Logo Design with Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Are you planning to design a logo but don't know where to start? Let me help you out. I'm Martin. I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator, and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, Disney, Google, IKEA, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamline hands-on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step-by-step, and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along. In case you prefer not to copy me, you can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided, and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. First, we will explore the various types of logos out there, important terms you should be familiar with, and considerations you need to make before starting to design. Next, we will cover the stages of a professional logo design workflow, brief, research, sketching, vector design, and presentation. We will be using Adobe Illustrator for the majority of the process, apart from the sketching, which I will be doing in Procreate. However, you can do this on paper, or with any other drawing tool or application you prefer. At the end of the course, we will also cover how to create and structure a brand guide for your client. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future creative projects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design illustration, or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud, and a desktop or laptop computer. But now it's time to start creating. I will see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 2. Types of logos: Logo design is one of the most commonly discussed topics in Graphic Design. That is mainly because most people, either designers or not, are quite opinionated about the brands they like and the ones they don't. The logo, in a way, is the visual essence of a brand or a company. That's why as a Graphic Designer, if you ever are designing a logo for a company, you are actually taking on a highly responsible job because you will be defining this crucial visual communication tool for the client, and even though the logo itself is only part of a company's visual identity, or brand identity is still is the most important element of it because it is the one that will be seen by people the most. First of all, how can we categorize the types of logos that we see? For this, there is seven main categories that we can talk about out of which the three most common ones are Wordmarks, Pictorial marks, and Lettermarks. A Wordmark or otherwise also called logotype is a type base logo that most of the time just has the company's name and maybe an additional tagline. A Pictorial mark, or Brand mark, or Logo symbol is an icon or graphic base logo without any typography. Lettermarks or Monogram logos are usually the initials of a company's name. Essentially, they are logos consisting of letters without spelling out an actual name. Now, the other four categories are also obviously very popular, and these are combinations of the first three that we already discussed, starting with a combination mark that is probably the easiest one to understand. It's a combination of either a Lettermark, a Wordmark, and a pictorial mark. It would have both typography and illustrative details. An abstract mark is very similar to a Pictorial mark. But the main difference here is that it is an abstract shape, usually an abstract geometric form, so it's not a recognizable image compared to the Pictorial mark. An Emblem mark is more like a bench which would have a container most of the time that holds together typography and additional illustrative details. These types of logos originate from the crests that were used by noble houses in the past, and eventually also by craftsmen. Last but not least, mascot logos are these unique types of logos where you would have a very recognizable character which became equivalent with the brand itself. Now, depending on the sector in which the brand is that you are designing a logo for, can have a big impact on which of these categories will work best. You can see with high fashion brands, it is mainly Wordmarks or Lettermarks that I've used. Although there are a couple of combination marks, most of them will rely solely on typography. Since we are talking about typography, it's also interesting to mention that most brands, whether they are in tech or fashion, in the last couple of years, have been moving away from more decorated type faces, including serif and script to more simple sans-serif fonts. In case of Burberry, they not only changed the font but also got rid of the pictorial detail in the logo. In general, when you look at the left and the right side in each of these columns, the most prominent changes that all of these logos got much more legible. They can be seen and recognized from further away, even when used in a small format. For instance, even at this size, when you try to compare these logos, you will be able to tell that the ones on the right side are definitely much easier to read. Now, another important thing about logos is that they are supposed to be original, unique, and something that stands out from the rest of the brands. Although this should be an aim that you should always keep in mind whenever you are designing logos, you have to also accept the fact that there is nothing new under the sun, and almost every type of combination has already been done in one way or another. Just a few examples. I'm sure you're familiar with the Beats logo, but it's almost a direct rip off from this 1971 Stadt Bruhl logo. Even the proportions are very similar, but Beats wasn't the first one to copy this design. Even BigFix had something very similar. Although it's upside down, Priority Parking logo is also very similar. Another good example is this pair of logos, Sun and Columbia. But probably recently the most controversial logo has to be Facebook company's new name and its logo Meta that is extremely similar to many other logos like this one here above it. Whenever you are designing logos, just remember to do some research before you commit to a design. If you find something very similar to the idea that you have, especially amongst the competitors of your client, then you should really go back to the drawing board and refine your concept or maybe come up with something different. Now, that we've covered the basics, in the next video, we will talk about useful tips when it comes to designing logos and also a few trends that you should be familiar with. 3. Best practices: A good practice for designing a logo is to always start in a black and white. Don't introduce colors in the beginning. You should always start doing sketches after you collected some references and inspiration. These sketches can be initially more loose and then you can select the stronger ones and you can refine those further, until you get to a point where both you and the client are happy. Then you can turn your sketch into a vector design, preferably using Adobe Illustrator. Now, the reason why logos should always be vector-base, because they need to be able to scale from the size of a sticker or a business card, all the way up to the size of an airplane. A good way to test whether your logo works in a small size is simply by zooming out and looking at it from a distance. For instance, this logo right here, which has a lot of details, when scaled down, will be very hard to recognize what's actually going on. Having a lot of details in a logo is not only going to affect the visibility and recognizability of it, but it's also going to make it harder for people to remember it. Now, for a memorable logo, you want to have meaning associated with the design or even better, multiple meanings. That leads us to the most important tip that I can give you whenever you are designing logos, keep it simple. Even when you're looking at the logo of Starbucks, which still is considered quite a complex design, you can tell how with time it evolved and got simpler. You would see a similar trend with most famous brands that their logo just got simpler and simpler with time. Here's also an interesting list showing the world's top 100 companies, and their logos ranked by their brand value. The first five are Coca-Cola, Apple, IBM, Google, and Microsoft. Even though out of these five, four are tech companies, the rest of the list includes brands from pretty much all sectors. It's also interesting that 21 percent of the logos would use circular shapes. Circle is perceived as the perfect and most balanced geometric shape, so that's a reason why a lot of brands would use it. Forty five percent of these brands use sans-serif type. That's something that we already discussed. It's clear and easier to read even from a distance. Also interestingly, 34 percent of these brands use the color red. That makes sense because red is probably the most powerful color. It's actually something that I go into much more detail in the color topic within this course. Again, if you are interested to learn more about this, make sure you check out that part of the course. Animated logos like the ones that you can see here, are also very commonly used nowadays. They can range from simple dynamic effects to whole short video presentations. Turning a logo into an animation, again, is always easier when you have a simpler design. To be able to create these types of animations and turn a static logo into something more dynamic, you would need motion design skill and experience, and most likely to be able to work in After Effects or something similar to that. This area definitely goes beyond the scope of what a print designer is expected to do. When it comes to different versions of a logo, the most essential that you should always consider in the design are these four versions. Having a full color version on white and black background, and then a monochrome version also on white and black background. Having these variations defined is already going to give some flexibility how the identity can be used. But many brands are actually now use variable logos or dynamic logos, which means that they can be adapted to the format and the environment that they are used in. We can see a few examples here where a slightly more complex logo can get further simplified depending on the size and context that it would appear in. But besides functional variability, there's also stylistic variability that some brands would apply. Like with Apple, there are actually a lot of variations, but you would still recognize the brand, thanks to, again, the simplicity of the original form. But when you look for variable logo examples, you will find lots of creative solutions where the logo could even become like a little building block that again, can change depending on the format it's used. Now, I mentioned in the beginning when we started talking about logos is that, they are part of the identity design of a brand. Even though it is the most important element, it's still just part of a collection of elements that the company creates to portray the right image to the consumers. A brand identity would include every form in which the brand is going to be represented, whether it's printed or digital. But in case of print design specifically, you can think of business cards, any stationeries, packaging, apparel, posters, flyers, brochures, and so on and so forth. 