Turbocharge Your Logo Designs: Boost Your Productivity in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: Designers. I can't draw there. I've said it and I'm proud to say it because there's a stigma that seems to follow designers around like a bad smell, that in order to be a great logo designer, you need to be good at sketching. Well, I am proof that you do not. My name is James Barnard. I am a logo designer and a seasoned freelancer with around 15 years experience in the industry of graphic design. I have worked with companies all over the globe designing logos for motorcycle clubs, restaurants, sports bars, engineers, tech firms, musicians and even TV personalities. And I made every one of these logos without the need for artistic skills with a pen and paper by creating a workflow that allows me to work lightning fast in Adobe Illustrator. During my career, I have worked for in house design teams at agencies, and as a freelancer for my own clients. And at every single one of these jobs, I made a name for myself as a designer that works quickly. I've been freelancing for more than eight years and I now run my own logo design offering from my home studio on the Gold Coast, Australia. I also teach everything I know over on my social channels to something like half a million followers. Plus I'm an Adobe certified Professional, so rest assured. But I've been there, done that, and you can put your trust in me. In this course, I'll show you my secrets to working in Illustrator at breakneck speed. To help you test and ultimately refine your designs in a vector format. You'll discover how to set up your hardware, customize your work spaces and keyboard shortcuts, plus additional software and hardware tricks that will have you flying around Adobe Illustrator and working iteratively inside the program. Some of the techniques in this course are for beginners, but ideally you should have a basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator. I'll cover some of the fundamental tools you need to work up logos. But I'd class this course as beginner to intermediate. The workflow and techniques in this course are designed to help you question your current workflow. And to help you optimize your output and increase your efficiency. With these tips, you'll be able to take simple line drawings, terrible sketches, and work them up in vector in no time to either rule out that concept or refine it to perfection. And with these skills, you'll hopefully be able to get more clients through the door. At the end of the course, you can follow along behind the scenes as I design an actual client logo from start to finish. So what are you waiting for? Come and have a sneaky peek at my set up, and you'll be racing around Adobe Illustrator in no time. 2. Class Orientation: Okay, let's talk about what you're going to get out of this course. If you've made it this far, firstly, thank you so much for being here. Your support means the world to me, and I'm so glad you've put your trust in me to help you become more efficient as a designer. And if you find that you're struggling at all, at any point, or you're not quite getting what you expected, just drop me an email and we'll get you squared away. For this course, you'll need your trusty Mac or PC and the latest copy of Adobe Illustrator CC. And in this course, I'm actually running version 28.0, but we're not covering anything too advanced inside of the software or any of the very latest features. We're mainly going to be focusing on your setup and workflow so that we can go faster. So I'll be talking a little bit about your hardware, your software preferences, your shortcuts and actions, and a little on templates. At the end, I'll give you some quick fire bonus tips before wrapping it all up with a live example of me taking a crappy sketch to a final logo so that you can see all of these tricks in action. I'd encourage you to have your copy of Illustrator open as you watch because this is going to go fast, so be ready to pause so that you can dive into your software as we go along and you can make any tweaks that you think might help you. You're going to see my setup and workflow. This is something I've refined over the course of nearly 15 years, but some of it might not be for you. Be sure to watch carefully and learn, but use only what is appropriate for you and take only what you need from this to help you improve your efficiency. These tips aren't gospel and they might not suit everyone, so pick and choose what you need as we go through. What is important is that we apply these tips and techniques as soon as possible so you can get used to your new setup and start reaping the rewards of a faster workflow. So as a class project, you will design your own logo. You can either follow along my design process during the live session at the end, or use my prompts or your own to come up with your own logo design. Hopefully by the end of this program you'll leave with a super slick setup and the foundations for a lightning fast workflow that will have you churning out more designs than you know what to do with. All right, we're ready to begin. But before we fire up Illustrator, let's talk a little about my logo design process and how I like to work with clients. 3. My Logo Designer Process: At the end of this course, I'm going to do a full run through of work in a crappy sketch, into a full vector including all variations and mock ups for a client presentation. Now, one of my clients has very kindly given me permission to use their logo project as a case study for this course. So you're going to see an actual example of how I like to work with clients and how I got to the final product. Lucky you. In the summer of 2023, I was approached by a childcare facility in the UK called Billy Bears Nursery. This facility needed a rebrand as it was underdue management, the old brand used this pretty generic bear logo. And the team, we're looking for something more modern yet playful. Now, there are a few main parts to my discovery process with clients, and there's far too much to go to inside this course. But here's an overview of the information that I try and get from a client before I start a logo job. Firstly, we need a detailed brief answering questions about their brand, their origin story, their target market, and much more. Once I've reviewed this, I'll work with the client to create a single paragraph that answers the question, what does success look like for this project? Once we have this written out and set in stone, this will become something we can look back on and work towards throughout the project. We can then go ahead and start creating our list of four brand nouns. I got this process from Alan Peters. Help me immensely speed up the logo design process. Working with the client, we will come up with a list of four things that represent the brand. This will be a pre approved list of objects or concepts that I can work with in the design phase for Billy Bears. Here's our home run slam dunk statement. Insert your own sports analogy here to create a professional yet playful logo that is instantly recognizable as a nursery and incorporates a variation of the color scheme used by the parent brand. The logo should look modern enough to represent the high standards of the facility and inspire trust, leading to an increase in new