Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hey. My name is Jeremy and I'm a brand designer from Sydney, Australia. In this logo design class, I'm going to be showing you how to create some popular logo design styles, which you can use for your create projects, maybe it's a side thing or even for your client work, if you're a designer and you want to improve your design game. The classes will be very practical and technical. I'm going to also share some tips and techniques as well, but we're going to be using the basic tools in Illustrator. It's great for beginner, or an intermediate level designer, or a person who is just wanting to learn more about creating your own logos. I'll be showing you how to design the logos from scratch, on how to get some inspiration ideas, as well as showing some of my sketches, but then we're going to take it to the three dimension design, each one, and I will show you the whole process. For your class project, you're going to pick one style of logo design, maybe you're a learning designer and you want to start a design studio, you can do a monogram based on your initials. All the information you need will be in the project description as well so check that. There will be some resources as well and some templates and things that you guys can use. Hope you guys enjoy the class and get stuck into it. I will see you in there, and let's get designing.
2. Finding Inspiration: There are so many ways of finding inspiration, and I believe that you can get inspiration from anywhere. Whether you're going to watch a movie with a friend, or you're listening to the music, or just things are happening around you on your way to work, there's so many things around us all the time where you can draw inspiration from. You don't just have to go online and look at logos or famous people that are logo designers. But I'm just going to show you a few sites that you can actually use to get some inspiration. If you watched my previous logo design class, I talked about some other sites that you can go and watch that which is totally cool. The first one, one of the key ones, is Pinterest. I have some boards on my actual profile. If I go to my profile, you can see I've got some boards that I'm always, constantly adding. For example, I used this one for the class. A whole bunch of monograms, which I loved the style of, super cool. But the cool thing with Pinterest is that you can search for anything. The key to this is searching using the right keywords. You can see it actually gives you some recent searches that I had, which is pretty cool. For example, if I was going to look for, maybe the client wanted a retro vintage logo and it's a real old school type of classic company. I would start to type in, "Retro logo, " and see what pops up. You can see things might pop up but it might not be the style I want. A cool trick is that I can go and start typing something else, like "Retro old logo." I just change one or two keywords and you get different results every time. I can go, "vintage label design." I can see even logos here on labels, which is pretty cool. That's what I just do and I type in different stuff and I just constantly do that until I get a cool result. I can go, "logo design old century." You just key to that and then, once I find something, what I can actually do, I'll go back to, "vintage logo design." Example, if I find something I like, I'll click on it. The cool thing is, it's going to give you all these logos that are similar to the logo image you clicked. You can go ahead and if you click the red button and save it, you can save it to a board. You can start saving it to a client board or your logo design board. You can build that up and you can have it as inspiration for later on. For example, you can use it as a mood board. You can see here, I can use all these other logos. If I like something else, I can click on it and it's going to give me some other suggestions and recommendations. That's another good way I use or do, to start to find some logos that I like. You can see there's so many different logos and I'll go and I'll save it, click on the red button and save it to one of my boards, which is super cool. Another way that I've been recently going on is Behance. I've been using it for a while, but a lot of my friends actually use it, so I decided to go on it. I found a lot of designers and you can see all these cool work here. Just looks amazing. First you can see all these logo collection, so I can click on it. I can click on this, these are cool logos. That's super awesome. Behance is another great way to follow logo designers, and people post a lot of logo projects, that are like collections of all the work they've done for the year. You can see here, just searching up. Super cool, and you can use it definitely for inspiration. You can click Discover and start to search out different things, so you can click Illustrator, or Graphic Design or whatever, and you can search. I can go to the search bar as well "Logo design 2019." You can see what pops up, all these cool stuff. Definitely check that out. Another one of my favorite ones is called Brand New. This is an awesome site, It's actually called underconsideration.com/brandnew/, keep that in mind. I'll put the link on the screen. Mostly famous logos, or big company logos that go through a re-brand or a redesign. What happens is they show it on this site and what they do, they review it and people can vote. You can see here one of the big ones is Mailchimp, lassy. I'll click that, and see what happens. It's really cool to see the before and after picture. You can see, look, this is the before, and this is the new rebranding of MailChimp, which looks super awesome. Give you some explanation, and then it shows you a bit of the images and the reasoning behind the design. A bit about the brief, they did some illustrations, which is super cool. I'll show you some of the marketing as well. definitely check on this side. It breaks it down, and it gives you examples of proper corporate and big brand names, which is super awesome. Definitely check that out. Another cool site is called AWWwards.com. That's AWWwards with the three Ws. They have a lot of stuff on web design mainly. But sometimes they got logos like for example, that had this cool blog called a recent one from the see here 99 Creative logo Designs for Inspiration, you can see here animated logos, which I like, even this one, that's super awesome, that's cool. These are all from this year, they're modern. It's a great site to look at other projects as well because they do really cool stuff. Plenty of logos there, go check out AWWwards, and you will see they have a lot of competitions and things like that. They do a lot of ratings where they rate, different types of projects and web design stuff, so definitely check them out. Then of course there's Instagram because I'm always on Instagram. There's so many different sites, but a few ones that I've been looking at lately, one is called Logo Bloom. They have challenges, but they have so many cool logos here, I love it. Look all different styles, different types, they've got some monograms they've got some badge styles. Just go on Instagram and type in logo into the search bar and you'll find so many different accounts. Like logo inspirations, logo archive, logo passion, like there's so different many, but here's just a couple that I use. I also love Badgedesign as well. Almost at 100,000 followers, it's pretty interesting. Look at these cool badges, that also I love the texture, how to do that, it's awesome. We've got some vintage ones, and some more modern ones, topographic. So many cool designs. These are some places you can go for some inspiration online, and then of course there's books and stuff like that. But this is just a quick way to get inspiration for your logo design.
3. Getting Ideas with Thought Maps: One of the first thing that I do before I start any design is; start to do some research and start to do some mind-mapping because we have so many ideas and thoughts in our head that we have to get it out. If you're not doing it on paper, which I used to do a lot, then there's a few apps I'll show you now to create some nice mind maps. What we want do? We want to draw out the ideas we already having a minds or thoughts regarding the logo design or the style or the audience, whatever that is. We want to expand that out into a mind map. You can call it a thought tree, an idea tree, a brain map. It doesn't matter whatever you want to call it. This site is called whimsical.com. If you go to that site, you can create free boards. You can also create like a wireframe, flowchart and stuff like that. All you do is when you sign up, you can create a mind map. You click new mind-map, and you'll get this page pop up. I am just going to zoom in here. What I have done, I am basing this off one of the logos you will create in this class, which will be the logic logo design, which is just based on a video streaming service where people can upload their videos to specifically for like gadget and take reviews of logs base in that genre. Obviously, just made up just for the purpose of this class. What I've started off with, you can click this white box and you can choose some of these settings. You can actually change the style of how the lines appear. So if I zoom out, you can see it can get vertical. If you're a type of person that likes this, and likes to see it visually, you can do that. I can switch it back by clicking back and make it horizontal. I can also make the connections angular and just straight if I want, but I like it curvy. You can add links and you can add all these other things as well. You can have little icons as well, which is pretty cool. From that what I do, I start to just think of things that are in my head and start to write it out. What you can literally do, just click here and you get this little button on the right hand side, you can click that, and then you can type whatever you like. Then from this, you can just click it and it can make more connections. If you [inaudible] write anything and click off, it will just get rid of them. I just can click again and change it and just type whatever [NOISE]. I can also select the top box, and I can change colors and do whatever I want. It's super handy. Make it green. The point here is just to be rough, you don't want to be too focused. You can see I'm just playing around with one ID. It's about video streaming and videos online, I am thinking of like video, okay, a Play button. That reminds you of YouTube. YouTube has a red button, subscribers, or a play button like a triangle, so I'm thinking of a pyramid. I stretch it as far as I can. Obviously, this was done pretty quickly. The more time is spent on it, you extract different words. You just want to create word associations, that's all you want to do. You can see here are some examples. Start with camera. You can see that's Sony and all that stuff. Start breaking it down together. If I go over here, I got technology or gadgets or I think drones, oh cool drones, wings then I start thinking of planes. So you want to think of all these different words because you could actually use that in your design. Once again, we got streaming here, and then it makes you think of an online audience, connection. What would connection look like? Would that be like in a interchanging lines? Would it be like a globe? It could mean so many different things. Another main tool I use is called notion. You can use it for both Mac PC and mobile and on desktop as well is, which is pretty cool. But you can have all these different work spaces. Primarily, you can create a page, you can create tables and all that cool stuff. I usually make a page and write notes of the client projects on the brief. I'll break it down very simply in here. Yeah, I start of talk about like the goal, a bit about what the actual design is going to be about, like what's the business? What's the name? Does it have a tagline? What's the target audience? I can move the columns as well here, and what's that goal as well. I just start to write out words, whatever I'm thinking straight away and then start to spend a bit of time doing that. You can spend up to 30 minutes, an hour, a couple hours. It doesn't have to be too long, which is up to you how much you want to develop and how big this column is. Honestly, I can just start typing. I can add like headings. I can also add to-do lists. You can get all these options. I can add bullet lists, I can add a numbered list or a toggle list whatever. Maybe I want to type in video, and then I can click this and start to add more notes. It starts having that, you can add a list like this and I can close it, which is super handy. You get the point, it's pretty easy. It's a really good note-taking app and it's free as well this one. You are limited to 1,000 words on a page, I think, something like that, but you can just pay like five bucks a month, it's pretty cheap. That's the two sites that I use. You can use it to get IDs, track your mind maps, and start to generate different types of word associations that you can use to [inaudible] your logo.
