Logo Design Workflow: Creating Timeless and Modern Logos

1. Intro: A lot of people think that a good logo needs to be decorated with a lot of symbolic meanings and test to convey all kind of hidden messages. But the truth is, a good logo communicates one core message that clearly reflects the essence of the brand. Hey, my name is Robert Mattias and I'm a multidisciplinary graphic designer from Transylvania and the founder of Panther Vision. I provide branding services for luxury screen and tech brands, and I also create educational content for designers on Youtube and on Instagram. I like to call myself a math scientist when it comes to branding and design, because I'm always exploring and experimenting the boundaries of creativity. I also like to play around with special effects, optical illusions, and typography. There's so much you can do with graphic design, but when it comes to creating logos, it's all about the process of simplification or a reduction, or the process of striping away all unnecessary details. So the core message is clearly translated into a strong looking mark. In this class, you'll learn how to create effective logos that can stand out even in a saturated marketplace. We'll start with the fundamentals of what makes a good logo. And throughout the process will cover the basics of typography. And how to design word marks, which create optical balance. How to use composition and color in order to create a cohesive logo. Some basic strategies around logo functionalities and the full logo design workflow from ideation to final deliverables will cover how to conduct research Storm with the use of moodboards, sketching, and the full digital design process in Adobe Illustrator. From building from basic shapes all the way to the final refined logo design. As a bonus, I also show you how to create the presentation for your client. This class is perfect for beginners or more intermediate designers. It is filled with case studies, supportive resources, and examples of good versus bad logos. So you can understand better in which direction to go and what to avoid. It'll give you the knowledge and clarity you need in order to create strong and cohesive logos and a workflow you can replicate time and time again. So you always know where to start and what your next step is. 2. Class Project: All right, welcome to the class and we're going to talk about, of course, the project and how it's going to be divided. And of course in the first part we are going to cover up the theoretical part, you know, the fundamentals of logo. And of course, after that we're going to get into practice and we're going to start creating logos. And I'm going to show you the process from start to finish and of course how to present your logo to your clients. I decided to go with this approach because it's more flexible for beginners and you don't need as many skills yet. Literally broken down to the simplest approach that is executable. In this class, you're going to need a laptop or a PC pen and paper. And of course, Adobe Illustrator, the software that we are going to use to create logos. This class and its tools only works if you keep on practicing. If you keep on researching sketching, and of course designing logos digitally. This practical side is going to be a more longer process for you in order to develop on a better and better position. The more practice, the faster you're going to grow. In this class, you're also going to find the guidebook with questions and other kind of resources which are downloadable. Also, I would like to upload your logo designs to the project gallery sketches that you have or screenshots of the logo design process so I can see the full picture and send you feedback if you upload your logos. It also helps my logo design course get more exposure and help more students. And it would mean a lot to me. When you finish the course, don't forget to give a rating as well. If you want to see more educational content from me for free, you can check out my Youtube channel at Panther Vision, where I have uploaded hundreds of videos related to Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, and the journey. And I try to upload consistently on a daily basis. 3. Logo fundamentals: All right, so the first thing we're going to cover up is the logo fundamentals. Now most people think that this logo design is just a five minute thing. That you can create these logos in a couple of seconds with some text under it, and that's it. Well, it might seem like that, but things get a little bit more complicated and a logo might be just the tip of the iceberg. So you should imagine the logo design on a huge ocean where is basically the tip of the iceberg, the logo underneath. There's a couple of more things that are going in. We got a couple of more pillars. And the first one and the most important one would be the brief workshops, brand strategy, marketing analysis, focus groups and surveys. Now, freelancers only do the briefing part and some brand strategy most of the time because it's like, this is a too complex elaborated process which basically huge brand agencies can tackle up. You know, they got like a full staff member who can cover up all of this and extract the right information in order to create the perfect logo for it. Because we've got like bigger brands who want rebranding and that's a little bit more complex where you need more data, you know, and you cannot do all kind of logos there. It's like super objective. And then after that, we can get to the next pillar which is basically the research, the style scape. In other words, this is the mood board, by the way. And then we also get the mind mapping. Only now we get to the creative process after we extracted the information, the data. And then we got brainstorming, sketching, digital design process, we got the presentation process. This is one of the most important part of creating the logo because this is what sells your logo. And then we get like the style guide book. After you finish the logo, you basically send a style guide book that contains the rules and regulations of the logo. What can you do with the logo and what can you not do with the logo? And this is going to be sent to the design department of the company so they can read it, to understand it, how to implement it. Not at least we got a trademarking part of the logo. This is one of the most important parts. A lot of companies don't do this because it's quite expensive. But bigger businesses actually trademark their logos because they find it important, and at least nobody can use your logos in the same niche. And finally, we got the final logo. So that's how you get to the final logo. There's a few steps for it, and today we're going to cover up the brief part. Research, mood boards, brainstorming, digital design process, presentation, and then source files. Personal versus professional. All right, most of the beginners designers think that they should create some design that they like. You know, some logos that they like personally. But the truth is you're going to need to create a logo that is going to work first of all for the client and most importantly for the client's brands target audience. And of course, it's going to serve the company's goals, mission and vision. And it needs to be strategic. Now you know, for an artist, as an artist of course, they should create something that they like. And eventually they are hoping that some customer is going to come and you know, they're going to buy it. This works basically vice versa. You need to create something that is going to complement that company's mission and vision. So with that being said, you design something, how you feel versus you design for the company, how their identity should look and feel. Now this is a pitfall. A lot of beginner designers fall in because we like creating and designing. It's amazing. But in order to create 100% something for the client, it's not going to be so much fun anymore. Some projects is going to be amazing, but quite a bit of them also won't be that much fun. But the main idea is to serve the client. Local designers also need to know fundamentals of graphic design. If you're new in design and you're planning to jump into local design, I also highly recommend you to study the fundamentals of graphic design because these fundamentals are going to help you create really good posters, you know, UI logo design typography. And these fundamentals are going to help you know, in every design branch, basically these are branches and every, each has its own rule. And the fundamentals of graphic design basically applies everywhere. Meanwhile, we've got logo design rules or rules in typography, or rules in UI or web design. So that's how you should perceive these. Next we've got typography. I also included this because in logo design we tend to work with a lot of typo. We've got like the word mark, we've got combination marks, or you've got like letter marks, monograms, and so on and so forth. And typography has its own rules. We're also going to talk about the fundamentals of typography in discourse sketching. You don't need a lot of skills for sketching, but it's really important to sketch down your ideas and what you have in your mind, because eventually they are going to be lost and you won't remember it anymore. You don't need to have skills. You can doodle it, you can scribble it and whatever. Just have that sketch, that idea done on the paper. Now, on the other hand, some of the clients also might want something more illustrative, looking, something more stylized. And there you're going to need more sketching skills and stylization skills. But most of the times, you're good with, you know, simple ideas on paper. Next we've got marketing skills. Now you might ask, why do you need marketing skills? This is a logo design course right now. It's good to have some of the basics also in marketing because the logos are going to be implemented in different kind of marketing campaigns and they're going to be used in different kind of marketing materials. So it's good if you can show the client how can the logo be implemented in these scenarios. Then we got print skills. Again, if you know some basics in here, you're all good. Clients tend to ask things related to print. Yeah, then we got negotiation skills. This is one of the most crucial and important soft skills you can develop in logo design and design in general. This is going to help you because most of the beginner designers usually have this complaint that the clients are usually choosing the bad concepts. Or clients are coming up with bad design ideas that they need to execute. You know, and they are really frustrated that they need to create like really bad designs. But truth is, you don't have the skills enough to negotiate with the client, convince the client, and redirect the whole design phase into the good direction eventually. With that being said, this is also going to complete with the presentation skills, how to present the logo to the client. You need to create a solid presentation, and with that you can give context of the logo and at least you're going to show how it's going to look on different materials. These two basically are communication skills. The more you practice them, you better become and you better become also in sales in general. Then we've got animation skills. This is really, really underrated. A lot of designers are kind of intimidated from three programs and from animation software such as Adobe After Effects. The main point is to animate the logo and also present that to the client. And this part is a little bit more complicated, but if you know how to master these, then you can achieve great success. A lot of brand agencies double down on this. And they also hire animators who can do this because they know that they bring really good benefit. And then we got the brand strategy. It's good if you know some of the fundamentals here. Also some of the most important things in brand strategy. And most of the time brand strategy usually gets mixed up with logo design process anyways. So it's good to know not, but at least we got research. A good designer is a good researcher, a designer, a logo designer going to need to research the target audience. The competition is going to need to research like good ideas, inspiration, and a lot of things. I love to research, I don't know why, but it's just, it's a really good pleasure. And with that being said, the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. The more you learn, the more you learn Warren Buffett. In the next lesson, we're going to cover up the reduction phase, in other words, how to simplify the logo. 4. Simple: The Reduction Phase: Okay, top, most important rules in a good logo. We got simple, distinctive, and appropriate. These might seem simple on the surface, but the truth is it gets a little bit more elaborated. But I'm going to show you quite a bit of case study so you can understand what we're talking about. We got simple and I dissected this in a couple of pieces. The first one would be the reduction phase. Reduce the amount of meanings and ideas in a logo and remain with just one idea. A lot of beginner designers want to implement a lot of ideas, a lot of symbolic elements and stories into the logo, and also clients want to do this. By the way, truth is this is incorrect. You're going to need to stripe away as many details as possible and remain with a strong logo. The more elements you want to add into the logo, it's going to create like a Christmas tree. It won't be that scalable and you cannot implement that easily in different kind of applications. So we're going to discuss that also here. First example, we got the Apple logo. You can see here how simple it is. It's just an apple with a bite inside. When you look at it, that's what you see. Now Apple thought about, you know, that byte written with the B YT, that's basically the smallest size of a computer file, we got byte kilobyte, megabyte gigabytes, so on and so forth. It's simple, it's just a little meaning. And truth is nobody knows about it. Only a couple of people, maybe designers, know about it and the company owners knows about it. And that's it. We got BMW. Bmw had been producing airplanes back in the days and they had been inspired from the propeller that eventually created this crossing pattern. And they turned that into a BMW logo, which is really simple and minimalistic. Fed ex you can see the purple and orange color that creates this really nice contrast. And there's also a hidden element in between the letter E and the letter X. You can see that negative space arrow. This basically represents speed, accuracy, achieving goals, strive for perfection. Da made it simple. Not a lot of people know about it, but that's not even important. Then we got the Nike Swoosh. Nike had been inspired from the Nike Angela Victory. Specifically, the bronze statue where you can see the wings of the statue, that looks like a Nike Swish. That was the inspiration. And they also took the Nike name from Nike Angel of Victory, a Greek goddess, Adidas, the three stripe company. They also redesign the logo into these three stripes and this indicates and represents growth, mainly growth of the athletes because they start at the beginning and they get better and better until they become the best. For example, the shortest stripes represent the beginner athlete and the longest stripe it represents the athlete when it becomes the best top tier player. Here is the Audi four interlocking rings. These are basically four car manufacturers from Germany and one of them are Audi, DK, Horse and Wanderer. And these four companies formed the Auto Union. It wasn't even called, Audi was called the Auto Union, and after that, they rebranded it S by Dre. Most of the people think that this is a really nice, stylized letter B into a circle. But truth is, the designer thought about where the circle is a head. And that letter B, basically it's a headphone, so it's a head with a headphone viewed from the profile. A logo doesn't need to say much. It's an identification mark. You saw the Apple logo. How simple it is not. A lot of people know about what that means, what it says. These are irrelevant. Putting a lot of meanings into a logo because nobody cares about it. The most important thing, how you implement the logo on different surfaces, if it's going to work or not. If it's scalable or not, you need to stripe away as many details as possible and remain with the most important elements that are relevant to