4. Propositional density: To better understand how visual hierarchy works specifically in logo design, we need to talk about propositional density. Here we think of the relationship and the proportion between the amount of elements in a logo and the amount of underlying or hidden meanings packed into them. Take this logo, for instance, from Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, which is a brilliant example of how the amount of meanings can far outweigh the amount of elements used. When we talk about propositional density, the meanings, usually we refer to as deep propositions and you can easily remember that because these are the hidden meanings or underlying meanings, so they are deep down. The actual elements that are used in the design we call surface propositions. That's also easy to remember because they are on the surface, that's what we can actually see. There is a very simple mathematical equation to get the actual propositional density, you just simply have to count how many deep propositions you can find and then divide that number with the amount of surface propositions. So essentially count the number of meanings you can find and divide it with the number of elements used in the design. In case of this logo, we can find 10 meanings and only three elements that are used. So the equation is 10 divided by three, which results in a number higher than three. Now, even if you can achieve the propositional density to be higher than one, you are already doing a great job, but as you can see, in this case, there were more than three times as much meanings as the actual elements. This, of course, is an exceptionally good example for propositional density, but just to show you the other extreme, here is a logo which is obviously much thicker in terms of propositional density, and here the number is most likely below one because there are more elements than meanings. Without counting it, we can just immediately see that we have the bold eagle and the American flag, which basically carries exactly the same meaning of patriotism. Similarly, we have the text In God We Trust here at the bottom, but then we also have the bible and the cross. So again, three elements serving the same meaning. Not to mention that even text is repeated, like the Saint Francois County that is written here on the outside, is also visible here on this tiny map inside the logo. So I'm pretty sure that even without counting exactly the deep and surface propositions, we can clearly see that this logo is far less successful compared to the Obama campaign. But there are lots of other logos that has a great propositional density like the current Airbnb logo, which even though it's just a simple abstract shape, it actually refers to a lot of things like people, places, love, and also the letter A, which is the first letter of the name. In this case, there are two surface prepositions, the shape, and the text, but we immediately can find these four deep propositions, four divided by two, we get two for propositional density, which once again is a brilliant achievement. For a brand to be memorable and for people to be able to recognize it easily, the effectiveness heavily relies in the propositional density for which, as we can see, one of the most important thing is to keep your elements as simple or as less as possible, and there is a study called Branded In Memory, which shows how different brands are remembered by the general public. Here, for instance, we can see the Apple logo drawn from Memory by more than 150 people, displayed in a way that we are getting the more accurate versions as we're getting to the bottom right and we have the least accurate ones here on the top left. The drawings are improving as we're making our way down to the bottom right corner, and there's also some additional interesting statistics here at the bottom, out of which, probably the most interesting one, is showing that the actual color of the logo is gray, but these are the colors that people used when they were drawing these logos. Even though most of the people used gray, there's also quite a lot of people who use black, and there were even some people using blue and red in their drawings. Now, definitely, the most important number here is the percentage of how many people managed to draw a near-perfect version of the logo, because that shows you really well how memorable this logo is, and in case of Apple, it was 20 percent. Compared to that, the same exact study resulted in only 6 percent for near-perfect drawings for Starbucks and some really funny versions of the logo here on the top-left corner, but the best performing logo in this study was Target with 25 percent near-perfect drawings. That means one in four people managed to draw the logo from Memory without making any mistakes, and even the colors and their proportions were almost perfectly matching the actual logo from all of these drawings. Now we can clearly see that propositional density plays a huge role in logo design, but the general lesson that we can learn from this is that thinking of surface and deep propositions is something we can also apply to any forms of design. So even when you are working on a brochure, a poster, a magazine, or a website, you should always question yourself whether you need to add that additional element and whether it is going to add any meaning to your design or make it easier for viewers to understand what they're seeing. Only introduce new elements when they are really important and when there is nothing already in the design that serves the same purpose. Getting the visual hierarchy right in your designs depends not only on prioritizing certain elements over others but also on your ability to be able to judge which are the elements that you really need in the composition and which are the ones that you can leave out. 5. Logo design process - Brief: It is almost impossible to create something exceptional without first having a really good brief. It doesn't only apply to logo design, it's pretty much true for every creative project. Your responsibility as the designer is to really make sure that you got every detail right before you get started on the project. You have to sit down with the client if possible, or talk through the brief or the objectives that they gave you and if anything is not clear, make sure you ask questions. It really depends on your relation with the client, whether they want to see some examples of your work before and maybe point out some things that they like from it, or maybe even look at competitors logos and again, ask the client, which are the ones that they prefer. However, normally I prefer to stay away from the creative choices in the beginning and concentrate on things like the target audience, who are the typical customers that the client would like to impress and want to get their attention. Also it is very important to set the expectations right at the very beginning, so you have to agree on the deliverables, what you are going to present, how many variations the client can expect from you, also how many rounds of revisions you will be able to supply for the agreed price. Finally, of course, you always need to ask for a deadline. That's a good thing for both you and the client because he's going to keep things moving and it will give a structure to your creative process. Now before you agree to anything, always remember that you should never over-promise. Make sure that whatever you agree to, you're not only capable to deliver, but also you most likely will be able to exceed the expectations. For instance, if there is a tight deadline and you know that you can do, let's say three logo variations in a day, then instead count and promise, only two for each day that you are going to work on the project. This way you can keep your client happy and they will become a return customer because again, you exceeded their expectations. 6. Logo design process - Research: Let's move on to the second most important stage of the logo design process, which is the research phase or gathering inspiration. Now for this I normally use Milanote, which is a brilliant online tool where you can really gather all visual assets or examples that you would like to use for a project. Now of course, you can also use Pinterest boards or even create mood boards in Photoshop, whatever you are familiar with. Important thing is to collect as many examples as you can and organize them into themes or categories, whatever is going to make sense for you. You can prioritize looking at competitors logos and logos from the same industry. However, that might give you a little bit of a tunnel vision and it's good to have a wider spectrum of examples. For instance, with this project, even though it's about a farmer's market, I would broaden my search, I would look at examples for organic food, healthy living, even outdoor activities, whatever has a similar type of audience is going to work for a research and besides seeing many examples, the main reason why you are doing your research is to be inspired and to have ideas laid out in front of you. For this brief, I organize my research into six main categories based on their style, and I always make sure that I don't let myself influenced too much, by the examples that I collected or the categories that I created. They're great for setting some direction and give a bit of a structure for my process, but I always give myself some freedom to explore and to even cross in between these categories that I create. 7. Logo design process - Sketching: The next stage of the process is definitely the most fun and the most creative one. This is when you start sketching. Now, if you're not good at drawing, don't worry because your sketches can be very simple, they can be rough thumbnails, instead of being very detailed. To be honest, it is not good to create too detailed sketches anyway, because again, they might force you to really follow everything and add all the same details once you get into illustrator. Instead, it's good to keep them a little bit rough and depending on your drawing skills you can judge what works for you. But please remember never to jump into illustrator straight after you've done your research. You can start sketching already while you are researching because, if an idea comes while you see some cool examples, you should note it down and you should record it, because it is so easy to lose and forget, some of those brilliant sparks that you get from looking at some inspiring work. Also it's good not to limit yourself, how many sketches you create. I would say minimum three is good, and probably maximum 20, but you can have as many as you want. If you have more than 10, I would always say, it's good to filter the ideas down already, and maybe select out about five, six that stands out, and that you feel it's worth developing further. 