Pictorial Logo Design: Crafting Recognizable Brand Symbols

1. What is a Pictorial logo?: Hey, welcome to this mini course on Pictorial Logo Design. In this course, I'm going to be taking an exclusive module from my brand designer Pro program to help the community of Skillshare to understand the world of pictorial logo design, just that little bit better so that you as a brand designer can create better logos for your clients. I'm actually being hired through my brand agency Clementine House to design this logo for a real life business. So I Kanaway the div in with you. Let's get started. 2. Amazing Pictorial Logo Examples: Okay, so let's look at some great examples of pictorial logo. So you can understand what actually makes an incredible pictorial logo. So the three logos that I think are the best representations of pictorial logos are Apple, Twitter, and Target. Now, one thing all of these logos have in common is not only pictorial logos, but they also use the golden ratio to make them look more aesthetically appealing. You can see this predominantly in the Twitter logo and the Apple logo. You can see both designs are using the golden ratio method to make the designs better in proportion and also more aesthetically appealing to look at. With the Apple logo, for example, you can see how they have taken a fairly common object being an apple and made it more distinctive by taking a bite out of the right side of the apple. Now, there are lots of little stories about why that bite was taken out of the apple, but most predominantly, you can probably imagine that it was to make the icon more distinctive, because if they just did a symmetrical icon, which didn't really have anything unique or distinctive about it, icon would ultimately be more forgettable and also less unique. And if an icon is less unique and it just looks like anything that you could find on like a stock imagery website, then it's less likely to be able to be trademarked, which is obviously going to be a massive problem for a company like Apple, who obviously sells products everywhere across the world. Now, for Twitter, you can kind of see the bird looks quite positive, right? It kind of looks free. So this is subconsciously communicating to the user or to anyone looking at the logo that this app is going to provide a free way to communicate with other people, right? Now, obviously, that's a little bit ironic because of what happened when Alon Mus took over and stuff, but you get the idea. Intentions in the beginning were good from the brand designer. Now, the target logo is probably one of the simplest logos out there, but it's also one of the most powerful because it does exactly what it needs to do, and it does it in a way which is memorable, not really unique, but it's very, very focused on communicating the brand's messaging, which is ultimately focus, accuracy, and also reliability. Now, the target logo, I think we can all agree, is not difficult to do. It's not the technical aspect of logo design. Which designers usually struggle with. It's actually the thought process of simplifying things and creating something which is super memorable, but also related to the brand's messaging and which can be used pretty much anywhere on any given environment. That's the main struggle that brand designers face. So anyway, those are a couple of examples of pictorial logos. What I want to do now is I want to actually move into the phase of designing a pictorial logo with you. So on that note, I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Brief & Research: First step designing an incredible pictorial logo is the discovery phase and the brief, ultimately. Okay? So what we're going to do is we are ultimately wanting to understand what the client is trying to achieve with their brand identity and with their logo, what they want to communicate, and then we're going to discover different ways that we can do that. Okay? Now, for this particular mini course, I am going to be designing a logo for a real client called Ginger. Now, the founder of Ginger has said that she wants the logo to be quite minimal, o? She wants it to tell a story. She would also like it to include some form of negative space, if possible, and she would also like it to be kind of balanced so not too masculine, but also not too feminine. Okay. Just to let you know a little bit about what ginger is and why it exists, ginger is a holistic app, which ultimately helps to harmonize Eastern medicine with Western medicine. So the best practices from both because Eastern medicine is more kind of herbal and using very natural ingredients, whereas Western medicine is more about prescriptions and pills and stuff like that. So with that said, I wanted to ultimately confirm some messaging with the founder of Ginger. And one of the ideas that I came up with and ultimately what I would do is when I was talking to a cliens I would ultimately talk to them about what they wanted the actual logo to communicate. One of the things that the founder of Gina said is, she would love to see something where Eastern medicine and Western medicine was harmonized to come together and to create one single mark, okay? Which is perfect, right? It sounds like a challenge, so I am well up for it. Now, the first place that I would start is I would ultimately start to look at what are the icons for Eastern and Western medicine. Okay? So let's start, okay? So Eastern medicine. I always start on pin tress, but then it obviously goes off track sometimes. Okay, so