the logo to be bold and strong. All right, we're going to jump into some creative word marks. And we got here the info secure. This doesn't contain any symbols. The symbol is in the word mark. You can see the letter C here facing downwards. And inside that there's like a pick clock in negative space that basically represents security. Then we got Maca. This is a company that sells hammocks. And I made the letter really wide in between the letter legs. It looks like there's like a hammock inside Gun Properties. And Gun is a cattle breed indigenous to Southern Africa. Of course, Gun Properties is a real estate company, and I transform that letter U to look like a cow with those pointy corns, honey apiaries. This is a local high form and I transformed the letter into a droplet. And I also included the yellow color into the droplet. If I would remove the yellow color and make the droplet transparent, people would think that we're talking about water. It's important to add the identification color for people to understand what is going on. This was quite a bit of a detail there, we've got visible. This is an online app related to maps, and I transformed the letter E into a pin. Gas lamp, I transformed the letter L into a gas lamp. So these are like really basic mandatory, but they look also really nice. Bad versus good examples. I also included this section because I consider it's important for you to understand what are some of the bad examples, so you can avoid those and on what you should concentrate on rather making the wrong mistakes. Okay, so firstly, we got info secure. I did this logo back in the days like ten years ago and I didn't knew what I'm doing and why I'm doing. So I was just doing it. And we've got a couple of problems with this. The first one would be that letter that I recreated as a messaging bubble. I thought that's represent the information. But the truth is, a messaging bubble represents messaging. You know, when you're sending messages, it's not information related, Information represents something else. It's represented by some different symbols and it's already too many symbolic elements into this logo. Then we got the letter C turned downwards, which was a great idea that negative space. But I also added this color in order to highlight even better that negative space in there. It was basically a bad idea. I don't consider it doing this because there's too many things going on already. And then we got the distance in between the letter, as you can see in the info, we got bigger distance in between the letters rather than into the secure. I try to distance the letters into the info versus the secure to create contrast in between the words. Because we've got two words that are working as a word mark together. So you need to create some contrast in between in order to people to understand that there's like two words. And that way it creates contrast so they can read it better. Then we also got the colors going on that creates more contrast. Also, the blue color represents also security and information. By the way, there's another thing I observed that we got the contrast between the funds we got the info is done with a thin fund and the secure is done with a bolt fund. There's a lot of solutions in here that create contrast where basically it's too many solutions already. We got here the simplified version of the info secure. As you can see, I removed that messaging bubble from the letter and I removed the color from the letter C. But even this way, we got a lot of things going on. I reduced this even more simpler. I reduced the distancing between the letters in the info word and I also remove the colors. This is also another solution, but I also would change the fonts on this, but it's enough for this. Then there is a vine click. I also did this like ten years ago when I was a beginner in this. And I added a couple of things here. For example, we got the letter. This letter I contains the legs, like it has these legs going on. And by the way, in the click word you can see the letter I doesn't contain any legs. So we got like two types of letter I already, which was weird. These legs are, are coming from, basically from the serif fonts. To be more precise, this is a slab serif font. I did complicate it a little bit by adding those legs because of course this one has it, the right one doesn't have it. It makes it a little bit more complicated. And then we got this three stripes going on. I simplified the letter because back in the days it looked really cool to remove parts from the letter E and make these three stripes. It looks really cool. But the other hand, you don't know what does that mean or what does it do for the logo or it doesn't have any clue. Because you're a beginner. Yeah. Meanwhile basically these are views in tech industries. They implement these three stripes in the letters because it looks really modern, it looks really tech, it represents servers, it represents data, those kind of things. Eventually after I created this logo and I delivered, they also put the normal letter back. That was like really funny. Yeah. Then we got this letter. I did separate the letter K in two pieces and I recolored the right part of the letter K. This looks like an arrow which is pointing or clicking because it's all about clicking. It reads, Click This. Basically emphasize this meaning there. But the problem here is if you separate the two pieces, the left side of the K, it looks like an I. Of course, if you recolor it, the right side of the letter K is going to emphasize this. You got to read it like click instead of click. That also creates a little bit of confusion problem there. Of course, we got like the color contrast, which is good. But you can see we are adding and adding and adding all these elements which are unnecessary and incorrect. Eventually, this is the simplified version of the wine. Click you can see the letter I got simplified. I removed the seraph, the letter got back to normal, and I removed the color from the letter K. Now this would be the default. Next we're going to talk about functionality in logo design. Aka how the logo is going to be implemented on online versus offline platforms. 5. Simple: Functional: All right, functionality. A good logo going to need to work on any kind of application we're talking about like online application, on phones, on pre materials, everything. We're going to start with a small logo, which you can see it on the right side. We've got 16 pixels by 16 pixels. And a logo need to be clean and understandable on these small proportions. And 16 by 16 pixels is for website fa, icon format. And also these days, most of the people access brands and websites and products from their mobile phones where basically things get shrink down even more. You're going to need to create a mark that eventually going to be clean and understandable onto small proportions. Then we got like 100 pixels and bigger and bigger than that. Not all the logos look great when they're scaled up on big proportions. And not all the logos are understandable on small proportions. So you're going to need to test it, check it if they still look good and clean. Understandable. Next we got Pixel platforms. We're talking about here websites, mobile applications, everything that is on a monitor. And you can see the iphone in case you are developing an app and you want a logo for it. You can see in this situation and how many times the logo gets scaled down in different small proportions. Of course, Apple requires different dimensions for it. Things get a little bit more further when we're talking about an iphone watch. Here they get scaled out even more ipads. And again, different watch formats like 42 millimeters versus 38 millimeter watch. As you can see, Apple, how it's requiring the logos in different dimensions. We've got print applications, now we're talking about print formats, physical format. Mostly you can see here the logo embossed in leather. This is a complicated format because not all the logo is going to be look, embossed in leather. If the logo is more more detailed, it's more complicated that it won't look good. Scale down, embossed in leather. Even this logo, you can see it has a little bit of difficulties on the pattern, but overall it looks good. Like 95% passes the test or we got an acrylic print on a business card, you can see the pattern and logo. Then you can see the logo sealed, decorated with different elements. You can see made out of steel, or you can see decorated with colors. You also can see on the right embroidered. Now, this is also a little bit challenging for not all the logo is going to work pretty good with embroidery. I also had logos, illustrated, logos that I tried out embroidering but turned out pretty bad. Simple bold logos work really good. 6. Distinctive: Distinctive. When you're analyzing the client's competition, you might see those logos. And you want to avoid creating the same logo or similar logos because that's going to create like market confusion. And if you create something more different, and it's basically going to stand out from the competition a little bit more. Here we got logos from luxury brands and one of my clients, which is right here, Ali, this is a jewelry manufacturer from Uva Arabic States. He wanted a logo that stands out from the top competitors. And of course, he wanted to sell jewelry on line worldwide. He wanted me to create something that competes with these guys, and I made a really strong bold logo. And of course, with has the look and feel of these Arabic elements. Arabs have these really nice decorations. And then we got a bad example also. By the way, Panther vision is my brand, and I rebranded it in this way. That looks like the Louis Tongue. Now, this is really bad. You might get backlashes if you post similar logos to other competition. You know, I highly not recommend this. Try to create logos that are different, avoid similarities. Don't make unique logos. Unique logos doesn't exist out there. But make something a little bit more different to not look the same. In the next chapter, we're going to cover up what is an appropriate logo. 7. Appropriate: Appropriate, the look and feel. This is also a crucial element when we're talking about logo design. So the question is, when you look at a certain logo, how it's going to look and feel. And when you look on it without reading the story, without reading what this brand company does, you know you're going to need to have a slight idea what is this company about? I'm going to show you a couple of examples. For example, we got here a pretty interesting logo. So when you see the symbol, it's really spiky. It looks kind of aggressive. You read the word mark, it reads Nuclear Blast. Again, it's a little bit more hardcore sounding. It looks really modern. And in the background there's this guy with a lot of tattoos, Hot, long hair in the grunge environment. So I might think on a rock and roll, you know, heavy metal or something like that. So this was made for one of the biggest label, heavy metal label companies in the world. And they wanted me to redesign this with a really modern, aggressive logo because we're talking about like heavy metal rights. So they wanted something more hardcore for them. And then we got Uka Buka. This is a pastry shop from Oman, and I basically recreated the letter from Uka, but it also looks like a doughnut, and I wanted to make the logo creamy and delicious as possible. So you can see this abstract circular motion there which looks really wavy and looks really creamy Dr. This is an online platform where you can consult the doctors. On line, I made two hearts that they are colliding and overlapping each other, and it's creating this Apple logo. I also used appropriate colors. Here you can see the mint and blue color. Mainly, these two colors represent the healthcare. If I would add, for example, yellow or I don't know what purple color that wouldn't represent the healthcare. Mainly, we've got blue, mint, green, and red colors that represent the healthcare industry. This is how people recognizes it. It's also really friendly looking and it's really modern looking. Gray step media. And these guys are photographers and they are photographing interior and exterior of penthouses. And they asked me to create a Mexican pyramid. And I made it really modern looking, really abstract looking that eventually complement these abstract simple concrete buildings. Nike. The word mark of the Nike is a condensed tall bold looking type face where in which you can see it's tilted. It, it's like an italic font. And when you tilt the font this way, it basically indicates speed, it indicates motion, it's energetic. You know, it represents the athletes. And this way it represents sports. A Lego, we got this red intense color, which is really energetic. And there's also this yellow color that looks really friendly and positive. And of course, the letters of the word mark is really bubbly and positive, friendly looking, that it's mainly made for kids. A role, the word mark is written with classic sera fonts with a royal green color. And of course we got the crown above. You can see this way we're talking about a luxury logo, a luxury brand. Next we're going to talk about timeless logos. 8. Timeless: Okay, time less memorable. If you make the logo simple and strong and bold enough, then of course it's going to become timeless. And the main idea of the logo is to live up for decades and decades. For example, you've got the Coca Cola logo. It lives like more than 100 years already. They redesigned it like 100 years ago. And still they are using the same thing, same as with Apple logo. So I'm going to show you some examples. Leave the trends to the fashion industry. Trends are coming and going. Back in the days, there was like these three dimensional logos everywhere. Everyone implemented into their logos. And then we got vintage logos. These days we've got modern logos with a lot of vibrant gradients all live up like 234 years. And then some other trends come in. So you need to research the trend, see what's out there, avoid those, and create something really good that basically is going to stand the test of time. For example, we got the Apple logo. They rebranded the logo in 1977, and they kept the same silhouette. They only changed the style of the logo, they only changed the interior of the silhouette of the logo. And you can see in 2,001.2007 they also implemented this three logo style effect, which was a big trend back in the days. But they kept the silhouette the same, which was a really good idea. Mercedes, they rebranded the logo in 1916. They added those triangular stars, and they kept the same triangular star till today. They redesigned it a couple of times, but the silhouette is the same, exact silhouette. All right, now we get the homework. Take a walk in your downtown where you can find the most markets and stores, search for logos on stores, banners, signs, et cetera. And see how you can apply the most important rules in a good logo. You also can take photos and bring them home with you and upload them on your computer to see the differences. Good luck. In the next lesson, we're going to cover up some of the differences between the word marks and the symbols. 9. Wordmarks vs Symbols: Word marks versus symbols. Now theoretically speaking, word mark is more simply to remember, when you include also a symbol. Things going to get a little bit more complicated. People are going to need to understand, what is that symbols? What does that mean? Also word mark is more simpler to understand because it's also written there. What does this says? If you promote the symbol only, then people might get a little bit more confused. If you promote the word mark, only people can read it, they can understand it, depict what is there. But there's also like brands who are combining the symbol with the wordmark. Also there are different strategies to it. I also going to show you some of the examples. Sd lauder. They are using a beautiful monogram with the letter E and the letter L. And there's also this really nice word mark, ST, Loud. There you can see the letter E that contains that line above with a beautiful Sera Fonts without Serif of course, but it's really modern. They're implementing these different ways. For example, on these products you can see they're implementing also the symbol with the word mark combined together perfectly symmetrically, and all the information are symmetrical on it. Then in this situation, they are implementing only the word mark on all these products. They start from left to right. I mean, all the composition basically starts from left to right, and it creates this beautiful design. Next is the La Paris. Now Lac Paris has this nice simplified abstract rows. Not a lot of people know about this. They mainly use the Lac Paris word mark because it's enough, it's just beautiful. You also can see the roof on that letter. It's a really distinctive word mark already. In some scenarios they are also including the symbol, for example, in the stores. But mainly they are using only the word mark on their products and on their marketing campaigns. In the upcoming lesson, we're going to cover up the logo functionalities. 