8. Logo design process - Tracing sketches: Now once you have your sketches ready, it's time to jump into Illustrator. What I would normally do is to set up a template layer, so that just helps to keep the sketches in the background and have everything fitted so I can work easily on top of it. Here you can see I already placed in these images. They are just simple JPEGs, and then I'm going to double click on the "Layer" and choose Template, and then set the dim to around 20%. You can keep it higher or lower, whatever works for you, but I prefer to keep it quite low in terms of visibility. This layer can easily be turned on and off but by default, it's going to also be locked. That just allows you to work easily on a separate layer on top of it. It's important to create that empty new layer because Illustrator won't let you to work on a template layer. 9. Adobe Illustrator Tip - Multiple windows: Now, once you start working and adding details, you will still see the template underneath. Occasionally, you might want to just turn it off and turn it back on to be able to see it without the sketch. However, if you have a large monitor, or even better, a second screen, there is another method that you can use. Just go to the window menu and choose "New window". This is going to open the same document as a separate window, so it is a linked document. It's not a separate document. You can see here on the top, it will say Version 1, Version 2. Just so we can see it together, I'm going to choose "Arrange tile". That way we can see the two windows side-by-side. This is when you have a second screen, you can just drag one of these windows on to that other monitor. But for now, I'm going to select this window here on the right, and I'm going to turn off the template on that one, which will only affect that window on the right and not the one on the left, even though it's the same file. Having two separate windows allows you to even see different layers at the same time. You can continue working with either one of these, and the changes will be visible on both of them at the same time. This is extremely useful specifically for logo design, where you can also use this method to have one of the versions zoomed out while the other one is zoomed in. You can work on small details, but always keep an eye on the overall design. You should never forget looking at your logo from a distance anyway, because if you are always zoomed in, you will end up adding too many little details that won't even be properly visible once the logo is in use, printed on a small business card, for instance. Having two windows in Illustrator is useful for many reasons, and of course, even though it's two windows, you have to save it only once. You don't have to worry about accidentally closing one of them, because as long as one of them is open, you will always be able to maintain and keep whatever changes you made. 10. Adobe Illustrator Tip - Line density: Now jumping back to Illustrator, you could see that I was drawing everything over the sketches and recreating everything bit vectors. However, at this point, I'm not adding any field colors yet, no gradients, no colors, just pure black and white details. The main reason I'm doing that is to be able to concentrate on more important things that will define a good composition, like contrast, line density, hierarchy, and balance. Let me give you a quick example. If I zoom closer on this design, I remember originally, I had these branches here at the bottom with the same stroke width as the rest of the details. You can see currently this is ones are a little bit thinner than the other lines here on the top. If I go into an edit this which by the way is a symbol, and I increase the size of the strokes to five, which is the same as the rest of them, it will update on both sides because it was set up as a symbol. But when we zoom out, we can see how it looks with five points, stroke size, and how it was with three points. Once again, that is the five-point and there's the three points. Now, it is a very subtle difference, but you have to always ask yourself, is this helping the composition? Is that an important detail that to have such a big emphasis on it? Because all of those compress details, the leaves next to each other, really create a busy and dense detail there. The question is always, do we need it? Is it helping the composition? In my opinion, it works better with a little bit less density. The focus can move more towards the center of the composition where we have the carrot and the little illustration of the firm. Here is another example how important to get the line density right. Here I went with a little bit more traditional look for the logo. But you can see again that I made this thing division between the lines that are used for the actual character illustration in the middle and the thinner lines in the background, which is used more like as a pattern. For instance, if I select these lines and increase them up to two points to match the same thickness as the carrot, it might get a little bit overpowering. It's not making it worse for sure, and maybe the client actually prefers this way. However, I feel like keeping the line density lower on the less relevant details is always helping to pop the important details and get those in focus. 11. Adobe Illustrator Tip - Symbols: Now I briefly mentioned symbols and I would use them whenever I have multiple instances of the same object. Because by having a symbol setup, you can just make changes on one and they will roll out the changes to all the instances. It's like working with components in Adobe XD and I can show it to you here on this design with the carrots. You can see here on the bottom right, we have the Symbols panel and all I have to do is either Double-click on one of these elements here to start making changes to it. Or I can also Double-click on the thumbnail here and let's just say we are going to move these lines a little bit closer. I'm just going to move that up and this other one also we will move down. Now if I Double-click outside, it will immediately update all of the elements straightaway. I mentioned that this technique is also good when you're working in symmetry. Once again here I have this site setup as a symbol and then just simply created a duplicate that's reflected on the other side. That's just another instance transformed of the original symbol and whichever one I Double-click on, I can start making changes. Let's say we just change this leaf a little bit, turning it around, maybe even add an additional leaf by holding down the Alt or Option key, we can duplicate it and place another one here. Again, maybe let's rotate it a little bit further, and then I Double-click outside, it will immediately update the reflected instance of the symbol. In general, whenever you work in Illustrator you want to be efficient and do everything the smart way. It's not only going to save you time once when you set it up, but it will also whenever you need to come back and make changes after the revisions from the client, so work smart and save time. 12. Adobe Illustrator Tip - Shading: A good example would be how I do shading on logos or illustrations in general. For this, all I need is to just duplicate and element in this case, let's just get this fun little carrots character. Copy and paste in front. That's Control or Command C and then Control or Command F. If we look at our Layers panel, we can see that there's two of the same objects. By the way, I just double-clicked on this group to isolate it, that's why everything else in the background is grayed out. Now that we have this second version, what I would normally do first is to change it to Multiply blend mode and usually reduce the opacity maybe down to 50 percent. Now that's not always necessary. It depends on the colors or the shading that you're going for. But besides that, I also like to slightly change the hue and maybe make it a little bit more warmer or cooler, again, whichever you prefer. But by doing this now we have two versions. We have the original color and the shading color, or the shadow color on top of it. Now that we have this created, we can open another important panel called transparency, where we just have to click on "Make Mask". Now by default, this is going to completely hide this object, which is great. We don't actually need to do anything else apart from selecting the mask. Here in this transparency panel, you just have to click on that "Black thumbnail". It also shows in the layers panel, it tells you that you are now working within the opacity mask of that object. There won't be any layers visible at this point. But now to reveal parts of this object, I am going to use the blob brush tool, which is here in the toolbar shift B is the shortcut and with the square brackets, you can increase or decrease the size of your brush. You want to set up the fill color to be white. You don't need a stroke color here, so we can just set that to none. By drawing with white in an opacity mask, you are going to reveal all of those details that you paint over. All I'm going to do here is to just nicely paint over this section here on the right. Maybe just show a little bit more of the shading there just under the eyebrow. Then probably I will make my brush a little bit smaller and just go over here under the other eyebrow. Maybe under these lines as well, just to add a little bit more depth and with a little bit even smaller brush size, I'm just drawing on the mouth and maybe just add a bit of shading under the eyes as well. Instead of using the pen tool to draw these details or using the eraser to delete out of the original object, we have everything saved into this mask. If I change my mind, I can even move these details around within the opacity mask. For instance, I can zoom closer, move these shapes around, resize them, delete them individually without affecting the original object. That's just one thing that you have to remember whenever you work with an opacity mask, and that is to get out of the mask. You have to go back to the transparency panel and click on the other thumbnail and make sure that you see everything in your layers panel again. We're still in isolation mode. But to also get out of that, I'm going to double-click outside of the illustration. We're back to seeing our main layers and we can continue working as normal. 