Intro to Illustrator: Create a Badge Design

1. Course Trailer: Hi, I'm 10 Ambrosio and I'm a lettering and graphic designer in Chicago and in this class on movie teach you how to create a bad design for a city of your choice using Adobe Illustrator This classes for funders of any skill level. And if you never use the program before, I'm going to be giving you shortcuts to help you along the way. I've worked in worldwide design agencies as well, a small studio, and what I'll be teaching in this class will apply to all of yours. In this class, you'll be learning. How do you find inspiration Sketch as well as designing and texture in your patch to see you there. 2. Finding Inspiration: when looking for inspiration in the first place. That I always start is a book. Look for what catches your eye isn't the type. Maybe it's the shape. Notice how the illustration and the badge unite. Is the illustration contained or doesn't come out of the back? No. What you like so that when you're sketching, you can use it later if you don't have any design books available. A Great Place to look is also online from up North has a collection of badge designs as well as Alan Peters, who designed so many different badges. I also created a Pinterest board for this class so you can find different badge designs that I like. All the links to these resource is air down below. Once you found all the inspiration you need, you ready to start sketching. 3. Sketching: when sketching, make sure to get all your ideas out quickly. It doesn't matter if you sketch for five minutes for 30 minutes. Mean idea is to quickly and easily work out all of your design ideas. Don't raise your sketch. If something doesn't look right, you never know. You might be able to use some of it later. Think about the application of your batch will be designed for Web or print. Things such as the thicknesses of your lines and type are going to be important, depending on what your final output is. Thes sketches don't have to be perfect. I'm in no way an illustrator. We're just trying to get ideas out on the paper. The stage of sketching is gonna make your life a lot easier. Once you get to the computer, try as many different layouts as you can. The badge that I'm going to be designing is for Chicago. I want to think of different icons that can illustrate Chicago, whether it be the Willis Tower or possibly a fire or a lantern for the Great Chicago Fire. As I sketch, I'm going to think of as many icons as I can to represent Chicago. Think about what's important or helps your city state now use that in your design. I think the lantern is a great way to represent the Chicago Fire, so I think I'll use that in my final batch. Once you have a design that you like, we'll take a picture and bring it over to the computer. 4. Designing the Layout: The first thing we're gonna do is create a document in Illustrator The size and the orientation don't matter as much as the color mode, which should be in C m y que This is because if you want to get the badge printed at some point, that is the color mode that printers. Except if you are designing for the Web, though I would suggest going RGB So once we're in our document, the first thing that we're going to want to dio its import our sketch. So I'm going to go into my file and just drag my sketch right into illustrator, going to zoom out a little bit pressing command minus scale it holding shift an option and then just scale it to a size that I think would be good right there Seems about right. If I go into my layers panel, I can double click on my first layer and actually dim this to around 25%. So now the layer is dimmed and I can lock it, and now we can't actually move this layer. So when I create a new layer, um, let's call it vector badge. Now we'll create our artwork on this new layer, So the first thing that we're going to want to do is create our outer shape. Mine is a circle, but many people might have different shapes, and the easiest way to do this is to use this shape panel. Here there's rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses and all sorts of shapes. For a ship that is not offered, such as a diamond of some source, you can create this using a couple different shapes. So if you were to create, say, a square, you can just turn that sideways to make a diamond or another would do. It is you could use the star tool and press the down arrow on your keyboard and that'll get rid of points and it will go to three points and you can go infinitely to create more points. So I'm gonna go down to make the triangle on the whole shift. I'm going to copy that and flip it upside down. And now, as you can see, we have another shape. Now we don't want the line through the center, so the best way to get rid of this would actually be to create one object out off the two. So to make sure that you have Pathfinder open, go to Window Pathfinder. And in this window, which shows up over here, we can use a couple different commands to do different things. So for this one, we're going to use the first command on the top row, which is unite. And this command does exactly what it says. It creates one object out of the two. So if you press unite now, this object is just one object. If we wanted to create for some reason say, an object that was this circle and then we wanted this part of the circle gone right, we could select both of these impress minus front. And now we're left with the just that circle. So this could be very useful for creating a more unique shape. For this example, though I will be using an ellipse. I will hold shift to keep the proportions constraint, and I will drop it around about there. I will turned the fell off and I will just increase the stroke a little bit proud of to around three points. The next thing that I would like to do is add in the type now my type is on a curve. If your type isn't, you can use the type tool and just simply type within their But for an object that's on a curve in this case and the lips, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna copy my lips that I've already made paste in place using command shift V hold, option and shift at the same time to scale from the center. I'm gonna place it right about there Now, if we go and unfurled the type tool we can go to type on a path, this will allow us to type on to the actual Ellipse. So I'm going to click that and I'm going to click on the Ellipse. They see the stroke goes away, and it just allows us to type on it. I'm gonna type the rise of a city and I will expand this out holding option and clicking to the right on your arrow keys, and this is going to increase the