Make a Minimal Badge Logo in Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro: Today we're gonna be looking at some simple techniques to create a badge design here in Adobe Illustrator. Now this is a cool logo design and I really want to teach you some skill sets here that you can carry over into any sort of badge design that you want to create. So we'll go through something very specific in this video, but you guys can use what you learn here to apply it to your own designs. Now, this file is actually available, including a starter file with the background and the colors are already in there for you. So go check that out in the description, it's totally free to download. Let's get into this badge design. My name is Spencer Martin. I'm a graphic designer and content creator with a YouTube channel as well where you can check out a lot of different free tutorials. Hey, look at that. It's on this logo. That means you guys can actually personalize your own badge design in this class. I can't wait to see what you post in the project area. Let's get this thing rolling. 2. Creating the Badge Outline: All right, so here's what we're gonna be creating. I've got two styles here, one on black and one on white. We're gonna start by creating a new document. This document is 1920 by 1080 RGB color mode, and that's about all you need to care about. So here we go. We've got a new document. Here's our board, pretty wide art board. First thing I wanna do is create a background color. So Rectangle Tool, double-click out here. I'm gonna type in 1920 by 1080 to create that size of a rectangle, we are going to get rid of the stroke. I'm going to double-click this fill to just grab something down here in this charcoal area. Hit OK, and there we go. Now this rectangle, I'm going to find my alignment panel. Any of these panels over here on the right, you can go up to window and find it like a line right here, this alignment panel, I'm going to make sure it's aligning to the art board and we're going to center it and see this Layers panel here. I'm just going to switch this to background. We're going to lock it in. So now we have a locked background layer. I just liked designing this badge logo, kind of on this darker backgrounds so I can design in white. I think it just looks better. So that's the way we're gonna do it. Hit the plus icon to create a new layer. And this layer we'll just call logo because here is where we're gonna do our designing. First thing I want to do to get that sort of cool badge shape is go to the Star Tool, open up the star tool. Now you'll see mine already looks like this, but yours probably if we can find it, probably looks a little bit more like that. It probably has a few less points on it. So with the Star Tool selected, I've just clicked and dragged. I can make this bigger or smaller. I can press the up and down arrow keys while I'm using this tool to add points. And then I can hold Command or Control on a PC to sort of make these points less pointy. So I could bring that into something like this. I could let go of command, scale it up a little more, kind of see what I'm working with. Can grab command again, maybe make these a little bit point here. I think something like this would work pretty well. So I've still got this held. You guys and I can kind of scale in and out, use my up and down arrow keys, used my modifier keys like Command or Control. If you're on Windows and create this style of shape, I don't even know what to call it. It's a lot of different points and we're gonna create like a nice smooth curve with this, just click and hold, scale up and down and then press your different modifier keys to get the shape that you want. So once we've got that, I'm just going to let go. And we've created this shape out here. This is going to be the outside of our badge. So I'm going to switch this from Phil to stroke just by clicking this double ended arrow to swap. And then we're going to double-click on this and turn it to white, hit ok. So now we have a white Stroke around the sky. We're gonna change that stroke to 5 would be good for this size documents. We've got a five-point stroke around this shape and we're going to not have these corners quite as pointing. I've got this selected. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit and we're going to switch over to the direct selection tool is the white arrow in your toolbar. You can always press the shortcut key k. See how these points, this is the corner widget. If you don't see them, go up to view, down to show corner widget. Got make sure that's shown. We're going to click and drag these points to just smooth out these curves a little bit, I think, right in their works. So just grab that and smooth them out to the shape that you want. 3. Adding Circular Text: Alright, next up, let's add some text. But to do that, I actually want to type on a circle. So what we need to do is find our ellipse tool. It's going to be back with that star tool was shortcut key is l for the ellipse tool, you can find the center point here, but if you miss it, that's okay. As we scale up, it's gonna be kinda weird, right? So we need to hold option or on a PC to scale up from the center and also hold shift. And that's going to keep it as a perfect circle from the centre, some holding Shift and Option or Alt if you're on PCM holding those two right now and just scaling up and down. So once we get about in this range, that's where we're going to want to type our text in. This circular path is going to be the type on the path tool to do that the way that we want to do it to create a top level of texts and a bottom level of texts were actually need to split the circle into