Negative Space Logo Design: Creating Clever & Memorable Logos

1. What is a Negative Space logo?: Hey, and welcome to this mini course on using negative space within logo design for brand designers. Now, this is an exclusive module that I'm sharing with the skill share community to help brand designers to elevate the logo design game and ultimately create better logos for your clients. Now, in this course, we're going to look at examples of incredible logos. We're also going to take you through the entire process of how I think about designing logos and ultimately how you can design logos in a similar way. And we're also going to share how I actually showcase logos to clients to get them signed off with minimal revisions, and so you can move on to the next project and get paid really well for your services and your time. Now, this logo that we're about to design together is a real life project for a real life client. And I'm actually being hired through my branding agency, Clementine house to design this logo for a real life business. So I Canaway the dive in with you. Let's get started. 2. Amazing Negative Space Logo Examples: So what actually makes a great negative space logo? Now, there are three main logos out there that use negative space pretty much better than anyone. First is FedEx. Second is Pitborugh Zoo, and third is Toblerod. Now FedEx, by far is the one that gets talked about the most. One because the brand is the biggest, probably, and secondly, because it's the most simple and minimal and just the most genius. Now, Toblerod on the other hand, is a little bit more subtle, but also clever. So within the logo, they actually have a little hidden bear. In the mountain, which is a symbol of where the chocolate originated from, a little place called Bern. And if you don't know where Burn is, it's just a little town in Switzerland. Now, not many people actually know that this bear is here, probably. It's actually probably the best hidden bear in the entire world. However, it's not the point. The point is that it is there. And the point is that it's a little story to tell, and it actually communicates the little town of Burn in the most subtle and most charming way possible. Zoo takes the bear and basically times it by three. And they do this by ultimately creating a lion and a gorilla inside a tree silhouette. Now, just by looking at this logo, first, you see the tree, and then afterwards, you get kind of the bonus of the gorilla on the left and the kind of lion or tiger on the right. But one thing that I do want to point out Mg, this logo in particular is it isn't very scalable. And that's one thing which is going to become super important a little bit later, of course, when we start to actually apply the logo to things like mock ups and different environments, this logo, although it's super clever, it is unscalable. So it's actually due a little bit of an update, in my humble opinion, but what do I know, right? But anyway, in the next lesson, we're going to develop our own negative space logo. It's not going to be unscalable like the Pittsburgh Zoo example, but it is going to be a little bit more simple, a little bit like Fedex. So on that note, I will see you in the next lesson. See you there. 3. Brief & Research: Designing a negative space logo for a client, what is the first step? Well, brief and discovery. Okay? What is the brief? So this client is a logistics company, okay, who essentially take packages and ship them all around the world super, super quick. So they're a critical logistics company called Center fi. Now for this particular client, they did say that they wanted something focused around negative space, a little bit like the FedEx logo, for example. What I wanted to do was to give them four to six different directions in regards to, Okay, this is how we can communicate that you're a time critical logistics company so that you can ultimately choose whichever one you like best. Now, one of the directions, an idea that I was to try and communicate logistics, time, and also the letter S for centify in one single icon, which I'll be honest, I don't even know if it's possible to do all three in one single icon, but I'm going to give it a try. Who knows, right? We might get lucky. Anyway, with this next step, I want to look and do some discovery in regards to icons that can communicate logistics, time, and then obviously we have Letter rest. Let the rest, I think we've got to let the rest down. We know the letter S looks like. But how can we communicate visually Time and logistics. So let's have a look now. However, the real question is, how do we communicate time and logistics in the similst way possible, so we can form it inside the geometry of the letteres. Okay? I don't know if it's possible, but let's have a little look. So if we look at logistics, we can see a couple of things. We can see vans. We can see we've got an arrow or something. We've got an arrow here with a okay. We've got a box. We've got a box. That's one thing. Let's put the box inside. But we do have an arrow here as well, which is pretty promising. Okay, with her. What's this? Okay, with her. We've kind of got two so it's supposed to be a letter L, a human I. I'm not quite seeing that, to be honest, but finger framing. But this also kind of looks like a little bit like an arrow look. Look at that. That kind of looks a little bit like a letteress. It doesn't give us the time aspect, but that kind of looks like a letteress. This definitely looks like a letteres. Look at it. And logistics, you're