tracking. Now I'm just going to leave it there for the moment when going to do is take this and rotate it to look about correct and then going to select it all and increase the size by holding command shift and then pressing the period key in command shift comma. Actually, decreases aside, someone set this up about where I think I would like it. I'm also gonna center it. So when we scale it more, it'll stay where we put it. And when that looks about good, I'm gonna actually copy this and piece it into place again, flip it down to the bottom and edit the type here to say, Chicago. Now I want this type to be facing the opposite way. So the best way to do this would be to go to type, type on a path and then choose type on a path options. I'm going to set flip, which flips this to the other side. And then there's many different effects in here. But what we're going to be using is the part of the path that is aligned to, and I want to align it to the sender. So it's on the bottom and matches the rise of a city and press OK to confirm that. And I want to change the font for funds. There's a couple different options. I like going to places like the hands. The League of Movable type Creative Market also has wonderful fonts. If you're willing to spend a little bit more, which I highly recommend you do fonts are definitely worth the investment. When you do buy fonts, the make sure that you A have the correct licence for what you're trying to do. So if you are creating a project that you were going to be making money off of, make sure that the font allows for commercial use. The fact that I'm gonna be using is called Zona Pro. There is a free version as well as a paid version. The only difference is the commercial licensing. And also you get a couple more versions with the paid version, which I highly would recommend gonna get his own approach, and I'm gonna put it on extra bold. I'm going to increase the size to about there, and I'm going to do the same thing for the Chicago type. I'm gonna go. So the pro, an extra bolt who is there now both at 24 points, just going to increase the stroke as well to match a little bit better. So now we should be ready for the illustration 5. Illustrating: Theo illustration. We're gonna be using a combination of the different shape tools, the line tool and the pencil. So the first thing that I'm going to do is actually create the simplest shapes that I confined. I can see that there's a rounded rectangle right here. So I'm going to do first is grabbed a rounded rectangle and draw it out. Now, if you're rounded, rectangle doesn't look like how mind is at the moment you could have a different corner radius selected To change that we're going to need to do is click with the rounded rectangle selected and you can change your corner radius. If you have something along the lines of, say, five inches a rounded rectangles gonna look more like an ellipse for this project. I'm going to be using 0.125 inches. I'm going to draw that out right there. And now I see. I can also use that rounded rectangle again and place it right here to be ableto line these objects up. I have my snap two point on, and if you aren't seeing these green commands that are coming up next to my mouse one way that you can get them is by going to view and then snapped a point. You go here to show your guys or press command semi colon and you can show your rulers by pressing show rulers going to zoom in and just to make sure that these air perfectly lined up and now I can copy this once again and use it to create the top that I'm looking for. I also see that I have a triangle on the top. So I'm going to use my startle again and make sure that it is set to be a triangle from here. I can scale it to how it would like. I don't like how the points of my triangle are not rounded like my rectangle. So one way to fix this is to go into my stroke panel up here at the top and change my cap in my corner to be rounded. This allows us to have more continuity in our design. The next shape that I can make is this trap is way down here and I can use my rounded rectangle to do so. We're going to do is use the direct selection tool which you can also access By pressing A I'm going to select these bottom points and make sure that I only have those points selected and not the type as well, which I do with the moment on a zoom back in. And now, with the direct selection tool selected, I can pull this point out to where I wanted to be. Now, instead of trying to guess on the other side to make sure that it's perfect, I can copy this object and paste it into place using command shift V, then going toe object transform, reflect and reflected vertically. Now I can just bring this over to the side, combined both of these objects in the Pathfinder using the Unite Tool. And I have one Travis, I'd I can bring this up here just to make sure that it's lined up and then hold shift to bring it back down street. The next shape that are going to make is the glass of the lander going to pull this out just slightly. Also, bring this down here, rotate it and then connect all of these points with my pencil, which you can access by pressing P on the keyboard with all three of these objects selected . I can unite them, and I have one object again to create the flame. I'm going to use a starting a lips to make sure that my design remains around going to set it to a stroke. And I want to match to the other stroke. So I will use the eyedropper tool, which you can access by pressing I and click on another stroked paths in order to copy that style. Next, I'm going to go to the pencil again by pressing P on the keyboard and draw out my design. These handles show where your design is going to be heading. So if my handle extends out over here to the top, right shows that the next point is going to go that way before going toe where it clicked from here. I'm going to click downwards and finish my flame. When you're done with your sheep to close it, just go back to the first point, and it should show a small symbol next to your pen tool that closes shape. I do think that this points a little highest. I'm going to bring that down to adjust these points with the direct selection tool selected . You can pull each handle to be exactly where you want it to be. Once again, to match my stroke, I'm going to go into my stroke panel and round the corners. Then I'm going to combine this with my circle and I'll even copy it again, pasted in place and scale it down, holding option and shift to have a second flame. The next part of my design is going to start from the lips going to start from the center and hold option as I draw