two pieces. We're going to use the scissors tool, the shortcut key for that is C. And we're going to find these two anchor points on the circle. And we're going to cut at those two anchor points on the sides here, just like that. So now what you should have is a top piece and a bottom piece Command or Control Z to undo any mistakes you make and then redo them. So with this top piece selected, I'm going to press T for my type tool, going to hover over that path until I see my cursor change to this sort of type on a path cursor. And when I click right here where it says intersect on this point. Now a lot of these pink lines and pink words and stuff, they're called smart guides. To turn on smart guides, you need to go up to the View, drop-down, down to smart guides, make sure that's checkmarked. It's gonna be very helpful for different things like that. So now we've got this text on our path and it's horrible, but we're going to change that first. I'm going to change my text to white. So we're going to grab this swatch here and switch it to white just like that. Perfect. Now with the type tool selected, you should be able to, or actually with this text selected, you should be able to double-click on the Type tool and it's going to pull up the type on a path options if you don't get that or don't see that goat to type same thing, type on a path and then go to type on a path options. So these options, we're gonna check mark to preview box. First off, this is upside down, so I want to flip it. Cool. Now, the effect, I wanna keep it on rainbow. You guys can play with the other ones if you want a line to path, I like using center because it helps me line up the circle itself a lot better. So we've got this lined up in the center just like that spacing, we're gonna leave on auto and hit OK. Now what we need to do is actually type in some text. I'm just going to type in my name in all caps, and then I'm going to select this type. It's really a type layer. Now, just an arc pattern, arch shape. I'm going to switch my font to trade Gothic. And I believe I'm going to use the Trade Gothic condensed, maybe bold condensed like that in your paragraph panel. Align the text to the center that gets it type in from the center. And the top here, I think something like 34 or something around there for this size is good. And then we're going to space this out. Alright, so this is your tracking, which is like the space between all your characters, must base that up by quite a bit and maybe something like 300. So the idea here is I'm going to have text on top and texts on bottom that kinda match a little bit. So let's do the same thing. We're going to press T for the type tool. Click on this anchor point down here. I'm going to type in graphic designer in all caps, going to grab that text, switch it to white. If it's not already the font you want, switch it back to the font you want and the size and the tracking will keep it 300 for now. We'll change that later, but we'll keep that for now. So there we go. We got we got some text on top and on bottom. You have to split that circle up to get the text going in different directions. If you typed just on the circle path, the text would stay the same all the way around. So on the bottom your texts would be upside down. So you've got to use those type on a path options on either the top and the bottom halves of that circle. And you're going to be able to get the text the way that you want. 4. Adding Elements & Initials: Now what I'm gonna do is just add some initials to the middle and then some little x's over here on the sides. To do that, I'm gonna go back to the Type Tool T is the shortcut. Just click on my canvas here and I'm gonna type in S, M, that's my first and last initials going to highlight that we're going to change it to a different color. So I'm just going to double-click on one must swatches here. I'm gonna find like a nice bright gold yellow color and hit OK. And with this color, if you guys open up your swatches panel, remember go to window down to swatches or any other panel that you don't see. I'm going to actually add this as a new swatch and I'm gonna add it as a global. So make sure that global is checkmarked and hit OK. And the reason I did that, and I'm actually going to add a new folder here. And I'm going to just do select it swatches because I have this one selected. And we're just gonna do badge colors like that. Hit ok. So this New Folder took that Swatch down here. So I've got a new folder of my different swatches here. Mainly just the gold is what we're concerned with. But now I can actually click on that to create other elements and fill them with that color. So this S M here. I'm going to want to allot larger. So I'm going to hold shift on this and press the up and down arrow keys just to make this a lot bigger, these letters back together, maybe like 50 would be a good distance. And then instead of bold condensed, I'm thinking heavy compressed, if you're looking for are font that's similar to what I'm using here because you can't get trade Gothic. It's going to be like a sans serif font that's fairly tall, so condensed, compressed those kind of words for those fonts means they're compressing the width, the characters in that far lot taller. So in this case, we've got heavy compressed. And once I kinda like that, I'm going to duplicate this piece out here. And I'm also going to shift click on both of these pieces and hold Option or Alt on PC to duplicate this out here. So these are where I'm going to keep my actual editable text up here. I'm going to probably start to outline a lot of things I do like the spacing between this S and m. So I'm going to outline these by