we're getting kind of some leaves, we're getting some pills, those vitamins, okay. Vitamins. We're getting, to be honest, Oh, we're getting some kind of, like, dried herbs and stuff. Okay, awesome. Okay, we're going to move on to there's ginger, okay? Perfect. We're also going to check out this as well. Because, to be honest with you, Google images is usually a little bit better. Okay, so we've got this. We've got kind of these like a pestle and mortar with some kind of dried herbs and beans and stuff. We've got leaves again. Okay, so we're kind of let me put icon in there. Okay, so we're getting a pestle and mortar. Got you. Okay. And I'm just going to pop them in this little folder here just to save for later on in the process, which you'll see what happens afterwards. Okay, so what I'm saying here, there's leaves popping up left right and center. There's a pestilu mortar, but I feel like a pestilmta is a little bit too complicated. If we do a pestilumta, the geometry of a pestilmta it's very distinctive and you can definitely see what it is. But if you look at it, it doesn't leave any room or any space to fit anything focused on Western medicine in there, it doesn't have that much flexibility, I don't think. Whereas a leaf, a leaf is a little bit different. A leaf has that flexibility because the shape can be slightly different, and I think we can do something with it. Okay, awesome. I've got enough stuff to understand how to symbolize Eastern medicine. Perfect. We're going to use the leaves. Perfect. Okay, so now let's look at Western medicine and see how we can communicate Western medicine. So we've literally just got pills and this syringe needle slash thing, kind like a Zen thing, but to be honest with you, there's the circle pill and this kind of long rectangle pill. Or ovo pill, which is very much the prominent shape that I'm seeing when I'm looking at this. Now, this is interesting. Okay, I've just spotted this. Now, this icon actually looks pretty interesting. Now, it's terrible quality, and it's very pixelate at the moment. But what if we took this icon and we tried to kind of change it so that here was a leaf. And on the other side, there was a leaf, as well. That actually would not be a bad idea. That's just kind of inspired me to try that. This sometimes happens a lot faster. Then other times, sometimes it takes a little bit of time to really figure things out, but I think we could be on something. And with a client, ultimately, what I would do is I would have depending on the package, I would have maybe four different journeys that I want to go on to try and explore. So this is one trying to harmonize Western and Eastern medicine together in one single icon. But I think this could work. I think we've got Eastern medicine, which is the leaf. We've also got Western medicine, which is the pill. Put them together into one icon is ultimately harmonizing them. I wonder what that's going to look like. So we've did the research. We understand what we're going to do for this particular direction. The next step is to get sketching and I cannot wait to do that. I will 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 pictorgal logo. Okay, so we've already got our icons ready, and we've kind of realized that there are two things that symbolize Eastern and Western medicine for ginger, okay? We've got the pills for the Western medicine side. Then we've got kind of leafs and kind of pestilu mortar. But the pestil mortar, the geometry of it is going to be very difficult to fit inside. A pill, right? It's not really going to work very well, but a leaf, I think it's got more potential. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to structure out my sketch pad into two phases, okay? Phase one and phase two. And usually what I do is I would develop like 20 different variations of the idea in phase one so that I can then refine the ones that I like in phase two, okay? That's kind of how I like to work. So We've got a pill. Let's just get a pill drawn. And at this point, as well, I'm not trying to, you know, reinvent the wheel. I'm not trying to, you know, do a piece of art here. I'm literally just trying to get my ideas down on paper to see what works and what doesn't work. So let's just look at this here. Then let's just break this down into two, wow. Like this little curl here, actually. That's a nice little that looks like a good leaf. Okay, let's look at this. Let's look at that. I like how this is, like, curling around. I like that. Okay. That looks pretty nice. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. This looks that's not bad, actually, for a first try, right? That's not actually bad for a first shot at this. Okay, cool. Alright, let's try another one. Let's Let's Let's do it sideways like this. Just try a little pill. This actually looks more like a dog poop, to be honest. What am I even thinking about. Okay. But if we get the pill, and we just think this off, and then how else could we do this? Um, we can make it a little bit more kind of, like, structured, I guess, and just make it a little bit more 'cause this is more like here. I wonder if we can make it a little bit less I don't know, dramatic, make it a little bit more predictable and just see because then it would make the leaf a little bit more kind of, like, rounded instead of long. I wonder if that looks better or not. So it actually looks pretty cool, to be honest, but I'm not sure if it's better or not, but I kind of like the elegance of this