Logotype Design: Create Brand Marks with Typography

1. Introduction: My name is Mackey Saturday. I am an independent designer currently living in Denver Colorado and right now we're hanging out at Steedbrook. My focus is primarily in identity design and development. That includes branding as an extension really in the end, but the most work that I do is concentrated on developing iconic symbols for brands as well as corresponding logo types. I'm teaching this class on the beauty of a logo type, how to create one yourself, and how to do that for somebody within your local community. Branding as a whole is this monstrous principle an idea. That is extremely important, but also seemingly intangible. So, the understanding of creating these valuable touch points, and creating these pleasurable moments of recognition for people is the challenge that I'm faced with everyday, and that's something I really appreciate. That ability to create something so simple that is a representation, or at least aligned with the values of something so big, and then give that out to the world to experience, and to fall in love with, and to care about, that's really the focus of branding that drives me and that I really love and I think it drives a lot of people. I'm teaching this class because there's a really big mystery around what is logo type or wordmark design. I want to help everybody be able to create these things that people can just look and, "Wow that looks great", and wow that feels fantastic, I want to be a part of that. We're going to focus on doing your proper investigation and research, understanding your customer, understanding their market and looking for the pieces that tie that all together. We're also going to focus on individual letterforms and what those really look like, and the beauty that is there within the restraints, how creative can we get, balance, symmetry, form. Even more, we're going to look at some of the more traditional type pieces like our kerning and understanding the proportions of our sender's to our cross strokes, and how we can bring all of that together to create a unique logo type. It will transcend fads, it has the ability to last forever and be at a consistent point of communication for a brand. If you wanna be a designer, this is one of your most important skills. 2. Your Assignment: The assignment for this class is to create a custom logo type for one of your favorite shops. Be that a boutique, a coffee shop, a restaurant, skate shop, something that you're passionate about. I chose this assignment because I saw it as a very tangible project, something that you could very much get commissioned for and also it has direct ties to you, the things you love and where you live. Going through this class and actually completing the project, you're going to learn a variety of skills from your basic letter form creation through custom ligatures, the geometry of letter forms, balance symmetry really focusing on the negative space and ultimately creating a wonderful logo type. I would love for you guys to post your strategy, your sketches, the revision of those sketches, your vector work that's almost done and definitely the final piece. I highly recommend that you don't post all of that at once, I think that it's really important that we use the community we have in this class and I'm going to be there to help as much as I can to so that we can work through this step by step. As a teacher, what I'm going to be looking for are a really well thought through strategy, unique letter forms and then ultimately a beautifully refined logo type that could live in the world today. I'm really excited to see what you guys are going to create, the focus you're going to put into creating something unique and ownable for your favorite shop and to really be blown away by the talent that's out there. 3. Research and Ideation: The first step to really get started in this process and then most creative processes is research. I know that probably sounds a bit redundant, however, it's incredibly important. When we're looking at designing a logotype specifically for your favorite shop in your local community, that's different than say designing a symbol for one of the world's largest branding firms or a giant beverage company. So, we have to approach it in a slightly different manner. When get to know our client, that's a really big thing. So, depending on the relationship you already have with the shop that you're designing for, that's going to help or cause a little more necessity for research. If you have a close relationship, it's still good to go talk to them, it's still good to get to know them and really understand what they want to convey because your interpretation of what they're doing is different than what you may understand them to be, and it's your job to be able to know that and find in the middle. So, the research really starts with those initial conversations, that initial research of understanding who your client is and ultimately what they want to convey to the world. From there, you have a chance to start jumping into looking at outside inspiration, finding things that are suiting in that industry, but honestly it's really good to get out of that industry. Initial research, yes, you always want to know what is already happening in an industry, but it's going to be our goal to really broaden those horizons and pull our inspiration from other areas that maybe touch a little bit in the industry that you're looking at or that just aesthetically work well. So, your goal with this research is to get a very personalized understanding of who the company you're designing for is, who their consumer is, and how we're going to convey their ideals in a way that the customer can come to know, love, and be excited to share. As I'm evaluating the industry specifically, I'm going to look at everything that I can get my hands on, from competition to history to even the close touching brands that are on the outsides of that. Honestly, I'm looking at most of that not inherently for inspiration, but more from a knowledge base because I need to know what's out there, I need to know what has worked, I need to know what hasn't worked, and look at those pieces, evaluate, and create a really strategic plan for what can I garner from that, what's wonderful there, what are the things that I really need to be cognizant of, and then really it's like I get those hard fundamentals down so I can start having fun. So, I guess you're breaking the rules and start creating unique things that hadn't been seen within an industry, but that can really create equitable points within the logotype. So, if I'm looking at a shop and I see what they do and I start looking at the past of that industry, a lot of times what you'll see is a consistent guiding line of something that works really well. Be that, okay, hey, an animal symbol has worked really well within this industry for quite a while. That's a cool thing. However, what we want to do is we don't always want to do the same thing. Yes, we want to focus on what has worked, but let's see how we can bring a fresh approach to that. So, one of the greatest ways to do that is to find things that are similar to the industry but not inherently a part of it. What that allows you to do is then start looking at those industries, their past, what's been successful to them, and you can create this crossover that, actually it's like this part of this industry and this part of this industry, both have really unique ties and similar characteristics to the shop that I'm working on. I think I could pull. I can pull this really crazy script that they do all the time over here, and I can pair that with this really gnarly black-letter thing that's going on here. But there's a unique mix in the middle, and that's what's going to create this new identity that still feels comfortable for the industry that I'm working in. When I'm looking at other people's work, things that have already been done, things that have been successful, it's really good to just get a broad overview, sometimes a really simple way. In that case, it's something like a book literally called Logotype. It's only logotypes, that's what we're doing. This is about as straight to the point as we can get, and we're going to branch out from there. But so, I grab this book and obviously it's extremely well-curated and everything in here is really awesome and your brains just melt if you try to look at everything all at once, and you physically can't do that. There's things in here that you're just like, "Oh my gosh, that is unbelievable." Fantastic stuff here. You've got your classics, your Campbell's, these scripts that have done really well and become so well-known over time, but there's also tons of weird basic things going on here. I know that's something I really enjoy back here. We've got this Howcast logo that pentagram did, and there's just something so elegant and