13. Adobe Illustrator Tip - Vector workflow: In this chapter, I am going to show you six different versions for this project that I came up with based on my research. So in the next lesson, you will be able to see all of the examples that I have found. I created these six categories based on which I'm going to create my logos. However, I'm not sticking to these styles completely. It's always a little bit of a merge and mixing of concepts and ideas together. But generally, I tried to stick to these six distinct directions. Again, you can use my research as a reference for your take on this project. However, I recommend to always do your own research additionally to the examples that you can see in my Milanote board. Now when you watch these next couple of videos, you will see a time-lapse version of the vectorization of my sketches in Illustrator. Now, it took around half an hour to an hour to recreate each of these versions, but I made them faster, but still explain all the important decisions that I made on the way. For each lesson in this chapter, you will find a separate Illustrator file which you can download, and there, you will be able to see my final vector version without any colors. This is just simply the black and white version for each of them. There's one color version for the playful concept. To see how I've done the shading on that, you will be able to watch in an upcoming chapter. But most importantly, I also set up the tracing layer for each of these files. So in case you want to practice the vectorization process and use my sketches as references, you can do this once again by downloading the Illustrator files from the lessons in this chapter. 14. Project direction 1 - Traditional: In this version, I want it to go for a little bit more traditional look and specifically the woodcut relief printing technique I wanted to resemble. If you're not familiar with the technique is when the artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood and then leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. That the areas that the artist cuts away carry [inaudible] while characters or images at the surface level carried the ink to produce the print. That is pretty much what I was going for here and you can already see my sketch that I have all of those little lines to create the shading for the character illustration and also the background. As you can see on the right side, in Illustrator I first started with the main element, again, the carrot and I'm intentionally using a thicker line for the carrot at this point, but that might change later as you can see, I already adjusted it. Because I feel like it would be hard to add small details like the depth here on the left side and then right side where we have those little imperfections. I really wanted to make this carrot look a little bit more realistic compared to the other logo variations so that's why I even have the roots visible at the bottom and the leaves are more detailed than in my other versions. Now here comes the lines in the middle and I'm going to actually use an opacity mask to hide that part for the carrot. You can see at the moment I just temporarily hidden it halfway and then now it's completely hidden. I tried to keep it non-destructive so if I want, I can always [inaudible] it later. But I also want to keep everything a bit organic and hand-drawn, that's why I even kept these lines not straight and I added a couple of gaps inside it. Now comes the part when I add the text, and again, my choice for the fonts are trying to replicate what these more vintage looking logos would have. I'm using two circles, one for the arc on the top and the other one for the bottom. That's quite important to do because otherwise it would be hard to manage it and you wouldn't even be able to have two separate orientations on your text. You can see that I am still using kerning and spacing to make sure that everything falls in the right place and it's easy to read. However, this font is not the easiest to read. I think it still works. Here, I just changed my mind and actually following the sketch, I remember that I need to have the Farmer's Market, which is the most important part of the text in the center. Again, I chose a font which really nicely compliments the more script font on the circle so here in the middle we have this nice bold Serif font, again a bit more traditional feel. At the end, and I intentionally do this at the very end, I start to add details. I first wanted to make sure that the composition works because sometimes if you do something as a sketch, it might not still work as a vector artwork. I don't want to waste time adding all of these tiny details without really first confirming that it's going to work. For the lines in the background, you will see me using blend tool so I added a line on the top and the bottom and then using the blend, I set up, I think 25 or 30 steps in-between those two. To create a little bit more organic look, I just used the warp tool to just squeeze a little bit the line on the top and on the bottom and that adds a little bit of randomness to these lines, but still keeps them very nicely organized, thanks to the blend. What I'm doing is using, again, an opacity mask on this blend and I am just basically painting with the blob brush tool on the opacity mask to hide these lines wherever they shouldn't show. I create that nice little gap between the carrot and the lines and then also finally I decided to add a bit more shading onto those imperfections just again have a little bit more contrast and also under the leaves, almost like a bit of an additional more emphasized shading for these areas. I feel like that's all that was needed here so I just do a couple of final adjustments and there we have our final version. 15. Project direction 2 - Monoline: For this version, I wanted to create a very geometric look. Again, it's slightly minimalistic, even though it has quite a lot of details. But more importantly, it's mono line, so we have the same thickness on all the lines. That was again a restriction I set myself for this take. Although I was trying to do that on the other versions as well, here, it was a primary focus. To capture that geometric feel for the logo, I made sure that, for instance, for the hills, I only used perfect circles. Once I had them all put together, I selected all and used the shape builder tool to cut them into the pieces that I needed. Sometimes when you use the shape builder tool, you end up having unnecessary shapes as well. Is good to get rid of those like I had one there on the bottom left. But now that I tidy things up, I can add the texts on the top. I'm using this nice solid font that is very similar to the lines that I will have in the design, so it's the same thickness throughout all the characters. That works well with this mono-line style, and what I'm doing now is creating the branches at the bottom. At this point, I had the idea to keep them completely straight. Instead of having actual leaves, I want it to just have straight lines. Again, keep it very geometric and it's not bad, but it adds quite a lot of restriction. I intentionally didn't want to rotate into anything else from 45 degrees and 90 degrees angles. It is actually quite tricky to recreate a nice branch, especially in this small size. At a later point, you will see I changed my mind and I actually reused another branch that I created for another logo. That's actually a really good thing to do. Keep all your versions in the same Illustrator file, and then you will be able to easily move pieces from one version to another. Also, it just helps you to keep an open mind and you never know you might find a cool element that you created in one of the versions that can easily be tweaked and reused in another one. Now here you can see I'm working on the windmill, and because of the restrictions of the line weight, I'm really struggling to get all the details necessary in place. We need to have that roof that I wanted to have on the top, which would be the top of the tower, but it was just really hard to make it read well. It's again too dense. There's too much lines in one place compared to the rest of the design. I will have to come back to that and adjust it later. But here is the carrot, and I wanted to keep this quite abstract so it's in a V, also like a hidden message there for the setting or rising sun, with the leaves being, again also quite abstract, not completely connected into the carrot. This I'm going to skip all the way till the end, just refine it a little bit, make sure the carrot reads well. But at this point, it looks quite abstract and some people might not recognize that being a carrot there. You can see I'm just adjusting the leaves, make sure they fill out the space or fill up the empty space there. I'm struggling to add the cloud because again of the restrictions on the line weight. It's really important to get the details easy to read even from a distance. That's why you can see I adjusted the windmill. A taller tower fills in the space better as well, but also, more importantly, it just gets the contrast right so there's not too much detail in one place. Now, I look at this version and I feel like it still needs refinements. One of the ideas that I had is to maybe show the carrot, not just above but also below ground level. That actually helps to define it better and make it more recognizable, but also it works to divide the text at the bottom. We have a natural distinction between the text barnet and the date on the right. I still wasn't happy with this day so I went further and just refined the line weight and also the copy at the bottom. Instead of having that text go all the way from left to right, I decided that the branches can be slightly larger, but their line weight got reduced. This way, there's not too much emphasis on it. Instead, we are focusing on the main text on the top and the carrot in the center. 