so that I'm able to draw straight from the center. Then I'm going to scale it down, bring it down skillet out just a little bit. And actually delete this back point. Since I don't need it from here, I'm going to draw with the pencil upwards and then over toe where that meets that point. Once again, I'm going to copy this line, paste it into place goto object, transform, reflect and reflected vertically. Now, with all three of these selected, I can combine the object. I don't want this point here. I'm going to delete it using the rectangle tool I'm going to create these sides of my design going to place them and rotate them exactly where I want them and use that same rectangle again, holding option to copy so that I maintain and consistent with going to scale this back just a bit and scale this back a bit as well. It's OK that overlaps because we'll fix this, eventually going to rotate this so that all points touch pulled us out just a bit more. Now, with both of those selected, I can unite those again, copy it, pieced it into place, reflect them and then bring them back over to the other side. The design is looking great, but there's a few parts of the design that I don't want, such as this overlap here or the overlaps down here. The easiest way to get rid of these is to select all of it without the type and go to the tool called the shape builder tool. If this tool isn't displayed, you might have one of these tools displayed as well. The shape builder tool allows you to erase different fills and paths, but we're only going to use the path section at the moment, holding the option key were able to delete certain sections. As you can see, this path highlights red. And if I click it while holding option, it goes away. I can do this throughout the entire design until I'm happy with what I have to create the stars on the side. I'm going to go back into my sheep panel, choose the starch will and choose a star with six sides. Place this where he needs to be, and copy that over to the other side, holding option and shift. The last part of design that we need is the background to create the background illustration. What I'm going to do is use the line tool. First, I'm going to select on Lee the illustration that we've made and just decrease the size. I'm also going to turn off our sketch now that we have a pretty good understanding if you're scaling and you see that your stroke sizes changing a good way to go about fixing that would be depressed Command K or go into your illustrator preferences and go to general . In here, you can choose scale, strokes and effects. Honor off with it on. You can see that when I scale the size of the stroke also grows for this project. I want all the stroke withs to be the same. So I'm going to choose to have this off, going to scale this down just slightly and also make sure that it is centered by pulling out my rulers from my sights and snapping them to the points of my circle. And as we can see, this is not centered at the moment. Once that is good, we can use our line tool which can be found right underneath the pencil. And what I'm going to do is draw a line from the top point to the bottom point. I'm also going to make sure that the stroke for this is around as well. Now I'm going to copy and paste it into place and hold shift while I rotate to get a 90 degree angle going to do the same thing with both of them selected now and then, with all four lines selected, I'm going to copy them again, paste them into place and rotate them so that they land right in the center and scale those down just a bit. Next, I'm going to select all of them grouped them all by pressing command G and then send them all to the back by present command shift left bracket. Now, when I select just one, all of them will be selected, so we won't have to re select all of every time. We don't want these to show up in the center. So what we're going to do is select this entire illustration without the type and without the background as well as without those. And we're also going to option shift drag over to the side just in case anything changes. We're going to reset like that. And only that and what we're going to do is make the stroke white, and we're actually going to outline this by going to object path outline stroke. With that outlined, we can add another stroke to the outside that it black. And I'm also going to push this stroke to be on the outside of the object. This stroke is gonna act as a way to cut out the rest of the light splash of the background . With all of that selected, I'm going to press join, and then I'm going to loosely draw with the pen tool the shape of this, and this is going to act to cut out any parts of the inside that we might have missed with the stroke. Once that's drawn, I'm going to join that to the other outside and once this has an outline stroke as well, so that it becomes a shape. So I'm going to go to object path, outlined stroke, join those and then join the front. So all of that is one shape with the background. Select that I'm going to press command eight, which is to create a compound path. You can also go to object compound path make. This is what you're going to need to do when you are subtracting different objects that are in a group that will unite the object into one. Even if they aren't touching, we're then going to select the object that's in the front. Make sure that the path is outlined. Make sure everything is joined. We're also going to need to outline these strokes, enjoying them once again and cut out the back. Now we can drag our illustration back right into the centre, using our grids and simply clean up anything that we weren't happy with what I'm going to do here is double click to enter the isolation path, delete that object and actually bring this one over to the side. Reflect that so that I don't have the odd cut that I had a prior going to make sure that we don't have anything more like that and we don't seem to have any. Now we turn our guides off and return our sketch off. We're starting to have a badge. The last step to finish up our illustration is going to be to add color for this design. I'm only going to be working in black, but feel free to use any color you wish just going to decrease the stroke on these. The last part in our sketch seems to be this lying here. The way that I would go about doing this is copying this circle on the outside, decreasing the size and then taking a rectangle would draw it to where I would like to cut it. Anything inside of this rectangle is going to be cut out. I would also draw a rectangle around the word Chicago so that it too, could be cut out