beautiful and simple about that that's instantly recognizable, just a wonderful sans serif done so well. I think this is really important to evaluate. Okay. When have things gone over the top? What's too far? Or when are things incredibly simple and just right? What does that look like and what does that need to be? So, as I started to think about the project that I'm doing today with you guys, I needed to get a little more industry-specific. I know that I'm doing something for a local skate shop, and so I wanted to grab some other books that I thought could really provide some unique inspiration to that, from this grey iron retrospective, which is going to have just the gnarliest weird old graphics, but he's done some incredible stuff that, I mean, just really illustrative but still with super unique type that can be inspiring to us. I thought that is just the backbone of the skate industry, is these old graphics, these really in-depth detailed pieces. So, I'm like, "Okay, what's going on there?" But, man, still some really killer type that we're already seeing here and pulling from that. This complete manual of self-education for sign painting is actually really incredible. If you can get your hands on it, go for it. But I said I want to reach out into multiple industries, and so I'm going from our classic sign painter book here to this Corporate Identity Graphics in Japan book because I'm a big fan of what's been done in Japan and things that have been created. I think they have a fantastic appreciation for their craft and executing things really well, and some of my favorite logotypes actually come out in Japan, and things that have just been done in so you uniquely and are so immediately identifiable. There's just no question. I mean, you're looking at this stuff and like, "Yeah, I know that. I recognize that the first time I see it again." I see it once, I'm like, "That's neat." Then, you picked it up so quickly. Let us do things that are just crazy cool. Do you see that the C and this E, notice that it's just the same form brought in, not actually connected on that cross stroke and that's super rad. I mean, weird stuff. Really getting unique creating those value points. While I'm doing all this, I'm obviously focusing on what's been done within the industry. I've done that initial research, I know what is out there and what exists, what people are already doing for skate shops in the skating industry as a whole. So, I'm keeping that all at the forefront of my mind, and then starting to try to think of, okay, how can some of these pieces of inspiration pull into that? What things in here look like something that would fit and what things are just way off and never land? But maybe that one letterform I can bring that in to a style that we decide on and create something new and really valuable for them. In this case, I have a very personal tie to this industry just because it's something that I've been doing for a long time, something I've been involved in for a long time, and something that really has inspired me and allowed me to grow as a designer. I think that there's a ton of crossover between what you'd get from skateboarding and the premise of it's only you and so there's nobody else to blame same in design. You have to see the world differently. You start to look at everything different than somebody would. You see stairs as something to walk up, I see stairs as something to jump down. It's we get this different perception, but that's what happens to you as a designer. That's your job as a designer, is to start to see everything in the world differently and to start to interpret it all differently, and pick up on those little things, and take those pieces that other people may never noticed how are their there and they're creating this emotion for them, you're grabbing onto those, and you're strategically using them to create those same emotions. So, because you know the name of your shop, that means you know the letters that you're working with, and you can start focusing and thinking about those very specific forms and how they're going to interact. So, for all of you fantastic students out there who are probably already doing more amazing things that I can never dream, I just want to give you a little bit of guidance and what really helps get through this process and goes well. Number 1, you really got to make sure you actually do research and actually get out into the world. Don't just sit behind your computer, please do not just sit behind your computer. It's super important. I know it's weird to be sitting here and hearing this stuff and being told like get up and go, but you really got to get up and go. Right now, what I want to see before you get going, before you start making fantastic ligatures and everything else under the sun that's going to be incredible, I just want to see some research. I want to see five to six inspirational pieces. You can do like 20, that'd be awesome. I love people who really get a lot of research done. I want to see that uploaded and I'd also love to just see some strategies, some actual thinking, type some words. I know it's a crazy concept, but let's lay out what are the equitable points of the shop, let's put those down so we can hold ourselves to that standard, and let's start to pair those with these research images and these inspirations that we found. 4. Sketching 1: Alright. So now, we're going to move into sketching. I noticed that a lot of research, I know I had a lot of references out, but when I start sketching, I want to be really free. I don't necessarily want to be tied down to some of the things that I've already found and I want to really just start writing out the word because what I'm looking for right now are natural relationships that come from writing these letters. So in my case, this skate shop that I'm designing for is called the Lookout, which it can be written a lot of ways, there's some repetition in there. So, what I want to do is really just start getting those letters onto paper and this is going to be ugly. This is going to be terrible. These are not production samples, nothing like that. I really am just trying to start figuring out what my letters look like together. So, I will just actually write it, but all right, actually, I kind of want it to be a little bit more condensed, like, how did those letters start to play out when I do that? Okay. Whatever. Well, what if I started to think about some script things? Okay, if I connected that there, there. Again, this is just super rough and I'm just writing and writing, let's give it some serifs, put the O's in here, get weird with our K, I got U. I got this T. I don't know what's going to go on, maybe I'll drag it back but I'm just writing this over, and over, and over. What does it look like lowercase? You'll notice I'm using this dot grids sketchbook, you can use whatever you want, I mean, obviously, I'm not adhering to it all the time. I'm not super focused on, is this straight? Especially now, because I'm just writing this word over, and over, and over. In time, I'll start to use these grids to give me a baseline, to give me a cap height, to allow that kind of stuff for me to work with but right now, again, I'm just not worried about it. So I keep going. Okay, well, maybe, this would look really rad if it was all uppercase, how did those letters start to play out? I don't try to draw a perfect circle. I don't try to draw a perfect form. I keep my pencil moving. I keep my pencil as free as I can and so you'll see me going over lines more than once because it's an average, I'm trying to find the average. Your real goal, at this point, is to get out of your own head. Number one, when you start thinking about something, it's easy to be like, "Oh yeah, that'll work just like this." and I'm, "Oh man, I really already have this great idea for how I'm going to connect my D to my T or something." Once you start writing the word over, and over, and over again, you just start to find things that are actually really obvious sometimes but you weren't thinking about and those are really critical. So the point here is by drawing these letters over and over again we may find these repeating forms or these similarities between letters, these unique ways that we can make one letter look like another, or find negative space that can be similar because a really important thing to remember is that our negative space is just as important as our positive space, some would argue even more important. So, looking for what those relationships are going to look like as well to really create that visual balance because we're making a logo type here. We're not doing hand lettering, we're not making something that's just purely aesthetic, we're making something that must communicate, must communicate really well. At the end of the day, this needs to read. That's the most important thing and then we get the equity points off it. So