Transcripts
1. Introduction: People don't buy products,
they buy brands. Branding gives businesses
a personality, a more human touch and identity to connect
with the consumer. At the forefront of all
of this is your logo. Hi, I'm trying to
know a self-taught graphic designer and a YouTuber. Art and technology have
always equally interested me, which led me into pursuing my
bachelor's and technology. Instead of learning Java, I spend most of
my time designing websites, posters, and logos. There's any required
both my artistic skills as well as my
technical thinking. Since then I've probably
design hundreds of logos. And I've learned some principles along the way that I want
to share with you today. The purpose of a logo is
to identify a company, an organization, a
business, or a brand. It's something that's easily
recognizable and recall. And that's why
it's so important. In this class, we will be
learning how to design a logo, but also understand
the importance of a logo in a bigger
brand identity system. I'll walk you through
my entire process of designing a logo and also explain to you the important steps
like research, mood, voting, sketching, and picking colors
and typography. I taught myself all of this by simply watching tutorials
and practicing. So don't feel intimidated by it. All you need is a
basic understanding of illustrator and a
curiosity for design. By the end of the class,
you'll be able to design a logo that not only
looks visually Great, but also conveys the
essence of rack. I'm really excited to dive into this class, so
let's get started.
2. Getting Started: My mom's side sending me to add classes ever since I was five. And I just developed
a great interest in sketching blocky letters
and geometrical shapes. Although I still can't
draw a circle in one go. My first encounter with
illustrator was in tenth grade when my
computer teacher asked me to design the
school magazine cover. After that, I continue designing posters for school events, fan out for movies that
are really liked and also participate in a
lot of design contests. And that's how I
transitioned into designing. Many say that the
logo is the face of a brand or a symbol that
represents a company, just like how flag
represents a country. But the logo alone does
not communicate much. When we talk about the most
successful logos like Nike, Apple, Starbucks, we often
see how well-designed it is. But I think one of the
reasons it works so well is that it's also a part of a
well-crafted band identity. A brand identity contains
elements like colors, typography, photography,
illustration. At the center of
it is your logo, which is the most
prominent piece. People make snap judgments when it comes to
buying a product. And if your first
impression isn't appealing, then it makes it all
the harder to sell. As a designer, I
cannot really say that a good design will convince
the customer to byproduct, but a bad design can
definitely turn on away what actually
makes a good logo? There are three important
factors that are fundamental to any good logo. Memorable, distinctive,
and efficient. A lot of people say that a
good logo needs to be minimal. Minimal doesn't necessarily
mean having fewer lines. It means efficient, efficient in privatizing simplicity and
having only the essentials. It should also be
memorable and distinctive. Now these two
characteristics can be achieved through
various methods. Almost all good logos have these easy to
identifiable features. The FedEx logo has an
arrow between the e and x. It's settled, but it makes
the logo more memorable. Another example of this
is the Amazon logo. It has an arrow from a to Z representing the vast library. It is the bite of the apple logo with a capital D of Disney and the follow-up of C in the Coca-Cola logo or
all sorts examples. A lot of food and beverages
brands tend to use mascots. Kfc, Pringles, Wendy's are also examples of a
well-designed mascot. These mascots make
the entire logo memorable and easy
to identify it. The whole point is to be
original and distinctive. It's not possible
to be a 100% origin because everything
in the world is inspired by something
or the other, it is important to be surrounded by good designs and designers. And an easy way to do this is by following a lot
of design content and designers on your Instagram or any other social
media that you may have. The next time you're
endlessly scrolling you at least consuming some
good design content. And this little life
hack has helped me in understanding
the current trends better and also helped me in differentiating good
design from bad design. You don't need a lot of
things to design a logo, all you need is a
pen and paper and any design software in this class I'll be
using Illustrator. And I also recommend
it because it's most commonly used in
the design industry. But even if you use
any other software, you can still follow along. Today I'll be
designing a logo for a fictitious company called
Keq is creative club. The brief of it you can find in the project
section below, you can also find an
alternative before another company there if
you want to start fresh. My design process varies
from project to project, and every project demands
a different approach. I start with G, so
it's where I studied my competitors and learn
more about the brand. In mood boarding, I
collect references for the look and feel of the
brand and sketching, I put down my ideas to paper. And finally in
Adobe Illustrator, add colors and typography
to finalize the logo. In the next lesson, we
start with the first step of designing a logo,
which is the research.