16. Project direction 3 - Crest: For this version, I wanted to create something that looks more like a crest or a badge. Have a very solid container that holds everything together and just to go with the theme, this was almost a bit of a challenge for myself. I wanted to make sure that the primary or main focal element in all of the versions is the carrot. In this case, the carrot became the badge itself or that container that's going to hold everything together. For this particular reason, I decided to use a much thicker line here. I think it was 10 points compared to five points which I use for the smaller details like the leaves and this is actually something that's going to change at the end you will see. I changed my mind because I felt like that 10-point thickness was too much. It was just too much contrast or line density in one place, but at the beginning, it's always hard to tell what's going to work, so I'm going to adjust these things later. You can see me adding the small little details at the bottom. Even though there's not much space inside this container, I felt like it would be quite nice to have a little bit of that farm seen at the bottom, just to have some additional depth to the logo. I'm drawing this with the pen tool. It's a couple of simple parts put together. I don't really have much space for a lot of details, so I literally just add the roof and the door, and then there is a small tree. Again, following the sketch, I start with a circle and then just simply adjust the four points of it to create that little tree. Now that we have this detail at the bottom, we will be able to add the copy, and for this, again, I'm using a font that compliments or works well with the general shape or design of this variation. It's a little bit more bulky, sans serif font. I wanted to make sure that it fills nicely that space on the top. That's why it's quite good to have four words that are roughly the same length because it's fairly easy to work with it. If you have, let's say three words in a logo and one of them is really long and then you have to work in different way with it. Here, it was quite easy to fit it into this shape. The date which I decided to put at the bottom is a little bit hard to squeeze in, again, with this thick line on the container, but that's, again, something that I'm going to change later. But for now, we have another pairing of fonts. Both of them are sans serif, but there's a clear contrast between them, so one of them is more condensed, the other one is much thicker and bolder. Now we are creating the branches on the right side and because I'm going to duplicate it, I only have to create it once. It's a simple line and then we are just copying and rotating those leaves. I try to keep things organic. That's why I'm not using a repeat pattern or anything like that. It doesn't take long to put down a couple of leaves and individually rotate them and move them around. I always prefer to do it that way whenever I have time. There we have pretty much the whole branch ready and it's supposed to be [inaudible] but it could be anything really. I am just now grouping together everything and then created the reflection of it with the reflect tool. However, since I recorded this video, Illustrator has just finally released the repeat options for the desktop version. This is something that we've already had for Illustrator on the iPad, but now it's also available on the desktop. Creating anything symmetrical just got so much easier now and this is something that I've been waiting for so long. We have all the little details on the leaves as well and here is the refinements you will see that I added later on, I didn't record this, but you can see the difference here is mainly that I reduced the intensity or the thickness of the crust and also on the branches on the side. I felt like it was a bit too overpowering and I wanted to keep the focus on the center of the logo, on the text and also having a thinner line gave me a little bit more space to play around with additional details. Just to add those details for the carrot, I think are important, those simple lines, but they're also working to fill in those white space or negative space and also I decided to have the leaves a little bit more detailed and add a bit more depth by having them come in front of the main shape instead of being hidden behind it. That's the final version. I hope you like it. Obviously, there's a few mistakes I can see on the leaves, but that can easily be fixed later on. 17. Project direction 4 - Hidden meaning: Originally when I was doing my research, this was supposed to be the simplest or most minimalistic logo, but it ended up being much more complex. Here I want it to play mainly with the negative space and trying to create a smart combination or hidden message for it. The hidden message here or the symbol is the basket, which goes quite well with the market, but it was a little bit tricky to get this working with the carrots. Because as I said in another video already, I wanted to keep the carrot always like a central piece or a primary element in the design. Because here I have multiple carrots, I designed it to set it up as a symbol, and then I could just rotate and duplicate them several times. Now, the date here and estimate in 1850 is going in the center, even though it's small, is going to get a very central location. It looks going to be still in focus, especially with all these carrots, almost like little arrows pointing at it. It takes a quite important placing the logo, although it's not the most important part of the texts, I quite like the way that it fills the space. Here I'm using a simple circle again for texts on the top and in this case, I managed to keep the whole copy, the primary texts together in one element. I would never go under the horizontal line when it comes to adding texts on the circle, so you want to make sure that it's easy to read. That was again, another restriction I want you to follow. You will see first that I am working to adjust each characters by the way, I outlined these stacks so I can easily manipulate individually each character, and I really tried working hard to resemble my sketch or to go with that distorted text style or composition. I am doing a lot of adjustments here going back and forth. But I just have to realize that it doesn't work or I really didn't like the way it looks. At this point I scrap that and I use the same font that I have on the bottom already. Again, I didn't want to introduce a third font is just the same font as I have on the date. Instead of creating a graphic version of the text Barnett, I am going to just outline it and make it very similar to the rest of the design. Again, he's going to have the same thickness, but it will blend in quite nicely into the handle. It doesn't have to be so blended in to make it work. By having a little bit of extra space there on the top, I will also be able to squeeze in just a little bit of detail of the landscape that we had in the other versions. This is what I mean like I tried to keep this simple, this version, but I ended up having actually quite a lot of elements in it. It's not the most successful version, I would say, because again, in terms of proportional density, here we have so many elements like instead of one carrot, we have seven of them, and then we also have that handle of the basket, which is another element, plus then we will also have all the landscape details. Instead of ending up with a simple minimalistic logo, it actually became quite a complex one. But that is the reason why you have to create multiple versions. Because even if you feel like a sketch works really well in the end, once you start doing the vector version of it, it might not be the best. As always, that's why it's important to have multiple versions and present those to the client before you add the final details and coloring and so on, so forth. 18. Project direction 5 - Playful: In this version, I wanted to capture a more playful, colorful, whimsical, and stylized approach for the logo. I think the easiest way to do that is to have a fun character. Even though it is the same main item or element that we are using here, the carrot, it can easily be turned into a character by just adding some cute features, the eyes and the mouth. Later on I also decided to add the arms and have a little bit of an attitude for this character. Using those lines that we have on the side, which just also emphasizes the depth and makes it look a little bit more like a carrot can also be used for eyebrows, I thought, for this version. These are the simple ideas and decisions that I made already in the sketch, as you can see. But then I can further refine it and tweak it once I work in Illustrator. The whole point of your sketch is to give you a direction, but don't be afraid to change proportions and even details later on. But it definitely saves you so much time to have these sketches because coming up with these decisions, I could waste hours in Illustrator. Having that sketch ready I think this only took me around 10 or 15 minutes to recreate in Illustrator because I already had a very strong concept ready. Now, you can see I'm using the pen tool here to create the leaves. Again, I'm not sticking exactly to how I've done the sketch. However, I am going to still use three separate elements and they will be placed roughly in the same place. I'm just using, as I said, the pen tool. Sometimes if you use a thick stroke, you might be struggling with those sharp lines. You can just adjust the stroke to have round joins or corners or you can also sometimes just adjust the alignment of the stroke so it can help to keep it outside or inside the shape, and that can also fix it. But now that we have our three leaves roughly in place, I will be moving on to adding the text. I start first with the lines. We have these lines on left and right. It's supposed to be a very simplified, stylized version of a ribbon. Again, I intentionally not connecting these lines. I want to keep some space between the character and that simplified ribbon. But I'm using the same shape, so I just duplicate it and rotate it or reflect it for the other side and make sure that they are aligned so they are in the same position. Now, I'm adding the text, which is obviously the secondary information which we have here in the middle and I will have the main part of the logo copy on the circular area outside or around the character. I will also make sure that we have a nice pairing. Again, we have a contrast between the two font. Here I'm using a little bit more playful script type font for the main text. I think it goes quite well with the whimsical approach, is not too difficult to read it, so it's still very legible. You can see when I get to doing the text at the bottom, I always adjust the size of my circle because the baseline which we have on the top part, it has to be aligned with the x-height for the text at the bottom. So it's a little bit of adjusting the size, but making sure that the actual text size is the same. So when you resize your circles, you can just adjust that later. But it's a fairly quick and easy thing to do. Once you get used to it, just remember always use two separate circles for a circular composition with texts like this one. There we have our final version. I can always add additional details like little lines that we have in the sketch. But at this point I felt like it's not necessary, so it already works quite well. 19. Project direction 6 - Abstract: This version was very quick and easy and straightforward to vectorize. For this logo, I want it to keep sharp angles and make it a little bit more abstract and quirky. Here I'm using the brush tool, or I think in this case I was using the pencil tool to draw the text. I want it to keep it again, as I said, a little bit random and again, handwritten digital hand-lettering here and to add to the quirkiness, I am also mixing lowercase and uppercase letters, like all the Es, for instance, are uppercase. Again, I'm trying to add some sharp angles in some of the characters like the O. I didn't want to keep it completely round. It's a little bit closer to being a square. As you can see, I only used a font for the secondary copy. I'm going to change the font later on, but I just prepare it there at the bottom for now. Then, once you have hand-lettered text in Illustrator, the amazing thing is that you can easily adjust all the characters because they are all individual parts. You can just select them easily and make those adjustments. Now for the secondary copy, I want it to have something that again works well and pairs well with the general aesthetic of the logo. So I want it to keep it still quite angular and have those sharp corners in it and I think this font works quite well. Now it's all about just finalizing details. I added a few lines, adjusted a little bit everything and in general, you can see that I still try to keep everything a bit more like a circle so that even though there is no bounding box or shape or a crest holding things together, it is still going with that circular composition that I have on the other logos. 