we're looking for high eligibility, at this point, while searching out some of those unique characteristics that we can pull together. One thing I'm starting to see here is that I have a potential to create some really unique balance within this word because we've got this L that's extending to our cap, we've got this K that can extend in this T, that can extend with two letters in between those. So, we're getting this really nice balance of like one two-two, one two-two one, and that's pretty cool because inherently, this is just going to look really nice the way this is going to balance out. So, that's a really exciting piece to find. But I'm only getting that if I do the lowercase compared to if I do it's uppercase, it's a little boxy for me, it doesn't quite have the character that I'm hoping to find, it doesn't quite have an equitable point that I really want to get out of this. I say a lot of things that they sound businessy, almost when I'm talking about design, like equitable points and I'm not talking about like, "Man, I could sell that L for a bajillion dollars." What I'm talking about is brand equity, and that really is valued within enumerability, and the creation of community and the recognition that's brought on by something. So, when I'm talking about creating these equitable points throughout our logo type, I'm talking about the pieces that people are going to remember. The pieces that are going to be the aha, the when you see it you know it to be true. The Coca-Cola C, you don't need to see the rest of that logo type, you know that C and you know that that is Coca-Cola. So, we're really working on that, that's what I mean by equitable. For example, this one I'm working right now, and realizing, Oh, you know what, I can have a really crazy L. This L could really go under a bunch of this and then I could disrupt it with that K bringing that below my baseline here to stop that, and that's kind of cool. I mean, what if I took this T and also made it uppercase?" I could draw that back and we're creating some pretty cool balance there and that's not something I saw or anything that I found in my research but I'm going, "Hmm, that kind of looks cool. Those could kind of work together." Creating these unique lines, really making it a standout piece. Then, I can do whatever else I want with this. O, O, K, O, U because I've got this balance within this L and this T. So, we've been sketching. We've been doing this really gross kind of ugly things but in a really strategic way and starting to learn how these letters interact with each other. How these forms look together. Seeing them more than just as the standard alphabet that they are. So, we saw me working through some of these and I just kind of kept sketching and playing with some different Ls, some extra script stuff, thinking about adding this angle for the type, getting weird, and I started to kind of refine in here and find some things that I'm enjoying. So far, it's coming together. There's pieces that I'm liking, there's stuff that I think we're going to be able to grab from and really go farther. So, I'm going to go ahead and move into the next phase of what we're doing here. So, I'm feeling pretty happy with these initial rough sketches and like we're getting somewhere or at least we've got a really nice structure and understanding of these letters themselves. So I want to go ahead and move into the next phase and for me that involves just getting a little more detail. We're not making production ready work here, I want to emphasize that again, but we're starting to plan out how these letters are going to fit. So, I've added some utensils. I've got just some plain old tracing paper here and I'll show you how that comes into play and can really become your best friend. I was just sketching with this pencil which has HB lead in it. It's very medium, very whatever. I've brought in another pencil lead holder. This has got a three B, so that means it's softer, and it's going to allow me to make some darker lines where I need those, and when I kind of have a finalized form over the sketches that I'm laying down with this HB, and I even brought in my little pit artists pin. You can have whatever you want. This is not a calligraphic class. I'm just going to be drawing some lines to this to darken things up again. So, liking where some of this stuff is going, liking some of this stuff's kind of going. So, what I want to do, and this is where the tracing paper comes into play. 5. Sketching 2: Some of the things I've been working on, I was playing here with kind of your standard cursive or script L, and I think that has something unique to it and something good. However, I worry that for our usage scenario, this might be a bit too feminine, or it might not come off quite right for the skate industry. I was playing with langsam things at an angle, getting this upward slope to it. It's really classic and reminiscent of a lot of old sports logos, and things that they've done that I think are really beautiful and can tie in, can be a little bit of overlap for what we're doing here. Then, I started playing with and realizing that there's some potential for a pretty cool balance with the L and the T, creating almost a box to hold our logo type with any other part of it, and thought that that could be something really fun to start playing with and adding that on a little bit of an angle, shearing it. I mean, I think that there's some potential there. I also started working on the O's and the K in that interaction because I was finding some really unique spots for ligatures here. Some unique ways that I can connect Os, but, I thought that there's a really beautiful connection that we could create from the O up into the K here and make it all still flow as one line, which provides a really unique look to the K as well as a very tangible and relatable piece to the logo type as a whole. So, what I've done now is if I've pulled out fresh sheet of paper, and I'm going to start working on the concepts that I think have a little more merit and start designing for those. So, now I'm actually going to use my grid a little bit to set up my baseline, my x-height, my cap height, those type of things. Just to keep them a little bit in line, I'm starting to add some structure, I'm starting to care about how these letters go together. However, I'm not going to get precise yet. I'm not going to get out a ruler, I'm not going to do anything like that. So, all I'm going to do is really, gently just rough in where I want to work on this piece. The first one I kind of want to investigate is the one that has the balanced L and the T creating that rectangle to hold everything. So, what I'm going to do is, am going to have this just at a little bit of an italics. But I want this L to go all the way down. So, technically, here's what I'm doing. This is going to be my baseline and this is actually going below the baseline because I want the L to wrap under where my other letters are going to go. I also need to set up a relative x-height there. So, we've got our baseline, our x-height, and our cap height. I'm going to start laying in some of those other letters at a similar angle. Again, I'm just really gently ruffing this in, and I'm only looking for spacing and basic interaction at this point. It's not really kerning, it's not perfect. I'm just visually thinking about what I can do here. I'm not making us a script yet. Again, just the getting the letters, making sure they're relatively similar, and you can do this as detailed as you want. Honestly, I just think it's good to get it out there. Another thing that I've found and we talked about this a little bit before we were really highlighting here, is this cool balance between the L, the K, and the T. This is going to really highlight that, because they're all going to extend all the way from our cap height down to the lower baseline. But be basically in line outside this little bit of the T. It's going to create a cool balance and a cool holder for the wordmark. So, am going to draw that T, and then I want to bring back to the K. What decided that I want to do here with the K, is pull that actually down to stop the L, so it has a reason to quit running away from us and bringing this T back. So, super rough still, but we're starting to get some form. One thing I always like to do first is just draw. You can call it the skeleton, you can call it a simple, almost-like monoline version of the typeface. I don't want to add weight to this because weight is and feel, that's going to really start casting a style on this, and I'm not sure about that yet when I'm just trying to lay out the letter forms. I don't want to mess up the structure of this by worrying about drawing with weight. So, I'm actually going to go back in to say this sketch, and start adding a little bit of weight. So, what I'm thinking in this realm is that this is pretty boxy as is, and so I don't