10. Logo Functionalities: Logo Functionalities. Dynamic Logos, one of my favorites. Dynamic logos are basically the logo silhouettes decorated with different elements. In a situation we got like City of Melbourne. As you can see, they chose geometrical shapes, isometric shapes with a lot of vibrant strong colors. They basically are implementing these elements in their campaigns, in the print materials. And it's really a strong decoration for a full brand identity system. You probably remember the MTV logos, if you are from the '90s, MTV used to rebrand their logos. I don't know. Every three or four months they created all logo animations of the letter M TV logo, and they made a versions which looked really, really amazing, Nike. They also did a couple of variations back in the days, I think this was made by the designer who also made the Nike swoosh. And you can see how many things you can create out of the logo. You also can see another story of the Nike swoosh when basically it's rebuild, renovated into a really modern, minimalistic mark. Here you can see only the Nike word mark redesigned in different ways. These all contain special effects that indicate speed. Because we're talking about sports, we're talking about energy and speed, and these are representing those pretty nicely. This is my brand, my personal brand. I also redesigned the logo in a couple of ways in order to create marketing for it. Now you can see in my situation, I have a word mark, and I redesigned the word mark in different styles, in three dimension, two dimension. I got out of the comfort zone quite a bit and entered into different directions with it. Also here you can see the logo with a lot of special effects. Yeah, these are going to be good for different banners, campaigns, pre materials, and a lot more Romans. And here is the Romans logo, you can see the letter M stylized. And here you can see it implemented already in different kind of posters. For example, on the first poster, you can see this letter M symbol. This works as a silhouette and inside of it, and there's like an image on the second one. The letter M silhouette is also decorated with different kind of abstract forms without images. And the list goes on. And all these posters looks quite a bit beautiful. Okay? Responsive logos. Now, a lot of brands also found out this thing that you know, a lot of people, most other people are accessing their websites and products from their mobile phones. And things get scaled down on small proportions, and everybody needs to advertise their page on websites, on landing pages, and so on and so forth. And also, for example, Heineken and Disney had complicated logos. I mean elaborated logos. And they need to come up with a solution in order to simplify and implement the logo in these new platforms. So as you can see, Heineken, it had these beautiful floor decorations. It had these ribbons and all kinds of things. And how the logo gets simplified with only the star and only the Heineken word mark. And eventually you can see only the star. And I really like the Wall, the Disney option here, because they had these castles going on and they had these beautiful animations. When you see in the movies, you can see that huge castle that basically gets transformed into this logo. They remove the castle and then they figure out they also need to remove the Wald word in order to simplify. And then we got the Disney word. By the way, a good word mark is in 5-7 letters. Those are the really good and easy rememberable word marks. And then eventually, we got the letter D from the Disney simplified. And of course, a really, really good logo fits into a square. So you need to remember this, make sure that your symbols also fit into a square. In this situation, you can see the Heineken star and the Disney letter D fits perfectly. Also, the Disney with the full word or Wall Disney, they fit in horizontal lockups as well, for example, in banners. But I'm also going to show you different examples. Okay, I had this client, Devin Williams Speakeasy, and they had this really beautiful Art Deco bar. And on the left you can see decorated with Art Deco elements that looks really luxurious. And on the right you can see only the word mark simplified or you can see the edge of the DW monogram simplified on the left, which is just the monogram and it gets decorated more and more. On the right you can see with all the beautiful decorations. And there's like also another example, more Art Deco variations, logo lockup. There's like a couple of lock ups I want to talk about. For example, this is the perfect symmetrical lock up. Here you can see the symbol is on the top and wordmark is on the bottom. Next we got symbol on the left, word mark on the right. This works really nicely. Horizontal situation for banners on websites on really narrow, tight ******. We also have this example Mogi. You've got the wordmark on the top, symbol on the bottom. There's like another horizontal lock up version, the badge. Now you also can modify the logo how you want. You can combine the word mark with a symbol and different aspects and situations. Put it in different places, test it, experiment with it. You can discover like new lock ups. Also, next chapter is going to be about understanding colors in logo design and branding. 11. Understanding Colors: Understanding colors. What's the identification color of your brand? Maybe you thought that symbol and wordmark is the most important when we're talking about branding and we're talking about a brand identity. But the truth is, it's the color, color improves brand recognition by up to 80% So this is what people see. First they see the color of the brand, and then they see the symbol of the brand. And lastly, they're going to see the word mark the text of the brand. Because people don't like to read them much, they're more visual, they mainly like to see, the brain doesn't do a lot of effort just seeing a symbol or just seeing a color, but it does more effort reading that text there or word mark, for example, when you see a brown truck, there's not a lot of brown trucks out there, but when you see it, you probably notice that it's the UPS truck. Or when you see a purple color banner in New York or somewhere, you probably think about T Mobile. Every brand should have a signature color and should stay consistent with that color choice without changing it for a long period of time. It works the same way as the symbol and the logo. You made a logo to live up for decades and decades. And same thing works with the color. If you change it constantly, people won't recognize your brand. You're going to have problems like that. Try to simplify your color palette through a primary and secondary color. If you have two colors that are contrasting each other really, really nicely, that's good. And by the way, if you use only one single color, you don't have any primary secondary color that is even better because people recognize it and remember that more easily. But having two colors, three colors, four colors, that's totally fine also. But don't mix it up with too many colors. That's a little bit more pro, advanced level. For example, we've got fed ex perp and orange. Really nice contrast to colors or hana can red and green. Ikea, blue and yellow. Really strong contrast. Lego, red and yellow. Subway, green and yellow. This is less contrasty UPS, brown and yellow. We're going to talk about the color wheels. This would be a little bit more boring, but I'm also going to show you how to implement these and what other brands took from the color wheels. We got the basics here, monochrome where you use only one color. We've got the analog which are using similar colors from the color palette where it's using totally the opposite colors, it creates a strong contrast. And then we've got split complementary colors, again, totally opposite colors. By this time it also includes another one. On the bottom, we got the triad colors. This is 120 degree angle color choice, where we can find really, really beautiful color combinations. Then we got the tetradic, which is basically 90 degrees angle and uses four colors. Let's see how brands are implementing these color pellets. For example, we got the Lego red and yellow. You can see this is a triad fed ex per pen orange. We got another triad, Ikea, blue and yellow. This is again another triad. You can see a lot of companies uses triads because they got like really beautiful color combinations. And then we got Subway green and yellow. This is an analog. Similar colors doesn't create that strong of a contrast but still looks organic. Hanken, red and green. This is a complementary. All right. Color psychology, basic. It's also important to know a little bit about the color psychology. I'm going to leave you an image where you can find all the colors and all the meanings of the colors, and also which brands are implementing these colors. This also plays some importance when we're talking about coloring the logo, coloring the brand identity, but it also can get really detailed. In the upcoming lessons, we're going to talk about the basics of typography. 12. Typography Basics: Typography basics. These are the four main fonts type that we've got. We've got the seraph, which is a classic seraph is the modern slap serve that comes from the seraph and it's like really thick and bold. And then also the handwritten fonts, I'm going to use this word as a reference and we're going to dissect it. The bottom part is the baseline. Then we got the x height. The letter X basically is the shortest letter. And as you can see, this is going to be the height of the lower case letters. All the other lower case letters are going to go beyond the x height. You also can see the letter U. The top part doesn't go beyond the X height, but the bottom part, it goes out of the base line, which is totally normal. And then the top line is called the median. We've got the cap height. This is the upper case letter height. You can see some of the letters also go beyond that height. Which is the ascender line from the lower case letter K. That would be the top, most tallest one. Then we've got the descendant line, for example, the letter P that goes downwards. These are the two main fonts. The left is the seraph and the right is the sans Serif Classic versus modern. I'm going to show you what are the differences. The seraph are basically these little legs. And also there's like another thing going on. We got the contrast. You can see the left leg is a thin leg and you can see the right one is more thicker and this weight creates contrast optical balance. We've got here three geometrical shapes. We've got the triangle, the square, and the circle. You can see that the triangle is a little bit bigger. And also the circle gets out of the grid lines as well. Now it has to be like this, because if you scale down the triangle, if you scale down the circle, they're going to look a little bit smaller than the rectangle in the square. This is how it also is applied in every letter. Upper case or lower case situation. It gets scaled up a little bit more beyond the grid lines than it used to. This is how the geometrical shapes are also the silhouettes. You can see how it works with the letters we got here, the X example. And as you can see, the letter doesn't pass the grid lines. Here is a situation where on the left it doesn't pass the grid line, and on the right it passes the grid line where the letter is a little bit bigger. I think I made it a little bit too big. But the main idea is that the two letters to look almost the same, to have almost the same weight. There's also beginning designers who do this mistake when they have only a thin font and they add a stroke on it. So we're going to make the letter more thick looking. But this is a big mistake because when you created the font more thicker and thicker from thin to other way to black, it's just making it more wide. The accurate way to do this, you're going to need to recreate the font and make it more wide. Now, this is time consuming. You need more knowledge and technique in order to create this, but this is the right way to make a font more bolder and black. Look in kerning. This is basically distancing between the letters. When we're talking about the sensory font, this works pretty nicely, even if they're like the same distancing between the letters. But when we're talking about the Serifs, you're going to need to customize them because when you write down something with the software, it won't adjust the kerning. So for example, we got this situation, the May on the top part, you can see that I wrote it with Adobe Illustrator. And this is the default. This is the distance that it's going to put between the letter A and the letter Y. On the bottom, you can see I had to reduce it manually, the distancing between the letter A and the letter Y. There's like a couple of websites. You also can check out and exercise your kerning skills and typography skills, and we're going to check out that also. Here I'm going to add some fund websites. The first one is funds, Google.com So these are non licensable funds. You can use it anywhere. You can use it however you want to distorted whatever. This doesn't contain any licensing. You also got Adobe funds. This is also a really good source for funds. This is not for free. Of course, fund, Squirrel.com Again, free funds do fund Fund.com Now on this website, not all the funds are amazing, but you're going to find some really cool scripts. Funds or decorated funds which is going to eventually work really nicely. Not necessary for the logo, but you got a couple of variations but they're not, all the funds are clean. Okay Not, but at least we got fund type.com This is also a really nice place to find tall bolt condense typos. Don't download too many funds, stick to a set of funds. Again, I had this situation back in the days I downloaded all kind of funds. I don't do that anymore because I overload the system with a lot of funds. And then the software is like going to need to load. And it's going to take more time, and of course you are not using it. It's going to sit there uselessly. So. Stick to a set of funds. You memorize those funds and you're going to know where to use and what kind of funds. So that's the main point of these, okay, display funds versus text funds. First we got to talk about the display funds. Display funds are mainly used for title funds, for example, on posters, also on logos. And these are mainly funds that you can use it for, like titles, Mainly if you are using it for a text. If you are using it for a book to read it like long hours, like 200 pages, this won't be good because it's going to be hard to read. These funds are a little bit hard to read. They're not that optimized. They're mainly optimized for titles. First one is a Trade Gothic in line. You can see this is used for restaurants. It has this interior line into it, it's decorative, it looks really nice. It's a little bit complicated to read again. This is just title, fund, display. Fund, noi has grotesque display. I hope this is how you pronounce it correctly. I think this can be used also for reading fund, but you can see it is a really modern fund that is used for pharmaceuticals or other kind of packaging designs dot this is a modern Sera fund that mainly fashion industries are implementing it. Then we've got Alternate Gothic. This is a bold condensed type face. You can read it from far distances, it's really in your face, it's super bold. The list goes on. You can see the FDN implemented different vintage old school packaging designs. And then we got the text font. This font is mainly used for reading. And the best one of course, is the Seraph font. That's the most natural and organic for the human brain, for the human eye. Seraph is a little bit more modern, but that's