essentially taking the package from one place to other. So you're distributing the package. It actually looks quite dynamic and fast as well. So I think it could be a pretty decent approach. Obviously, it doesn't look like the letteres, but it kind of does as well. I think arrows, so look at this, as well. So we can kind of see lots of different ways to do letters. But I'm just looking at the arrows. I keep coming back to this one for some reason. It seems I just looks so kind of like cause the letters is in the negative space as well. And what about time then? Because we need to set time in there as well. So Okay, so we're looking at this. So we've got clocks, clocks everywhere. We're like an alarm clock, which ultimately what we're looking for is we're looking to be able to fit the geometry of the clock, the S, and also the arrows for logistics in one single icon, which is, you know, near enough impossible. We've got like an hourglass. That's something else. Another way it's a little bit simpler, I guess. I mean, this kind of looks a little bit more simple, I guess, right? And workable. Okay, okay, okay. Now maybe we're getting somewhere. Okay. So at the moment, at least for this direction, again, this is just one direction out of the five or six that I'll probably do for this particular climb with the package that he secured, we've got kind of arrows for logistics. We've kind of got a couple of ideas of how the rest could be brought to life and I've actually got the same icon like three times there, I think. I don't think that the clock is going to actually work, but I think the hourglass might be a better solution in MoGrass to time, because from a geometry standpoint, the lines are not I also think this one won't work as well, because it's kind of like curved and everything else is quite sharp and straight. I think if it's going to work, it's going to be one of these, something like this, that's going to fit together. But fitting it together, that's the hard part. So I've got my worker out. Anyway, let's move on to the sketching phase together, and on that note, I'll see you in the next lesson. See you soon. 4. Sketching Your Logo Ideas: So now we understand the brief, and we've done the research, and we have some inspiration that we've captured from Pinterest and Google, for example. Now it's time to start sketching our logo ideas so we can use negative space in a creative way and create something truly memorable. Okay, so we're going to be sketching the icons for sendipi and now it's just a case of trying to pull together the ideas that we brought together in the research phase, right? Where we were trying to kind of figure out, okay, how can we get together logistics, S and time? Okay? And we kind of found that the hourglass was probably going to be the best option to try and kind of fit into things. But it's going to be a challenge to do this, to be honest. I do not know how we're going to get the arrows and the hourglass and S together. I've literally got no idea because none of these look like they can fit an hourglass in there. And let's see. Let's just see what happens. Okay. So with that said, let's look at the actual sketch pad, okay? I like to section off into phase one and phase two. With phase one, I'm literally just looking at getting my ideas down on paper. Let me just change my pencil actually. And then let's look at phase two. And then phase two, what's going to happen is we'll essentially look to take the best ideas that we have in phase one and move it into the refinement stage, right? Where we'll tidy it up a little bit before going into Illustrator and tidying up digitally. So with phase one, we're not trying to create art or sketch the perfect masterpiece. We're just trying to get our ideas down on paper, okay? So with this, we have arrows, right? So what's the S here? So, this has two arrows, and it has kind of S, but it doesn't really look like an S, really. This looks like an S. Could we kind of get It's not really gonna work. Let's try and get, like, the arrows here. Um okay. So arrows, an arrow here, an arrow here. Okay. Then maybe another arrow here. I can already tell this is not gonna look great, to be honest. Okay, we've got that. We've got that. And what if we did I mean, this is kind of like an hourglass, right? That's kind of like Ah, what about that? What about that? What about that? Let me see. Let me see. Let me see if we can get this hourglass together in this one, 'cause this actually looks like it could potentially work. But then we need to basically try and get it to a point where it looks like a still. Okay, so this looks absolutely terrible, by the way, but just sketching ideas down at the moment, but I like how we have managed to get this in here. So maybe what we could do is potentially if we wanted to, we could I don't know, put this here, put this here, and then just take this off and take this off. That's potential. So we kind of have the S. We have the S here, but we also have the hourglass. But then we've kind of lost the arrows, right? We've lost the arrows. We've lost the arrows, so it's kind of like a square now with an hourglass in the middle, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Okay, so let's go back to the drawing boat. So um, we've got arrows again. Okay, obviously, we need this here. Okay. And then maybe this again, here. And then maybe this again here. There's there's your S, basically. Kind of got the q on. And then our glass would go like this maybe. Is this going to work better? Okay, we've kind