want to try to get too far away from x. If I try to jam something that had a ton of contrast in between the letter forms or within each letter form, I think I'd run into some real problems. Vertical, thicker, then horizontal. Even though optically they will start to look the same, that's the way you're actually going to get there. If you make those the same weight, it's going to look very bottom heavy, or very cross stroke heavy. So, I'm bringing that in, and that's a really standard thing. That actually comes even from sign painting and things like that. We have a heavy hand when you're coming down, lighter hand as you're going across. It just reads really nicely. So, that's about the only thing I'm playing into this right now, because I just want to get the structure out. So, this one, we're just going to go ahead and leave as a Sans Serif and not be a script or anything. Try to just fill some weight here. Again, you notice I'm giving the vertical line some more weight than those horizontal. Just forgetting a little bit of structure here, but this is really still imperfect and that's for sure. But, it's that rough sketch that gives us something to work with and gives us something that we're going to then pull this tracing paper over for in just a second. That's a really ugly U. Luckily we can fix that. So again here, top of the T, you're going to have a tendency to want to make that thick because its prominent, but it needs to be thinner in the the stem. So, we've got this really rough, but we're kind of getting somewhere direction. This is where our handy tracing paper comes into play because I like parts of this, but there's parts of this that I really don't like. So, what I'm going to do is just lay this right over the stuff that I'm already working on, and it's already getting here structurally, and lightly keep the things that I want. Just laying down that rough outline of what I've already created. However, I want to do something different with the Os for example, and so, I think I actually want to leave the Os open on the top to start giving this a little bit of character. So, I don't have to start over, I don't have to lose the work that I've put in so far. I can just draw right over what I'd laid out here. So, for example, I don't like this O that I've created here. So, what I'm going to do is just move back over to actually this first O that I enjoyed, putting it right in line with that O, on where it needs to be in the logo type, and again pull from that shape. That's the real beauty of using this tracing paper to make your revisions, because you're good pieces aren't lost and I can just, while I stick that back into place, my U is still pretty ugly. So, I'm going to fix that here. I'm going to leave it really light because I actually want to draw that after the fact. Work on my T. I like quite how far this top bar is sticking out. So, I'm just going to bring that back in. So, I've got this tracing paper here, and I can just do that. All right. So, now that I've started to make a few more final adjustments to these lines and kind of how I think this is going to fit together, I want to fill it in a little bit. So, I get an idea of the visual weight. Sometimes over though, you need an eraser. Thanks guys, and I'm going to go and clean up some of these lines, just on the outside really quick because I just don't want them to get filled in on accident. Now, I'm going to keep my harder pencil, bring in another handy dandy sheet of tracing paper, and do this magic trick of putting that over the top of this so I don't smear everywhere. Can you believe it, who would've ever thought of something so astonishing. I mean, everybody knows the horrifying moment when you've been drawing something and you're trying to get it together and looking relatively clean, and then you drag your hand across it all while you're working on it and create like, somehow have your hand look like you got a disease, and then your drawing is horrific as well and it's smeared and looks super distressed or something. You can try play it off like you like vintage style, but we all know what happened. So, I'm just keeping this under here given these letters some weight. Now, I bring the eraser back in for a second, and we've got a nice, pretty ugly still, but at least the layout of where we're thinking about co-inherit its direction. 6. Sketching 3: So, I've made this design. I think it's cool to an extent and it's got some unique characteristics to it. I think you can really fit and work within the skate industry, it's bold. However, I'm also coming to realize a real problem with this design and that being that this L is gigantic. Though that can look really cool for say lettering project or something where I'm always going to have the whole piece of type. In a logo type scenario, there's often a need to just use that first letter. Especially, since I'm really focusing on creating an identity for this local skate shop, I know absolutely for them and their use cases that they're going to want to make hats or t-shirts or things that just have that first letter and this doesn't work for that and we would just have a really ugly slightly strange angle thing that felt off balance if it doesn't have the rest of the form. So, I'm going to step back and I'm going to look at some of my other sketches and start bringing those in to solve this problem better. So, I'm going to go back to the sketchbook, we've this one that we were working with and we see it's just not going to work out and I'm going to pull from some of the other ideas that I had maybe go towards a script. I think that scripts have the ability to really communicate uniquely and I know that we'll be able to get a lot of character out of that script. I also believe that we can create that first letter in a wonderful way that they can really own and they can use in the scenarios that we know they need. So, I'm going to flip back really quick into some of these sketches that I was working on because I think that I have something going here with this L, I think it worked on a little bit more. Yeah, this thing seems promising to me because it's not your standard L, it's not your loop, de loop, de loop. It's got this cool piece but we're bringing that bottom line just straight across really kind of harsh and that's cool, that's different, that's weird and I like that and I think that's going to be ownable for these guys. So, I'm going to start sketching again based off of this but I'm just going to do it from memory because I don't have anything great here. These are just ideas again. Like I said it's good for these to be bad because we're just trying to get ideas out. Now, I'm going to start working on, hey, I want to make something that maybe I'm going to take to the computer, maybe it's going to have some legs in time but I don't need to look at these. I know what's there and I'm going to create a better interpretation of it by working myself here on the clean page. So again, same premise, I'm going to give myself a baseline to work on off the grid. Notice that I have switched back to my HB pencil, it's lighter. Again, doing these things you can go really light, like a 6H will barely show up. I just find that I don't need to go that light, because again, I'm not going to scan this stuff at the end. I don't need to make it perfect but I'd like to have something on the lighter side, harder side technically to work with. Laying in that baseline, I'm going to give it a cap light. However, I know for a fact that this one's going to extend probably above and below both the cap light and the baseline line because it's a script. It's that cursive, we need to give it some room to breathe in. As I was doing a research I was looking at these old sports teams and going well skateboarding is a sport, not really but that style that idea of wearing a jersey of wearing something that you're proud of, that still resonates very much in skateboarding. So, I pulled from that realm and was seeing these wonderful first letters, a lot of times everything else was terrible but that first letter is just so memorable on these jerseys. So, I looked into that and then counter to that, I also did a good amount of research into the music industry. Because skateboarding is a personal thing, it's an artistic expression and that's what musicians are really known for. You create something that's good and it's appreciated by so many people. However, you distinguish yourself by the small things that you do differently and I think that's very much how skateboarding works. So, what I'm trying to do is blend those two inspirations and bring two things that aren't inherently skateboarding into skateboarding because of the ways that both of them work and their natural tie-ins. So, that's why we come with this direction. This one I'm also actually going to go ahead and just lay a few diagonals in here, so I can keep a relative idea of where or how