also still a very readable. But the seraph is basically the most readable, 100% we got. Helvetica, this is great for display fund and it's great for text fund as well. And Caslon Classic regular again, another classic. All right, let's check out the type method and here we can adjust the kerning. You can see we got four letters and I can pull the letter V. Basically, this is the maximum we can do. I'm going to pull it here and I'm also going to. So it seems like I can pull only the letter V. After you adjust it, you can click on Done Here. Let's see if it's correct. Oh, actually I could adjust the letter A two. Let's go to next. But your score is 100% here, so it's good. Click on next. Here you can see you cannot adjust the letter. You can adjust the letter Y. And this is the max you can go. That's extreme, I think I'm guessing it's something like this. It's about optical balance. You need to trust your eyes and not the mathematical calculations and the grid lines. Those are not available here. They don't help in this situation. You're going to need to do it optically and Gal done, oh, it's only 73. All right. That didn't work that well. You can play around like this quite a bit and just practice it until you get these right. Then we got the shape method where you can practice your pento scales. As you can see, you can pull the handle at the letter. I'm going to pull it and I'm going to pull it here. Where is the doted lines are? We've got ten remaining in this situation. You don't have any guidelines anymore. This is totally free handed. Also, if you press and hold shift, it's going to isolate it horizontally, perfectly. Again, you need to trust your instinct. Plus you need to have a good amount of skills. But here you can practice it quite a bit. I'm going to click on Complete. Oh, I needed to pull a little bit more, but 80% is pretty good. You go on, check this out. Oh, wow, this is fun. I think this is a lot of fun. And you can practice it. This app is really smooth and that doesn't even look that good here. But anyways, you get the main idea. There's also a website called Fund in Logo Here. You can search for the logos you like and then it's going to show you the funds that they use. For example, we got Lufthansa and they use Helvetica. Loreal Trade, got LTS, Std, check it out. Helvetica is used quite a bit and we go, Louis Viton used the Futura. These are popular funds out there. You just type in here to the search bar, for example. Nike look at that, it's going to show up. The Nike uses the Futura and Adidas uses the ITC Avant guard view all logos. And this is how you find out what brand, what fund uses for their brand identity. Now in the upcoming lessons, we're going to jump into the practical part. And of course, we're going to start with a brief, and I'm going to show you some of my brief questions, what you also can apply for your clients. 13. Brief: The process. Finally we got to the process where I'm going to demonstrate to you to how to create logos. From the brief to the sketch, to the refinement process and all that stuff. So the first thing is the brief. First we got some basic information related to the business. Like companies names, description of your company, company's location, company's website, brands, Logan tag line, a list of products, services your business provides. I created a fictional brand that I'm going to fill up the brief and I'm also going to show you those. The business name is Mo Amer provides effective online marketing solutions to small businesses in Arizona and New Mexico to grow their online presence with website design, SEO optimization, and social media marketing. It's based in Arizona website Gamer.com slogan, empowering your success. Then we got goals of the company. What goals do we need to achieve with the logo? Where do you want to use the logo? What should I avoid designing the logo? The last one is a really powerful question because the client is going to provide you with information. We're, he's going to send you examples with logos where you should not go in those directions. Like logos which he don't like and images and color palettes and that he don't like, fonts that he don't like. Where do you want to use this logo? We're talking about like online or offline applications that I showed you before. I did the response with a visual showcase what Jamo does in marketing. The logo should be modern, simple, and it should be a balance between corporate and friendly. It should be used online, on website, and social media. Other applications as business cards, marks, T shirts, and signs in the future, avoid vibrant, trendy gradient colors that our competition has. Next, we got examples. What are some of the logos you like and why this is a really good one, because at least you are asking the client to come up with logos that he likes. You can understand from here what direction he likes, what direction, basically you can go on with this logo. For this one, he mentioned the target. It's simple, bold, and distinctive. They are also implementing the logo in all sorts of marketing campaigns that looks incredible. Target audience. Who is your target market? How do they look like? What's the age range of your target audience? How old are they? How do you want your target market to feel about your brand identity? This is super crucially important because it's mainly about the target audience. Of course, the client wants to create something for themselves so they can like it. But the main goal is to create something for the target audience. And create products for the target audience that eventually it's going to sell. The target market is small businesses and start ups. Age range 25-50 years old. Excited and positive competition. Who are your top competitors? Quantum Advertising Agency, Amplify, digital marketing catalyst, Creative and not. But at least we get the brand attributes. Please describe your business in three words. What is the personality of the brand? And here in the next slide, I also included a list of keywords that eventually is going to help the client select the right keywords that is going to represent the brand. This is also very important for you to narrow down into the right keywords so you can understand in which direction to go and how you can make the logo according to the keywords as well. Okay, brand attributes in my case would be professional, creative and growth, clean and modern. You also can check out the good brief and there it's going to generate. You automatically briefs with fictional companies and see if you can create some logos for that. As a homework, assemble your fictional brief using the questions from the brief video. You also can rebrand an existing business with an outdated logo or use the brief generator on good brief. Here we got good brief here we can select the type. We got logo illustration packaging like what would be the brief about the client, let's say one logo in our situation and we got here the industry. We got technology, food, retail. I'm going to go this time with fashion and I'm going to click on Generate. So you can see it chooses a fictional company name, the West Home Company Description. We are a fashion company that sells plus sized dresses. Our items are made with low cost materials and are sold in your favorite stores. Our target audience is women. We want to convey a sense of power while at the same time being professional job description. You must create a logo using the information given in the brief. They will prefer a letter mark that uses the color yellow. The color will be embroidered on uniforms. Take into account the company's values and preferences and make sure it will work for the planned use case deadline. Three days. Now, three days, it's really unrealistic. Now, this is a fictional brief of course, but I usually do logos like in one or two weeks or three weeks. Next we're going to talk about the research. 14. Research: The next phase would be the research. Here you're going to need to research the target market, the competition, and gather all the information you need. Here's a quote, a good designer is a good researcher. I also mentioned that before. But it's important to do the research and exercise. Your research is based on keywords and see what you can find inspiration is like bathing. You need it on a daily basis. Of course, you're going to get a lot of information related to logo samples and brand identity designs. Is that going to work for this project? You need to collect those and I'm also going to show you how to do it. But if you try to get inspired more often as possible, you're going to become more and more creative. And you're going to have more and more data in your brain and more knowledge related to brand identity, homework, research, the competition which are in the same niche. Okay, regarding to the competition, when you ask the client to show you the competition, basically it's going to write it out. My situation, these are like fictional competition. But I'm going to do some manual research and I'm going to show you some real marketing agencies actually. But when your client is going to write down their competition, you're going to research those. And eventually you're going to research even more. And I'm going to show you how. Let's go to Google.com and I'm going to search like this marketing agencies in Arizona and we're going to have a couple of links. Google does great research and I highly recommend to start there. I'm just going to open up the links and you can see here, it's going to open up in tabs because I'm pressing the scrolling button on my mouse, we get like top advertising agencies in Arizona, 2023 or top 30 digital marketing companies in Arizona. Look at the top 15 marketing agencies in Phoenix. I get a couple of results that we're going to check out. But what I'm looking for is basically pages like these where are collecting multiple marketing agencies and you can see reviews and you can see a lot more information from them. So this is one of these. For example, we got also the top 30 digital marketing companies from Arizona. Let's see what is this top 15 from Phoenix. And you can click on a visit website. So this is how you start, You know, we got like you already got here, all of the brands logos, So this is how you start with now. You can see how they look. You also can go here basically, you can see even better, we got some good logos, bad logos, That's the start. Just to see the logos. Now, we don't want only the logos because the logo is not the full brand identity. I'm going to start, for example, with the Co digital. You got also this button here. Visit website. I'm going to click on. See what's up. Oh, look at that. These guys already have something cooking that actually looks really professional. For example, when you're talking about their website, they got their color. You can see it's red, black, and white. The website is professionally, almost professionally. This should be also in red and white and black. But here you can see it's already inconsistent. But they did a better job than the rest, usually because most of the websites or most of the brands, they don't look professional enough. Anyway, they're going to go up because this is pretty much unsuccessful already. They implemented all colors. Anyways, I'm going to go to the menu. We can see here their social media pages. I got to go to their Facebook, their Instagram. What is this? They got hands as well. Interesting. I got to check their work. Let's see what they are doing. Check this out. Also on their social media page, they are implementing this red, white, black nuances, which is pretty great. They're combining the logo with the serif fonts. All right. It's not that bad, this is a decent company. This is a decent brand growth oriented digital marketing, best in class web design and development, professional video production, business to business, business to client and so on and so forth. So these are pretty good this way. You check out and read about them and see what they're doing, see how they look alike. Let's see what I'm going to check this also, let me see something even more interesting. This one Interior digital. That sounds interesting. I don't know. It makes me think of interior design. Check this out. Also, the colors are implemented. Well, you've got this blue combined with mint colors, which they are consistent with. The logo also looks pretty good. Let me see if they got some social media pages or do they got only their websites? Yeah, they got linked in. Anyways, let's go on. This looks like a tech logo, Keta Tech. It also says it's tech. Make it easy for your business to thrive in competitive marketing. This is what they do, mobile app web design, web and size applications, web development, SEO. Okay, this is a really good method how to research when they got a full list of brands, for example, related to marketing agencies. There is also another one which is pretty nice. You also can see here all the logos, all of their identity. You can see some information about these businesses. Of course, most of them look really unprofessional. I mean, they don't look that big of a deal. Nothing really stands out. I like more these simple word marks in my situation because that's like timeless. Yeah, these are not impressive as much. In this situation, you got a really good advantage to create something really nice and stand out of the competition. Look at Web. Look how strong this word mark is. This word mark outperforms actually most of us. Oh yeah. This is also good avenue. I want to see this website to see what's up. I also want to see the web website. I'm just going to go and check out some of the best identity visuals that are actually good meta jive. This is also pretty good. This is a really old school three D gradient trendy logo from back in days. It's really awful but I'm still going to check it out. It has like 24 reviews, I don't know what is that, but I got to go with this really bad website then. Looking identity. Yeah, they are really working with this one. It looks like a stock template web page which doesn't have a lot of trust. But check this out. They actually have a huge staff. They also collaborated with the big brands in there. All right. You can see up here the social media you got. Instagram, Facebook. I'm also going to check out the Youtube. Seems they have one. I'll look at this. They actually implemented the color from the logo, which is amazing. So they got the red, green, blue and yellow implemented in these story circles in here. And you can see here also in the images, they implement these colors. Down here in this line, which is amazing, they got a specific typography. Of course, the logo typo is slab seraph and this one is a san seraph, which is really modern. They communicate really good with each other, the seraph and the san serf because they create a really nice contrast. So that's a good approach. Yeah, the images are good. It's not that bad, but I don't know what to say about it. It's not the top notch that I would think of it, Best visual identity that I can think about. Look, they got Google Partners. The logo is also like in the same scenario. I don't know. Somehow it's not clicking for me. But let's go on. I can check the What is that? This is amazing. Wow. The website is amazing. They are using this green color as an explosion. Here. As an effect. Yeah. They're really consistent so far with imagery, videos, colors, typography. Typo is amazing. It's really simple. It's minimalistic is exactly what I like a lot. Look at this huge video in here. I don't know, is this a video? I don't even know what is this, but yeah. Okay, it's switched up to work company. Look at that green hand in there. All right. It's really consistent with the colors. It's really consistent with the brand identity system so far because the whole thing is minimalistic. And check out the logo up here in the corner, it only shows the letter M in a perfect square right there, so it's not showing the full word mark with the meta jive. Look at this, all services, it's going to bounce out again, we've got the same toxic green going consistent on all the pages. It's a really good website now, it basically checks everything. So far, I'm going to go check out their Instagram, eventually their Facebook. Yeah, I'm going to go back to their work to see a little bit more about it. Look at this. User experience is amazing, image qualities is not that bad because I'm on four K. But anyways, you can see that they did some work and they are not