of got the same thing again, right? Okay, okay, okay. That's, um, I mean, at this point, I'm kind of looking at I'm kind of looking at this. But there's no hourglass there. So how can we I mean, an hourglass is essentially just two triangles on top of each other in the simplest form possible, right? So these just look like squares, which don't make any sense. It doesn't look like an SO or kind of arrows at all. How can we kind of pull this together where it sort of looks more like an S? I mean, what does an S actually look like? An S is like that, so it's straight on this side, but it's, like, curved here and here. So maybe we need to curve in a little bit on certain edges or certain sides. Let's try that. Let's try that here. So we've got this, here look. We have another block here, just to try and create the shape of it and then this here. Okay, so we've got this, and let's actually make these a little bit longer and flatter. Okay. That's me it is a little bit longer and flatter, just so we've got something to work with. Okay. So if we're looking at the S shape, we've got curves here and here, so we need to curve this and curve this here. Okay, so then let's get rid of that. This now, we can keep this straight, I think, because in an S, obviously, it would be straight on either side, okay? So we can keep those straight. That's fine. I think, at least in the meantime. But then how would we do that and that? Could we do something like this? I mean, that definitely looks like an S, but it also doesn't look like an arrow anymore, or it doesn't look like an arrow to begin with. So what about if we did I mean, if we put those I mean, what if we put the hourglass in the center here. But it just looks like an hourglass in the middle of an S, right? Ah, okay. I'm just trying to see how everything could kind of connect together, and I guess that could kind of connect to that. Wait a second. What if? So we've got Okay, so we need arrows. We need arrows. We need an S, and we need an hourglass. We've got the S. We've got the hourglass. Now we just need to refine this to make this look more like an actual like an arrow. So we need to make two arrows. So we need the two arrows. We need the hourglass, and we need the S together. Okay, let's have a little look at how we can make this work. Okay, let's move this to the refinement stage, and let's see in phase two, if we can make this work a little bit better. So let's again take the sketch of the overall shape. And we'll structure that into three. And again, with phase two, we're not trying to, you know, create an absolute masterpiece. That's going to happen or at least hopefully happen when we get to the digital stage. But for now, I just want to get things looking and feeling pretty good. Okay. I'm gonna put the hourglass in first. I feel like that's going to dictate where everything else goes. I'm going to just stretch a little bit more then there. Okay, so in order for this to work, we need to create arrows in two different places. Here, and here. So let's start by doing that here. So that's the start of the arrow here, okay? And then obviously the arrow needs to come along here. So then let's do maybe this or something. But that's gonna look like a z, I think. Is it? Let's see. Okay. And then all we need to do is we need to develop, like this. We can't do this as we can't do it as like this because then it's gonna look like a zed. So we need to have the curve there. We need to have some sort of curve there. We're going to curve this over here. And we're going to curve this down here, which then gives us this kind of as well, because this is a time critical logistics company, we're essentially showcasing that kind of dynamic. Oh, my God, that actually looks pretty good. Look at that. That actually looks like it looks fast, like it looks dynamic. Oh, my God. That's like super, super good. I love how this is looking at the moment. Lord how great this looks. This actually looks very, very promising. Now, I'm not sure if I'm going to go for a more straight edge. Here. Or whether I'm going to go for the kind of the curved approach, or whether I'm going to go for kind of the more cutting edge approach. I'm not sure yet. I do not actually know, but what I do know is this is ready for the digital stage. Okay, so I'm actually really happy with how this centerfi logo is coming together. I love the fact that we've managed to use negative space. I think it's creative. I think it's unique and distinctive. I cannot wait for the next phase while we can start to digitize things and really make things super polished and then start adding color and typography and all that good stuff. And on that note, I will see you in the next phase of the course. 