20. Logo design process - Presentation: Keep in touch with your client throughout the process. Don't just wait until the very end when you have the color versions. Already send them even maybe the sketches, but definitely the vector outline versions without the colors. Because this can really help you define the direction that the client prefers. You can really focus your time and effort on those variations that the client liked. Finally, when you're presenting your work to the client, make it look cool and include some nice mockups because it's always easier to visualize how it could look as a final product. 21. Creating Brand Guides - Part 1: Most of the guys I'm going to show you in this video are from the site called brandingstyleguides.com. The link is in the description below, make sure you check it out. You can create a free account and once you have that, you can download the PDF guides. Now, some of these guys might not be the most up-to-date or most recent version for the brand that you are looking for. Nevertheless, they can be still perfect to use as references and examples if you are planning to create a brand guide yourself. I like the fact that you can search based on the year of publication here on the top where you have the filters based on languages, the size of the document, even countries where it was used, and even tags or if you know a brand that you are looking for, you can just type it here in the search area. Now first, let's take a look at Adobe's 2018 guide, which is quite an extensive one, so it's around 80 pages long and of course, for these types of documents, it's good to have a table of contents where you can indicate the structure of the guide, but you can also incorporate hyperlinks here if it's an interactive PDF, which is quite simple to build in InDesign, for example. That means we can also just click on any of these entries and we can jump straight to that page within the guide and that is actually already a consideration you have to make in the beginning, whether you would like to build your guide mainly for print or for digital use. In recent years, I'm seeing more and more companies going towards having their style guides and assets all online in an interactive format and they might not even have a PDF or a printed version available. A good example for this is Google's visual asset guidelines, which, again, the link is in the description below, and this is actually on Behance so you can find it. It's in two parts and it goes through all the different details from icons, how they are generated and created, and also how they are supposed to be used. How can you decide which format works better for you or for the brand that you're working with? In my opinion, an online interactive guideline might work better for more digital companies. Companies where there will be a lot of stationaries and physical products like packaging as well. It is better to have a printed guide, which of course, can always be available as an interactive PDF at the same time. Now coming back to Adobe's brand guide. We can see clearly that the first chapter focuses on the mission, values, and the tenants, which are the basic principles of the company and this is a very important section. Whenever you work with a brand or a company and you are creating a guide, you really need to get to know them before you start working on the guide so you need to know where they are at the moment, where they are heading, what is their target audience, what is their tone of voice, and in general, what's the brand's personality? Here's another example, the National Geographic brand guide. Again, if we take a look at the table of contents, once again, it starts with our brand, then it goes into brand behavior, and only after that it starts talking about the ingredients or elements used in the visuals for this brand. If we take a closer look at this introductory section, is good to start with the mission, which is usually about why the company exists and what's its purpose. This is most of the time is the present of the company. But then you can move into the vision or the future ideas, or where the brand wants to move and what its ultimate goals are. In general, in this section, it's good to have adjectives used that can define the brand. Here we have premium, science, adventure, exploration, and destination, which perfectly describes and encapsulates the brand. Now in some guides, you will also have the opposite of these things that the branding is not about, which can also be useful for further clarification. Usually, after the brand story is covered, we would move into the elements or ingredients, and probably the most important and most well-known part of that is the logo. Now again, it depends on the complexity of the brand, this can sometimes be a single page, but sometimes it can end up being a whole chapter. Let's take a closer look at National Geographic's logo. First of all, we have the yellow icon on its own, that frame, which is really well-recognized, and then we have the lockup with the text next to it and notice the amount of white space or negative space used on this page. The page is not crowded and cluttered it really focuses on the elements and what they are used for. Also, it's a good practice to build the guide itself using the fonts that are applied to the brand and even the colors. We can already see that on this page and it really just unifies the whole brand experience. On the second page, we have more information about the tagline, which is further how it can be used in different formats and also how much space is necessary between the main logo and the tagline. Then we move into a section which explains how not to use the logo. This is also very common and a great way to make sure that all the partners and everyone who's going to work with the brand, will end up using it the way it was meant to be used. This is the part I normally called, don't mess with our logo. Then we have a couple of additional examples. Again, variations on how not to mess up the logo. Then we reach the next section, which is also very crucial for most brands. It's color, and in case of National Geographic, it's quite simple. We have the black and the yellow, but with other brands, this can be a little bit more complex. With the Animal Planet brand guide from 2008, explains that there are 10 different color variations besides the black and white version of the logo and out of these, this yellowish-green tone is the hero colors so that's like the primary color usage, while the others are more supporting colors, these can also sometimes be referred to as primary and secondary colors. In case of British Airways, for example, there's even a chart showing the percentage or priority of the colors associated with the brand. The blue is definitely their hero color, followed by white, then red, and then finally buy gray and they can also have an inverted palette where white becomes the primary color, followed by blue, red, and then again finally by gray. Having a percentage or a comparative chart that shows the difference between the usage of colors is always useful because it really helps again, to understand how to work with the brand as a designer. It's a similar thing with the brand guide for American Red Cross where, once again, we have the different versions of the logo. Then we reach the color area where we see the primary, secondary palate and there's also a neutral part. But more importantly, we have the color proportion here once again, showing that light is the most important color and then with the size, it's nicely representing the proportions or the hierarchy between the colors. 22. Creating Brand Guides - Part 2: It is important to remember that brand guides are not all about visuals. It's also about things like the tone of voice. Since we are here, I really like how the Red Cross explains that how we talk is just as important as what we talk about. That's a great statement to start with. Then it's followed by these headlines, uplifting, inviting, empowering, personal. By the way, this brand guide is a single poster so all the information that's relevant are compressed into this one single piece. There might be also a more extended version of the brand guide, but it's also a good thing to keep in mind that it is possible to use a single page and still have all the relevant information included. That's another thing that you need to keep in mind and you have to make sure that you have the same understanding with your client. Even though they're a small company, their brand guidelines might be a long document because they would like to specify a lot of things, while other companies might be huge, but they are happy with a smaller brand guide that really focuses on the important aspects of what they would like to define as standards. What you as a designer need to pay attention to is the level of restriction. It is a fine balance between keeping a brand flexible, allowing some creativity and freedom in how you use its assets, but being rigid enough to keep the brand recognizable and consistent. Another big section in most brand guides would be about imagery. Especially with very visual brands like National Geographic, this is, of course, crucial. It's interesting to see what are the three main filters that they use for choosing the right images whenever they want to represent the brand. First one is that they need to always have a human element. They want to maintain that and avoid just showing landscapes without any human representation. The next key concept is immersion. They want you to really feel like you are present and you are in that place that they are showing. Stuff like that can really help to choose the right type of compositions for the brand. Last but not