4. Monogram Logo Construction: In this part of the class, I will be showing you how to create a monogram style logo. You can see here I'm using three letters, but a monogram is typically two letters or three letters. You can probably do four, but that would be a bit tricky. With a monogram, is typically your initials, so, your first name and last name. For this, I did MDC, which is Mirror Design Code, so, you can see it's three letters here, and you can see the construction here. I'm going to show you how to create it from scratch just using basic shapes in Illustrator, and just using some new colors. You can see here MDC, you can see it pretty clearly, and then you can see in a different color forms and shades from one color in white and black. Then you can I added a bit of a stroke there just to make it more clear. You can see it reversed and with a bit of texture. Monogram is super cool. It's got that vintage and tiki vibe to it. It works really well if you're doing that type of client work, you can use as a modern style like a badge. It works well on t-shirts in smaller sizes and that type of thing. Monogram can be used for multiple uses. It's a cool way of doing a logo, and it's good to do it as a secondary option as well, just to have something different and unique. I love combining letters. One of the things I would add is that, it can be a bit tricky if some letters don't match and work well together. You might have to find letters that work well. That's why you could do a bit of research, and you can look around into that stuff. But I recommend if you're going to follow along with this part of the course, then what you do, just use your first name and last name. You can use your middle name if you want to do three letters, if you want to challenge yourself but, if you just stick with two, it will be a lot easier and see what you can create with what you have. What I did, is went on Pinterest and I found a lot of styles that I did like. I typically like this blocky style of monogram, very thick, very cool. You can see I liked the little descenders and ascenders, that little flourishes on the ends. As you can see here, just really simple, and clean, and nice. It works well. You can see how they add these little shading just to make the letters more clearly ensure that it gives an illusion that it's into looping with each other. Even for this one, this is pretty cool. See how it gives that illusion that it's coming under the H and the T stuff. You can see people apply it to a more like retro vintage style as well. I did some research, looked around, got some inspiration on Pinterest, which is super cool. Then what I did, I did some sketches as well. You can see here the sketches that I did, and I just took a picture with my iPhone, nothing fancy. I just started off with doing some basic ones. Originally, I was just going to do my name, but then I figured I might as well to do my company name, which is [inaudible] , which is technically my last name. I just did some basic blocky sketches as well as doing thin as well. I like just sketching with the lines into some path because it's easy and faster, so, I recommend doing that. They're very rough, nothing too crazy. Then you can see that, I started to like this type of lockup P, as you can see in the middle and just playing around there. I could have done a lot more sketches but, I had a picture in my mind of what I want, and then I decided to do this. You can go ahead and do sketches as well if that helps you, you can try some of that. But we're just going to use the basic shapes really to create this monogram here, and that's all you need. Let's get stuck into it. I'm just going to press "Tab" to bring up my toolbar because it wasn't there. You go to Window, and to get up the toolbars, you can just get up to the top here and click "Toolbars" and go to Advance or Basic, whatever you want to use. We're just going to be using most of the tools from here. First off, the shortcut key for rectangle tool is M, you can go to the left and see the rectangle tool there. What I'm going to do, is start to create the M. I can just use this as a guide as you can see. I can refer back to it. I'm going to start off with this rectangle. I'm still drawing a rectangle not too thick, just like that. I like to keep my monograms in a single width, it just makes it a bit easier, and then I customize it later on and edit it, fix it up later. I'm just going to hold Alt and Shift and that'll duplicate it. I'll place my mouse over the corner and you'll see a little rotating arrows. Then I can click and drag holding Shift and then it should rotate at a 45 degree angle and just flip it, so, it's horizontal like this. What I'm going to do, I'm going to drag it to the top, and now we have the top part of the M. What I'm going to do now is select the shape and go to the edges, you can see all the anchor bar points and things like that, which you can drag in. Drag that point in, like this, maybe make it a bit short like this, cool. Now what am going to do, I'm going to duplicate the left bar, bring that across, and an M typically doesn't go like this. This is two blocky, so, what I'm going to do, I'm actually going to shear it. The way I do this, is I select this "Bar", I press "A" for the direct selection tool, and that's pretty much the white mouse button which you can see in the top-left toolbar, it's a white little mouse button and allows me to select just anchor points, so, if I click and drag, I can select these top two anchor points. Now what I'm going to do, is left click on one of them holding Shift and dragging my mouse, and just slowly bringing it across like that until I feel like I have a nice angle, like this. Then I'm just going to select this shape and just bump it to the left, which is super cool. You can see there, if I'm happy with that, that's fine. I might bump at a bit more because I like having a bit more space to work with here. That looks good. What I'm going to do now, is I'm going to to select this and I'm going to duplicate this, so, I don't have to recreate it, it will just save me time. I'll press "O" on the keyboard and that's the reflect tool, which is on the left. So on the left you can see my mouse is over it. It's like two triangles together, that's the reflect tool. Now what I'm going to do the reflect tool, I'm going to hold Alt, left-click on an anchor point, typically in the middle, so, make sure you press "O" hold Alt, left-click once, and make sure you select all your shapes as well. I want to click "Vertical", and you can see, is going to make a copy of all those shapes once you press the Copy button. Don't, press Okay, make sure you press Copy or else it won't work. Press that and then boom, you have this. I'm just going to select all the shapes, drag it across, and I'm just going to zoom in holding Alt and just using my mouse wheel to zoom in, and then I'm going to make sure that it snaps together like that. If things are not snapping, you can go to View, make sure Smart Guides are on and make sure Snap to Point is on. You can turn Snap to Pixel off as well, unless you're using a grid. If I turn on the grid, you can see here, there's a grid there which is also a pretty handy as well, so, I can leave that on Snap to Grid if I want to. Awesome, there we have it. We have our M so far. If we need a customize it, then we can, but for now, it's totally cool. You can see how all these shapes are separate now. That's totally fine because what we're going to do is, some things will overlap with each other, but we can also just plus then later on, but for now it's totally fine. Now what I'm doing, I'm going to to create the C really quickly. I'll do the same thing. I'll select this bar, press "Control C", "Control F", rotate it. I'm going to change the color to a lot of gray so we can see what we're doing. I'll just bring it to the front and place it somewhere in the middle there, and what I'm going to do is hold Alt and select the middle part of the bounding box and holding Alt clicking "Dragging Out", and it should double like that, as you can see. I'll duplicate it holding Alt and Shift and I'll click and drag it downwards. Now we have that shape. Then I'll just duplicate one of them, rotate it again. I'm just repeating the process to create all the shapes. That's why it's crucial that you sketch first so you know where you're going to be placing all the letters and shapes. You can see here I've got my C here, just going to check that it's wide enough, if not, I can always change it, but that's looking fine to me at the moment. Cool. That's looking good. Now I'm going to create the D. The D is pretty much the same thing. Just flipped around. I'll select these shapes, press "Control C" "Control F", rotate, and I'll just move it all the way so you guys can see what's happening. I'll change the color to a lot of gray as well. You can always group the shapes as well, so, I can press "Control G", or "Command G", which is the same thing if you're on a Mac or PC. I can just group it together, which just makes it easier. You can always ungroup things as well by holding Shift and pressing Control Shift G. All the options in Object as well, so, you can see, and edit as well. You got groupings, paste in some of that. What I am going to do, I am going to press "A" for the direct selection tool and just drag this little shape down here, I will drag this one down like this extend it out because I want the D, overarching that C. The key is not to scale it because if you group things or the shape or you scale it like this, what is going to happen? It is going to increase the width of the shape and we do not want that, that is why I am using the direct selection tool, just use the anchor points to extend shapes so it does not change the width, I have more control over what is happening. What I am going to do, I am just going to drag all these shapes, holding shift, just the D in the C shapes and just drag them down a bit like this, I want to extend these shapes out a bit as well, I am happy with i, cool, that is looking good. Now what I am going to do is I am actually going to add the little flourishes on the end, which is super fun. You can also play around and you can add different types of largest, but I am just going to show you a simple way of doing it, we are going to make a rectangle, press"M", hold Alt and shifts to drag it out. Make sure it is the same size as this or you can duplicate one of these shapes if you want so to match the size, the width of the other shapes, I am going to drag this out, I am going to press ""A, select any of the anchor points on the top, you will see if you are in a [inaudible] , which you should be, you can get these little white circle. What you want to do is you want to drag it all the way down or inside and you will get this slight cut pizza slice shape. Now what I am going to do, I am going to select it, use the ref-lux tool again, which is super helpful. Hold all left-click ones so I can see what is going to happen, it is just easier doing it this way instead of just doing it blindly, then you can see vertical preview and copy. Now we have this cool shape P, which we can use, I will group these shapes together, select it and press control G. I will then rotate it and I will match it like that, because this is groups, I can scale it down together, so I will hold "Shift", select any of anchor points on the bottom there, and I am just going to scale it down like that, I am going to press "I" for the eyedropper tool and just sample this color here to change the color, and then we have our little descender, little flourished thing, whatever you want to call it, I am just going to duplicate it and do the same thing for all the other shapes, and our constituent duplicated four like that and then just change the colors. I am just keeping it very simple, you can create yourself, but, if you have time, you can experiment with this one, you can maybe add it on the M as well. They can see it looks a bit funny because you see it is not connected and