slanted I want this to be, how italicized, you call it what you want, I don't care. So, let's take one last look where we're coming from, we got our ideas here, we've got little bit of muscle memory going on what we're doing there and let's just take that right into play. Again, I'm going to go very light from the beginning. See I'm going above that cap light like I said I was going to and this is really the awesome thing here that's going to feel natural. I'm going to put that right on the baseline for now and that will actually you might want to fill out with the brush in the end but I think that could be cool. So, like I said, this one needs to have a little more character, so I'm grabbing my brush pen, there's nothing fancy about this, you can buy this for like 2.99 at any art store. Again, I'm not going calligraphic but I want to figure out this bottom line that I've got going on here. So, I'm actually going to draw a few underneath just to let it go and see what starts to happen. I like where some of these last ones are starting, this stuff's gross. Let's draw a few more. So, I think we've got something coming out in some of these that I'm enjoying that I think we can maybe replicate. But notice I'm not going to draw the lower type with this pen because that's not my glory yet. Again, not making final artwork, I'm just using that for inspiration of what this could look like as more of a brushstroke. So, I'm going to draw them with a pencil. Very counter intuitive, I know. So, I'm actually creating this shape that I like here by hand. Not standard lettering but we are being strategic, we are solving problems well and we'll fix things on the computer when we need them to be perfect. So, one thing that really good tip for you when you're working with letters is to always draw right through them. Don't try to draw and run into your stem stop, go over to the side. It's okay to let your letters run through because you want that curve, you want to feel out what that curve should look like naturally. So, I'm almost shading this thing in just by feeling where the curves go and that's why I like to do it with the lighter pencil because I think it's got some potential here. So, I'm going to grab my 3B again softer pencil. I'm going to start focusing in on these lines and actually giving them some permanence. So, now that I've started to solidify some of these shapes and I'm feeling pretty good about where it's going, I'm going to go ahead and fill this in so I get an idea of the weight. However, I do have some stragglers going on. So, you do need your eraser and that's okay. Grab that eraser, it's going to get rid of some of those stragglers like I said and then from my hard pencil again and I'm just going to fill this in pretty quickly. So, I brought this back over to this white behind it so I can see what I'm doing. You can see that my baseline is pretty messed up because my tracing job wasn't perfect and that's okay. Again, this is still just very rough. I want to get that U in. Ideally, I'm thinking about the forms of the O's in the way that those curve, those have a lot of character those and I think I need to balance that out with some standardized letter here that we can really read, then I close it with this T. So, as I'm doing this T, I'm not quite sure what I want the crossbar on that T to look like but I'm going to continue this pattern of the script where goes down, comes back up very natural as if it was actually written. Laying a pretty standard crossbar on my T, move it over here so we can see what's going on. I think we've got something here, I think this really has the potential to be a piece that we can work with. So, I'm going to go ahead and take my softer pencil again, harden this and fill it in. Then I think we'll have something that we can work with. So, what I need from you and what you need for yourself at this point really is to upload three to five sketches. Don't go past without uploading. You've got to get these things on to Skillshare and let your peers help you, explain yourself. Again, do not just stick up a photo and hope people go, yeah, that looks neat. Tell us why you're doing the things you are, tell us what you're thinking between those different ones. For example, if I uploaded these two, I have this one and I'm going to explain why this doesn't work but I still want to have it there so people understand the reasoning of how I'm getting to here. So, upload your sketches, get them online, get some critique, I'll be there to critique and we'll keep moving forward. So, we're ready now to take this on the computer. We're not going to need anything high tech, we're not going to be crazy, Just grab your phone, snap a quick picture, make sure there's not too many crazy shadows or something. Wallah up, it's perfect, email to myself. 7. Digital Refinement 1: So, here we go. We have brought the sketch onto the computer and immediately we can see the grossness of it. However, we've got some context here and some stuff to really start working with. So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn down the transparency on this bit. Set it to say, 50 percent and I'm going to make a new layer. Layers are your friend in logo type design. We're going to lock that bottom layer so that we can't mess with it. Then on this new layer, we're just going to start working right over the top of our sketch. First things first. Let's set in some of those rules. We're going to need a baseline, we're going to need a cap height, and we're going to need an X height. So, I've set those. I'm just going to select all of them. Go ahead and give it whatever stroke you want. I like pink. Pink is easy for me to see and easy to not lose track of. I like to keep my opacity down just so I can see the things I'm working on. These look relatively okay except for my cap-height, it's a bit tall. So, bring that down and we've got this descended that were going underneath. I also love things aligned and you should too. So, we've got our baseline, which is what all of our letters are set on. Obviously, this is pretty bad from that drawing that I made, but we're using our tracing paper we didn't set it up on there. That's okay. I'll show you how we can make this great. We've got our X height, which is the height of our lowercase letters here. We got our cap height which is where everything can extend to, and again this L is going to go above and beyond all of that. So, that's set into place. I'm also going to go ahead and I'll do this in say, a blue. Set some angles for everything that I want to be working on so that we keep some consistency between those. I'm just going to duplicate this. All I'm doing is pressing option. See it brings up that little secondary arrow and that's led me go. Hold Shift, it's keeping it in line so I can move these wherever I want. I care only really about having one on this k and something around this t. I think everything else I'll be able to work with a bit. I actually think that those are a tad too slanted. So, I'm going to grab my direct selection tool. You can get there just by pressing A. On top of those and bring back that shearing, that italics just a little bit but doing it consistently throughout the word itself. Cool. So, select those. Again, I'm going to turn on my opacity because layers are our friends, and we're setting another layer that we're actually going to work on. It's always good to label your layers. So, I've done my guides. I'm going to call this one my art, and this one is our sketch. So, you don't get confused. We're working our arts. I'm actually working underneath the guides that I've set up. That's why I made them transparent. I just really enjoy working that way. I think it lets me see the fonts that I'm creating and understand how they're interacting with the guides. So, move this guy back into place. Let's work on getting this thing on the computer. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with Pen Tool. Just press P, very simple. I'm going to do this in an outline first, because I like to just see the outline. I think it helps you really get a hold of what your shape looks like before the fill, just like when we're sketching. It's a really similar process. I'm just going to set that in black. My goal here, and it doesn't always have to be like this. We're not typographers so to speak. We're not making a font that needs to scale but the goal is still going to be to put in few anchor points as we can, and to put them at those extremes because we'll be able to set up much more beautiful curves with less anchor points, and by keeping things perfectly perpendicular and horizontal or aligned with our set angle. So, let's start getting this in the computer. Let's start at this northernmost axis. Create that first point. Press Shift to lock us into place. We drag out these directional lines here to get our curve looking beautiful. We've got our first anchor point. This thing is kicking off. I'm going to ahead, I'm actually going to go clear into the letter because the way that we drew this, and the way this is supposed to look as though it's drawn is as though it was done with two strokes. You had this around and you have this across. So, as I talked about when we were sketching, drawing through your letters. You want to do the same thing with the paths that you're creating, with those shapes having them go through each other because we need to keep those curves intact. So, I bring this down to here, that's good. I'm actually going to press options to lock in that first directional lines, because I don't need this code down to the never land. Start that gone this way. It doesn't really matter because this is going to be covered up on the bottom. We're going to start adding some of these other ones in. Again, I'm still holding Shift option to bring that directional line back in so that it doesn't take me out and make a really ugly shape and notice. Trying to find those most extremes of the curves where I can make things vertical or horizontal. So, let's just jam this in really quick. Doesn't have to be perfect and that's the point. I'm just really trying to set up the groundwork for what we're going to want to be working with. Notice, here we go. Making shapes, going right through our paths and that way we have created what actually will emulate the stroke that we made ourselves. We'll go ahead and make this bottom line. This setting the groundwork. Nothing is looking good yet, we'll get there. As you're probably noticing, this is semi tedious to do. People might be like, why don't you just live trace it? Number one, with live trace what it's going do is, yes you can control it and yes you can set up some semi structured and nice curves. However, none of your anchor points are going to be where you want them and where you need them. This way we're also going to keep like we said, our stroke going through the letters. If we live trace this, we would lose that. Live trace really isn't your friend. It's really not going to help you make a beautiful piece in the end. So, I just recommend staying super far away from it because you need to recreate this just as though you had drawn it. What you'll see and actually I'll just give you a quick little demo now is, so, say I decide that this curve is looking wonky. If I would have live trace this, I can't just grab it and change that curve and bringing it down there. When I took this in, it's automatically adjusting the curve over here. Who wouldn't have had any of that. That's the control we're going to need to refine this and make this perfect. So, that's why it's important to draw your individual letters and create those as their own shapes with overlapping strokes so that we can manipulate this in time. Okay, back to my Pen Tool. Just get jam and on a few of these. Again, just applying those same principles here, really quick, really rough. So, again, one really important thing is making each letter has its own shape, its own object because we want to be able to come back to these and tweak them individually, and move them, and shift them. What I've found is just that if you leave them as their own shape or an object, that gives you that freedom to move all this and not inherently affect another letter. I'm not worried about making this look awesome right now. Like I said, I'm going to get these on here because I've got some structural issues over here big time. We can see that this is all dropping way below my baseline. The beautiful part is we've got our layers here. We'll just grab this, bring it up a little bit, get things a little closer to back on track, and give it a little rotation. Helps it out a bit. Lock that guy back up, and we can get back to work over here. 8. Digital Refinement 2: Okay. Now, we've got O's, and I've duped those across. So, we've got three of those going on. Before I move on to the K, I actually want to set up a little more structure because we're going to need some more consistency for this whole piece. So, I'm going back in my guides layer. I'm actually going to set this spot where I want the bowls of all of my letters and everything to be consistently going down to. Also, something I need to do here in order for this to be proper and optically work well, is make sure that all my rounded letters go both above the cap, or above the X-height and below the base line a little bit. So, we're going to set that up, and that's giving us a little more structure. You're going to notice that the guides just really start to build up. Now, as we get into the K, I need to talk a bit more about what it is to to build your verticals, your horizontals for your pieces, this stem width, and what we want that to look like. We can start setting those rules now. So, I'm actually going to take my guide that I have here. I'm going to pick something relative to what I've got going on here with my O's already. So, I'll just go ahead and create based on that O. Delete these guys. Pull this over because we're going to end up using that for both our K, and in the end, for our T. We're getting some more structure. We'll lock that back up, get over here, get up it into a back out, and work on this K. So, the K, I'm going to draw it as two shapes actually, not just one. I'm actually going to make one stroke that does the connection from the O, and comes around, and goes down creating that stem, and then I'm going to create a second one, which is where the stroke would come back out, and then go to connect with our other O. That way, I have more flexibility in how I can tweak those and how I can really refine this in the future. So, I've just get this started right here. Oops, I'm drawing blue. That's okay, though, we can draw on whatever color we want. Make sure, and get this guide down to the baseline but not below. I'm actually going to go for a pretty crazy curve there. I think it'll play out for us and look really nicely or work really nicely, look really nice. So, I've got one shape, better set that back to black there, and we actually fixed a couple of little things within my curve right now, but for the most part, I will be adjusting these things later. Got this piece in play, and I'm going to go ahead and set up this piece over the K. Now, one thing I want to do here, is I'm actually going to start back at this gross intersection that I've got going on, because I know what I'm going to end up doing is wanting to connect my K eventually to my O, so I needed to set myself up for success with this, and create some room where I can make some initial, just quick roughed in, connection happened for me. So, we've got this guy going okay here. Close that off. It isn't too pretty yet, but it's getting as our structure. Now, you saw that we set up these guides and my trace definitely doesn't follow those guides. So, what I'm going to do, is just turn off my sketch for a second, so I can stop looking at that as inspiration and start seeing how can I make this fit into where I need it to fit. So, I'm working just with my outlines that I've drawn, and also work in outlining mode, if you prefer, whatever works best for you and your personal preference. But, being able to remove yourself from that sketch becomes very critical as we continue to develop this and as we continue to go forward because creating logotypes is often about perfect imperfections or the tiniest of details that people wouldn't notice, and they don't understand, and we get to get to the right. Okay. So, we've got a decent looking K now. This curve is still pretty bad. We'll get that fixed in a minute. Let's jump, trying to sketch back on real quick. We need to get to U. I don't know that our sketch is going to be a ton of help for us with this, but it will give us some form. Our scale is off. So, what I'll do, is actually go back to the sketch and increase that size a little bit since I had just drawn that in there by hand. This is the beauty of the computer, like we said, it doesn't make it easier but it definitely makes it faster. I was looking a little more in scale to give me a better starting point to work on this. Just go ahead and start with my curve here again. [inaudible] in this U. What I'm going to do here, again, I'm going to take this all the way up actually because I want this curve to end up being very smooth for me. I know watching somebody add anchor points and move them around for an hour is enough to make you drool and never want to design. So, I hope you're picking up a few little tidbits of insight. Even if nothing else, it's just to see how unperfect this step has to be. I think that's important to learn that you have a lot of power on the computer, you've got an idea. If you've got a strong idea, if you really strategize through this and you understand where you're going, the computers becomes an asset in terms of getting you there more rapidly. So, I'll keep this on my same black