least further, which you might recall was their tagline as well. It's about vast spaces so a lot of negative space use besides the subject or salient details within the photographs. Similarly to images, type usually also gets its own chapter within a brand guide. In case of National Geographic, starts with the main font and the secondary font. Most brands would usually work with a font family that can be extensive and have several different variations which will allow flexibility in the editing. But of course it's also coming in practice like with National Geographic, that there is a main font and the secondary font, and these two are very specifically selected to work well together as a pair. For visual brands, it's also sometimes good to lay down the rules of how to combine type and imagery together. Here we can see some examples of type over light backgrounds. We even have a separate page on how to do color correction on imagery to make sure that we have enough contrast to maintain good legibility on the text. Then sometimes we also have actual compositions including the brand guide just to further define how certain elements can be used like the logo or once again, text and imagery together. Even if you are producing a printed brand guide, when the brand uses a lot of motion graphics, it's also important to keep that in mind and include in your guide. Once again, with National Geographic, of course, because it's a TV channel, that would be a lot of motion graphics used. In this chapter we can see how the logo should appear in footage. We have a very specific placement, also very specific negative space around the logo and the titles and every detail is clearly defined here, once again, to make sure that it is always used consistently. Most of the times when an agency or a designer works on the brand guide, they should also provide templates. For motion graphics, it would most likely be an After Effects template or Premiere template, while for print most of the time it would be an InDesign file with master pages and everything prepared. These templates most of the time would be for in-house use, but sometimes they can also be given out to partners. Almost all brand guides would have separate sections for the different types of collateral. The main categories are usually digital and print. We already seen a couple of digital examples, and here are a few printed examples for National Geographic. We have first the stationary overview, then we have a focus on business cards, both the front and the back. Then we have letterheads, envelopes. Then we even have the email signature defined here. However, there's digital. It still works well next to the letterheads and stationary. The appearance of the brand on social media should also be a separate chapter in most brand guys these days. We can see that perfectly in the National Geographic brand guide. We have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube next to each other, showing first the headers. Then we have a little bit more about the headers, detail, instances of the channel graphics on mobile, and then a couple of social posts templates, and banners, and even presentation slides. Of course, probably the most important one for the digital assets is going to be the website. There will most likely be several pages about that and how certain lending pages should be created and even rules about the navigation or the general layout of pages. At this point, I wanted to mention that in the past, brand guides could work for decades. Like this brand guide for NASA is from 1976 and it was in use for a long time. However, brands nowadays change their appearance quite often following certain trends in graphic design. But that is not an excuse of having completely new brand guides released yearly. I think longevity is an important factor of a good brand guide, which can serve the company for many years to come after it's been created. 23. Exercise 1 - Mastercard: Here we are in Adobe Illustrator and I have 10 logos prepared that I'm going to recreate by using this circle on the left side. The only shape that we will need for the entire tutorial. Of course, we will be using lots of different techniques from Pathfinder, Shape Builder, the Repeat Option. By watching this video, you will be able to pick up some very useful shortcuts as well. In case you want to follow along, you can download the file from the description below. But without any further delay, let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is to double-click on the Reference Layer and turn on the Template Option. I'm going to have the images deemed down to 10 percent. That way, we will be able to concentrate on what we're doing. I'm going to use this circle, as I said already in the beginning. It's already set to have no fill and just a black thin outline. I will actually set that outline to one point just to make it easier to work with it. I'm going to alt, click and drag or option click and drag to duplicate this. Now let's zoom a little bit closer. We're going to start with MasterCard. By the way, we'll have the complexity and difficulty of the logos increasing as we are moving along. I'm just using the Shift key to re-size this shape. Then Alt or Option-click and drag again, holding down the Shift key to keep it only moving horizontally. Once I have it in the right place, I can select these two circles, press "Question Mark" or "Forward Slash" on the keyboard to remove the stroke color. Then select the Paint Bucket tool by pressing "K" on the keyboard. Then from the Swatches Panel, I have this category prepared for the MasterCard logo. I'm using the left and right arrows to quickly move between these colors. I can just quickly fill in the colors having this one here in the middle and we are already done. 24. Exercise 1 - Target: That was very easy. Let's move on to the next one. Once again, I start with the same circle. Zoom closer. Now this is target. This will be fairly easy as well. I'm going to create this circle here on the outside first. I'm using the Shift key to resize this. Let's just make it slightly bigger like that. In this case I'm going to change the stroke settings. I'm going to set the alignment to inside, then using the Shift key, I will quickly increase the stroke weight, maybe going a little bit higher like that and selecting the stroke color. I'm going to choose the color that I prepared for this logo. Now I'm going to quickly duplicate this shape by pressing Command or Control C, and then Command or Control F that will paste in place. I'm going to re-size this, holding down the Shift key, and quickly swapping the stroke color to the fill color by pressing Shift X. Now I'm going to just resize it and align it to the original logo. Now, to keep things tidy, I'm going to select these two shapes, and group them together that's Command or Control G. This is something we didn't have to do for master card because there we use the paint bucket tool which already created a live paint group. 25. Exercise 3 - Audi: Moving on, let's do Audi's logo. I'm going to duplicate this shape again, re-size it, increase the stroke size to match the original design in the back. We probably need to make it slightly bigger, something like that, and this one is very simple. I just have to duplicate again holding down Option or Alt Shift, drag it to the side. Then to repeat this duplication, I'm using the Command or Control D shortcut twice. There we are. Grouping these together with Command or Control G, we have our third logo ready. 26. Exercise 4 - Olympics: Let's move on to the Olympic logo. Now I'm going to create again the first circle. I will resize this. Let's increase the stroke size a bit, something like that. Now, you will see that I'm not always 100 percent accurate because I just want to concentrate on the techniques. Of course, if we have more time we can always be much more accurate. But I'm just going to get it close to what we have in the original logos. I think that's close enough. Now once again, we can duplicate this, have it placed here, and then press 'Command' or 'Control D' to have the same distance again for the third circle. Then let's select two of these, Option or Alt Click and drag them down here. Now the space between these two circles is exactly the same as on the top row. That's why I selected those two together. But what's important with the Olympic logo, is how these circles are intertwining. It's not enough to colorize them. We will also have to do an additional step at the end. But first, let's just change the colors. I have these colors prepared again. This one is that, we have the green one here, and then we have this orange at the bottom. I'm just going to move this a little bit further down just so we can have a better look at how these interlocking shapes are created. One quick method to do this would be to select all of these shapes together, and then go to the Object menu and choose 'Expand'. This is going to turn the strokes that we have here to fields. Once that's done, I can switch to the paint bucket tool again by pressing K. Then let's select the blue color first and click on this little area here. As you can see, immediately, we have that overlap created. Now it feels like the blue circle is in front of the orange or yellow one. We can switch to black color and fill in this one here with the same black color still selected. I can also click on this section here. Then with the green color, we just have to click on this one here. Just with a few simple steps, we managed to create this interlocking effect. Now we can just place this back here. We have our first row of logos ready. 27. Exercise 5 - Vodafone: Moving on to the second row, we have a little bit more complex logos to recreate. First, starting with the Vodafone logo. First, once again, I'm going to resize this circle to roughly match what we have in the original logo. There we go. Now we just have to duplicate this. That's Command or Control C, and then Command or Control F. Make sure it's placed in the exact same position, and I'm using Alt or Option Shift keys to resize this and keep it centered. It should be aligned to the other circle in the middle, something like that. We will also need two additional circles. I'm just going to duplicate this once again, align it to the left edge of that smaller circle. You can see there is a snap thanks to the smart guides that's turned on by default. But this circle needs to be slightly differently shaped. I'm going to select this top anchor point and just drag it down a bit. I think we have a good curve there, which is very similar to the original logo. Now we just need one more circle. I'm going to again duplicate this original one and align it to that curve there. I don't care about the rest of the details outside. I'm just concentrating on the actual outlines of the logo. Because what we will do now is to select all of these together and then use one of my favorite tools, the Shape Builder, which you can select by pressing Shift M. Then holding down the Alt or Option key, we can very quickly get rid of all the unnecessary details. I can just paint over these also, these ones here in the middle, and then the remaining ones we just paint over without holding down any keyboard shortcuts. There you go. We have our final version. I'm just going to swap the stroke to fill colors by pressing Shift X and then change the color to the waterfall and the red. As I said, this is not a 100 percent accurate, but close enough for a quick one-minute technique. 