going up to type down to create outlines. Shift Command or Control. O is the shortcut key, that's 12x. Remember, once I've created these outlines, I can actually shift click on the outside of our badge. And I've also got this selected, then I can click on the outside of our badges and that's going to highlight it. And now I'm aligning two key object. The key object is that outside stroke and I'm going to horizontal align center and vertical aligned center. That's gonna get this S M right in the middle of this badge. Now I can do the same thing with these buffer. Now I'm not going to because we may mess with the text. So I'm gonna keep that editable. I'm going to scale this up by holding Shift and Option or Alt to something that feels right, something right in there. Now we need those little x marks that we had. And so we're going to just use that type tool. I think I might actually type a plus icon rather than an X icon. And we're going to highlight that, turn it to that gold color. Create outlines. Can't have it highlighted. We gotta have the text selected, then type down to create outlines. And I'm going to rotate that, but I'm gonna hold shift when I do it. So it just goes and 45 degrees. And now I have a little x that I can insert right here. So I'm going to line that up to this by shift clicking both, then clicking the SM, align it to the vertical center, just like that. And then we're going to duplicate this out. But first, I think this probably needs to be a little bit smaller, just kinda scaling that down, holding Shift and Option or Alt on PC. And then we can duplicate it by holding Option or Alt. And then while you're dragging hold shift to keep it in line, just like that. So I'm trying to line this up about where the letters would hit as they're going around the circle. So as I'm looking at this, I feel like these or this circle is a little offset. And actually the reason why is if you look at this, we made a little mistake and you might make it to the top part of this type on a path is lined up to the center. The bottom is lined up to the bottom of the letters. So we actually need to grab this piece. Double-click on our type tool and make sure were lined up to the center, not the baseline and hit OK. That's going to actually be a lot better and feel a lot more centered on our badge. 5. Cleaning Up Your Design: Now we're getting pretty close to being done. But the last little tweaks here is to just tweak some of the size, some of the spacing, Some of the character tracking. So if you have made it this far, that's awesome. We're just going to finish this up. I'm making a few tweaks. So this is sort of like dependent on the words you're using. If you decided to use your name, if you decided to use video editor at the bottom, that's going to change some of the spacing and the letters, your two letters in the middle, right, your, your initials are going to be different than mine. So a lot of this is dependent on what you've created. So here's what I'm gonna do. I think this SM is a little small, so we're going to scale that up, but it's kind of bump in there. So I'm going to zoom in first, that's Command or Control plus. And then holding Shift and option are all to scale up from the center, always doing that so that I don't have to realign this object. I think these guys are good, but they might be able to scoop out just a little bit, maybe 123 on that one than left 123, just using my arrow keys, I believe that this text, this badge is a little bigger and maybe than the last one I made this text probably should be a little bit larger than 34. So I'm just going to use my up arrow key once I have that highlighted in the Character panel to try to increase the size of that text a little bit, just trying to fill in the space. I think 36 works. Now one of the things that I was talking about earlier, and actually I'm going to delete this text down here because it's messed up now, right? But one of the things I was talking about earlier is the spacing we were going to change. So this tracking, I think instead of 300, I'm going to bring that back to 250. I'm gonna grab my brush tool really quick just to show you guys, I don't want to match up this spacing with this spacing as best as I can, it's not gonna be perfect. But when you're looking at this and you're looking at this, I don't want those to be similar so that one side doesn't feel off-balance, right? So they feel the same. Now, I'm doing that with the spacing between the letters because I would like the size of the letters to stay the same. I want this and this to be consistent from a type or font size. But the spacing, I think is where we can mess with that a little bit and try to tweak it so that it feels a lot more balanced. I think we've got it pretty good here. I think we've sort of figured this out pretty well. So now I can actually shift, click on both of these and save this out here just in case I need it later. And from there, I'm actually gonna grab everything and go up to type create outlines. So now all my type is outlined. I'm going to shift click on top and bottom, command or control G. You can also right-click and group or ungroup, but I've grouped this text. So now I'm going to shift click on the outside and we're going to center this up just by then clicking again on the outside. So this, these two are selected, but this is selected as the key object. And once again, using that alignment panel to just nudge that ever so slightly into the centre. Same thing with these guys, grouped them together with command or control G. So now I have a group with these two pieces going to shift, click on the outside, Click on the outside, and just line that up to the center. And then same thing with this guy. Just make sure that everything is lined up to the center now that everything is outlined. 