line as I have there. Let's work on this connection. As you can see, I have made this is ownership, again because I'm not exactly sure how this is going to play out with my T, but we can tweak all of that because I don't need to bomb my guide over now for my T to at least build that. I'm actually going to bring one over for my U, so I can fix that up, and both sides get something I'm feeling more confident with. This is structure. This has a lot of structure, a lot of structure for a script, and it's something to start to learn and to be aware of it, something that's different. Again, everybody does things in their own way, and always are good. I just hope this maybe can give you a little bit of knowledge as to how I do the things I do, and why I do them, and maybe it'll spark you to go, make something brilliant way better than I could ever even think of. That's our hope here. So, again, I'm also doing the T as two different strokes. We're getting our stem, and then we're also going to have that cross stroke as its own shape. Re-inspect black. I'm just going to rough this guy in, be aware of where things. So, I am just roughen this in real quick, and now it looks like we've at least got all of our letters laid out. We have our anchor points in the right place. That's really something that is so valuable but so often overlooked. This thing still looks pretty terrible, but we have the structure to now create everything that we want for this, and to work with our anchor points in places that are functional. So, at this point, I actually go ahead and just turn off my sketch completely. I don't delete it, I know I'm going to need it at some other point. I'm going to want to bring it back but I turn it off for now. I'm going to go ahead and select all of my artwork, and go ahead and fill this in, remove my stroke, and start working on tweaking this thing a bit, so it starts to look proper. 9. Fine Tooth Comb 1: Okay, so now that we have basically hidden our sketch layer, we get to start having some fun. This is really my favorite part of logo type design because this is still really poor obviously. It's gross but we've created our structure, we have developed a system in which we are going to follow and now we get to be free to develop that and make it look fantastic. So, what I'm going to do first is start working with a few of the letters that we were just playing with, just getting those to a better state. Notice I want the bottom curve of my U here to go to the same place as the bowl of my O. I need to get this angle. It's little more close to the shear that we're working with. So, one thing I want to do and I want to emphasize as well that you'll be picking up on is this line right here is still completely vertical and I don't actually care about this being a perfectly straight line along my U because that takes away from a lot of the character that we're creating but what I want to do is create the illusion that my curve is still following that same general path. So, we can do is slide our anchor points relatively close to that, shift this up so we can turn that on and off and we can start to see the beauty of the form without taking away from the script itself while still having structure. Just going to do the same general things this other side here. So, all we're really working on is getting this to a presentable state. Something that we feel comfortable sharing and seeing if we've hit the vibe accordingly if we're resonating with our client and with their target audience. So, we're not fine tuning this yet. It's not living in that perfect realm but we definitely got to work it out and get our curves and get everything starting to look great together. So, one thing I really want to focus on now and that I think it's really important that all of you guys pay close attention to is the relationship between your letters. You'll notice that we have these Os and these nice loops here. Notice that the k has a similar negative shape there because like we said earlier, the negatives are just as important if not more important than the positives. So, I want to really capitalize on that. Furthermore, I need to be conscious of the fact of okay, what does the outside of my O looking like? How is that shape coming together? And how is that going to relate to say my U? So, a really easy way to compare our letter forms to one another is just to simply copy them and place them right on top of other ones. Go ahead and make it pink and bring that to the front, turn that opacity down and voila, it's already revealing some really basic mistakes that we've made, like our curved bottom of our U doesn't go below the baseline like it needs to. That's a classic rule of typography that we are missing here and of legibility. So, we want to assure that it's getting down there as well. It's okay for our U not to look exactly the same as our O. It shouldn't, it shouldn't have the same curves, it's going to have its own unique character but we want to make sure that certain parts of it are starting to line up. So I really like the back half of the O and hey check it out, the U basically aligns with that. One thing I noticed is that this is a little bit thinner here and so I wonder well, do I have any room to make that thinner? Not a lot. That's okay, but we're continuing that relationship. Continuing to refine and bring these letters closer to one another. I'm done with that, delete it, gone, we keep moving on. So, here within our K, I want to assure that this negative space has a good relationship with this negative space. So, again I'm just going to duplicate that over and I'm going to go ahead and simply rotate this, make it pink. Turn the opacity down, bring it to the front and just tweak it in there and see. Oops! Just pull that in there and say okay that is actually those curves are looking relatively similar. I can dig that. It's not about specific repetition. We don't need these all to look exactly the same but we want there to be that same general feel to it. So, one thing I'm noticing is yeah. So this negative space is quite a bit smaller than the negative space on my K. Super quick fix. I'm just going to go ahead and bring this up a little bit so that we start to get something with a tad more consistency. I think this all needs to be thickened up a bit including the outside of our K. Since, I have these already made as all their own shapes, it's really easy for me to work with them and it's really easy for me to keep those curves. So, yeah, that negative space is definitely appearing better. I noticed that there is a little bit more of a pinch here and bring that down. No problem. And we're starting to get somewhere. So, let's zoom out. Take a look at this, what looks weird? The L definitely looks weird. We'll get back to that in a second. Our O, U, T, I think our K is looking a little bit skinny and we got there just because of our sketch but we don't have to stay there, is the beauty. We can just change everything so I unlock my guides layer. I'm just going to drag all of this over collectively, relock that guides layer, and I'm going to work on spreading out, okay, a little bit giving it a little more real estate and that's also going to relieve some of the stress that we have here in this really heavy area because visually, that just doesn't look awesome when it's that thick. It's going to look thicker than all the other parts of the letter form and that's not a good thing. So, we talk about drawing through letters as well. Again, this is another chance for us to focus in on that. We can take this anchor point and drag it to right here where the O is connecting. So, we can actually recreate this happening and adjust accordingly to that. What that's going to do is keep our stroke really true. Keep our letter, making sense. So, I'm zooming out often. You probably noticed that I'm zooming out all the time because I like to quickly take in how the changes I'm making are affecting all the other letters because at this point, I'm not seeing these as letters, I'm seeing these as the individual shapes they are and I'm looking at the relationship between all of them. I'm looking for the balance, the symmetry and how they each play off each other. I don't care that this is a K at this point. Yes, legibility is number one in the end and we'll get back to that but right now, I'm looking at how do I create beautiful forms that communicate well with one another. So, that's why I'm pressing zooming in and out like a madman and I'm sorry if I'm making you crazy. I do things. I think we all do things in really rapid fashions that sometimes we don't even notice. So, I hope you pick up on some things here that I'm not saying because there's definitely more to this than what I'm talking about. Now here's going to be some fun. We've got this line coming through, we've got this connecting. We didn't actually continue the proper width of this stroke here. So, I wasn't really worried about that because it's all covered up. So, we're going to add some anchor points in here. These anchor points have nothing to do with the final curve of it. The only reason we're doing that is so that we can tweak this down just a little bit and get this tucked back up inside to be appropriate. And,voila, we're getting a much nicer shape. Zooming out, I like that width of the K, it's looking better to me. Bring this over just a little bit. Yeah, turn the guides off. We're getting somewhere. This is starting to look promising. 