once everything is where it needs to be. I will select all three of those objects, choose my shape builder tool and cut out the lines that I don't want. Then I can just delete my rectangles and I have the lines there for this design. I'm going to reverse the colors so everything that is apparently black will be white and everything that is white will be black. I'll start with stars and the centre illustration. Since these all are outlined paths, I was switched the outline to white. And then I will switch the color of the type in the inside to white as well. These paths could be switched. And then, with all of that done, I can switch the color of the fill in the back by clicking this swap tool. One thing that I like to do is copy the background, pieced it into place up the size just a bit at a black stroke in a white Phil and send it to the back. This gives us a white rule around the design. I think that looks good right there. Now we're already for texture ring 6. Texturing: To add texture to this design, we're going to be using a set of free vector textures from the think design block. This set of 15 includes many different Greenwich textures, and I think it's a great way to start off. Using vector textures also allows this designed to be able to be scaled to any size Once we're finished, the download link for those textures could be found with all the other links in the about section. Once you have those textures downloaded, you're going to want to find the ones that you want to use and then drag each of those into illustrator as you're dragging them into illustrator, make sure that you dragged them into the actual application and not just your working file . The difference here is that if you drag it into your working file, you're going to end up creating pictures instead of vector images. So take those textures and drag them straight into illustrator. With your textures in Illustrator, you can grab the specific textures that you want to copy them and paste them straight into your design. For this design, I'm going to change my textures to White just so that I can see them better while I'm working, I'm gonna scale it down. The textures are already starting to look great, but at this moment, there only white vectors on top of a black design. What I'm going to want to do is use the same texture over because I really like the look of it. So I'm going to scale it down, transform it reflected and rotate it just so that it can look slightly different than the other texture. I'm going to do this a couple times just to get different looks throughout and to cover each section of the design that I want to have a texture on. If they're specific parts of the design that you do not want textures on, you can easily avoid that as well. Since these textures air edible, you can always use your direct selection tool and select just certain points of it. With all of those done going to select each texture, join them all together and then just move them down off the screen for the moment before we can subtract Those textures from the artwork they are needs to be one single piece. I don't want the white to be part of the Arctic. I want those to be transparent at the moment. I would create a magenta box behind this artwork. You would see that you can't see the magenta through their design. In order to make this design just one color, I'm gonna have to do the following. The first thing I have to do is outlined the text which essentially creates the text into shapes so we can go into type and create outlines. We're also going to have to do the same thing that we did earlier with the background in order to create shapes as well. I know that these air paths so I will outline those strokes. These also need to be outlined. Anything in your design that hasn't outlined at this point should become a shape. If you still want to maintain the ability to edit it later, I would save a copy of your design now. So once you outline everything including this shape, we should be ready to begin cutting. The first thing that we're going to need to cut through is this type. We can select the type united and then erase it from the background. Now, if we keep our magenta piece in the background. We can see what we have come through at the moment. It doesn't look like we've cut through much, but that's because we have this white circle. If you go into the isolation mode by double clicking it, we could delete the white Circle. Since we won't need it anymore. Now we can see that the type and the outer border have been cut out. We're going to continue to do this for the rest of the design. Everyone's. You join all of these and make them a compound path going to first outlined the strokes. Combine them all, make them a compound path and then subtract them from the back. We also need to make the background a compound path as well. Once we have that, we can subtract them all. And we have a design. At this point, we can take Oliver textures, drag them back up onto our design in the exact spot that we want. What I've noticed is when using these textures and subtracting them using the Pathfinder, you seem to lose a lot of weight with the texture, and I'll show you what I mean by that in a minute, and I'll show you a way to fix it as well. So if we select all of our textures and create a compound path by going to object compound path, make my present command eight, we can select that and her background. Once we make sure that our background is also a compound path, it's like both of those and cut them now. At the moment, it looks like one of our textures air there, but when you zoom in, you're able to see them a lot clear. They did lose a bit of weight, though, so what we could do to fix that is when we have our texture selected, we can add a small stroke. I would say about 0.5 and then create a white stroke around that outline that stroke and joined it all together once again, created compound path and subtract that from the front. You're going to be able to see these textures a lot better, and you can still see them when you zoom in. Now we have a unique battery design that can be scaled to any level, and that is textured 7. Wrap-up: and that's all there is to creating a vintage badge design. If you like your badge and you want to get it printed, you can use the resource is in the about section. Feel free to use what you've learned here in the future at any of your designs. I would really appreciate if you could leave a review of the class and post your project. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the discussion panel. Thanks for taking this class and I'll see you in the next one.