messing around. This is a serious business already. Look at their Instagram. It's like really professional looking. You've got great graphic designs in here. Great imageries, fonts, colors, everything is consistent. Yeah. They're doing a great job. Check this out. They're really highlighting this toxic green digital creative agency focused on creating great experiences for brand, pursuing excellence, amazing. This is their symbol and when you go on their website, you can see the full word. If you can see it actually you cannot only can see it on this website, the word mark, but it's amazing. Anyways, this is their Facebook, again, really consistent. Check this out. So you can see a calendar with this green color or everything. They are trying to push this brand identity color in the right way. I mean, strategically you get the main point. Next is Webley, super simple word mark. I love it. It's perfect, It doesn't have any issues. I mean, they chose a really good font for it, that's for sure they're going consistent with the colors. It's simple, it's minimalistic. Again, it's really clean. And I want to also see this one because their logo is really good. Check this out. I love this logo a lot and yeah, they are also doing a great job with this. Their social media is not the best, but overall the logo is pretty nice. They still have to work on implementing the full brand identity system correctly, but overall it's nice. So far, this is the best, this is how you should think of when you're designing. You know that the logo is one thing, but it's all about the full picture. When you're helping a brand that we're talking about, like symbols, word marks, fonts, typo patterns, colors, and a lot of things in between. Next, we're going to talk about mood boards, and I'm going to show you how to create them. 15. Moodboard: Mood board. It gives an idea of the full picture and the elements that will be used in the identity, such as fonts, colors, logos, images, layouts and textures, inspiration. We're going to talk about pages where you can get inspired. This is not the same research as from the previous chapter. This is going to be like a creative inspiration research going to find like logos, colors and fonts. And different elements that are eventually going to collect and create mood boards for the clients where you can get also inspired to implement into the logo. We've got platforms such as Pinterest. I consider this is the most important and the best one that you can find out there. Because when you find a photo under it, you can find more similar photos and you can get lost into the process. Gathering infinite amount of ideas. Great ideas. I think this is the best search engine and search structure for inspiration. At least then we got. Dribble is way more modern vector based. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles like Pinterest has. But it's still good, but it's like really, really niche down to modern vector graphics. And then we got hands Hands is mainly based on full portfolio projects where you can basically present the full brand identity of one project on mock ups and on different kind of scenarios. That's also a different thing, but you also need it. It's very important not. But at least we got Instagram. A lot of designers showcase their designs on Instagram quite a bit now. And it became like a really good inspiration source as well. Software where you can create your mood boards. We got Photo Shop and I also included there the Pure Ref. I'm going to show you how to do moodboards in Photoshop, but pure Ref is way more easier as well. You just drag and drop the images in there and assemble it. And that's it. I created two moodboards. I created one moodboard that was from the example that the client like with the logo, with the target, because this is really bold and distinctive. I did gather all the information with campaign materials, how they implement the logos in different posters, and how they implement the logos on different packagings. And then I also made a personalized mood board that eventually is going to work for the company. The logo, of course, going to be bold, like this Moodboard, bold, distinctive, very simple. And I created the moodboard where, you know, it's using the fonts, the colors, and the imagery that is going to eventually incorporated into the brand identity. And you can see on this color platelet, I use a lot of blue. I also combine it with a little bit of pinkish red. That is going to make it look more friendly rather than with only the blue. It's going to make it look more cold with the white combination. So that pink, red going to balance it up quite a bit. And you can see like really modern marks and different scenarios, different symbols that represent growth. You can see also the arrows plays an important role, like in the rising logo there right here, that represents growth. Or we've got these scenarios here, these logo concepts that also represent growth. Like you saw before, the Adidas example. Okay, homework assemble one or two mood boards that are relevant to your brief and style direction. All right, let's get into the most fun part where we're going to do a research on Pinterest. We're going to check out some identities, logos, and what the brief is all about. So I'm going to open up Pinterest and I'm going to go to the search bar, and I want to search first for bold logos. Okay, I'm just going to enter it like this. It's going to show quite a bit of logo directions here first. As you can see here, we've got arrows that we're talking about, like arrows represents growth, something like that. This is a direction with arrows, this is another direction with arrows, this is a little bit bold. Also, this is more thinner as you can see when you scroll down. They're basically going to add you more and more ideas with arrows, bold looking arrows that basically looks like this, similar to this one. This is what we want on Pinterest directions, and this is what Pinterest is made for. For example, we got here, again, more arrows, White background, black logo. And when you scroll down, it's going to add another one of these or another one of these and it's going to give you like even bolder logos. Okay, let's go on and I'm going to open up, let's say something else. Let's say like an abstract direction or something like that. For example, this one. This also looks really interesting. It looks like the letter J. I'm curious what it's going to bring. We got this concept, but the main idea is that you can scroll down and you can find more crazy ideas. Look at this, I really like this one. You can turn it upside down and it's going to look like the letter J. It's going to represent growth and so on and so forth. And if you scroll down. It is going to bring you even more crazier, bold, strong looking logos. Of course, these are like logo modernism and this and that. But these logos are really, really timeless. They stand the test of time. They're really versatile. They're simple, they're really strong marks. Now of course, you need to balance it out between feminine and masculine vibes, but that's more in the process. Okay, after you find the logos you like, let's say you open up this, you scroll down, and you maybe open up another one. This one. And this is how it goes and goes to the infinite, because there are so many ideas, you can see that these can be transformed into arrows, and it's just a lot of fun. You get really exhausted also. But I recommend you to do like 40 minutes of research, then do five, 10 minutes of pause, and then do another 40 minutes of research, and so on and so forth, because you're going to get exhausted quite a bit. And then after that, you're going to hate it if you don't do any pause. Okay, now I'm going to drop these images into pure F. And I'm going to drag this, I'm going to put it half of the tab here. We got here the pure wrap that I showed you before here. I'm going to drag the image, I going to drag and drop the image like this. This is it. You got screw in, screw out, you can scale the image so that it's not distorting it. And you just research and add all the images. It's super simple. It's going to make the artboard bigger. Okay. Next thing, I'm going to also research for Growth. I'm going to click Growth Logo. Let me see if we can find something here. Look at that. Actually, these are pretty good. So these are some of the directions that represent growth. But this is also like a trendy default logo that you can find on Shutterstock and whatever stocks website. This is a trend. If I scroll down, it's going to bring more trendy logos in here. See that, for example, this one, this is like super trendy. Everyone is using it as a basic, simple look at that. This is one of the most trendy logos. These are logos that you're going to need to avoid, especially this one. If you scroll down, it is going to open up even more unwanted stock logos. Look at these, of course. You can find the website here as a link, 123 Rf.com This is a stock website. Already. Look at this. These are not good directions, these are trends. These are stock logos. They're unprofessional looking, of course. They represent growth, it's financial, corporate related marks, but not the best ideas. Eventually you're going to need to refine, take the ideas of these three stripe lines and apply it differently. But this is quite unprofessional approach. Okay, let me search for better direction related to growth. Sec, scroll up here and this one is good, but this also looks more sporty. It's tilted, it's indicates speed. It's really bold. It's a gym looking logo. Then we got here level up. I really like how they implemented the negative space, the arrow. So this would be like a really nice approach here. You scroll down and eventually you might find or you might not find. In this situation, there's like other similarities here. Look at that. We got expert three stripe lines, it's a little bit more common. What is still really good, still can create like really good ideas. I'm going to scroll down on this one, see if we can find something. Look at the letter M, again, implementing the arrow here. We look at this, the matrix. Look how nice it looks. It's really simple, minimalistic, and it still looks authentic. Check this out. This is from Dribble.com This gives me even more confidence to go on Dribble and research there. Also, I'm going to go to Dribble. What is that Ball.com growth logo? Let's see if we've got something interesting here. Yeah, so here the moodboards are way different. Like you get like way different results, that's for sure. But this research goes on and on. It takes quite a bit to find out the best results, so yeah, I'm going to stop here and do a better research. I'm going to show you how to create moodboards also in Photoshop. So let's go to create a new, I got to go with Web ten, ADP, click on Create. I'm going to uncheck the artboard and click on Create. There you go. I'm going to unlock the folder, and what I gonna do is just drag and drop the images that I saved. There you go. And I'm going to press Enter. Enter. Enter. Enter. There you go. And make sure to select the auto select. This way you don't need to check all the folders separately. And that way you can select basically the logos. You just select the logo and you can reposition it to wherever you like. For example, I'm going to put this here. From here I'm going to press control to scale it. If you have a newer version of Photoshop, you don't need to press and hold shift just freely. You can do it like that. You position it however you like. You scale it however you like and make a really nice composition there. You also can bring the layers up and down and arrange the logos accordingly. And of course, if you want to expand the artboard a little bit more, you can press the letter C for crop. You can find the crop also here and you can pull it more. There you go. If you want to repaint the background, click on the background and select the white and repaint it with a paint bucket tool. There you go. In the upcoming lessons, we're going to cover up the brainstorming AKA the sketching part. One of my favorite parts in design. 16. Brainstorming: Sketching: Next is the sketching process, one of the most controversial. At the same time, I guess it's much quicker to experiment with a pen and paper than doing it digitally. If you try to create ideas directly digitally, that might take you some time or the software might push you into some direction because it has these automatic grid line systems where you can create perfect shapes. It's, it's strict. A pen and paper gives you more freedom. You can sketch it down and it's like really fast, you can do it really quickly. It doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be clean. It just needs to be a scribble that is going to be eventually showcase that specific idea. So you won't forget it, that's the main point. You don't need design skills for ideas. For example, you've got Aaron Draplin, one of the most biggest and notorious designers, logo designers out there. And as you can see, I also added a screenshot from his book and you can see his sketches. He's also creating really, really fast ideas in a short period of time and doesn't require any skill for it. These are not incredible highly detailed sketches. These are just like simple ideas which eventually are going to be reproduced digitally. Okay, what comes into your head? Sketch it before it's gone. Now, some ideas stay in your head. A lot of ideas. You know, you forgot them. So it's good if you had a pen and paper and sketch everything down and because you might forget quite a bit of ideas. Drilling process, 2040 sketches 34 times per week. It's like a workout. All right? The more you sketch, the better. Of course, it depends how many ideas you can gather. But if you try to do it often more often in a week like 34 times a week, you're going to train your brain to become more and more creative. And that's the main point, like try to invent ideas. Try to put your brain in workout mode, at least your creative part of the brain to invent more and more ideas on a weekly basis. The 110% rule, let's say you can do ten ideas. You can sketch down ten ideas. Try to sketch down 11 ideas. If the goal is ten, try to do 11. Try to get a little bit more out of the comfort zone. Make it stretch it a little bit more in order to expand. Don't do it too much. Don't try to force it too much, just that ten more percent. A lack of drawing skills, disadvantages. Okay. I also going to highlight this a little bit, we won't get into it too much, so we got typography lettering. If you don't know how to draw, of course you won't be able to draw beautiful handwritten funds or you won't be able to create like read nice sera funds or this and that, where you're going to use like more stylization skills. Then we got illustrative logos, for example, if the client wants like a rabbit or he wants like a lion to be created as a logo. For that situation, you're going to need some illustration skills for sure. Stylization problems, this is a little bit more crucial because the stylization process is in the software pooling need to work with Pento. You're going to need to stylize, for example, these illustrative animals with Pentool and recreate them perfectly. Or probably you're going to need to stylize the letters. It needs a little bit of practice there with the pentool. That's a different science there. Examples, These are some of my sketches. I usually sketch it on four paper. Here you can see on the top, ideas are really simple. You can see those circle sketches as well. I used ruler that has these holes in it and you just can create these circles perfectly and fill it up. These are also a little bit more stylized, but not overcomplicated. There's like really fast ideas. Then we've got these, you can see the L and R combination made out of just 12 lines. And also versus a stylized L and R monogram there. How should be looking like? That's a classic version. Again, in this situation you need more skills a little bit. In some scenarios you just don't need any skills. Sketch it really quick and you're good to go by the way these examples here with the apples were made for the duct file logo that I showed you before. And these are really re organic forms that can be done mainly with pen and paper. You can just jump into the software and try to design it. In this scenario, when you have a pen and paper, you can sketch these really quickly. If you try to do this in the software, it's going