because it kind of suggests, like, a seamless experience within the app. But I don't like how these are kind of, like, cutting over the actual pill shape. It kind of comes outside, and I don't like that very much. But I like how these are kind of structured. And it kind of looks a lot more rounded. Okay. And what about putting something in the middle, as well? Like I don't know, maybe like a leaf or something? Mmm. Okay. What about doing it like this? Is that going to this is kind of spoiling it a little bit, right? I think, maybe. Maybe? Yeah. Yeah, I think this is maybe spoiling it a little bit. Okay. Okay. We're getting there, though. We're getting there. I think we're getting somewhere. Okay, let's just take a little rain check. I like how this one looks a little bit more elegant, but I also like how this one looks a little bit more round. So let's kind of take the roundness of this and let's take the elegance of this, but without these little bits popping out, I also want to take a sip of coffee because coffees very important. Oh, yeah. That's what I'm talking about, baby. Okay. I also don't like these little details. I think we can put a little bit of detail in that, but not too much. So let's try again. I also don't know if I'm loving the up or down approach or that approach. So maybe we need to kind of put it like sideways or something. Okay. Let's try it like this. And then let's do it like this. Let's just get the pill shape right first. That's the most important thing. Let's try and make this one not look like dog poop. Perfect. Okay, we've got this. Okay, so let's try and create something in the middle. So we don't want to too, like, extravagant and sort of elegant, but we don't want it too round either. So here we go. And then let's merge things off like this. And then I think what I'm going to try and do is basically look at creating a little stem in the middle. I think that's probably going to be the best way to do it because I don't want to be, like, too detailed with it because then it's going to be very scalable, and that's going to be a huge problem. If we just curve it around here and then that kind of gives us the shape of that and then if we put it around here like this, we're kind of creating a little frame around it, which I kind of like because then the leaves are in the negative space and they're not actually just kind of floating in mid air. So I kind of like that. But then if we do put a little stem in there, maybe that's going to make things look a little bit better. I think slowly but surely, we are getting somewhere. I do like how we've got a little frame around it now, which gives a little bit more structure. I like how we kind of have the pill, but I think these stems need to be a little bit longer, actually. I don't think it looks like a leaf, to be honest. Um, do we want to do, like, stems? I don't like how much those kind of thing, but maybe little ones like this. This is starting to look better. Okay. There we go. That's starting to look a lot better. Okay. I like that. I like that. I like that. I like that. Okay. Mm. I'm just kind of looking at it. And I'm not 100% sure how I feel. Just gonna sharp my pencil while I'm I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the pill and how it currently looks, 'cause it kind of just looks like a little bit all over the place. It's got ups, downs, blah, blah, blah. Um, right here. But what if If we switch that. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay, check this out. I can't believe I've just caught this on camera. So we've currently got the logo going up and down. We've got a pill, we've got leafs, right? Watch what happens when I do this. We now have the pill and the leaves going east and west Eastern and Western medicine. All my life. Oh, my God. Okay. So how would I do that? It needs to be it needs to be like this. So from top to bottom, right? Right? No. Right. Okay. Let me just try this. Okay, so we need to do it like this. I cannot believe that this is actually happening on camera. I cannot believe it. Okay. Is this recording? It's definitely recording, right? Yeah. Okay. Right. Let's do this. And I'm gonna just keep the same, like, frame and stuff. Okay. And then I'm gonna, obviously be able to tie this up in Illustrator. But do we do, like, a three D version? No. Okay, let's keep it simple. Okay, so we've got this here, we've got this here. We can, like, tweak this and move it a little bit, but the fact that it literally has, like, east and west I'm so flipping excited to get this down on paper just so I have it saved. And again, this is just, like, really, really rough. I'm just getting it down. For phase two, once I have the idea that I really like or a couple of ideas that I like, I'll just basically develop it and get it in place so that I know exactly what I need to do illustrator. Okay, perfect. And then it's just literally a case of just refining things a little bit, getting that stem looking good. So this stem definitely doesn't look great right now. But again, I'm not trying to change the world with this logo just yet. I'm just trying to get something down which looks half decent. And at least just confirms the idea that I'm trying to communicate. Okay. Listen, this isn't perfect, but it's definitely going in the right direction. I love how we've got the leaves. We've got the pill in side. I also love how we've got, like, a nice frame, so it actually has some structure and it's not just kind of floating around like this. I