3. Researching: The first step to any
design process is research among all the
projects that I've done. Sikkim coffee is
definitely my favorite. This project in specific was
very research intensive. And the main idea of the
research was to come up with the concept that would best represent the
state and the people. I started by researching the architecture of
the monasteries, studying things that are
unique to the state, and also took inspiration from a stylus painting called tanker. I would say that research
alone took about a month. Eventually, we settled on two concepts and decided
to merge both of them. The first concept was Red Panda, which is the state
animal of second. And the second concept was
stupid and calligraphy. I merge these two concepts and created this logo
for a second coffee. Every logo starts with a brief. If there's no brief,
There's no direction. This is the client brief that
we'll be working on today. In the brief had mentioned
that Keq is creative club, is a co-working space and
cafe based in New Delhi. They're looking for a
logo to use for the cafe, app, marketing and
other merchandise. It's a space dedicated to empowering creative
professionals. The name of the
space is inspired by 1989 Studio Ghibli classic film, quickest delivery service. According to the brief,
the goals and missions are that they provide a safe
space for credit people. It's a common
comfortable environment. They help increase productivity without feeling burnt out. Help overcome creative blocks. The spacewalks on a
subscription basis and falls on the premium side. They also do coffee
takeaways for non-members. When a client sends you a brief, it's not really structured. So what I like to do is go onto my creative club boat and
organize my information there. You can use Google Docs, pen, paper, whatever you're
comfortable with. I like to use Milanote. It's a free software. It's like a digital whiteboard
and it's somewhere I can organize all my files and
information in one place. So I typed down all
the information from the name of the brand to goals
and missions of the brand. I'm going to drag down a
note and write client name. That is, Kiki is creative club. I'll do seem for other
information like location. Location might be New Delhi. In most of the cases, the client brief
isn't adequate enough to start working on a
design process directly. So what I like to do is have a lot of conversations
with the client. I asked a lot of
questions and try to understand the client's
perspective on the brand. The main objective is
to align yourself with the client's perspective and embody the spirit of the brand. This will help you save
a lot of conflicts. Later on, I would
recommend you to document everything
that you discuss. The questions you ask can
vary from project to project. But usually I like to begin
with these four questions. Why do you exist? What's
the purpose of your brand? What future do you
want to create? What principles to
guide this behavior? You can always give
the clients examples to help them understand
the questions better. For example, Oberth mission
statement is transportation as reliable as running water
for everyone, everywhere? In a similar fashion, I asked my client what their
mission statement is, the short-term
clearer your answer is the MOOC on Peter
direction will be, I realized the more engaging
my conversations are, the better understand the brand. You can then follow up by
asking questions like who their competitors are and what other brands
they inspired by. So after I have all
the information and organize them on
Macmillan art board. So I'll put down nodes for each of the questions
that I've asked. So purpose, mission, vision, and values. Since I have the brief with me, I'll go ahead and
copy the answers to these from my brief. Then I organize
them into columns, let's say goals and mission. This can be my
client information. I'll also go ahead and create a timeline for this project. So I'm gonna pick
a checklists to-do list and then have the
search mood board, sketching and final logo. For this, I can add a title
here and call it my timeline, and add individual deadlines
to each of the stages. Next, I'll go ahead
and create boards for each of the important steps. I'll create another checklist
for the deliverables. So in our case, it's logo, colors,
color, palette, topography, and a final
presentation. For any brand. It's important to understand
who the target audience is. This is done after having
conversation with your client. In our case for
cookies creative club, I'll go ahead and create
three user personas. User persona is basically a cactus sketch of what your
ideal customer looks like. I'll drag down three nodes and give them a imaginary name. So let's say Kim droves. Inertia. And
basically understand what my ideal customer
would look like. So for me, all my customers
would be creatives. Maybe Kim could be an art
director, maybe drove, could be a freelancer, maybe Aneesh could be
a content creator. One thing to note
here is that it's important to mention your
persona's and details. This will make sure
that you have covered the entire target audience. I'll also write the age, what their hobbies could be. Now I'll dive into
the deeper research. I watched the movie Keq is delivery service from