to be way more slower. Again, in this situation, you're going to need some skills in order to make these aligns really nice looking and just create the right composition overly. We got scripts. Again, a little bit of skills for typography and of course the illustrative part of the logo. When the client asks for some mascots or ask for some animals or I don't know, this is like the more cartoony illustrative style. This is how they look refined. And there's also like the more stylized versions of mascots and animal logos which are basically not mascots by the way. They're like stylized logos which looks a little bit more geometrical as well. These are like Arabi logos. Already, I had quite a bit of clients who were from the Arabic countries like Oman, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and so on and so forth. And they love these really smooth, stylized shapes. Or we got like the Uka buka from man. This is, again, this couldn't be done in software. First, this idea came from a paper and I could sketch it really fast. And of course, typographical part, you can see you can miss out quite a bit of things if you don't know how to sketch correctly. But beyond 50% of the logos are made out of just geometrical shapes. Anyway, I'm going to show you how to create logos with geometrical shapes. And after that, I'm also going to come up with some courses, how to create with organic shapes. All right, we work, try to sketch 1020 or more logos. It doesn't need to look good. Ideas matter now. All right, now we're going to start drawing. Before that, I also going to show you some pencils that I'm using. This is the four B, for example. These are like really good quality drawing pencils. We got 628b. The more you go down, the weaker it's going to get. The more up you go. For example on eight, B is going to create like really strong lines that, like these really thick lines. Then we've got two. This is creating really thin lines. It's more like a sensitive simple pencil. Now, this is too complicated for local design, we're just going to use the four B. Then also you've got the mechanical pencils. These are really nice for details, I don't know. This is a 0.7 millimeter, really nice. Then I also can include these markers. This is the fake Faber Castle marker and this one, I don't even know what is this, but they're really good quality. And check this out. The tips are really strong and you can draw amazing lines with these really amazing. You can draw like thin ones or thick ones. This is also really good scripts or creating stroke lines on the sketch in order to highlight. All right, we're going to start drawing now. I'm going to go with the letter J first. This is a structure of the letter J of and make a thicker letter J just to see how this is going to look like. Okay, Then I'm thinking to another J. I'm going to just pull it here. Okay? So you can see it better, that are crossing each other. Maybe see that I can really paint it in real fast. This is a really interesting idea that goes some like this. As you can see, I'm drawing with confidence. I'm drawing really fast. If you try to do it with confidence, the lines are going to be more stronger, more bolder, more straight. Okay, I'm going to do the growth sign that we saw quite a bit. These were three stripes. We get the sh, the longer and the longest. I also tried to incorporate mix it up with the letter J. Ti is going to look like, I'm going to draw it here. This one is going to be longer and this one is going to be the longest. This would be. One of the ideas is just simple. It's not stylized, it's not overcomplicated. Okay, I'm going to go to a different idea. I'm going to go with this J and another one that is overlapping, like in this example here. Then I'm going to go with another one which is overlapping again. And it's creating this really interesting. Wow, okay, this looks quite interesting. This might be a good idea, but you cannot see the letter J. I might want to create another idea. You can see the process here. And I'm going to go here and recreate it again. Put the lines more next to each other, eventually is going to go here, here, and here. Now, I might say we get a proper after that, I might take the marker and just draw over it. This would be the small one. This one is the bigger one. And yeah, just as a reference, this would be a pretty interesting idea. I don't know. You might use also the mechanical pencil. Usually, I use the mechanical pencil because I like it quite a bit. I can draw a lot of lines. I like drawing a lot of lines. I like to put the logos into a square because a good logo usually fits into a square perfectly like this. I'm starting to stylize this, for example. I want to create an arrow. I'm just going to create these lines. I'm going to make this more rounded, and I'm going to add another here. I'm going to make the grids. Check it out. Create the grids first. Yeah. You can make grids as meanwhile you're sketching. Yeah, you can make the line stronger after that, but it's good if they fit into rectangle. This also fits in some square. I mean into a square, Sorry, this is also square is you can make it more square looking at the end of the day, but you get the main idea. I going to make another square. I can make four squares out of it and create arrows that eventually indicates growth. These are, oh, wait a second, these are three arrows. I'm going to add another one, but this way is going to be boring. I also going to create another one here with only three. I'm going to make the grids for that, really light lines. See that? I'm going to make it like this. I make another one. We get like a plus one that is crossing. I go one arrow here and here, which is going to be sh, sh, it's going to be like a triangular concept looking like growth, but I won't make the lines thicker that way. I'm going to use this marker to do it. Check this out how nice it looks. Just going to do the stroke lines like these. This way you got like a more complete sketch if you want to do it a little bit more detailed. I took a little bit more time to stylize, this is just stylization process. This is not the idea how you should sketch, how you should sketch basically using just these ideas really quick. Doing like this, this was an idea, boom, we got the double. You can do the triple with, boom, boom, boom. You get a new idea, you just scribble it. And then after that, you refine it into the software. And don't forget to practice drawing lines. Drawing shapes, see that. Try to make it reduce and try to practice curvatures or circles. You also can use a ruler that has circles in it, different kind of size circles. Try to put things into a square. All right? Try to make them fit into square. Good, Next we're going to dive into the digital design process, AKA, how you can redesign your sketches into software. 17. Digital Design: Digital design process. All right, now we're at the digital design process where we're going to refine the logos from sketches. So first thing you need to practice your problem solving skills, logo design and design in general. It's all about problem solving. Solving the issue, for example, for the client, for example, if you have a design concept, you need to figure out how to create that logo, how to create that specific design, how to assemble those shapes in the correct manner. That is going to look aesthetically great and it's going to work in terms of the company's goals, mission, and vision. Then we got creative skills. You can practice your creative skills by sketching quite a bit a few times a week. And also trying to research and search for inspiration as much as you can. And practicing this, is it like working your creative mind? Like doing that workout, that daily workout for the creative mind. And this is how basically you're going to get used to creativity and evolve your creativity. Because this elemental stuff, what I'm teaching you is going to show you the road. But if you're not practicing it, you will not get to where you want to get practice with quite a bit of practice. Then you're going to get good, eventually, creative buys, software skills, and then we got shortcuts. So we're going to work in the Illustrator here. You will need to understand the full software, how it works, and you're going to need to learn it. And of course, the best thing to do is learn the shortcuts and work as fast as possible in the software. Because if you do access a lot of menus with a lot of clicking, that basically going to break the flow with shortcuts. The whole thing is really smooth and fast. We've got two techniques, the one is geometric and the other one is organic. And we're going to talk about the geometric first. And these are basically done with perfect forms and shapes in Adobe Illustrator. And eventually grid lines, as you can see in this example, Nog, this is done by grid lines only made out of straight lines and 56 degree lines. Then we've got another one, this is made out of rectangles. Another straight lines, everything is perfect in these concepts. You've got your circles, grids, and eventually it creates a really strong logo, or this one made out of lines. We've got another one. This is also looks like a special effect already made out of straight lines. Again, it's all about geometrical shapes. You don't need to stylize anything here. You just need to apply circles, rectangles, straight lines, and so on and so forth. And on the other hand, we got the organic shapes which basically we refine these to illustrator with the pen tool. Pen tool is a little bit more difficult, not quite a bit difficult because you're going to need some skills in order to master this tool. And you're going to need to create everything from scratch. When you're working with geometrical shapes, you already got those shapes perfectly done. You don't need to create it from scratch. But for example, in this situation you can see there's like two hearts that eventually form an apple. And those hearts needed to be stylized. And you need quite a bit of stylization skills there in order to achieve these are, some of these are a little bit more geometric, others are more organic, but they're refined still perfection. And also this enters the monogram world. This was also quite a bit of challenge to stylize this with a panto. Yeah, all of these are made with pant. But yeah, you might say that when we're talking about monograms or letter marks, they don't need to be stylized at all or you don't need to touch them. You just type in two letters and that's it. But things get a little bit more challenging sometimes, and Pan is crucial in Adobe Illustrator as well. It's a trial and error process where 99% of the concepts will fail and only one will be used as final. So the main idea is to refine logos more and more and create as much concepts as you can, as much variations as you can. So from that pile of variation, you know at the end of the day you're going to search and find the final concept that actually going to work for the company. And the rest of it, of course, it's going to be useless, but this is how it works. There's like a ton of variation and simulation in logo design until you get to the final concept homework, redesign the sketches in digital format using only geometrical shapes in Adobe Illustrator. Try to design 23 or more symbols that fits the best for the given business. All right, now we are getting to the fun part, where I'm going to show you and demonstrate to you how to recreate the sketches and how to redesign those in the software with geometrical shapes in Illustrator. So this would be the mood board. Eventually it got edited. As you can see, it got edited with some gold and blue colors because this yellow gold is, is like more positive looking. More friendly looking. And it's neutral. It's between masculine and feminine, So it works both ways. But if I added that pink color before, that pink red, that would look like more feminine. So this would be quite a great balance. It looks also a little bit more luxurious. Okay, these are the sketches. The dribbles or what is that? The doodles. Scribbles. And I'm going to select one of these. I'm going to work on those. Okay? This is it. I'm just going to screenshot it real quick, like this and I'm going to create a new art board, control V, and here we have the concept, it looks something like this. The first thing I want to do is go to the field and stroke. I'm going to click on the field, click on the non and select the stroke. So it's going to be on the top. And I'm going to go to the colors and select the black color. Okay, I'm going to select a shape. I select the ellipse tool, present ship plus odds. I'm going to create an ellipse and I'm going to select the direct selection tool. Select the top anchor point. This is an anchor point here where basically you can select it with the direct selection tool and distort it. But that's stylization, we don't want that. I'm going to press on Delete. So it's going to delete the top. Okay, I'm going to select the Pen tool from the menu. And I'm going to click here at the right, Anchor point. And I'm going to drag it up. Also, press Shift to isolate it, so the line is going to be straight. And I'm going to click here, check it out. We've got the J. I'm also going to add another line here. Select the pen tool again and I'm going to click on the left anchor point, present hold shift, and I'm going to go somewhere here. Yes, something like this. I'm also going to select the anchor point. Press the down arrow. This way you can go up and down with it. Okay. And I'm going to press and hold out from here. And this way I'm going to duplicate the letter J. I'm going to press and hold Odd, drag it. Also, press shift to isolate. This is how it's going to look, the letter J in perspective. Okay, so these are going to be the first lines. I don't want to continue the design process on this, because I want the original unfinished letter J, like this. So I'm going to create a new copy because I mess it up. I won't use the control Z because we're going to have a lot of variations and I want to have all the logo options in here where I can see where I mess it up and redesign those eventually with the control, if I use the control, Z basically is going to go back and forth with only one concept. We got the original here, these two lines. And I can from these lines, new concept as well. With these, I'm going to connect with the Pen tool here and here, for example. You can see in this example here, the letter J is a little bit more narrow. I can go back, I can test with a more narrow letter J, but I also can create a new copy of this present hold. I'll drag it down where I can reposition these and make it more thicker. Make it more bolder. Somewhere here for example. This is a little bit more thicker. I think it's too much already. But I'm showing you just as an example and connect it like this. This way you can see the contrast. See that you can compare the two. This is what control cannot show you. Now you've got two different concepts, two different variations. And you can see in which direction to go. So far I cannot see it. But I'm going to need to test both. For example, I'm going to create a new copy of this. I'm going to swap it from field to stroke. I mean from stroke to feel like this, I'm going to press and hold out Duplicate and press control D to duplicate it. Again, this looks pretty nice so far, it might be a little bit too thicker. But let's see what happens with this. I'm going to do the same process, it's too thick, But what if I do a more thinner version because these two might seem too thick? Also, I might create a new copy and reduce the distance in between just with one. I won't over exaggerated. One is totally enough. I'm going to do the same process. There you go. The first one I think is the winner is the perfect one. Because at the end of the day, you're also going to need to test these on black background. I'm going to pull these, I'm going to group them together, and I'm going to paint them white. I'm going to click on the Feel. I'm going to select the white. I'm going to select, for example, these, it's going to highlight the black color. And I'm going to go and select the rectangle. Select the logos, Right click. A range sent to back. So the background is going to be at the back. This way you can see the weight of the symbol, how thick it is going to look on black background, because on black background things are going to change. You can see the first option it holds up well, but for example, the thick