just go straight and cuts down, for me I just let that out. What I am going to do now, I am also going to scale this down, I will select these anchor points and drag them down, just to make them more readable. You always want to make sure with the monogram that it is readable, that is how we add some shadows and things lead and cut some pots out, just say lead has become legible because that is very important, especially if it is going to be a key logger. Once I have added all the liberal end bits, what I can start to do the overlapping parts that I want, this might take a little bit of time, but what we are going to be using is the shape good a tool to cut out past that we do not need. First up, the letter M is the key pot or the key letter, this is one that is why it is the biggest, it is the dark color here as well, but it needs to be the one that is most prominent, I am just going to quickly hold "Shift" and group these together just so what is in front so you guys can see that what I want to do before I start to do the overlapping is I am just going to start to make this a bit more, wider some of these shapes, drag these shapes down a bit, just to give it more space for the D, just to give them more space there, then bump that down. What I want to do, I want to have this C going through the M, which I like that effect, what I am going to do is bring this shape to the front, the shortcut key is Control Shift and the left or right square bracket. The left square bracket brings it down, the top right square bracket brings it up, you can see, I am bringing it up and down. The shortcut key, you can find it if you go to objects and then Menu section on the top, you can go on a range and you can use any of the options, I prefer to use the shortcuts cause just quite faster instead of clicking every time to do that, you can send all way to the back, bring all of the fluid, but you can just do it in increments. What I am going to do, I want to have this pot coming through like that, what I am going to do is select the shape, I am just going to drag it in and make a duplicate as well, I have got the shape here. I want it coming under one of these little bars in the middle bar section of the M, what I am going to do, I am going to grab the anchor points, I am going to match the anchor points to this angle. If you have smart guides on it should snap because I turn back my grid on snap to grid, you can see it is not snapping properly, it is good example to show you, see how it will not go, just snap to the grid itself, attend the grids and you can see the little lines you might not be able to see it, but you can see the lines there, I can go back and turn snap the pixel off because I do not need it now. What I am going to do is snap this and then snap that, it shows snap exactly to the bar how I wanted. I will do the same for this one as well, just like that, you can see we have this cool overlapping effect with the sea, I love that. It is awesome. When he starts, I would like effects in job shadows and things like that looks cool, that is overlapping, the bottom section as well is fine. Now we are going to start to work on the D, with the D we want to have the overlapping of the heat, I am just going to get up. I will select this shape because it is, I am just going to quickly ungroup it. I am going to drag this in like this, I will duplicate this square. I got one shape here and one shape here, and I am going to bring that shape on top of the M. Now you can see, we have got two shapes, or you can just have this one shape and just bring it, say had this shape over the M, it looks like the D is coming through, and with the D, I decided not to have the main stem of the bar, that is going horizontal. That is going vertical, and just because it might look a bit weird here, and it will be tricky sources let it, but you can still see the main shape of the data, and the C is pretty much similar. We had that overlapping through there, and then what we want to have is we want this part of the C to overlap this, so I am just going to bring this shape here, duplicate it, holding" ALT and shift", realigning it, bring it forward, control shift, right square bracket to bring that in front. Now you can see the C is overlapping that D pot and the D is behind the C there, it looks like the D is further in the background the C in the middle and the M is like the permanent shape and everything is into looping with the M, but there is so many ways you can do it, this is just how I decided to do it. But, the more you experiment and play around, then it is going to be sweet. Just make sure that everything is connected, you can see I am just zooming in and fixing things up here and there, just so it is all aligned, because we want it to be neat and professional, let me clean it up later, it is going to be good. That is pretty much the main parts of the monogram. Now what we are going to do is create Little Shadows, and we are also going to start to round off some of these shapes and sought to clean up some of these shapes here up. Another key thing to remember though, is that you do not have too many shadows and overlap too much because it might not be legible, but we are going to add shadows in certain personal everywhere where there is an overlap, you can see here like we can have a shadow there, we had a show there whatever shape is on top of another shape, you can potentially put a shadow there and cut it out, but it just depends, you want to make sure that it is legible, unreadable. Say first what I am going to do, is start to make little rectangles, I am just going to make them white for now, because the thing is, we can always, I do not want to distort the string does shapes yet because then we can make a mistake will be hard to go back and off to control everything. Before I just stopped to add this shape, I will make a duplicate, I will select everything hold "ALT and shift" just to duplicate the monogram, and then now I have sought to add the shading, I will add a watch box there. I will just make it white because the background is white for now, just so you can see it, just so you can see what I am doing as well. I will add one shape here, I will duplicate, this shape this square. I will change the color so you can see what is happening. Once again, I am going to snap it, press "A" for the direct selection tool, select the anchor point and just drag it to the angle of the stem or the bow. I can eyeball it as well optically and then I'll make this white-. From my swatches, I'll click on the white swatch to make it. I just want to make sure that I keep the same consistency in width on all the shadows. So I'll duplicate this shadow over here, and just so I get a general idea I can see. Like this because it's an angle, I have the optically do it. So you can see that it matches, bump this one like that. Cool, yeah, that's looking good. So you've got one shadow, two shadow, three shadow, and one more over here. Make it a bit wider and there all the key shadows that I want to add, I can add more if I want to but I feel like these keeps the legibility and it doesn't overwhelm the logo design. You can see it's balanced like I'm pulling it all over. So I've got a couple here and then on the right side as well. So it's balanced. So the white space is fairly balanced, I guess. So cool. Now we've done all that, I'm going to duplicate it and now I'll just start to clean up some of the stuff and I'm making round some of the corners. So what I'll do, you can see some of these shapes. So I'm going to select the D here. What I'm going to do is go to my Pathfinder tool windows and go to Pathfinder. As you can see here, mine is on the right here as you can see the little board. It's the first one. This is just going to unite them. I also said that we can use a shape that a tool, you can do that as well. So if I select these two shapes, I can hold "Shift M." You can see that little plus if I hold "Alt" or "Option", it will become a minus. But I can just click and drag and plus those shapes together. So you can see like that. But you can see with the shape letter tool, if you plus Shift and shape, all certain shapes or group and things like that, it might bring it forward or change the arrangement of where it is in the layer thing. So you can see here, I just did it and now it's above, but I have to bring it below the M, as you can see now. So that's just a quick tip as well, just to keep in mind, when you're doing this. I'm going to select these ones. Now, I'm just going to drag them in because you don't make it too imbalanced, I want to make sure that it's like a square. So you can pretty much see it's like a square almost and it's not some weird shape. So I'll plus these together. Bring that up. I can plus those together. Some of the shapes we can leave as is for now. Plus these together. That's one shape. The M is a little tricky because everything's overlapping with it, so if I plus this one, it should be fun, plus this one. So if there's one shape that's on top and one below, it's not going to work. So you can just leave the shapes like that. Of course I'll plus all the main shapes. What I'm going to do now, I'm just going to quickly duplicate it, just bring these across. Duplicate this. I'll select certain parts of the M that I want to round off like these top anchor points. If you go to the top corner or in the middle of Illustrate up the top here, you can see it says Corners, once you select the anchor points, you can actually put in a number like, I'm going to put 10 pixels. Now you can see it's rounded off those corners. I just like having it rounded, it feels nice. I'm going to round off the D as well. So it doesn't look like a block. D is on an offset, I'll have to bump that up or we can use a little white circle and drag it in like that. So I can drag all the way that in. I can also round off this little pit as well if I want, so let us go back, select it. I'll do 15 pixels for that. For this corner you can see I can't do it because these are not plussed. So what I will have to do, is plus that together, I'll just use the shortcut to plus it because I have an action. Now, I'll make it the same as this corner, so that was 15 pixels. Select this anchor point, go to the top, while there I'll type in 15, plus enter, and it rounds off this little corner there. So that's the D, look at the nice capital D. Another thing with the monogram is make sure you keep all the letters uppercase or if you're doing all uppercase do lowercase, but typically monograms stick with the uppercase because it looks better and is more readable. I can also round off these corners here if I want to like that. That looks cool. See now it's looking good. So I'm just going to of duplicate this one, just so we can always go back if we make mistakes. Now, what I'm going to do, I'm going to start to cut out some of these. I'm going to cut the shadows off now. So what we're going to do, I'm going to use the shape letter tool, press "Shift M" to select the shape letter tool. I'm going to hold minus. So to get the minus popped up, once you're in the tool, you see it recognizes these different shapes in the illustrator. But you want to hold Alt or option, depending if you're a Mac or PC and where I put the white boxes, I'm going to minus them off. If you can't see, and if it's easier for you guys, you can always just change the color so you can see what you're doing there. Now what I want to do right here, I'll just click Minus. We can see it Minus this one for some reason. I can always just get to fix that. Select these two shapes, minus that off, I'll select the orange shape and the D shape, minus that off, and then this one. So now what we can do is I can start to change the color. So what I'd like to do is a short-cut. I'll press "Control G". I'll double-click. Now you can see if I go in here, I can select just stuff within Isolation Mode. So I'm in Isolation Mode. So I'm just using these shapes here. So if I select stuff, it won't select anything in the actual document. So I'll