which the name is heavily inspired by and better understood the
reason behind it. The movie tells us
about how failure is an inevitable part of
a creative process. But most importantly,
it's also temporary. Kiki, the main character tells us that if you stop having fun, then the magic will slip
away Kiki straight. If club is a space
designed to bring that magic bag and
prevent burnout. Now, I'll go ahead and add
all this information that I've gathered so far
onto my melanoma board. When I add just a few more
screenshots from the movie, I'm going to add a
poster from the movie. I'm gonna write a more refined
version of the message. So I look at Kiki
delivery service message and then have this information
onto my melanin board. Now moving on to the
competitor analysis, while conducting research
about my competitors, I looked for places where my target audience
would usually be. So that would include
coffee spaces and other co-working
spaces in my area, personal experiences is also one way to do your
competitor analysis to understand the
company the better I conduct interviews with
people in my circle. I like to ask them questions
about what they like, how they work and what
places the go-to. I like to see who
they are as a brand, what their target audience is, what their pricing plan is, and what their
design looks like. I usually take about two to
three days in this process, having conversations with client is very important
at every stage, just to make sure that
you're on the same page. The client knows the
industry better. He's the expert and you always
want the expert's advice. So according to the
brief, I know that my competitors are WeWork
and double slash coffee. I started researching
about them first. So they target
audience is mostly startups and small businesses. So I'll do some more
research on v work. I look up about their branding. Lot of creatives also work from the comfort of
their home studios. So how do I convince them to come to cookies creative club, apart from other
co-working spaces, even coffee shops can
also be a competition. So that could be Starbucks,
third wave coffee, or blue to k. I'm going to list all of this information
onto my research board. You can also look
for competitors and other countries and take
inspiration from them. Now I'll go ahead and add all
this information onto MNO. Not good. I feel like I'm done, so I'll move on to
the next step that's refining my research
into the mood board, your student exercise
for this lesson is to conduct a research for the
brief that's provided for you.
4. Moodboarding: A mood board is a
place where I collect all my reference
images in one place. This has me visualize
a mood for the brand. But before I move
on to this process, I like to do a little
exercise called mind-mapping. Mind mapping is a technique
to generate ideas. I'll pick out some keywords
from the research that I've documented in the
previous lessons and then expand around them. So first I like keq is creative club in the
center of my page. And then I'll
brainstorm on the words that best fit with the brand. I'll further expand with
some adjectives are synonyms around the worst
that I've already noted down. These words will act as
prompts from my mood board and also help in generating
ideas for the logo. These prompts and make
it easier for me to look for images that we create
the mood for the design. I prefer to do the rough work
on my notebook and then I filter out the words that I
like onto my miller notebook. Now I'll filtered out
five to ten words that I like and I'll use them as
prompts for my mood board. I can just double-click
or create a note, or I can drag a node
from the left as well. My first five words
that I want to use is magical, abstract, community. Creativity, and stars. I feel like these five keywords somewhat capture the
essence of the brand. I think I'll also
add five more words. Does to be on the safer side. Align these words in a row. Magical. I use word like
stars and Unreal. From abstract I want to
add are out of the box. For community, I really
like the feeling of a family group of creatives. One word will lead to another
and you can keep expanding. I feel then what suffice for me? I'll filter out a few Bill Woods and complete my mind map. Since I started looking
for references, after picking out five to
six words for my mind-map. References can be
photos, texts, patterns, CD artwork, movie posters, or anything that conveys a particular mood that
you're looking for. Websites like Pinterest,
the hands and rebel at the best places to
gather your references from. I like to use Pinterest because once you search
a couple of votes, it starts recommending you more images in the same domain. I started looking
for some words along the lines of maybe
creative photography. I'll browse some of the
photography and I can also sort something along the lines
of TD, abstract artwork. After browsing, I came across
this image that I like. Now I lose the melanoma
Web Clipper extension and I'll save it onto my mood board. I feel like I've
spent enough time on Pinterest now I want
to move on to dribble. I personally like to
use dribble because it has a very curated list
of vector designs. So in Durban, I want
to start looking for some patterns and posters