option, it looks even more thicker than this bold option, it's even more bolder. The second one, of course, it still looks even bolder rather than on white background. This is a pretty good accurate representation of the logo. Now we test it, this would be the one that I would go with. I'm going to put this here, scale it down a little bit more. Wait a sec, I'm going to activate the scale stroking effect. With the scale stroking effect, basically, when you scale down these strokes, it will look the same thickness. Okay, let's go on. We got the symbol, I'm going to work with this, We've got a new copy. And now I'm going to work with the height of these so we can create that growth effect, how you can see on the sketch. I'm going to create one rectangle. I'm going to swap it from field to stroke, okay? There's a stroke options and I'm going to recolor it real quick. Okay? I'm going to put it here and I'm going to create another one. But you also can do this with grid lines by the way. But we're going to need to create two exact same size rectangles. I'm going to select this one, I'm going to double click. This way is going to highlight. I can work only with this letter J. If I select these, it won't select it because I double click on this one. I'm going to select the direct selection tool, select the top two anchor points. I'm going to drag it down present shift, and I'm going to go here where they intersect. Of course this is not perfect, normally I here. And I'm going to correct it real quick. There you go. I'm going to double click on the first select the direct selection tool. And let's go down to the bottom rectangle there. I'm also going to leave an example with the rectangle. I know where I started and I know where I can re customize this again. Now as you can see that this letter J is really short. I'm going to need to make it more tolerant. Select the direct selection tool. Select the top anchor points of all of the top. I'm going to pull this up a little bit more somewhere here. It starts to look better and better. I'm also going to select the direct selection tool. Wait a sec, I'm going to select these two Js and I'm going to press the down arrow, 123. And I'm going to select this, 1123. All right, wait, whoa. Let's see what we got. I think this is great. This modification looks really good. Now, I'm going to create a new copy. I'm going to do another thing. As you can see, we got here these crossing lines in here. I want to minimize the detail that's an unnecessary detail for a logo. You need to simplify it even more because when you scale down those or you are printing them or whatever overall, it's like unnecessarily, basically these crossing lines. I want to remove these ones and these ones here. Basically this J is going to be on the top. It's going to look like in three dimension, but it's not. Now I'm going to select the pento. What I'm going to do is just click here, select this part where I want to delete these. Oh, by the way, seems like these are united together. See that we cannot group them. What I'm going to do first, I'm just going to put this on the bottom right. Click, arrange, send to back. I'm also going to repaint it. Wait a second, I'm going to click on the field, also going to repaint it real quick so you can see the shape there. But first what we need to do is divide the shape. I'm going to go to the Path Finder, and there's this option here, divide. Click on it, right click group. So this way we can separate these. This is very important in order to cut out these elements. If you don't have the path finder, you can go to Windows and select the path finder which is here. I'm going to do the same process with all of the rest separately. I'm going to select the middle one, Click on divide, and I'm going to select the end one. Click on divide. You can click on group. Select the middle one, right click on group. This way we are working separately. So these are going to be remaining the same. What I'm going to do is cut out these two. I'm going to select this line and present hold shift and select this also present shift again. And now we selected these. Selecting press shift plus M, or you can go and select here, the Shape Builder tool. And I'm going to press hold on, and I'm going to draw this. See that? Now it's cutting out these forms. Now we got some shapes cut out. Now you can see this clearly here. They are not crossing each other. Here you can compare the two concepts. See that the one that has the crossing lines, because that also has its own aesthetics. It also looks good and then we got on the right without the crossing lines. This is why you need to create every step separately and not use the control Z in this situation. Just create a new copy, compare those and see how it looked before and how it looked after that. And compare which is the best. Of course, see the full evolution of the logo. You can see here we started the way comparing three type of weights, testing it on black background, re finding the growth lines and then cleaning up the logo. I'm going to remain with this also where you can see these cut off. Now I also have one version which the lines are crossing each other. And then I'm going to create another version where I'm going to unite all the shapes. These shapes basically will disappear when I'm going to unite it. So I'm going to go to the Pathfinder and click on Unite. See that it's like now it's a full shape. We don't have any separated shapes until we group it. Of course, there going to be like separated these two guys. But anyways, now we're going to go to the word mark and we're going to test out that a little bit. I also going to highlight this concept here that this is the winner. Good, now we're going to work on the word mark, and I have a special fund for this. Let's select the type tool here. Click. I'm going to type in Jamo President Ship plus scale it up. I'm going to go to the funds. There you go. Where's the typo and the properties. And I'm going to go with Inter. This is a free font. You can download from Google.com It's a Google fund and it has no licensing. Okay, this is the bolt. And as you can see, we got some distance between the letters, which I don't necessarily like. I basically going to do the same process. I'm going to scale it down a little bit and I'm going to create a new copy. We're going to decrease the distance in between the letters. I'm going to go back to the properties and I'm going to decrease here the distance. Set the tracking for selected character. See that you can also click on the arrow and go with minus. This is even even more easier. I want to go with -50 This is pretty good. Might change the curling between the letter, and it also seems pretty good, but not that satisfied with it. Yeah, this is a little bit better, I think. Yeah, there you go. This is perfect. Actually, this is really good. Now, I want to see more variations of this, because I might say like bold is not the right choice. I want something more thicker. So I'm going to press and hold a, drag it down, create a new copy. I'm going to go back to the properties and I'm going to change the bold. Let me see. We got also extra bolt. Check it out. This also looks amazing. And we got also black. Okay, this is too much, but the extra bolt is quite cool. We've got two variations here, both look fine, both look great. But I don't know which is going to work the best for the symbol. And I'm going to create two new copies. Of course, I'm going to write click Create Outlines. It won't be fully editable, and I'm going to place it like this. I'm going to press and hold out create a new copy of the symbol. I'm going to press and hold Shift, scale it down. And I'm going to place the symbol on it. And let's see how it's going to look. Oh, wow, it looks pretty decent. I'm also going to scale it down a little bit more. There you go. I'm also going to add another one here so we can see the differences we can compare. And I also going to create, because I cannot see here the difference, that, well, I'm also going to create a new copy and I'm going to test them on the black background and see if they actually perform. I'm going to put it on a black background. Right click, Arrange, send to back. You can see the Shift plus controls. What is that left bracket? That's the shortcut and I'm going to select every element. Where are those? Yeah, both look really thick by the way, but the bottom one looks even thicker, which I'm quite not a fan of. Look at how Yeah, it's more thicker. Bottom one, I don't like that necessarily, so this would be like the winner, that's for sure, these two guys. I'm going to go with this one. I'm also going to drag a rectangle on this to highlight. After all this, we are going to create the colors. We are going to add the color combos. I'm going to select the logo also with this rectangle on. I'm going to present hold out, create a new copy. We're going to go to what is the Moodboard? And we're going to get inspired from the colors. I'm going to switch it, stroke to feel, and I'm going to try to recolor it. Go to swatches, I might choose a background color. This would be this vibrant blue, which is quite nice, but I don't know. I'm also going to choose some yellow, yellow, orange ish for the logo. Yeah, this might be good, but as you can see, the blue is really strong. I'm going to try out the navy blue. Now this is not good. Eventually I'm going to modify this one, double click, I'm going to double click on this color. There you go. Oh wow. Look at this color. It's not that strong, it might look a little bit more dirty, but it's basically diffusing quite a bit of colors. I also going to double click on this, might make it more lighter. A little bit more orange. Wow, okay. It starts to look better and better. So this is one inspiration from this color palette. I mean, this mood board that we have here. I'm going to go back and I'm going to put it here just to see what we've got. This is one of the colors and you can test it out with different color nuances. You can switch it up and I'm going to select the blue and background is going to be the yellowish color. See now you can see better the background with this yellow, orange color. It's not that good. It doesn't look that good. I'm going to select it. Double click and test it out. Better colors out. This light color, it looks even better. Let me test it. Yeah, I think this would be, this would be. Yeah. It's more lighter. It's more friendlier. This does actually work. I'm going to do two more, make the backgrounds white. Eventually, I'm going to see how they look on white background versus how they look on black background. Of course, now the blue won't be that, we won't look that well on back background, but you can see the yellow looks pretty nice on black background. I'm going to try another alternative, how these are going to look where the symbols are white. Yeah, now I got the full picture of how things look. This is how basically test out the colors, and now you got the full picture of the full identity process. This is a solution, okay? Until you get to the solution, you might go through quite a bit of trial and error process until you figure out this solution. You might do it from scratch, making a circle and making a rectangle and trying to create the letter J. If you don't have some background in typography or this and that, this is the thing you need skills. You need this attitude to problem solving, because at the end of the day, you're going to need to find the right solution, how to create the right logo. Until that you might feel a little bit, but that's totally fine. That's how I also did it like at the first time I didn't knew this technique, I didn't e the solution. I was like testing out different methods and those didn't work that well until I found this idea like how to recreate this letter G. And then this was it which I showed you. Next lesson, we're going to talk about the mockups, and I'm going to show you where you can find pretty nice mockups and how you can use them. 18. Mockups: Mock ups. This is one of the most important aspects in the logo because eventually you're going to show the logos on different mock ups and you're going to give context to the client like how the logo is going to look on different formats and how eventually is going to be implemented. If you just deliver a logo just by itself without anything, let's say you add some colors and that's it. It doesn't have any context. The client basically is going to try to imagine how the logo is going to look somewhere or how it's going to be implemented for his de brand. And probably he's going to feel at it and he's going to say, hey man, I don't like the logo a lot. Can you come up with another logo and another logo and this and that, But if you create a lot of mock ups, you know the client is going to see you put a lot of effort into it and he also going to see the context of the logo. Then he going mainly leave you alone. So with that being said, we've got two types of mock. Ups. We've got the downloadable mockups and then the self made mock ups. The downloadable mockups are pretty simple, but the main idea is to create a line of mock ups that are in the same style, that work in the same, you know, that has the same colors, they're in the same mood as the company that you're trying to serve. And then we got the self made mockups and the self made mock ups. If you can't find downloadable mock ups, the right mockup you need, you're probably going to need like mock up by your own. Take a picture or download some stock images and you can create some really nice mockups out of those. Okay, downloadable mock ups. For example, we got the nuclear blast. You can see all both two mockups are in the same style. They use like these gray, really clean clinical environments, really modern looking business card, and also the hoodie. Everything is in black and white and gray. Or we got the DW speaks, this was based on black, red, and gold color nuances. I made the whole thing like that. You can see also the iphone, it has this gold frame on it and the background is using this black and red color. And also the website is in that team style. Of course, the website uses the gold too. Again, we got here on a sign with a backlight sign. Then again in different scenarios, on different bars or client can see how it's going to be implemented in his store, in his bar or different packaging and so on and so forth. This is like a gold emboss print, how it's going to look on their website and stamped on the mug as well. You can see all three or four color combinations in there. Really nice contrast on a mug. All right, self made, I did a couple of self made mock ups as well. For example, in this situation, when I couldn't find the appropriate mock ups, I needed to recreate that. Again, everything is really dark, grungy looking, really modern, minimalistic. Right one is a mock up, the left one is made by myself. It's hard to notice which is a mock up, but basically both are mock ups. The left downloaded. The right is self made. Check this out. We got this logo. It's an apparel brand and these are all made by myself. I downloaded an image from Unsplash.com You can find unlimited images there. Basically, I downloaded all these images and replaced it with the logo. All right, homework research the appropriate mockups for the logo design and create a nice collection of 78 mockups with different applications. Okay, now let's research some mockups I'm going to enter up. There you go. We've got a couple of examples going on already on Google, so you don't need to go complicated, just Google it. And you've got thousands of mockup website all over the place. Paid or unpaid, that's for sure. But I'm going to go and access, for example, the first page we got mock up World.com and here we got the Brose free mockups, or we've got free mockup bundles also, which is really nice. I also going to check this out and I'm going to go and let's see paper and books, poster and pictures. I want to see that to sign and billboard, I want to see that. Fashion and pull. And you've got all sorts iphone, you're going to need one. We got Netbook Corona vehicle. Okay, I got to go and jump in real quick to the bundles and see what's going on. This is also delivering you a lot of mockups in a bundle that look, they're in the same style language. They're in the same design language. Okay, I won't go with this. I'm just going to go and see what's the paper and the book. Here we got like beautiful examples, everything for free. And you