient and you'll get this little box here. With that, I'm going to go to my color swatches down here and now our gradient swatches that you can get. So I'm just going to press black and white and you'll see that it goes all funky like this and it doesn't look very cool. But what we can do is actually change the gradient really easily by adding the swatches inside of this bar here. What I'm going to do is drag in the blue and I'm going to drag in the purple. Now I have a gradient of blue and purple all the way throughout. But it looks strange because each letter has its own little gradient. We don't want that. So the way that we fix this is by highlighting the logo, press "G", which gives us the gradient tool, not the box, and we just drag. We drag in a different direction and that will create a gradient there, and I want to go ahead and just keep duplicating this until I get a gradient direction that I like. Here I've got a few different versions of the gradient and we've got one here where we've got the blue on the left, to the right with the purple and it's a very subtle gradient, it doesn't really add loads to it. Over here we've got a version where the purple is on the left going to the right and then down to top. We've got three different versions. The problem that I'm having here is I don't want the origin logotype to have any gradient in it because as you can see, it looks a bit naff. It doesn't actually look professional. We want to isolate that gradient into the icon. What I'm going to do is I'm going to, again, duplicate this and I'm going to make sure that this is just the purple for now. We're going to change the gradient inside of this one one be a bit smaller so it works well on the side. I could add another gradient inside of here, another color inside. But as you can see, it goes a bit skew with the way it looks. It doesn't really match with the brand. So when you're adding gradients, make sure that you only add very subtle colors. Otherwise, it'll start to look less professional than it should. All we're trying to do is hint towards a little bit of a gradient or a little bit of that from there. Now that you've got the color all sets and you've chosen which design that you like the most, you've got the topography, everything is sorted, what we can do now is start to test what this will look like as an app icon. What we know is that app icons are all framed in a little bubble and we're going to create one, put the icon inside it and see how it reacts, see how it works, see if it can be used as an app icon to make it work. I'm going to create a new artboard board I'm going to drag it over my logo that I like the most, which is probably this one, and just the icon because in an app icon, we don't actually need to have the whole word mock in there too. This just needs to be identifying. So what I'll do is I'm going to create a square, just an equal square here. By holding "Shift" with the squared button it will constrain it like so. If we let go of Shift, it will create a rectangle. So just keep holding "Shift" and we're going to round the corners. When I go back to my selection tool, we got these little bubbles on the side, go ahead and round them like this, all the way until it looks like an app icon. We're going to drag in our logo design and I'm going to make sure by right-clicking and selecting the logo design, I'm going to arrange it to bring to front because I want the design to be in front in the layer order. Then I'm going to choose the color white. This is a very basic way of creating an app icon and seeing whether it will work properly and we can change the colors in the actual app icon as well. For instance, we can bring this, we can duplicate it. We can select just the square, get the gradient tool and move the gradient into a different pattern there. There we go. We've got that working as an app icon. If I zoom out, it works, when I zoom in, it works, and it looks nice. So now that we have the logo all digitally done and all colored in, it's time to make some mockups. The purpose of these mockups is to show what it would look like in real life without having to spend money on a printer or so on to make a t-shirt or on a business card. It's good to show these mockups to clients because it bridges that gap between fantasy and reality. 9. Create Mockups: In this lesson, I'm going to be showing you how to put your logo in a mockup and the reasons why you should do this. We're going to switch apps with this. We can't use Illustrator really for mockups as it's all about vector. I'm going to be using Photoshop, and we're going to use a pre-downloaded mockup which you can get free versions of Adobe stock, you can buy mockups online, there are thousands of them to choose from and I always just search logo mockup to get one. Here's a mockup I previously downloaded and we're going to use this one. The logo on there is the placeholder one to show you what it will look like. This is a cool one because it shows you what it would look like a bit more textured, so it looks realistic. You can get hundreds of different ones. All you have to do really inside of Adobe Photoshop is double-click on the Smart Object. A Smart Object is just an object that can be edited inside of it. When you double-click it will bring up another document. You might not see the change, but we've got another document there and then we double-click again where it says Replace and we put out our work in that. You've got three places here, this is the final, this is like this Smart Object and this is the logo part here where we put the logo inside. All I'm going to do is I'm going to take a black and white version inside of Adobe Illustrator, which is this one over here. We're going to copy this by highlighting and press Command C and I'm going to go back over to Adobe Photoshop, and I'm just going to hide this logo here. I'm going to press Command V to paste it inside a Photoshop as Smart Object, I press "Okay", and then I'm going to just scale this down proportionately and from here, I'm just going to press Command S, which will save the Smart Object. When we go back inside of this screen here, you'll see that the logo is automatically looking nice and it's being created as a proper Smart Object Mockup. I found this mockup on creative markets, but there are thousands that you can choose from different websites, you can even create your own. If you search on YouTube, there are so many tutorials on creating your own mockups. But generally speaking, you want a mockup that shows what the logo would look like when it's printed, when it's on mat, when it's on a vehicle, depending on what the company does, you want the mock-up on that. Mockups are really good for presenting work to clients and part of your job as a logo designer is to present work well. On the mockup side of it, really sells the idea to the clients who you'll be working for. I've got the Apian way here, and this is a presentation that I use for when I'm presenting a logo idea that you can see on this slide here, I've instantly got all of these different mockups with the logo on them. They look real and it's meant to look real, to really sell to the client the idea of the brand that I've created for them and it really shows the different products, it shows how each of the elements of the logo work together on small items as well as the big items. Having mockups all around your design process, especially for when you are presenting to clients, can really seal the deal whenever they choose your logo or not. Here's a mockup that I've got and I bought it from Yellow Images. They've got amazing mockups for like clothing, apparel, match, anything that you can think of. What we're going to do is show you why it can look like on a t-shirt, especially if origin was going to be apparel company or like a fashion thing, then this will really sell it to the client. I'm going to go ahead and go to the Smart Objects again, every mockup should have like a Smart Object and we're going to get to the front I'm just going to double-click on this. We're going to go back into Adobe Illustrator and we can just copy the logo straight from Adobe Illustrator we don't have to save it or anything. So Command C, back into Photoshop, I'm just going to hide this first layer and just paste it as a Smart Object here. We can actually change the color of this later if we need to. I'm just going to press save for now, and it might look a bit weird. It looks crazy weird there. All we need to do is mop out from this version where we should put it. If we're going to do a black and white version let's change the color of the logo to whites by going into the Layer Styles, we can go to color overlay changes to like a nice white. The background can be black with Smart Objects and do mockups, it's a case of just trial and error and every time we save it, it'll to take a moment for it to update. You can see it looks a bit crazy. We have to change the other Smart Objects too, we just change them to black by double-clicking and saving them. As you can see that I've got the logo right on that t-shirt, you can do anything you really want and you can add any designs that you like but when it comes to logo design, having a logo there for the client to see nearly can feel it because it looks so real, we'll really sell them the idea of your design. 10. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you made it to the end of the class. I hope you guys are more confident in designing logos, and also having more fun with it than ever. I'm really excited to see what you've created, so don't forget to post your work in the project gallery, so I can leave comments and you can ask questions and I can answer them. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I have, and I'll see you next time.