press Y for the magic one tool, this pretty much allows us to select the same color. You can also go to select up the top and click on "Same". You want to select it by Fill Color, which is the easiest. So now if I select the black, it's going to select all the black shapes, and then I can just change the color. So I can make that orange. I select the gray color, it will select just the C-shape. I can change it to a dark color there. I can do the same for the D as well and I'll just change that to a darker orange or a brown-y color. There we have it, it looks pretty cool with the colors. I've noticed I didn't round off these corners here, so I can go ahead and round off that and I can just press "Exit" for escape to get out of the isolation mode. I'm just going to duplicate this. So now if you want to put it on a different background color or whatever, you can put it on gray if you want. What I'll do is, well, I'll make a black version and I'll select all these shapes now. I can actually plus them all together. So what I want to do is go to my Pathfinder tool and press Unite, which is the first shape mode here. It should plus them all together and I'll make it white. Just like this. So it looks very complex, but it's actually really simple. I can just do for orange version if I don't want to do colors. Just like that, it's really simple. If your lines or spacing is making it not legible, what you can do is just add a stroke to it so I can go to my Stroke panel. So again, go to Windows Stroke to open that up and I'll put a five stroke and I'll make it black, make it whatever color is on the outside of the actual thing. So I can bump that up. Another key to remember as well, if you plus it altogether like you're not at all, it doesn't add the stroke to every shape. So if I go back and I'll show you what I mean, go back here and I'll make it all black or white. Drag this. You can see this one is not a plus yet, but I can still add a stroke to it. So you can see whatever shapes are not plus-ed together yet, we'll add the stroke to it. But just remember you might stuff some parts out, so make sure, wherever you've connected the shapes, that's the way you're going to see the strokes there. So with the added strokes and shadows, you can see it looks super cool. It's very clear and I can see the letters there and you can add some texture. I can add texture from one of my texture packs. I'll add this little clothy, and you can see that it's a bitmap, not a vector but I can trace it if I want. There you have it, it looks super cool. So that's how you create a monogram. Hope you guys enjoyed this style of monograms. If you decide to do this logo, then you can do that and put it in the project and that will be super cool.
5. Geometric Logo Construction: In this part of the class, I want to be showing you how to create a geometric style logo. As you can see here, I created a seed logo with a nice logomark and some custom type that I did just using basic shapes. The thing with geometric, there's a few different styles, you can go for more abstract style of variant and minimal style. It just depends what you like. I have some examples here that I finally created as well. I've been using this simple grid. It's on the back, which I'll show you how I created that. You can see some of the different logomarks here that I created. The thing with geometric, it's all about using simple shapes, triangles, circles, squares, rectangles or that type of thing and using the shape tools and illustrator to create a cool mark that is identifiable but unique and different. I'm going to show you how to create this mark here. I'm just going to start off by using simple grid. Remember, a grid is only a guideline. It doesn't have to be used every time you do a logo, but for this style of logo, we using a lot of circles. I want to make sure that we're using that grid just to help us out. First up, you want to press "Control K" or "Command K", and you'll get your preference menu up. You can also go to file or edit and there is a Preference menu there. In the general, you see I've got a keyboard increment here, it's just some four pixels, so you can copy that. Now, if I go on this side is there's all these menus. You want to click on guides and grid. I've honestly just did a four-by-four grid. I did a grid line every 80 pixels and then subdivision is full. That's how I did to set it up. There's different types of grids that you can do in an isometric grid and other ways you can do it, but that's all I've done. 80 and four and then general is just set the four. The increment is so when I press the arrow keys, it jumps on the right thing. For example, now if I zoom in, you should be able to see the lines. If you're not seeing the lines and you might have to go to View and play around with some of these settings here. Make sure that your grids are on. I've go to view. I go to guides. You want to go to grid. You want to make sure that it's showing the grid. The shortcut key's the "Control plus" and the "Comma" button. If I press that you can see it'll get rid of the grid there. If you want to make sure that's turned on, you want to make sure that snap to grid is turned on as well. But you can always turn it off. Sometimes I do that when I'm doing some of the leaf design. I turned it off just so I can connect some of the strokes together, which is totally cool. You want to make sure that your smart guides on as well, which helps you out. It's super cool. Now, let's get stuck into it. We'll start off with doing, the leaf here. First off, I'm going to press "L" for the Ellipse tool, which is located on the left-hand side. We can use Shape tool section. I press "L". What I'm going to do is hold "Alt" and "Shift". I want to try and select on these darker gray sections, where the grid is like [inaudible] just to make it easier. I'm just going to drag out a circle and I want to make it black for now. Black stroke. I'll turn off the field there and I'll bump the stroke up to about 10. That's cool. I'm going to use this circle as a reference point. This will be like the middle of the flower. I'm going to duplicate this circle by holding "Alt" and "Shift". Then I'm going to click and drag off it, like this. To make the leaf, what I'm going to do is select this circle, duplicated it again by holding "Alt" and "Shift" and dragging across. What I'm going to do, I'm just going to bump it. You can go left and right on the arrow keys to make the bump. I'm going to select and probably do. That thickness looks alright. Then what I'm going to do, I'll select these two together. Press "Shift M" for the shape builder tool, and then hold "Option" to minus those edges off. The shape and the tools on the left hand side. You can see, if I'm speaking too fast, it's on the left-hand side, which you can see there. You can also go to your Path Finder tool as well, if you're familiar with that and just cut them out. You can select this option here and it should cut out the edges. The third shape mode would get to the same thing. What I'm going to do now is just grab this. I'm just going to bump down the arrow keys. You can see I'm using my guides as a guide there. I might scale this up a little bit as well just to make it a bit longer there. Looking super cool. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to cut part of the stroke. If you can see, if I zoom in, you can press "Control Y" or "Command Y" to go to outline mode. It's also in the View section as well. You can select it from here, to go into the outline mode. You can see here that doesn't align up, that's totally fine. If I exit the outline mode, you can see it's still connected. Later on it's going to be fine because what we're going to do is we're going to be able to just expand all the strokes and turn it into one shape. If you want to join the things, you just go to View, turn off, snap to grid, and then you should be able to connect it. It's all aligning to the stroke. Then once again you can turn back snaps to get on. You can see the shortcut there, snap to grid to ease out, Shift plus control and the comma. If I turn that on with the shortcut key, you can see, it turns on. You can see here just be mindful of that part of the shape. What I'm going to do is actually round that off. I'll go to my Stroke panel and I'm going to click on the "Rounds Cap". You see in the cap section you got three options. Click the middle one to round the caps off. Make sure you select the shape. You want to round the corner. You can see how it's on the edge there. It's popping out. What I'm going to do is round it off. I'll select the leaf, click on my Stroke panel, which you can find on the Window section, Window stroke. I'm going to go to my corner and round that off. It should get rid of it there, as you can see. It's actually rounded off the top ends a bit. You can see. Pointy, click that, and it rounds it off. It will be useful. What I'm going to do now, I'm going to go zoom in, press "C" for the Scissor tool. I'm going to go in and actually cut part of this bit here. Then I'm going to select these part and delete that. You can see we have this part, it's cut off. Then what I'm going to do is press "P" for the Pen tool. Locate this anchor point. I can keep going to align mode. If you can't see it, which is Control Y. I'm just going to left-click once. For this, we're going to have to turn off the grid mode again, so go to View, turn snap to grid off so I can select the path there. I'll left-click once. Then I'll go about half way here, using the square as a guide. I'm going to hold "Shift" and just drag that up like this to get a nice curve. If I want to edit the curve, I can press "P" and then drag this handle down a little bit. You can see, holding "Shift" there. We get this shape of like a custom leaf here. I want to make sure that I select these. You want to make the cap round as well. Cap means at the end of the path, it's going to round that off. Corner and cap, you can round those off to make it look nicer. Once you have the leaf, what we can do now is actually rotate it. You can see. I'm just going to make sure that there's no extra copies there. Keeping it clean. I have the leaf there. I'm going to use the center of the circle as my guideline for this. I'll select the leaf, press "R" for the Rotate tool. Go to the middle of the circle and your smart guides will tell you it's the center. Holding "Alt" or "Option" if you're on a Mac, left-click once, you'll get a box pop-up. Now, for this logomark, I have six sides. What you want to do, if you want to make it even, you got to make sure that adds up to 360 because 360 is a radius of a round circle. Because I want six, I put the angle on 60, as you can see here, and it's giving me a preview. Make sure your preview's ticked on. It's going to move it to there. But you don't want to press "Okay", you want to press "Copy". This will make a copy of that leaf. Before I do anything, what I'm going to do now is press "Control D" or "Command D", which is going to duplicate that same action that we just did. It's going to duplicate the leaf and it's actually going to repeat that rotation. I'll press it on the keyboard, holding it down and just going "Control D". There we have it. It's all duplicated. It looks really cool, looks awesome. Now, we're going to do the same for the little circles on the sides there. For this one, I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to go to the fore middle part of the leaf here. Make a circle. A reasonable size. I'm going to place it where I know it's going to land somewhere in the middle here. It can probably go down a bit more. I'm going to do the same thing. Press "R" of the Rotate tool. You can also go on the left-hand side as well, to find it. In the middle of the toolbox section. I'll go to the middle, I'll hold "Alt". But this time, the angle, I don't want it to be 60. I actually want it to be 30 because it's half of 60, so we want it to be in-between the leaves. I'll do that and press "Copy". I'll press "Control D" again to do the same thing as I did before. We have our circles there. Now, I'm going to delete all the ones that I don't want. I can go hold "Shift" and select the ones in the leaves. I can delete that is by pressing "Delete". Now, I just have all these nice little circles. They can be seen as seeds or pollen, or that type of stuff. It looks pretty cool. Before I continue, I'm actually going to just scale up these circles because I don't really like, they're a bit too small. I'm going to go to object, transform and scale. I'm going to go to about maybe 130 percent. Press "Okay". I'll just repeat that process for the rest as well. I'm not sure if there's a faster process to do this, but if I select them all and scale them, it actually will scale them and actually move them out of their place. It scales from the bounding box of the object. This is why I'm doing it manually. Really quickly. There we have it. We have all the main parts. Now, we're just going to add a circle in the middle. I can get this circle and duplicate it. Go "Control C", "Control F", and now I have a duplication of that circle. I can scale this in. I'll go to View and make sure my snap to grid is back on. It's snapping. You can see to this grid here. Just makes it easier. I'll keep it like that. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to add some strokes. I'll press "P" for the Pop tool. I'm just going to click here once and I'll left-click once. You can see that it connected the leaf in that. I'm going to just cut that, so go "Control C", click that point, so it cuts it off. I just have this path here, as you can see. I'm going to rotate this as well. I'm going to press "R". Select the middle, hold "Alt". I'm going to do 30 and do copy. You can do it like this. You can have heaps of lines, which looks fine. There we have it. I'm going to duplicate this. I'm going to select everything, go to objects, and I'm going to go to expand. You will get a box pop-up and you just see, you'll say fill or stroke. That means it's going to expand anything that's a fill or stroke in the objects. I'll press "Okay". Now, you can see it turns everything into shapes. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to go to my Pathfinder tool and then click the first sign which is unite. You can see all the shapes just connected into one shape. Now, we can see we have a final logomark. I can bring it out here, like this. We can save it as a PNG, we can use it as a logo. Play around with the colors here. Just like that, we have a cool geometric flower mark that could be used for like an organic brand or a juice business, or an oil business, anything related with that type of vibe. But it's just up to you. This is how to create a logomark, using some bit of grids and having it within abstract geometric field.
6. Wordmark Logo Construction: Hey, in this part of the class, I'm going to be showing you how to create these cool word mark, and we're just going to be using basic fonts and some cool techniques, to just customize the font and make it look really nice. The reason why we use word marks is it gives a more premium fill to the logo. It also works really well when you have like one word, or maybe you have a long business name or company name, that's when it works really well. You can see in this example that I'm going to show you how to create it's more feminine, and the whole idea behind this is that it's a entrepreneur community for women based in the creative space, beauty space and fashion space, so that's why I went for this feminine look. I'll talk about strategies about building wealth, running their business and stuff like that. You can see how I just put a little description on the side, which is good to just keep in mind, always focusing on the target, especially if it's a client or something like that. Then I've got a basic color palette, I like this pastelly palette. Really subtle, really nice. Just got that off, Adobe Color, which is really easy to find. You can also go and Google as well and just do a search. On my other classes I mentioned some ways to get color. First up, let's start off with selecting a font. What you always want to do first before you ever start like creating, you want to just lay out heaps of different fonts, but you want to focus on the name itself first. What I do is I do different versions, so I started playing around with the word prosper. Maybe you can do this depending on the company name, and if it's a brand new company, you'll be able to maybe change the name, but if it's not, then don't worry. But what I've done is that I just tested out what would it look like if it had no E or maybe had like a dash between the R, or play around with it in uppercase. I tested it just in a title case with the P. What would it look like in lowercase? So I start testing it out in different versions. I can zoom out, look at it, see what it looks like. See the feel of it, you know what I mean, because a logo is for identification. It's all about what's the vibe I'm getting, you know, what I mean? A quick way to be able to quickly change the font. What I do, I just usually get the Type Tool, press T. I will just scale it up. Then I'll just quickly choose a type font from the top section here you can click the drop down menu and I'll just select the font to start off with, which is totally cool. But what I'm going to show you, I'm going to select this, go to the top left corner and press type. You can have this cool option called change case. If you select that, you can change the case to lowercase, title case, or sentence case. If I click lowercase now, you can see I don't have to retype out the name. I can just select it and it automatically changes a for me. I can get back to the top and do it again. You click on type menu, change case. Then I can do title case. So you can see it made the pay capital already. So that's a cool trick I do. But typically I do this before hand. You can even do it sketching as well. For this logo, I didn't sketch anything because I had a picture in my mind and I think it's easier to do this method. So once you found out your word in the name of the company that like you're stuck on. Then what we're going to do is focus on laying out some fonts. This is typically called a type wall or a font wall, whatever you want to call it. Pretty much what I do is just get one font and then I just duplicate it by holding Alt and Shift, so I can hold on Alt and Shift like this. If you do it once and press Control D or Command D, it'll just duplicate it heaps of times. I'll make a stack of that. Then what I'll do, I'll go to my type menu. So mine is on the right here, but you can go to window, and if you click on type, then the bottom here you can go to a character. Then you can open this little box here. Then what I'll do, I'll select that, do the drop-down menu, and go through the fonts that I feel resonate with the brief and the client and the target audience and the look we're going for. I'll then just get any fonts. But I try and keep it a bit more selective. Because it's like a woman, more feminine type of business, I went with the all different type of font. I went through all the lists, kept duplicating, and then just got a whole bunch of different fonts. I've got some sans-serif ones, like really modern clean ones. I got some scripts as well and Serif fonts, just a whole bunch of different fonts. The reason why I do is this, it's a quick way to quickly look at what I can utilize in use for the logo, instead of wasting so much time, this is a quick way to do it so I can look at everything and see what fits the bill. Then I pretty much go through a process of trial and error. I'll pick some fonts that I like. I'll just hold Alt and Shift just duplicate it and bring it out and see what type of fonts are working, and what could fit the bill really well. Maybe this one. I'm happy to be these fonts here. Then I'll just do a process of elimination. I'll just zoom in and zoom out and just read it and look at it and see what's the best. For this example, I picked this font. It does feel a bit vintage, a little bit retro, but it's a modern serif font that I like. It has a feminine feel and, but it's also bold. It's a community of bold entrepreneurs, women stepping out in business where it's like mastermind group, they encourage each other and like they're doing really cool stuff. So that's why I picked this font here. It also differentiates a bit. It's not just a plain sans serif font, which is typically most startups use these [inaudible] , but that's why I wanted to differentiate between these fun as well. But also it's a fake project, so we can play around. I'll start off with this font here. Now what we're to do we're going to customize it. For this, I'm going to bring my top tool out my character box. I want to tighten up the kerning first. So I'll hold Alt, if you're on a Mac, it'll be option. I'm just going to hold Alt and tap my left arrow key. You can see it's bumping the kerning, which is the shape between the letters. I'll bump that in, not too tight, just a little bit. I can also go in and customize the kerning. Maybe I want to bump R in or whatever like that. Just make sure there's enough spacing and optically with the eye that it looks good. So you can see here on my right-hand side, the box is minus 40 kerning, which is pretty cool. I also might adjust the weight. You can see we've got heaps of weights. This font I am using is called a Magdalena Alt. It's a paid font, we can find it online. You can see it's got all different ways, which is cool. I like using bold fonts, but I don't want to get too bold. So bold will save, bold feels right. I'll go and save for now. Which looks good. Then what I'm going to do, I'm going to duplicate this. Make sure you always make a copy because if you make a mistake, you can always get back. You want to have that option. I'm going to copy this. What I want to do now is actually I want to customize this O to make it feel interesting, add some character to it, but also give it some symbolism and meaning. But first what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select the font. Go to object. I go to type and go to create outlines. The shorter [inaudible] Shift Control O. Once I do that, illustrator is going to pretty much turn these into shapes. It's not going to be readable as a font anymore, it's not live. What I can do is actually zoom in and want to play on these O here, this negative space. First I'm going to create a little star. So what I want to do that is go to my shape options on the left-hand side and click on the Star Tool. What I'm going to do is as I'm clicking and dragging this shape out, don't let go of the mouse and just press down 1. You can also increase the sides of the star, but we want to just go down one and have four points. You can see we have this four sided style. Looks like a ninja shuriken as well. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring these points in. I'll use my Direct Selection tool, which is the white little mouse thing. I will select these two points and bump it inwards twice. Just using my arrow keys, I'll do the other side as well. One, two. I might bump these down as well, so I'll bump them in like that. That's looking cool. I'll then click, and drag, and select all these middle points. Illustrator gives me this little white, little circle here inside of these points after I selected them, and what I can do is round off these shapes now. I can click and drag and it's going to round it off and give me this star-shape. I'm going to scale this down now, bring it inside of that circle. That's looking super cool. I can even leave it like this if I want. Or if I want to get rid of this part of the circle, I can just double-click and go into to Isolation Mode, and I can go in here and just delete these points in the circle and that should get rid of the shape and the circle. Then now what I'm going to do is select the star, go to my Swatches panel, select the white color, and I'm just going to scale it up just like that. Now we have this custom O that looks awesome. We can keep it like the other way if we want, but it's just up to you. You can play around and experiment. Cool. Now we had this. I'm just going to create another copy now. Now we're pretty much done with the main part of the font, notice I'll add the tagline. I'll press T for the Type Tool and type. I'll use the same font because it has a lot of styles, but you can use a Sans-serif font if you want to have that modern just so you have some contrast with the tagline and the logo. I'm going to make it probably regular or medium, and I'm going to scale it down. I use Control Shift and comma and full stop to just drop those down. The spacing and then sizing there. I'm going to bump this up. The cool thing about this word prosper in lower case, it gives me room to play in this space here. You can see it's got a imaginary box here of space, and that's good to utilize for a tagline. I'll type in there the fake tagline, Enjoy flourishing forever. I'll scale it up. I'll also bump the kerning, so I'll hold Alt and bump the right arrow key just to make it a bit more space, not too much though because we want to be readable and we want it to look good. Cool. That's looking good. I feel like the contrast is too much and it won't be readable so I'll bump up the white. Go back to your Character panel, click on the Regular on the drop-down menu. I'm going to click on the higher white. I'll probably go with Medium, that feels a bit better. That's looking awesome. I'll make a duplicate first. To add a little trademark symbol, what I'm going to do is press T for the type tool, click once, and I'm just going to select this text box here, I'll go to Type at the top menu. Once you do that, you want to go down to Glyphs. With Glyphs, you'll get this box pop up. What Glyphs is, it allows you to customize your fonts because a lot of these fonts that are built by professional typography designers, they actually add extra styles to the fonts, and in other languages, they add the little marks on top of the fonts as well. I'm not sure what that's called, but they also add other symbols, so like the ampersands and the copyright symbol and stuff like that. All I have to do is just double-click on any symbol and it's just going to add it. You can see how it just adds it to my text box here that I've selected. I can use any one of them. I'm just going to use the R one, which is the rights to the trademark or the word of the name. You can also use TM, it doesn't matter. I'm going to get that and I'm going to place it somewhere that's not intruding on the logo. We don't want it too close. We just want it on the edge there, and we want it small as well. That's looking good. I can change the white of it as well. If I want, I can make it lighter or more bolder. That's totally cool. I'm going to bring this back there. Now we have our logo. Now what we can do is just finalize it and just add the color to it. For this bottom part, I want to make sure that this font is not live as well, so what I'll do is I'll go to Type and go to Create Outlines again. Now this is the shape as well as you can see. What I can actually do now is actually cut out this star-shape from the circle. One way to do that is if I select everything, I can press Shift M. You can go to the left-hand side and see Shape Builder Tool. What I'm going to do, I'm going to hold Alt, which is going to put minus and I can left click once and it's going to minus the shape from the circle. Another way you can do this as well is make the font a compound path, and then go to the shape modes and just minus the front. That's a good way to do it as well. Now I have this font, this font, and this font, and I can group them all together by pressing Control G, or Command G. I can actually make another duplicate, as we can see here. Now I can just place it on some color. I'm going to press M for the rectangle tool, drag out some color, make it green in my Swatches panel, I'll bring this out and I can make it white color or a cream color. I like making different versions so what I'll do, I'll duplicate it and then play around with the color. I'll double-click so I can go inside the group and just play around and see what it looks like. I can play around as well. I can always ungroup things as well, so Control Shift G will ungroup and then I can play around as well. Well, once you're done with this, also make sure that you do the outlines for the little badge there as well just so you don't run into any issues later on if you hand off the file to someone else. Type this. Make it all green, and I'll go to my Transparency panel and go to multiply and get this cool indent effect there. That's how you create a custom typemark. There's so many different styles and ways you can go about it, but it works really well. You can always play around, but I always suggest customizing it and giving it a unique personality. You don't always have to have a tagline either or the trademark symbol. Just depends if it's a startup or a big brand or whatever.
7. Iconic Mark Logo Construction: In this part of the class, I'm going to show you how to create this cool abstract, iconic mark all in Illustrator. I'm showing you how to do it from scratch. I did sketches on it, and the whole idea was to create a play button and it's based on this company called Logic, I just made it up, and it could be for like in the tech company that fixes on video and maybe to have the platform similar to like YouTube or something like that. We created the influences can share their experiences through video so that was the idea for it. It's mainly targeted at, in a majority males, but it can be mixed. You can see it's very abstract, very interesting. We've got some shadows. You can play around with gradients as well. I credit this using some grid lines which I'll show you how to make which makes it super useful. I'll show you all the iterations that you can potentially come up with. The so different styles and designs. You can see some examples just by using a simple grid lines. How many different ideas you can come up with, and it's crazy. You can see here is a couple more here, like this one that I did before. But just showing you guys the process so you can see what the possibilities, and potentials of if you do this. You can see here what I've done. First, I was doing some sketches, and as I'm playing around of several IDs' of the Play button. Just playing around with different shapes using it with just a line. What it would look like if I put some lines in it, and just test it out different angles, different effects. Maybe could shade, put some shade also in areas like this one here or this one and just see different styles. It did a couple of pages there. But yeah, I'm happy how it turned out. First up, what we're going to do, we're going to create these grid lines. What I'm going to do is press P for the Pen tool. I'm going to left-click once, hold Shift and left click again. What I'm want to do, I'm going to go to my swatches panel on the right hand side and click the gray panel, "Gray swatch", which is going to turn this into a gray color. If it's not popping out, it's because it's on the field and not strokes. You select it and press Shift x. Shift x will flip it, and you get the stroke. The stroke can be two points or one point. You want to make it very thin so you don't really want to see it was going to be in the background, which is pretty interesting. What I'm going to do, I'm going to hold Shift and I'll, drag it down. You want to leave some space. I want to press Control D. I'm going to create about seven lines here, which should be enough for our logo. But you can create extra in case it's not enough. Now what I'm want to do, I'm actually just going to make this shorter because it doesn't have to be that long, and I'll scale this up as well like that. Then what I'm going to do now, I'll make it a bit shorter as well. You can actually click and drag and select the endpoints and drop it in. I'm going to select these. I'm actually going to group them together. Press Control G or Command G, if you're on a Mac. I'll press Control C Control F and I'll actually rotate it. We made it a duplicate. I have one 90 degrees, so you want it to be vertical. Then what I'm going to do with this one, I want to rotate it minus 30 degrees because I want to have diagonal lines. What I'm want to do now is I'm going to press R for the rotate tool. I'm going to just find this, the bottom anchor point on left T. I'm going to hold Alt, left click once, and what you want to do, you want to make the angle minus 30. Click the preview button to make sure that you can view the change that you're going to make to these group of lines. Once you've done that, you can press okay. Now drag this up and then what I'm going to do, I'm going to duplicate this group. By doing that, you can press the old tool. So select this, press O for the Reflect tool. Find the center line here holding Alt. You can see you get the option on the reflect box. Make sure preview is on you wanted on horizontal and you want to press copy. Now we have this diagonal group, this group, and we have this straight group here. What I'm want to do, I'm just going to bring this down here and I'm just going to line it up with these other lines. You can see if you press control Y, you can pretty much zoom in and see with the lines all line up. I'm just going to move that so it's right in the middle there, which is great. You also want to go to View and you can turn your smart guides on and snap to point as well. To make sure its all snapping in place. Once you're happy with these guides, what we're going to do, I'm going to make the play button shape. I'm going to use the Pen tool primarily for this. You can use the shape tools on the left T if you right-click and you get to the shape tools there. I'm going to press P and I'm going to just follow these lines, and you can see my smart guide is on so it's going to help me. I want to select a bright color from my swatches and I'm going to locate this part here, left-click once go down here left-click once. Find this location left-click once, left-click once and now we have this triangle play button shape that we have here. What I'm want to do now is I want to make sure that these guidelines are all locked. You can actually group them all together all these gray guidelines and you can see here we've got all these. The reason why we did crisscross with these guides is now we can have all these interesting shapes. For example, if I show you one of the other designs I did, you can see this here, it allows us to create these like blocky shapes like a Minecraft style to make a like 3D or like a building, you can also do that diagonal patterns and stuff like that. It just allows for a lot more versatility, as you can see here. That's why with these guides, you want to create these half diamond shapes. But they always triangles at the end of the day which is pretty interesting. What I want to do from here, I'm going to select everything, make sure nothing's locked so you've got the shape and I got all these. To zoom in, I'm holding Alt. If you're on a Mac option and all you do is you hold this button, and zoom with the mouse which soon zooming really nice and close. What I'm going to from here after you've selected all this by just clicking and dragging, we want to use the shape builder tool. The shape builder tool is located in the left T. If I right-click, you see it's a mouse with two circles. I can actually press Shift M as well for stroke car key. If I put my mouse over once I've select, press Shift M or select the shape button tool, I can click over the shapes. Because we have all these lines selected, illustrator is picking up all the shapes now and it's going to be purely geometric because we've lined up all the lines perfectly and it's going to pick up all these shapes like this which is super cool. Now what I can do is I'll start to left-click and drag to create this backward triangle shaped like this and you can see now we already