can scroll and just download the mock. Ups you like posters and what is that? Wow, this is insane. All right, so I want to download a couple of mockups. Look at these, all right. I found, for example, this one. I'm going to open up this one. I'm going to open up in a new tab, and I got here the free download. Click on it. This is going to redirect you to another page. It's going to redirect to the original page of the mock up. Here you can download, scroll, download for free. It's going to download it. Click it's going to open up the file and I'm going to double click on the PSD file, basically double click. It's going to open up in Photoshop, and here we have it. So we've got a couple of layers going on in here, which you can notice. We got this folder with the light box and we got here, change this, We got a layer with the name. Change this, so you know that you're going to need to change that. But how this layer has to be a smart object. How you know it's a smart object, basically because of this little Tom nail here, this indicates that it's a smart object. Also, it's written here, Smart object, Tom nail. All you need to do is double click on the Tom nail and it's going to don't show this message again. It's going to open up a new tab with the logo from this image that you can navigate between the tabs. I'm going to go back to the tab with the logo. And I'm going to go to Adobe Illustrator and I'm going to check the logo that I created. And I want this nice blue logo. I'm going to press Control C. Go back to Photoshop, Press control V. I want it as a smart object. Click, okay, press and hold out, scale it. This is how you apply. Double click, release. I also going to repaint the background. I'm going to select the paint bucket tool, select the white color click. I'm going to repaint the background. There you go. I'm going to save it. I'm going to go to File and save, or you can press control S. This is going to save it in this stab and basically to replace the logo. I also can change up the color of this wire. You can see there's a folder with the wire here. I'm going to click on this arrow here, you can see the color of the wire at the stomach. I'm going to double click on it. And now this way can change it. Now I want to change it to the brand identities colors. I'm going to go back to the Adobe Illustrator and I'm going to make it yellow. I'm going to scroll zoom in and I'm going to select the yellow color. As you can see, we got here the yellow. I double click and I'm going to copy paste the hex code. This is the hex code. I'm going to press control C and I'm going to go back to Photoshop here I can copy based in this little thing, the Hex code control V and it's going to replace it with the color of the brand. You also can change the color of the backgrounds however you like. Maybe you can go with the blue or something like that, but I'm going to leave it as a default because the brand's identity is going to be with a lot of white space. This is quite good. This is how I work with downloaded mockups. Next phase, we're going to talk about the presentation part of the logo design. And I'm going to show you how I assembled the presentation for this project. 19. Presentation: Presentation. Now we got to the last stage, almost to the last stage, where you're going to bundle up nicely, the logo with the mock ups and you're going to present it to the client and give full perspective. So I'm going to show you how to do this and what are some of the slides I also included, okay, the first slide is the name of the company, Jamo, of course, brand identity design, as simple as that. And then we're going to go next, I'm going to highlight the goal, what we, of course, discussed with the client. This is very important so the client knows exactly what we're talking about. And it's going to redirect the client to the direction that of course we discussed before. So we don't get into these issues that, hey, I wanted, you know, another thing and this and that, we exactly wanted what we set as the goals. So we got goals. Visually showcase what Jamo does in marketing. The logo should be modern, simple, and it should be a balance between corporate and friendly. The logo will be used in online application as websites and social media, other applications as business card marks, T shirts and sign in the future. Avoid vibrant trend, the gradient colors that our competition has. The next slide, we got three interlocking rings. I separated the values of the company in three different categories, and the first would be modern, simple, and corporate. These work with each other. They are in the same theme, you know? And then we got the second ring is the friendly, approachable. And the third ring is the professional, creative and growth. Now you can create a logo that goes into these different directions to create a logo which is like only friendly and approachable. Or create a logo which represents growth or modern, simple and corporate. But you also can bundle this up and create something with all these elements, all these keywords. So this is what was my goal here? To create that sweet spot, you know, collecting all these values and ideas, and the logo contains all of those. Eventually, most of it. Next we got the Moodboard. This was the first mood board with the pink color. And then eventually, it got updated to this version, which has this really nice gold color. And of course, this is very important to showcase to the client. So he can see the direction that we agreed on before at the very beginning. So we don't slide into different directions where we don't know what to do in there that wasn't discussed at the very beginning. This is very important. And the next slide would be Logo design 01. I recommend you to present at least three logo design concepts, so it's going to be like 010203. You can also customize it in different ways, but the main idea is to present three concepts maximum. If you're going to deliver more concepts, it's going to show you more concepts. The client also might get a little bit more confused, so it's a little bit more difficult to navigate. But that has its own art also. But as a beginner, it's enough. Okay, The next slide would be on a white background with a black logo. That's it. It's important to showcase it without any color first, so the client can see exactly like how the symbol looks and how the logo looks without anything on it. After that, you can dress it up with colors because colors already give some other context to the logo and it's a distraction at the beginning. Next slide would be the contrast using white background versus black background. We also discussed before like how a black background is going to impact the logo. You can showcase this to the client that the weight of the logo also it's doable on white background versus on black background. And then we're going to showcase the colors of the logo. And here you can see the gold mixed up with the navy blue white. There's a bonus slide I did include, which of course, this version of the logo could work really good in the full brand identity. Because this logo can be used for more things. And this one is a little bit more illustrative. It has more colors into it. I also included that lighter blue in it. And this can create a different results when the logo is implemented in pre materials or online usage. Now we're going to showcase the logo on different mockups, for example on Business Card. And you can see here the logo recreated in a ribbon, for example. Because it's like functional as well. You can create with these curvy lines, multiple shapes and multiple things about it. This was also a really nice idea. Here you can see on different pre materials how the logo is scaled up and use also in the identity, more mock ups on different signs. The ribbon has been implemented also in different styles. You can play around with the logos parts and eventually transform them into something else. But also the look and feel remains the same as the original logo. Some parts going to still remain as the original logo. Yeah, you can see all of these mockups are basically in the same style. They're in the same team. Everything is every mockup, a lot of white space. It's really light and friendly. We got to the last slide. The last slide would be with logo, of course, on a white background with the black logo. And then you showcase all the three concepts like these on mockups. And then the final would be The final. Final would be all the three logos placed next to each other. The client can see and he can choose, okay, we got three logos and he can make up his mind homework, Assemble your presentation in Keynote, Google slides or Powerpoint Next lesson logo deliverables. 20. Deliverables: Finally we got to the end to the deliverables. And here I'm going to show you what to send to the client and what you should prepare as source files, export formats. We got pixel platforms such as JPP, NGS, BPS, D, and RGB formats because this is the monitor format, of course, color codes. And then we get the print formats, PDF, EPS, and these can be in CMYK or Pantone color formats. Usually, this is how I export the logos. The first on the top, you can see the symbol with the wordmark. The second is symbol, wordmark and tag line. The third one is a horizontal lock up. Fourth one only the symbol, and fifth one is only the wordmark. Then we got another slide here with the vice versa. I also export them in white without any background. They can have it also in the black and white version, pure black and white. And the third export, basically it's with the colors. These are the color codes and the color palette of the Amarro brand. You can see all the information of the RGB color code, CMYK, Hex, and Pantone color codes. You can send this also to the client as the PDF. So he can see all the color codes of the color palette. And you also can see here the RGB versus Penton. So, for example, when you try to print with these colors or with the colors of the brands that you choose, the colors, then if you print, for example, in Penton, the colors won't look the same anymore, So that's totally normal and the Pentons going to look the most accurate to the RGB as possible, but they will never look the same. Okay, Homework, prepare and explore all file formats, color codes, and fund license links to finish the project. Regarding to the funds, if you're using a purchased fund, then you should send the link of the funds where they can also purchase the fund. Because you cannot send them the funds, of course. You cannot send your funds which are under licensing, of course, so they're going to need to purchase that as well. Or if you are using a free funds, you also can send the link to the source. Next, I'm going to show you some really nice book recommendations. 21. Conclusion: The end. And mainly this was a Guys, I'm glad you made it through and this course should help you to go 0-0 Of course, not a super professional logo designer, but it should give you enough knowledge in order to understand how to do a full process of the logo design, how to deal with clients, you know how to show the presentation to the client, and eventually not run into too many problems. Now if you're a beginner, you're going to need to practice quite a bit in order to become better and better in logo design and take in mind that client. A lot of times are right. And of course, don't sell yourself to the lowest budget clients because they're up to no good. If you're trying to make logos, reach out to some friends who basically need logos. Or reach out to some local stores or something like that. Become friends with them and try to pick somebody that you like and try to do design for them, instead of just, let's say, create something for low budget clients. With that being said, thanks so much for watching this course and getting all the way through this. I hope this is going to help and yeah, have a good one, guys. See you next time. 22. Books: So I'm going to do some book recommendations. And the first one would be log design Love. I highly recommend this book because it's filled with a lot of golden nuggets case studies. And this author is taking everything to the point. This book doesn't include a lot of unnecessary reading. It's on the point, it has a lot of value in it. It's like describes, like full brand identity designs, case studies, and of course, it also includes a lot of things from his personal experience. Let's take this to the content, let's check it out. The importance of brand identity, the process of design, pricing, design from pencil to PDF, the art of conversation. This is also really good. And check this out. We got on the last page 31 practical logo design tips. Interviewing the client, think clearly, Expect unexpected logo design doesn't need to show what a company does. A symbol isn't always necessary. Offer one thing to remember. So these are very important things when it comes to logo design and you know, when it comes to rules of logos. So this thing has it all, you know, packed in in a smaller book. You should check this next. We got from Aaron James Draplin. Pretty much everything. This is the guy. It contains a lot of bold, strong looking logos, which are, of course, timeless, a little bit more vintage looking. But I highly recommend it for inspiration because it contains a lot of good concepts and logos. Check this out, for example, this sketching the logos, this is letter S. Then look at this refined digitally and check out how many variations he did. Refined and also mockups, again, strong looking logos, bold logos, a lot of colors. It's really good. He also did a lot of scribblings, but at the end of the day were the refined logo design look is looking flawless, Check this page out. This is for you for motivation. For example, if you don't have ideas related to a logo design project, for example, you got like five ideas or ten ideas. This is a good for motivation because check this out, this is the coal word, mark. And check this out how many iterations and variations of refined concepts he did. This actually proves that you can have unlimited amount of ideas. He actually demonstrated that here, there were like another page, this one. So you can see here also how he does the process. He starts from here and it goes all the way. So these are all the trial and error concepts that eventually goes to the final one. And this is which basically gets sold. And the rest are pretty much unimportant at this point. This is how local design is all about. This is really good book. Next is the Designing Brand Identity. Now this book is on a corporate language. A lot of you might not like or might dislike this book because of that, But it's going to teach you to talk in more in a corporate language. At least, or at least to understand these corporate people. Because at the end of the day when we're talking about brand identity is like a strategic thing. And you also need to talk this language because the whole brand identity and this design field, it's on this language at least at, you should learn a little bit about it. But mainly field really good case studies you can understand better how brand identity is but what approaches they used. Also it's going to be really good handling objections with the clients and so on and so forth, because you're going to go through a lot of experiences here. Not least, we got the logo modernism. This is one hefty book. Look at this, how massive it is. For example, if I take the logo design love this small book and I compare it. By the way, logo design love is a normal sized book, if I put next to it is like putting six books in order to create this big chunky of a book. But this book actually is the Bible of logs, let's say that I'm going to try to open this up. This book is nothing new. These contains concepts from the '80s, from the '70s, old school logos which look really timeless these days as well. Nothing has been changed. The same logos, the same concepts and the directions are used in these days plus, minus, it's like trying to reinvent the real. This has been invented in the '70s and '80s, the days working with the same shapes and the same elements. This book is done with only with shapes, strokes, and grid lines. Yeah, it also has like word marks. Yeah, I highly recommend this. Now, this book is going to be a little bit more expensive. But take that in mind that this book size, it's like six books in one book. It is actually cheaper. These would be other books. I hope it's going to help you and have fun.