actually like the structure of this one a lot better, so I'll take these both in Illustrator and kind of use them both, but I do like this, how we've got one leaf pointing east and one leaf pointing west. This is one of those little happy accidents which sometimes happens with logo design, which I absolutely love to the world and Black. So to the world and back to the Earth and back. Till the moon and back. Okay, we got there in the end. Okay, so I'm actually really happy with how this logo has came together for ginger. I love the fact that we've managed to harmonize both Eastern and Western medicine, which was the main thing in the brief that the client wanted. I also love how clean it is. I love how professional it looks. I love the fact that it kind of looks like an app icon already, which is super great. I just can't wait to get this design in Illustrator, so we can start tidying things up and making things super professional. And so on that note, I will see you in the next lesson where we get this design, put it inside Illustrator, and make things look super also adding color, adding a word mark, and all that good stuff. I'll see you in the next lesson. See you. 5. Digitising & Perfecting Your Design on Adobe Illustrator: Finally time to take our design for ginger and put it inside Illustrator. So we can really start tightening things up and just making things look super clean and professional. And so with that said, let's dive in Illustrator. Okay, so now we have our sketch inside Illustrator. It's now time to start refining things. Now, I actually prefer, I think, this one here. I think this one, it looks good, but I think the shape of this one is going to be a little bit easier to work with. So I'm going to just take that away. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make it easier for myself and make this here rectangle. I can just get the pill shape and then we can go from there. Let's just make this nice and thick. Maybe I don't know, maybe 60 or something, Something like that. Yeah, 60. Okay. And then we're just going to make it into a pill shape. Now we go. There is our pill need a little bit thicker actually, I probably want it to be about 80 roughly. That works. And then I'm just going to throw this sideways. We've got that has our pill shape. Now it's just a case of getting the leaves in there. Making it look like a pill with two leaves in it. So let's just change the color very quickly. And then how can we do this? So one way that we can do it is really simply, if we look at it here, we've got the pill share, but then we also have this line in between it. We literally just take this line, put it in the center, and then just separate because you basically have the two leaf shapes there already. So all you would need to do is very slightly change the width of it. So let's just say this now because we've got a little milestone that we've just made. Okay, so that's perfectly in the middle. Once we have that outline, let's just delete that little line there. Let's create a division here so that we don't have anything that we don't need. And then we can basically get everything and just create that. That definitely didn't work. Okay. Let's just select these that instead. I get that. Now we have basically our leaf shapes, but we don't have them in a way which they look good, basically. We need to do a little bit more refining. The way that I thought would have been good would be to just basically get this and then just basically remove that, but it doesn't look good at all. What we probably need to do is to create another anchor point here, remove this anchor point here. And then it should allow us to do it a little bit more. There we go. So that's a little bit better now. Does it look good still? It doesn't look great, does it? Let's try it again. Let's get another anchor point in there. Another anchor point. Here here and here. Then it doesn't matter if that looks square because we're going to curve it now anyway. That looks a little bit better. It's still not perfect. But we can now tweak it a little bit, that's why I get you, get. Let's get this off. There we go. Now we've got that. We can then take this and even things out a little bit manually, which is going to be the best approach, I think. You see here, it's a little bit square. You just give me a little bit more width there. Probably pull this out slightly. Again, I'm just literally playing around with this in real time, so feel free to watch on double the pace. But we basically have that now. If we look at that, that's kind of what we wanted, apart from the fact that I think I wanted some kind of curve inside here. So what I'm going to do is just to kind of save the time is I'm going to not do that. Why do I keep doing that? I'm going to take this section here. I'm going to take this here. I'm going to flip this around. Then that will give me two sections together. We have that curve now. That curve is set. Now the thing that's annoying me is this little part here. This is the bit that's annoying me a little bit because what we want is we want to create a curve here. What we can do is we can maybe do it with this anchor point and just curve it like this and then pull it out here. That's maybe a way to do it. We are literally pulling this to the end of time, apparently. Don't mind me. We've got this. Now we've got that little curve. But that wouldn't actually help with that, would it? Hm. Okay. In check. This is basically what, when you're actually developing