have one piece of the shape of the puzzle and you can do so many different variations it's crazy. I'll select this once, do this once. This one, this one, these ones will be a shape, and then this one have nothing in it. Now, what I can actually do is, if I select everything here, I can use the shape of the tool, shift in. Another cool trick is that you want to select everything and duplicate it. Just in case we make a mistake, I can always go back here and fix it up. What I'll do, I'll select all this, I can use a Shift M, the shape of the tool and actually hold Option. It will actually minus negatively instead of plus, and I can go and delete all these lines. Another way to do it, is actually group all the lines, and then using the magic wand, or you can go into select at the top and go same. You can select by stroke color, stroke weight. If you make the strokes a little bit thinner, or you make them a gray color, you can select it by color and just lay them all in one go. Another thing as well is you can see some of these lines didn't get deleted, if I just select all these red parts, and lock them, and then I'll click behind and just delete any excess lines that shouldn't be there, as you can see. That's why it's good to do that other method for deleting. There's no extra lines there. It's all clean. If I look at it, you can see it's all geometric. Really sweet. We have our base shape, I'm going to duplicate it holding Alt Shift dragging across there. I'm going to press Shift X, and what I'm going to do is just start to color this gray, so we can see what we're doing here. We've got our base shape, I've done the gray to where I want the lightest color to be, the brightest color, which is going to be the shape, and the darkest colors, are going to be the other shapes there. I'm going to left-click and drag it across. If I also look back at this one, you can see that this thing is plussed. You can always edit and go back, but this area, I'm just going to quickly plus that together. That's one shape now, and you can see for this back part there, these shapes are deleted so I can delete those shapes. So I have my key shape here. I'll duplicate that again, so what I'm going to do now is actually start to color it. I've got a lot of color palettes here that I've gotten, Cool Hue 2.0. You can use the colors from this, what I did, I got one of these blue colors, you just select the hex code, Control C to copy the hex code. I'll go to my swatches panel, double-click on the square, press Control V to paste this in, and you can see the code's there. If I click off somewhere, you can see it's adding color and I'm going to press OK, and it should add the color to my swatches panel, and what I'm going to do to actually add it to my groups, I'm actually going to have to press this button down here. It looks like a little folded paper. I'll left-click that, and you'll see we can make it a global color. It's going to be an RGB because we're just looking at in digital right now, and I'm going to press OK, and you can see here's my swatch. It's just added it. I can drag these drop it into the folder down the bottom here, and now I can use it to color whatever shape I want. You can use this to get nice gradients, which I find super cool. You can use other sites like colors.co, and if you watched my previous logo design class, you'll see all the other resources there that you can find amazing colors. You can see they have amazing colors as well, and you can build your own custom gradients, which is cool. I'll show you how to do that really quick. I'm going to make a box quickly, and I'll slip this yellow color. I don't know what the tint. I'll bump the tint up and what I'm going to do, I'm going to my gradient panel here. What I'll do, I'll actually just select the shape, there's already a gradient here, but if I go to get my swatch, left-click once drag it down, drop it on the little circle here. It will add those to the gradient. I can play around with the sliders here, so you can move the sliders. I can actually press G as well, to left-click and drag my own gradient like this in direction. Or I can just purely play around with this. I can make it a radial gradient. I can use the free-form gradient tool as well. But I'm only stick with the linear gradient for now and the radial because it's just easier. What you do, I select it. I can press the plus button and I can call it sunny gradient. When I make any shape, I can just select the gradients that I've already made, you can see I've made a couple there, just by left-clicking once. Because I already have a gradient, I can go ahead and start to select my shapes, holding shift to form these multiples. As you can see there, it's looking cool. I'm going to duplicate it as well, and just by clicking that we've already done some cool gradients. I'm going to show you how I created this fade shadow effect. To do that, I'm just going to use flat colors. But once again, you can use the gradient color. For example, because this shape is on top, we want to make it feel like this gradient. We want to make the shaded parts next to where it's located. In my gradient tool, you can see I can select an angle, so if I put my mouse over it, and hold Shift, and left-click on this box here, I can use my mouse wheel and it's going to move around the angle of the shape. You can also just type in whatever angle you want like 120 or whatever. I'm going to bring the dark color mode to the edge there. I'll do the same to here. I'll bring this slider up like this, and this is a good way of getting a nice fade. I can also press I for the eyedropper, go click on the other shape with the same gradient, and it should apply the same percentage and angle and everything. Then I'm going to adjust as I go here. This color, I'm just going to select this blue here. I can actually make it a gradient as well and what I like to do with gradients, I flip it around because it adds a nice dynamic there. It gives you this illusion. It feels like this one's on top. But what we're going to do, we're going to do a better way as well to do some nice shadow. I'm going to select the three bottom parts because this is connected. You can make it a purple color. This can be blue, can be teal. This color can be like a darker purple. Yes, that's cool. So what I'd like to do, is I use the "Pen tools". So I'm just going to move these over here. I'm going to just press "Tab" or press "P" for the pen tool. You see my mouse has changed, my smart cards are still on. What I'm going to do is left-click on this part here. Left-click on this corner here. It should snap. Then I'm going to click off it, and I'm going to make a rectangle shape. Don't worry about being too even. It doesn't have to be. If you want to make it perfect, then you can use a guide, or whatever. But I'm just going do with this, because it is just quicker. and then from this, I'm going to select all the shapes. Press "Shift" m for the shape of the tool. Once again, I'm going to minus this shape, and I'm going to minus that shape. Now I have this shape, and I'm going to select the same color as this. I got this shape, and I'm going to go to my "Transparency panels". I'll bring up my "Transparency panel". I'm going to select a blending mode. Click on this drop-down menu. Where it says "Normal", and then I am going to click "Multiply". Now I call this cool Nice shadow. Gives the illusion that this is floating on top of it. It is like a backwards arrow shape. I can select it. If it looks a bit harsh, what I can do, is drop the capacity to about 60 percent. Typically, I always drop it down by 20 percent. If 80 doesn't look good, I go 60, then I go 40, or even around 30.60 looks good for now. I can select this, so I can duplicate it. I'll press "0" for the reflect tool. Locate this center point, because this is our center here. Right in the middle of this shape. I'm going to hold all left-click one's on the middle anchor. We want to make sure the axis is in horizontal, and I'll press "Copy". Now it essentially flipped the shape and put it on the other side. Now, we have this cool shadow effect here on both sides. Another cool thing as well, is what we can do is, I can duplicate this. I'll hold alt and I'll drag it, and I want to make sure it snaps. I'll zoom in here, and make sure that it snaps in the right place. Because sometimes it doesn't pick it up properly. I'll drop it directly on where that shape is, and I can edit these shadows here. It should be aligned. I'll do the same for here as well. It all zoom in. Don't worry if it's not crazy perfect. If it's not, then you might have to fix your guides at the start. I will just drag this in. Snap that. Because they want to keep the same width. You don't want to have two different widths, like a shadow unless you're doing like these sort of effects and you're dragging it out like that. You can do that as well. But I'm just going for a basic, shading here. The contrast is not as good as I want it to be. I might have to do a darker purple, and even darker one here. I can go to my color over here and I can go to "K", which is black, and make it more darker. There's a lot more contrast there, which is cool. I am just going to drag, snap back these. Some of these panels in here. Just so it's easier, and some more space to work with. So now, if I declare this and place it on a dark background, it is looking really cool. Purple background there. This one's probably the best. I can make it this color is as well, but then these one's, we have to make it lighter. You can play around. There is so many different options you can do. Now once you have this, what can do, you can duplicate it. What I want to actually do is; you see you want to make it scalable, as well as being able to use it for other areas. In case it's unlike a color, or people are using it on a small digital, maybe on a website, some a small icon in the corner or whatever. We want to be able to have this flexibility here. I'm just going to extend the shatter and bring it all the way across like this. Now select it. Minus off any excess. I'll do the same for here. I'll select everything. I will just do credit in case. Select "Everything". These are shaped at a total again, as we've been using, and just minus all that off. I'll just go in here. Delete this little strike, because it was just a tiny bit off, and you can go in and clean it up if it was not a 100 percent accurate then we have that we can use this. I can make it black. I can make it a wide vision saying everything is any color, and it will work. It will still be legible. You've got gradients as well, looks super cool, that's how you create this cool play button icon. What I actually want to do, I'm going to add the logo type as well. I'll press "T" for the title. I'll type in "Logic". I'll bump the kerning in. Hold "Alt" and "left arrow" key to bump the kerning, and the tracking. You can play around with the color, or make it one of these colors here. Remember this purple? I'll go to "Type and create outlines". Now it's a shape. Type to create outlines. Now this is a group. I can ungroup it by pressing "control, shift, G". If I want to change the color of this other tone, the compound path off. Because you can see in the left corner it says compound path. I'll get an object in my menus is to fix these. I will call them pop object, compound path release. Now the top of the eye is now its own shape then I can change the color, maybe to this lighter color then I'll send this, just using my eye there, just to see how balanced it is. A cool trick as well is, if I going to Color Guide. I can click this little wheel here, and all the color groups I have. I can actually play around, with different colors. If I select these, or just shift all these colors here, that I've used. We will create something. That looks cool. It's like different versions. Press "Okay". Then press "No", and you are sweet. And you can do that so many different times to create the different logos then I can put it on a dark background. As you can see there.