and I start searching my keywords here quickly
want to jump to be hands. So unlike Pinterest and dribble, you can find entire
design projects here. I'm going to look for
something that I feel will help create the mood
that I'm looking for. So I feel like this
is a good reference for the mood I'm
trying to create. I'll go ahead and add
a few more images until I feel like I have to wipe that
I'm looking for to avoid deviating from
the track too much, just keep checking back to the five to six keywords
you started with using logos from a
competitive brands for your moodboard
is a big no-no. I try and avoid using
logos in general for my mood boards because
I don't want it to influence my design at
such an early stage, I usually find what
I'm looking for in about 30 to 40 reference images. So the goal is to group
the similar ones together. I feel like this set of images give me a more casual vibe. Whereas this set of images give me a more modern
than sophisticated. By once I have all
the grouping done, I like to get feedback
from the client and discuss if there's
any rework necessary. It's very important for you
and the client to be on the same page to avoid
back-and-forth later on. So the time taken to create
a mood board can vary. Some days I find everything
I need within an hour. While some days I do
get a creative block. You can also look
for inspiration for your mood boards
offline in books, graphic novels, or magazines. Don't feel restricted
to Mellon node for creating a mood boards. Alternatively, you can also
use Behance and Pinterest, or you can also create them
directly on illustrator. Ya shouldn't exercise for
this lesson is to start collecting all reference images and put them on your mood board. So in the next lesson,
we'll start getting some ideas and concepts and
digitize them on Illustrator.
5. Sketching: But any logo you want to create a mug that people
will easily remember. Sketching is the
most important part of a logo design process. It's literally the
foundation of any design. After I finished
my mood boarding, I like to start
sketching ideas on paper by mind-mapping
and mood boarding. A lot of ideas is parking ahead. In many cases, they're also
inspired curved shapes, layouts, and other elements. I prefer to use a notebook, but you can use any digital
apps like Procreate. You could divide a logo
into three formats. A logo type, for example, the Disney logo, a logo
mark, the sous chef, Nike, and accommodation mark, which is a combination of the logo type and the logo mark. For example, the Airbnb logo. I'd like to start with
the name of the brands, So I lay out Keq
is creative club. I first started with
left alignment. And since kiki and club
a vote for lettuce, eat, I'll also try a center alignment
which might look good. I'll also try and align
them inside a circle. Since it's a
three-letter word kiki, scared if club, I think left
alignment would work best. Next, I'll try combining the key and IIE and
make a monogram. Now, monogram is
basically combining two or more letters to
form a unique design. I'll try a few more
iterations of this. Maybe the lines of the key, maybe I'll extend the
lines of the eye. I haven't interesting
idea for a simple icon. Again, just trying a lot
more variations on this. The dot of the, I could
act as the head of a person and the body of the eye could
represent the body. I'll try and design
something with very basic shapes just to keep the whole mark very minimal
and easy to understand. I'm going to try a few
more variations of these very basic shapes and try and combine them in
interesting ways. Once I feel like I've
sketched enough concepts, I'll take a photo of it and
upload it to Illustrator. So Illustrator is a
vector-based software, whereas Photoshop is a
pixel based software. Any other vector-based software is ideal for creating a logo. So what happens in a
vector-based software is no matter how
much you zoom in, it will not pixelate
because it's smallest unit is not
pixels this vectors. Whereas if you're designing
a logo into Photoshop, it will easily pixelate
once you zoom in. If it's your first time
using Illustrator, don't feel intimidated
by all these tools. All you need to know it
just four or five of them. You can use the presets
that's provided to you, or you can create a new file
using this button here. I'm going to name my file. When I use the letter template, you can use whichever
template you want. Now once I have my art
board open in front of me, I'll drag in the photo here. I've cropped this
individual sketches from my photo and I'll work
on them one by one. I usually vectorize two
to three sketches just to have a better understanding of the concepts that I've sketched. I first take the
sketches and reduce the opacity to about 30%. This helps me trace over
the sketch that I've made. I like to break all my sketches into individual basic shapes. And you can make those shapes
using the ellipse tool, the rectangle tool,
or the Polygon tool. In this case, start with
first four basic shapes. I first started with
sketching two of my concepts that I really liked. I basically traced over the
sketches that I've done. And then I went on
to just play along with the shapes and vectors and create a few
more iterations. So I played around with