28. Exercise 6 - CBS: Let's move on to CBS's logo, the Eye. I'm going to start with this circle in the middle. Holding down Shift key. I'm making sure that while I'm resizing, I'm not distorting this shape because for this logo we have to make sure that this is a perfect circle like that. I'm going to then duplicate this shape and resize it. Holding down Alt or Option Shift together, let's move this up and align it here. We need another circle just below it, and then one additional one for this curve here. Now to make sure that these three larger circles are evenly distributed, I'm using the align panel, Vertical Distribute Center option, and then selecting all of the circles together, including the smaller one in the middle, I can use the Horizontal Align Center as well. Now that we have them in place, you can jump back to our shape builder tool Shift M and then holding down Alt or Option key, we can get rid of the details that we don't need and simply draw over it the details we would like to combine without holding down any keyboard shortcuts. Now, we can press Shift X to swap the stroke to fill and we have another logo finished. 29. Exercise 7 - Toyota: Let's move on to Toyota's logo. Again, I'm starting with a circle. However, here we will distort this circle into an ellipse. I'm not holding down the Shift key in this case. I'm just dragging these points out. In this case I'm going to keep the stroke aligned to the center because we will need to use a variable width and that feature only works in case you are using the stroke in this setting. When we start increasing the stroke size, we will have to resize the shape slightly. I'm holding down the Alt or Option key, resize it like that. Also resizing it this way a bit. You can see that even though we matched the width on the top and the bottom, on the left and the right side, we need more thickness. For this, we will be using the width tool, which you can find here on the toolbar, it's Shift+W. All you have to do is to click on the center anchor point and then drag it out to the amount that you need. But notice that by default, it's increasing the thickness in both directions. However, if you hold down the Alt or Option key, it's going to change it only in a single direction. That is what we need here. However, it made the thickness too much for us, so we will have to adjust the other points as well. For now, I'm just going to repeat the same step here on the right side. To reduce the thickness back on the top and the bottom, we just have to again hold down Alt and Option and drag them back to the level that we need, which is probably somewhere around there. This one here on the top probably can go a little bit higher up. I think that is close enough. For the next ring, I'm going to draw an ellipse and I'm going to make sure in this case the stroke is aligned to the outside. I can rely on the smart guides to align the two rings to each other, and then I'm just going to adjust the size a bit. Something like that is close enough. Now we can select these two shapes, expand their appearance so everything is turned into fields. Then using the shape builder, I can just Alt or Option click on that shape on the outside. For the third ring, I'm just going to use a slightly different method. I'm going to draw each of these shapes individually, so the outline of that circle first, then copy and paste this shape, reduce the size of that shape and align it to that other one, and now select these two shapes together using the shape builder tool. Click in-between the two and that turns it into a single shape. You can see, instead of relying on the width tool, it was a little bit faster and we got a little bit more accurate result for that last ring. 30. Exercise 8 - BP: But now that we're done with the second row, we are moving on to the more complex logos starting first with BP's beautiful logo using radial symmetry. Now for this one, I am going to start again with a circle and I am going to align it to these shapes in the background. I will actually reduce the thickness even further down here just so I can get as close as possible as I can. I can just move it here. You can see I'm trying to focus on these outlines here, so that's the key to get the right shape. I'm going to zoom out a bit and I will go to the Object menu and choose Repeat radial, which will create a couple of copies for us by default, but we will need 18 instances for this logo. Now I will be careful not to change the size of these circles because that's something that we already established in the beginning. But I'm going to move this whole object here and try to align it to the center of that image. Then the key of this technique is to use this little circle here, this widget with which we can start moving it closer to the center. This is a really cool effect, by the way, I love playing around with this. But what I'm paying attention to is obviously trying to align things, and I'm paying attention to the silhouette or outline of the logo. I feel like we managed to get fairly close to it. I'm happy with the way this looks. Now I'm going to remove the stroke color first of all, and then go to the Object menu and choose Expand. This will once again turn all of these shapes into editable elements. Then I switch to the shape builder tool and holding down the Alt and Shift keys this time, we can make a marquee selection and delete everything along the way. I can very quickly get rid of these, and then again here on the right side. I just wanted to make sure I don't delete any important details that we will need in the end. There we go. We've done that bit and then zooming a little bit closer, I can again hold down Alt for Option and Shift and highlight the central part and delete that as well. Now we have only what we need and now we can switch to the Paint Bucket Tool pressing K on the keyboard. Then I have already my group of swatches prepared here, with which I can very quickly paint over these inner shapes here. Then selecting white for the center, we can set that back. Then let's select the next color with which I can again just paint very quickly over all of these shapes on the center. I don't care about going over the shapes on the outside because now finally I can use the darkest green and I can just very quickly paint over the edge of this shape and we are done. Even though it looked like a complex logo to recreate, was actually fairly simple. 31. Exercise 9 - Woolmark: Now let's move on to Woolmark's logo. I'm going to start with the original circle. Let's just align this here. I'm going to start by using the scissors tool that C on the keyboard. I'm going to cut this circle into two. Click on the top and the bottom anchor points and then select one side of it, then press backspace or delete to remove it. Now we have an arc or half a circle for which I'm going to change the setting slightly. I want to use a round cap, so round edges for it. I'm going to just increase the thickness a bit so we can see it. I'm going to also change the width profile to this first one. So is going to have thickness in the center and then gradually getting smaller towards the corner points. Now we can just rotate this around and try to align it to those shapes in the background. Something like that, I feel like is going to be close enough to what we need. Now I'm going to Alt, click and drag to duplicate this and align it to this other shape up here. Then select the blend tool that's W on the keyboard. Then click on the first shape then the next one. Then double-clicking on the icon of the blend tool gives us the blend options from where we can choose specified steps and in this case, we just need to make sure it's set to three. We can then click Okay, and that looks already quite good. Let's duplicate this Alt or Option click and drag. Then use the Rotate tool by pressing R on the keyboard and then rotate it for this other shape up here. Again, let's try to align it as close as we can. Feel like that looks good. Then let's just do this one more time and align it at the bottom. Again, I feel like that will be close enough for this demonstration. Now we can select all of them together. Go to object menu, expand the appearance. Then before we can use the shape builder tool, we have to do one more round of expand because these objects, if we take a look at in the layers panel, are still blend groups. We have to simplify them further by using the Expand option and then click okay, now they are just simple shapes so we can easily use the shape builder tool, and then just holding down the Alt or Option key, I can get rid of any unnecessary details. I'd just like to paint over these bits here, these ones there, and then take away this one up there. Maybe there's a little bit of detail there, so let's take a look. We have a few more details, so I'm just going to select all of them together once again, let's not forget about those two bits there. Just to simplify this logo, I'm going to select everything together. Using the Pathfinder panel, I'm going to use the Unite option that's going to create a single compound object from all of this, so even though it looks complex, again, it was actually not that hard to do. 32. Exercise 10 - Twitter: For the Twitter logo, which is our final one, to save time, I actually went ahead and prepare the 13 circles that we need for this design. As you can see, these are all perfect circles, so there was no need for distorting any of them. If I select all of them together, I can use the shape builder tool and the same methods that we've done before. It can be used to remove the details that we don't need. Just paint over everything. I like to start first close to the shape itself. There we go. We have these removed. There's another little detail there. Then these ones here, and then while still holding down Alt or option, we add the Shift key to make a quick marquee selection and remove the rest. For the remaining shapes, we can just use the Unite option in the Pathfinder panel. Since I already have the right color on the outline, I can just press Shift X on the keyboard to set it to feel. Once again, it was a quick and easy job once we have the circles in the right place. 33. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go and check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.