8. How to Export Your Logos: I'm going to show you an example of how to export your logo design files. I actually use this cool plug-in and extension called the logo package express. You can see, you can buy on their website. It's called thelogopackage.com. It's super useful. It actually saves you time and it's really easy to use. All you have to do is select the parts of the logo you want and it will export all the RGB files and CMYK files in a PDF JPEG, AI, PNG all for you. It literally packages them all in a folder for you so you can hand it to your clients or hand it up to another designer, which makes it super easy, super neat, and makes the prices a lot smoother. It also convinces the PMS code as well. If you're going to do a custom one color, two color print, it'll give you the code as well. I'm going to show you how to use that. I have my logo here and what I'm going to do, it's okay if it's not all grouped, but I'm just going to quickly group this word mark there and then group with control G to the maxi. I'm going to go to my window and go to Extensions and logo package express. I'll show you how to say the files manually as well not just doing this method in case you don't want to invest in this extension. I just think it's really cool and I've been using ever since I bought it. It's just so cool. What I'm going to do, I'm going to select the whole Logo and click Set Logo in the middle of the box. Make sure you select it, click it, and what's going to happen. It's going to open a new file. You can see it's got the Logo here and now what I want to do is actually set different parts of the Logo. I'm going to select this part and click Set logo mark. I'm going to select just the font and the word there, which is going to be logo type and I don't have a tag line. I don't need to set the tag line. What I do now I can actually go to the settings in this little cog button here and I can determine what I want, let's say, if I don't want there Pantone colors, I can just turn that off really easily. I can turn on the inverted and maybe I want to PDF and AI, that's fine. The web formats, I'll just probably do P and G, for now.I can also do SVG and then I can set the pixel width or the scale. I'll just do 500 for now and the PPI, if its print, you'll want 300 PPI and if it's just for web surface it can be 72 but I'll just leave on PPI for now and then what I'm going to do, I'm going to click make prints logos then you can see what it starts to do. It starts to generate all the different types of logos. If it's, sometimes it lags as you can see. It's slightly big but that's fine. That's normal, shouldn't crash. You can see it starts to save all the full Coliseum words or save the reverse colored, the black, gray version, gray scale, the color vision. It will save the word mark and also just the mark itself, which is like super handy and then what I do is I click Export, Print Logos then what it's going to happen. I can type in a name Sagan's logic logo design project. I can go to browse and then something on the desktop for now. I made a folder here called logo class example. and you can call it whatever the project's called and now what I'm going to do is click Create logo package now you'll see it'll start to automatically start to generate all those files that you need for the final project, which you can give and sendoff. You can see you just let it load and if I just open that folder you can see it starts generating all these folders and files. You can do the same thing for the web version as well, which I'll show in a second. If quickly go on these files, you can see full colored gray scale and if I double-click and you'll have print CMYK, and you can always customize the files names as well. You can just go in and change it but you can see now all the files in there got the AI and the PDF. If you click on it and open it, it's going to open up just how I export it in the corner here and then we have, here our logo which is super neat, super cool. If I just open this you can see all the PDF files. All the print files there, and it's saved to the relevant size that we selected. I'm going to close this. Now what I'm going to do is once that happens, you can say finish Logo package, but I'm going to click Make Web Logos just to quickly show you that and it'll start to make all the digital versions in the same folder structure. You can see now there's a digital folder in that thing and it's saving it out. I can double-click and you can see how the logo is ready to use for the real-world. I love using this package, it's super useful and I love it and when you are done you can go and finish Logo package then you can just click no, and then it's fine another way is that I can select this logo, press control C. I'll drag it into another folder like this and then what I can do, I can scale it down and these are some sizes. Obviously what you want to do is you want to make sure you have the right sizes. If it's a banner for Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, you want to make sure that it's the right size. If it's just full fabric column or just a general logo size, then you can just do a rectangle. If it's a horizontal Logo-like a long version, you can have the long wider art board there and you can create the art board by pressing control O. By just dragging. I'll bring my art board backup. You can see if I click on art board it will show me the sizes. You can see all the different sizes up there. I can click on art board and presses delete as well, which is handy. If I select this art board here you can see it's 300 by 300, which is good for a favicon. What I'll do is I'll hold all duplicate this Logo here. Because the favicon is going to be very small. I'm going to delete these shadows because we want it to be responsive. I don't want it to be too crazy and then I'll scale it up and probably go all the way just like that and that'll be good for that mark. I'll bring this Logo in here, duplicate it, make it like that and this one and you can do different versions. I'll duplicate this and maybe this is going to be the all-black version. As you can see, the black version, I'll just duplicate it. You can press shift over the art board tool and then hold alt and shift to drag the art board out and then I'll reverse the so I'll make this one a white one. As you can see that and then what I'll do is the easiest way to save all these out is going to control alt E and this will get export for screens. If that was too quick then you can go to file and you can get Export and click Export for screens and this is an update that they updated last year,I'm pretty sure and it's just super easy. It gives you all the art board here and you can rename the art boards like Logo main or primary. You can do, logo long, horizontal, logo mark, logo mark black underscore black. Copy that and then do white. I can rename them. I can also change it to the list view as well if I want to change it here and what I like to do is if you need the blade, you can turn it on but I would select a folder. Wherever I go and desktop again, and just make a folder then get files, click it, select folder and then the cool thing is, you don't have to save your files exactly the same size because you can scale it up. I can save all these as the exact art board size. I saved that, I can then add a scale. If I click this button on the right here, I can change the scale to times two times three times four or certain resolution width and then I can rename this suffix. You can see it's changed to at times two and a PNG. You can change the format so you're transparent PNG, JPG, SVG and PDF. I can add so many different scales. When I export, it's going to save all these files, and then it's going to save them in one to scale times two and times three and you can also edit the option c as well. You can play around if you want to get into the detail and you can change the iOS or Android. I typically just leave it on iOS for now but what I can do now is just you can create sub-folders as well. I'll take that and I'll press export and it should explore all the folders like this and then double-click and now I have my Logo ready to go. I'll just send off to my client and obviously I'll package it and make sure that all the files in there, it's just a quick example. You see the SVG and three time scale, which is at least bigger and that's the way I would start to export the Logos. Obviously this is just a short example, but you want to save every version possible. If you don't have the Logo express and you're going to have to do it this way, which can take longer. It is a good investment, but I'll put a link in the class description so you guys can check it out.
9. Thank you + Next Step: Thank you so much for taking the class. Hopefully you've learned some new tips and tricks on how to create some modern logos in Illustrator, and hopefully it was an easy photo class, where you've learned so many cool things. I'm really thankful that you've taken it. I would just like to ask if you could follow me, you can click this little button called follow he it's highlighted in blue. Click that and you'll get updates on all the new classes I post on Skillshare. But also it'll be cool if you can go down to the review tab and click review, there'll be a button, it shouldn't be grayed out for you, but once you finish the class, you can press that and just leave a positive review and some honest feedback because I'm always looking to improve my classes so you guys have the best possible experience. Thanks so much. Hopefully I'll see your cool projects in the project section, and I'll see what you guys create. Have an awesome day.
Jeremy Mura, Brand and Web Designer