6. Adding Versions & Colors: There we go. You and I have created a cool little minimal badge logo. Now, I'm going to drag this over here and a while back, we locked our background. I'm going to unlock it and mess with the background a little bit. We're just going to pull this in from the side to it locks into the middle. So now we have our badge logo and I'm going to group that whole thing together, right? So now this guy moves around together. Let's grab both the background and logo, then click on the background and will center em up just like that. So now it's centered on this side, will grab it all again. And I'm going to hold Option or all on PC to duplicate and drag this out to the left. So now we have two halves here. This is where we're creating the version that goes on white by the way. So if you didn't know what we were doing, that's what we're up to. Select all of this again, Shift M, We've got the shape builder tool. See this guy over here, shade builder tool Shift plus M. Alright, now I'm gonna hold Option or Alt to just remove this outside section by clicking on it while I have Option or Alt selected. Now all we have is this sort of black object, but we want the background to scale out beyond a little bit. We're going to do that by adding a stroke to it. It's underneath everything. And we want to add the same color stroke to this background. So what I'm gonna do is just click on this fill and drag it to the stroke. And then we're going to need to up the stroke, hold Shift and use the up and down arrow keys just to go by tens, just like that. So you can kind of click this out to whatever I'm doing 40. And actually what you can do is go to stroke and make sure that stroke is only aligning to the outside of that object. Now it's actually 40 points from the center of this. So I know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but we're going to drag that back. Maybe the 20, sort of an outlined version of this on white Randy 30-point. There's one keep tweaking that you know, there we go. So now we have a version that can go on white because it's got this black border. And we also have this version that goes on black. And to expand this, all, you can click and drag to select it all go up to object and to expand appearance. It's gonna expand the appearance first, but we wanna expand everything. So we go back up to object and expand again to kind of have to do like a double expand their everything should well, not quite. We're going to put the object and expand it. Again. You need this panel to show up probably because we were in a couple different groups inside of that, we had expanded a couple times. Sometimes that happens, I just expand until I see this dialog popup. And it's asking me what do I want to expand the fill and the stroke? Of course I do hit OK. Now everything is a fill, which makes it a lot easier to change colors. So this piece is all one. And what I could actually do is use the Pathfinder option to unite that piece altogether. Now instead of having those strokes that we created also outlined, it's actually just a full shape that's solid. And what we have here is everything has a Fill rather than having fills and strokes, which makes it a lot easier to color this. So if you wanted to create a version and we can just scale this down. If you wanted to create a version that's all gold or all white, it's much easier now to just select this object, hold shift to de-select the background. And then you can double-click on your swatch or actually what you could do now that we have this watch over here, just click on this yellow swatch and it's going to change the fill of everything. So you can really quickly create a one-color version of this badge just like that. Here's another thing because we have that gold swatch created that's global also, we can change that. So because I have this selected, I can double-click on it, hit preview. We can actually change this color to whatever we want. We want more of a burnt orange book or salmon are a read. We can adjust that to whatever we would like it to be. It'll change wherever you've used that color. 7. Final Thoughts: So there you have it. I hope you didn't have a whole lot of trouble. By the way, you can download the final recorded version Illustrator file. I'm gonna save that. I'm going to save the original pre-recorded version that I created just to try to figure out what I'm gonna do for this tutorial. And I'm going to save you out a starter Illustrator file, everything in CC and ES6 that you guys can get started on this with the background and the colors and Swatches already inputted in. Just kind of follow along without having to think about trying to figure out your colors. By the way, we'd use, we use trade Gothic pro as the, as the type, as the font. So you can sink that from the Adobe Type Kit or use your own kind of taller stands there for even a serif. Just figure out what you want to create your own badge. Tag me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever at pixel and bracket. Thanks for watching. Subscribe for more illustrator tutorials. I'm Spencer from pixel in bracket, and I'll see you guys in the next video. In the next video, I keep saying icon. I mean logo. We created a cool little badge, logo. So pretty neat. I'm gonna back out to this. Pretty neat there. I think. How many times can you say pretty neat? I don't know. Here's another thing because we have that gold. Wow, thanks for watching, subscribe for more tutorials. And when we get out of here. And imagine if I didn't record that.