logos for real, you're going to run into things like this as well. You're going to run into little issues like this. Ah, I know how to fix it. Got you. Okay. Got you, got you got, go, gotcha. The reason that it's not working is I'm trying to fix it here. It's actually here. So you can see the amount of space here. I need to pull this corner into here. And then I need to adjust this part. Ah, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Now I know. Now I know. There we go. Now it looks a lot more balanced. Can you see that? Okay. So now the width is about the same as everywhere else, and you could obviously get a little rectangle in there and check it out yourself, real. But what you can do now is you can basically create like a Okay here, maybe. I actually works really well, to be honest. Okay. So now we kind of have that leaf shape, and now all we would need is just to basically get the leaf elements in there, and we can just draw those in to be completely brutally honest. We don't need to go crazy with it. We just need to make sure it actually looks half decent. So that's tie these into here. And again, I wanted to make this as organic as possible instead of making it super polished and sort of not very raw. I want to show you, like, the fact that I'm figuring things out in real time with you instead of, you know, kind of manufacturing it so that I know exactly what's going to happen. And then it basically makes you think that logo design is, you know, just all smooth sailing all the time, which just is not the case. Yes, you know, some people are better than others, and, obviously, you know, with practice, you can become faster or better or whatever. But at the end of the day, you know, everyone's just figuring it out, and some ideas take longer than others to create, to, you know, develop. Okay. So we've kind of got that. Do we want to put those little vines on there as well? I can maybe keep the same do I actually want to do that or not? I mean, I could I could do it. I think I want to make them a little bit thicker than that, though, if I am going to do it. I don't like how thin those are. But as I was saying, it's not a case of everything just being absolutely perfect first time. When you design logos, it's about figuring things out as you go along and developing your skill set. And as I've said before in previous lessons in previous videos, especially in brand design a Pro, you do not have to be an absolute wizard at Illustrator to develop great logos. You just don't can be pretty average at Illustrator, and as long as you know, a few core tools, then you're golden. You don't really need to, you know, be an absolute expert. So if you limit yourself and think, okay, you're not good enough to work with this client or blah blah blah, blah. Like, I am not the best person on Illustrator at all by any stretch of the imagination. I've worked with some huge clients, clients you know, turning like hundreds of millions a year, and, you know, I don't let my lack of illustrated expertise stop me from doing that. And I mean, obviously, you know, this could be refined 100%. This is definitely not, you know, perfect. But it just gives you an idea on a grant of the process and also how I would approach things going forward. So I think might be a good thing to do is if I just take a little bit of time to actually refine this, and then I've got it to a certain point where, you know, I'm not disgusted in the effort. But if I take a couple of hours to basically refine things and get things in place, then I think I could make this a hell of a lot better. So that's basically where I am now. I'm currently at this point. Well, wait that. I'm currently at this point. This is what I currently have and through the magic of time travel, I'll see you in a little bit. Okay, so we have a new more refined version, which I'll bring down for you now. Which is basically the exact same approach. The only difference is I adjusted the stem on the leaf a little bit. I made a little bit of curvature here just to kind of help to kind of harmonize things a little bit better. I curve the corners here, and here I made this a little bit bigger so that now it looks a lot better. I also made the overall kind of outside a little bit thicker as well, so you can see the difference between the two now. And, you know, ultimately, you can see how valuable it can be to take the time to just refine things. You can see the difference between this one and this one, and the difference here is literally just time, taking the time to refine things, make things better, and that is ultimately, from a client's standpoint, going to be super valuable because they are going to basically see that you are putting in the time to refine things and not have them, you know, basically tell you how to do your job. I also put little curves as well. On the edges here just to make it look a little bit less scary. Be yeah beforehand, they were, you know, being very pointy and very kind of yeah sharp. I didn't want that. I wanted to make it a little bit more approachable, so that's why I did that, and I punned it here as well. So yeah, overall, really, really happy with the result for this particular lesson. So yeah, hopefully you took something away from that, hopefully you'll learn something. Hopefully you can take something away from my process to implement into your own. And yeah, hopefully I'll see you again in the future lesson. I'll see you soon. 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.