the size of the shapes, moved around the shapes a bit. I liked the first concept. So I also liked
the second concept that represented a man walking. So I thought maybe there was a most subtle way to kind of integrate this concept
in the first logo. Basically, I merged
the first two concepts to try and create a look that was unique and also kind of tied back to the
co-working space nature. I played around with the shapes. I integrated a star, which I wanted to
add a little bit of magical element because
it was too serious. That's how I came up with these four to eight concepts that I want to show
it to my client. So one of the reasons I worked entirely in black and white is because I don't want color too influenced
by design choices. Good color could easily
hide a bad design choice. So I want to have a
more unbiased approach towards the vectors
I'm creating. Designing a logo is
not a linear process, so don't hesitate To go back to sketching and try
some new concepts. You can even fall
back to mood board, look for some new
inspirations or research a bit more to
come up with new ideas. New fresh ideas come from
the unlikelihood of sources. So be open to getting feedback
from people around you. After getting feedback
on dehydration, I felt the need
to improve on it. A new concept struck me that
I wanted to sketch out. One of the concepts
that are really liked from the
previous design was using a star to represent the magical element of
Keq is creative club. That's what I
carried forward and used it as a base
from a new design. This is a more
symmetrical shape. That's why I didn't
really trace it and said, I did it directly on illustrator because I feel it's
more accurate. Next, I duplicate it
and wrap them around the star to give a
sense of community. So to duplicate this
shape around the center, what I did is add a
very small circle at the end of the shape and
grouped it together. So then I'll go into Effect, distort and Transform, and
then click on Transform. I'll set the angle to 360 divided by the number
of copies you want. In my case, it's five. You can use this trick to create as many duplicates as you
want around the center. I made a few more iterations. I played around with the shapes, the spacing, the sizing. And instead of five, I tried grouping 34 together. And I felt was a little
more sober and modern. And it aligned with
the look that I was trying to create for
Kiki creative club. I think I'm more
or less satisfied with their designs
that have now. Next I want to take
these two designs and finalize them by adding
colors and epigraphy. Your student exercise for this lesson is to start
digitizing your logos.
6. Polishing: In this lesson, I'll
be adding colors and typography to the designs
I've shortlisted. So I started by
using colors from the movie poster that I had saved during the
research process. I bought in the movie poster
from the melanoma board onto my illustrator and copied the colors using the
eyedropper tool. The colors of the post of a very contrasty and
complimented each other. Since there are a lot of
elements in the logo, I wanted to try a lot of
variations of colors in there. So at first I would call him only one of the elements blue. Then I moved on to coloring
two of the elements blue. And then I tried filling the entire logo with blue and
using red as a background. In a similar fashion, I
tried a lot more variations with the red and blue
and the blue and red, and also with this off-white
color, if you confuse it, which color to pick,
you can always use color psychology as a guide. Color psychology
basically talks about how every color is
associated with a feeling. He gets creative
club is all about creative professionals
and the growth. And that's all I wanted
to use green because it's often associated
with the word growth. I don't want to use
a generic green, so I'm going to play around and move it a little towards blue. I'm always happy with the color, but I also want to try gradient because I feel it will
greatly amplified the logo. I would try a few
more variations with the colored background. You can try as many colors as you want and see
what works for you. Since you're walking
on a combination mark, I'll go ahead and
look for fonts. That best thing with the mark. I'm trying a couple
of fonts here. I feel like a geometrical
font will work best. That's what I'm going to try
first and see how it looks. Next, I'm going to try
a more condensed font and see how it looks. I'll also try a
more extended font. Maybe I should try them
all handwritten style. Now. I really like how it's come out
and I feel will make a really cool logo for
Keq is creative club. Now if this was a real client, what I'll do next is
make a presentation of the logo and provide assets like colors and
typography to them, docile index size for
this lesson is to add colors and typography to
your logo and finalize it.
7. Final Thoughts: Congrats on finishing the class, and I can't wait to
see what if design, please share your logos in
the project gallery below. If you want to check on my work, you can find me a
chance to Tacoma on Instagram and YouTube. Thank you for joining
me in this class. I hope you learned
something valuable and had fun along the way.
Shantanu Kumar, Designer & YouTuber