10. Fine Tooth Comb 2: So now that we've fine tuned a lot of these shapes, these letters, let's start looking at the kerning, let's start looking at how they are all playing off each other. I have a couple tricks that I like to do. Number one is always good to see it tiny. Look for where you've got problem areas. We've been seeing it really big. That's not an issue at all and so when I'm zoomed pretty far out, I noticed that things are getting a little tight on my Os here and my O to U so I might need to be careful of that closing off. Here this K O connection I'm absolute lookout for that. No pun intended. Overall I think I we're in an okay spot and this is all just been eyeballed to this point. Last thing that I really like to do that I find helps me is, I'm going to go ahead and select everything, object transform and I'm going to reflect to entire form. What I've done now is made this basically illegible. That's a good thing because it gets me to stop looking at these as letters and it forces me to only see them as the shapes that they are and so I can really evaluate their relationship with each other. When I do it like this, I can definitely see that "Yeah you know what, I've got a little bit of a problem here with my two Os." This is looking really tight and it's even looking tighter than what I've got going on over here. I'm going to undo this really quick. Got my guides here. I'm going to grab this, bring it down again, reflect that and then I'm going to create a new set of guides while it's upside down for myself to counting with. These relationships I'm just going to base off of an area that feels good to me and the Katie E feels pretty good. A really simple rule of counting. People will tell you a lot of different things and there's a million things you can do but what I've come to see us to be very true is, if you set up your rules like so, you're going to end up with a pretty good success level. Say I decided that this was going to be my main distance, this is my space between standard letters. What that means is for a completely vertical letter form and another completely vertical letter form, they're going to get this much space. If I'm going to do a straight to curved letter form, what I'm going to do actually is I'm going to split this into thirds. Just distribute that right there and I'm going to use two-thirds for the straight to curves. On this case that would be my two-thirds. Then if I'm going down to curve to curve, I'm actually going to use 1.5 of that space for curve to curve. The reason being optically, when you have a curve at the top and a curve at the bottom, there's a lot of negative space that is there and so that will play into feeling like this space is larger. Now that I've got these rules set up, I'm going to go ahead and change them to a different color. We can see them, bring them down here onto my flipped logo type, rotate these to get the same angle as what we're already working with, then I'm actually going to scale these right into what is my straight to curve and I want that to be my two-thirds piece. So, scaling this again pretty close, I've got to go a little bit back and forth since we're scaling all of it together. That's a big thing to notice that I've grabbed every rule and I'm scaling them together because once I have that like I do now, I now have the set for the entirety of the piece. So, I'm going to grab those, put them up here and go ahead and take this guy out. I'm going to delete that and delete that and I've got my one, and two, and three. It's a really nice system. We know we need to have a two here. We know that curve to curve, we need to have a one, again curve the curve, need a one. This is a unique scenario that's really good to be aware of. This is a curve to half curve and so playing that one by ears to what you think works best between the two-thirds and the half, that's really what's critical. In this case, I'm going to play it safe and go ahead and use the two-thirds piece just because I think a little more room is going to help us within this and then you've got another crazy thing going on here where you've got straight to straight but you can't use your one because these are going to just get too close because this cross stroke jumps into that. We're going to set that up so we at least have the visual play off it. We're pulling these in like I said it, and ultimately these rules aren't set in stone. We're using guidelines that I've set up just through examination of other classic typefaces and just learning about their relationship between letters. One thing that you'll see for sure is if for example your letters are extended, this two-thirds thing is not going to be what you need. You're going to need like a one, a 1.5, and a 0.25. If you have two Os and have an extended typeface, they're going to seem so far apart. They need to get close together. You don't have to follow these exact guidelines but I do recommend setting this up to an extent and practicing these principles because it's those little details, it's those kind of things that are really going to make your logo type stand out and seem fine tuned. The beauty of what we have now, and this is where all of our proper planning starts to play out is that we still have all of these letters as individual one or two shapes. We can just select them with their kerning pieces and kern this really easily. Instead of having to move around, just anchor points trying to get everything right which is very difficult. We set ourselves up to succeed right off the bat preparation. I hope these little tricks are helpful to you guys and that you're going to be able to really knock something out with this little bit of advice and do it quickly and really see the beauty of it come to fruition. Just like we thought, these Os over here are a little too tight. I need to go ahead and make sure this is aligned properly and grab all this inclusive of that guide, bring that on over so should have some pretty good kerning going on through here. Like I said, this guide is in its own world because of this crossroad that's setting things off. We've got some lenient to play that one by I in the end. You are going to turn these guides off again. We have got to fix this piece here. Not a big deal. Work on those little pieces but overall upside-down, I'm feeling pretty good about the relationship of all of this and the negative space we've got going on. Now that we're at this point, we've got this logo type that we're happy with. It's current well we'd like the weight of everything. First thing we're going to do is we want to keep the good guide and broken up one. We're going to go ahead and go over here into our pathfinder tool and we're just going to go ahead and unite all of those compounds shapes. Everything is nice, tied together, smooth and it's not going to get messed up, we're not going to accidentally grab only a part of it and leave our U hanging out and you never know where it will end. You can take this piece then start applying. Let's see how it's going to look because when you're showing it to your favorite shop, when you are showing to them, you are like "Hey guys, look what I made for you. This is amazing. " They're going to want to see how it's going to live so application is always key. In this scenario, one thing I want to do is I'm going to ungroup that real quick. I can grab like L. Just regroup it to stay safe but I think that this L is going to really lend itself to some unique applications all on its own. Maybe some hats, maybe some T-Shirts, definitely a pretty cool sticker that we can make for them. There's a lot of room for some fun here. Really unique things. What I want to see from you guys is yes your final logo type, but let's see this thing living. Show me what you want to do with it and allow everybody to really see the lengths that you can give your logo type. 11. Conclusion: For all of you fantastic designers out there who are taking this class, when you're evaluating your project and other people's project, I really want you to focus on appropriateness, uniquity and ultimately the beauty of the execution. Thank you for taking this class. I'm really excited to see what you produce, to learn about the wonderful shops in your towns and I genuinely hope that you can create something you're proud of and that you're excited to share. 12. More Design Classes on Skillshare: way.