5. Digitising & Perfecting Your Design on Adobe Illustrator: So we finally got the design for centify and we're ready to put it inside Illustrator to just make it look super clean and professional. And so with that said, let's dive an Illustrator. Okay, so we have our idea for the centifi logo. How do we digitize it? How do we start to make it look and feel nice, right? Now, this is actually a pretty simple icon to digitize, right? We've got the idea. We understand what we want to do. We're not sure if we want to cut it off here or if we want to actually add the full kind of S because we don't look like a Z. But let's start by literally just creating, I think, maybe just using a four box might actually be best. Let's see. Let's see what happens. Okay. So we've got the four box. And then actually, let's just get a full square just so we know it's perfect. Then let's just chop this down into three sections. By the way, I'm not the best on Illustrator from a shortcuts perspective. There's probably better people out there who do it far quicker. But you don't really need to have an incredible amount of shortcuts to make money as a brand designer. Trust me, I know from first hand experience. So we've got this, then I'm just going to center everything so everything's good. There we go. Okay. So we have everything now pretty much what we did actually before I screwed everything up. So we've got everything now. We essentially have three boxes that are perfectly stacked on top of each other to ultimately help us to make this a little bit cleaner and a little bit more professional. So the first step is going to be to create the time in the middle, right? So let's just copy paste that. We've got this, which is good. Then we need to create these lines. Let's get this pen tool and let's just get the angle first of where we need to be. Then let's just see if we can put that. Can we put that literally like that? Corner to corner. Just copy and paste that. Yeah, we probably do that, right? That makes a ton of sense. Okay. Let's do this. Let's pull this all the way over. Okay? So I'm just trying to make sense of things now. We're just literally trying to structure out everything so that we can then, let me just see of this because this is going to probably need to be used again in future, maybe. Let's put this down here. Okay. Then what we can do here is we can just take the divide tool and divide it, then we can start editing things and taking things away. I say, for example, we're going to be using the approach that I mentioned before, and we can use this. We can use that. We can take this away, we can take that away. So that's already started to look pretty decent, right? Okay? And then we need to do this little curve section up here. So let's do this. Let's do this, and then let's For some reason it's hot letting me do that. That's probably because there's two sections, there we go. That's why. Okay, so we're going to take this away. Now it should let me do it, hopefully. Let me go. Okay, so we got that. I'm gonna get rid of that box behind. Well, there's plenty of boxes behind. See, I told you I wasn't the best on Illustrator. Okay. So there's going to be tons of boxes behind each of these boxes. So we just need to get rid of those just so it's nice and clean so we don't have to worry about it later. Okay? It seemed like that one was okay, actually. There we go. So we should be good at going now, to be honest. Perfect. And if there's anything else that comes up, we'll figure it out as we go along. Okay? Now, this one's going to be the same. There's probably going to be another little there we go. We found it. So get rid of that. And that's why it wasn't letting us pull this in, okay? Now, let's do the magic and pull these inside. There we go. Okay, so that looks decent. And then, basically we have another one here, I think, where we basically cut it here and here. So if we cut this here and here, okay, maybe we shouldn't do that first. Maybe we should do that afterwards. Okay, I get. I got you. Okay, so let's do this to this again, just so we've got that angle and then let's get this here. And all I'm going to do is create this angle and put it here between these boxes. We've got that. We're putting it there. That's going to cut at the exact angle that I wanted at. I just replicate that and put it here. There we go. Now we've got it perfect. And all I need to cut is just this box here look. I need to cut this box with this. That's all I need to do. I want to take this. I want to ungroup everything so I can just cut in piece, divide. Life's good. So long. Okay. Now you can see here the proportions are way off. We'll figure that out afterwards. That's not a big deal. Okay. We've got this. There we go. That looks good. Perfect. Okay. Now we are talking, right? Now we're talking. So now we have this section. Which is a certain thickness, and this is a much higher thickness here. We can see here how the proportions here look good, but the proportions here and here need to be the same, how are we going to do that? Well, first, what I want to do is I want to save this because if I don't save it, I know for a fine fact, I'm going to regret it later. I'm going to put this down here. Perfect. Now, this has a certain thickness. I'm going to solidify these and use this tool here to unite everything. Then I'm going to just get this to a point where I have the actual thickness here. Then I'm going to create. Again, I am not the best on Illustrator. But what I can do is I can take, take this and not do that. I can basically create a ruler to give me the perfect amount of height as those other lines as well. If you see here, There we go. So this is basically if I drop these down to this height, it basically means that everything's going to be the same size, which is exactly what we want. There we go. So this is just our little guide, okay? Now, how we can do this? We can use a divide tool if we want. There's plenty of ways that we can do it. We could do it manually if we really wanted to, which, you know, we can do it tons of different ways. But the reality is, it doesn't really matter that much. Because, you can pull this down like this, you would probably do all three, right? Together. And then you would pull this down. I mean, it's probably not gonna work, to be honest. Yeah. Actually, let's do it the other way. See? You know, I ain't perfect. I'm just trying to work straight about on a daily basis like anyone else. There we go. That's better. Right? There we go. So we've sorted that now. That's sorted. We'll do the same here. Okay. Then we go. Perfect. So now we're at a stage now where everything's in proportion. Everything looks good, okay? The next step is to add these curves and that should finish things off nicely. So we're going to add this. We're going to unite these together if we can. Okay, so for some reason, that's been a little bit of a pain. I think it's because there's the gap between these. That's why. Okay. So they're not actually united. That's why they are that's why it's been a little bit funny. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay? So what I'm going to do, Okay. Is I'm going to add the curves here first because then it's going to show me how much I actually need to change. Okay. So I'm going to add them up to here because then the rest of the curves are going to come from here. That's basically where it's going to come from. It's going to come from these two being connected. These two here, it actually curves into that dip, which is going in there. Okay. So what's the easiest way to do that? You're asking me. Okay. Let's have a little look at this. On what the situation is. I think there's some sort of gap here. That's why I think. So once I've connected that together, then I might need to do a little bit of do a little bit of tender and care for this. It's going to be that type of project. Got you. Got you, got you. Got you. We understand what we're doing now, so we don't actually need this anymore. I want to just put this to the side. What we want to do is we want to increase the height of this. So we've got a little bit more to play with. Then we can create a little bit more leverage. We want to get rid of this if we can. Then we're going to take this and we're going to potentially get rid of this as well because we don't actually need it. Does that change much or not? All right, but definitely changes that. Okay. Definitely changes that. There we go. So we are literally just tidying up these little corners just to make them super, super sharp. You can see here how even this one has these little tiny corners that just like these little tiny imperfections. If you come out outside, you literally cannot even realize that they're there. But because of how Illustrator works and it isn't pixel based, it's shape based, you can't get away from it. So this section here is basically the difference between it being perfect and imperfect. Okay, there we go. So now it's perfect. Now it's perfect from a shape standpoint. There we go. Now it's perfect. I'm not sure if it'll allow us to there we go. Now it's allowed us to do it. There we go. Awesome. Now you can see how they need to be slightly different. There we go. So now what we need to do is just essentially get this. I mean, we could do the exact same thing on the other side, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. We can just literally take this exact same section, put it here. Make sure it's exactly on top. Yeah We can just take it off. There we go. Now we have this mark, which again, we have the arrows, we have the time in the center and we have the S and everything's there. If we did want to create it with the S like this. We can do that. We just need to drag this along a little bit. Not difficult. We could even drag it all the way to the edge if we wanted to. But I think we can all agree that this just looks 1 million times more dynamic and just better overall. Then all we would do is just basically tidy it up, decide how we want it to look, and then essentially add it to a word mark, add it to mockups and showcase to the client, and then would be good to go. So, yeah, I hope you enjoyed this lesson. I hope you took something away from it to enable you to use negative space in your own way when you're creating logos. But yeah, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and I'll see you in the next lesson. See you. 6. It's Project Time!: Teaching brand designers and working with them to improve their skills and help them build more profitable businesses is by far the thing that I'm most passionate about. And just seeing the designer become more confident and more capable and also see them have more success with their design business, it brings me so much fulfillment, and I'm so grateful to be in a position where I can help brand designers on a personal basis. Pretty much every single day. Now, if you are an ambitious brand designer and you really want to accelerate your learning and become the best brand designer you can be, I love to invite you into our community, the brand design abroad community, to help you to get to where you want to be as a brand designer and building your brand design business. I really do put a lot of effort into making the content look great and also trying to be as informative and as helpful as possible to help support brand designers to ultimately be the best version of themselves. I'd love you to share one of your logos that you've designed that you're super proud of as a project this course. That way I can give you some personalized feedback to really help to accelerate your learning and just add a little bit more value after you've taken the course. Anyway, I just want to really say that I'm super grateful for you spending the time, watching this course, and yeah, hopefully we'll connect again sometime in the future. Anyway, I'll see you very soon. Take.