sign ups. The logo should not be too childish and needs to work well when embroidered onto uniforms and printed onto internal stationery and signage and working with the client. This is our list of pre approved concepts to work with. We have a bare BB characters for Billy bears, building blocks, a house or a home icon, and a bonus one. Anything to do with family nature or growth. We couldn't agree on that last one, and that often happens, but there is plenty to work with here. And if nothing comes out in the sketching phase, then there are elements like a seed plant or tree that we can use as backups. They're a little cliched so I might check back in with a client if things don't go as expected. Okay, this is good. We have a solid foundation to work with here. The beauty of this is we can try and combine some of these concepts into one shape to create a logo mark or a logo type for a client. And by doing so, we can create something truly unique in the process. If logo design is your thing, I'd encourage you to start implementing this idea of pre approved concepts into your process. An hour spent in the discovery phase will save you a day in the design phase and will decrease the overall time wasted on ideas that the client might not like. We're going to move into sketching now, and while we're there, look at some of the crappy doodles that have turned into beautiful logos for some of my other clients. Be gentle. 4. My Sketchbook: I want to give you a little behind the scenes, look at some of my past client work and the sketches that led up to a final finished logo. You'll see, while the basic concept might be there in pen or pencil, the vector is a long, bloody way from the drawing. Typically, I use pen and paper to do extremely quick line drawings. These line drawings are done at lightning speed and tell me immediately if a connection works or not. Let's say I'm trying to combine a letter and a shape together to form a logo mark. If I can't get that to work on paper, then there's not a lot of point in diving into the software just yet. However, this logo I sketched out for a company called The Wine Treasury, which uses a port colors inside a wine bottle. This concept works. The line drawing is terrible. But I know the basic concept is working, so that means it's time for me to start creating this in Adobe Illustrator. And this is my process. I do extremely simple, durable line drawings to rule out ideas and test combinations. And when a basic idea forms, I'll dive as quickly as possible onto my computer and use my speed and illustrator to work this up quickly to see if the style has legs or not. Now I have treasure troves of sketch books like this. So before we move on, I want to illustrate this to you with a couple of examples of some of my original sketches compared with the final result, Kyle Engineering. This is a great example of how I like to work because while the concept was loosely there during the sketch phase, a hidden element only revealed itself to me once I was inside. The software logo for a civil engineer is a monogram of the initials K and where the E is hidden in the negative space. But the stem and the arm of the letter K represents a corner brace which shows strength and stability and woven into the leg of the letter K is a symbol for a solid building. Both meaning tying nicely into the theme of structural engineering. You can see in the sketches that the basic lines that form the K and monogram are there. And over here we have an attempt at a building shape, but that building shape that leaves an E in the negative space here was the result of a lot of testing inside the software. And it was only by working quickly inside Illustrator that I could see that the style held up, but also that I could make the design really harmonious and balanced, which is something I just wouldn't have seen in the sketch. Samin Coltozvi, I've included this logo for this finished gold reserve to show you just how bad at sketching I am. The logo represents the recycling of gold with these coins falling into a smelting pot and the national animal of Finland, the brown bear, tipping the pot into this gold bar mold shape. Now, while this logo turned out beautifully, just look at how bad my depiction of a bear is here. This one looks like a moon walking Street Fighter character. And this one, I don't even know what is going on here. But the point is that by refining this quickly inside the software, I was able to make this concept work. And you can see my progression here. So there we go. I am living proof that you don't need to be able to draw to create beautiful and professional looking designs. Yes, sketching is an important part of the process because it allows you to work really quickly, to discount concepts that won't work, which will save you even more time in the software. But your sketches do not need to be worked up in supreme detail and then scanned to your computer to trace, like you might have seen on social media. In fact, I very rarely send any of my sketches to my Illustrator document. But if that's something you might like to do for safe storage or easy reference, then you can use an app called Adobe Capture. Which converts your sketch into a vector format and allows you to send it to your CC library for that project. Or you can scan or take pictures of your sketches with your phone. Bring those images into Illustrator. Just remember to click Mbed to keep those images inside the file. Otherwise you'll need to store the actual image file in a project folder and keep the linked files active. Before we move on, I just want to throw in a little logo design tip for you when it comes to sketching ideas. A good rule of thumb within logo design is to try and keep your logo as tall as it is wide. This makes for a much more versatile design because it will always suit horizontal and vertical mediums. Meaning it'll look legible on a website navigation, for example, against something like skyscraper advertising. So when drawing, I'm trying to make sure that my sketch fits neatly inside a square. So grab your sketchbook and start by drawing out square boxes to use as bounding boxes. Or at least use your grid paper and count the little boxes to try and keep the designs as tall as they are wide. That way you can ensure your sketch is at least starting from the point of being as versatile as possible. Soon we're going to head to a computer and check out my Adobe Illustrator set up. But before we do, let's have a little look at some of the hardware I'll be using. 5. Desk Tour: Before we dive into the actual software, we need to talk about hardware. Now, with any profession, acquiring the tools for your trade can be an expensive and daunting task. I remember as a kid walking around my dad's garage, and the tools he had on the walls with his assortment of screwdrivers, spanners, and electrical hardware he used to maintain his hobby of motor racing. He had it all and I remember asking him once how much it had all cost him. Of course, he couldn't tell me because it had taken him a lifetime to acquire his collection. The fact is, like with graphic design, you can start with some very basic tools for him. It was a set of screwdrivers and spanners, And with each new tool my dad acquired and learned to use over the years, his efficiency and speed at his craft improved. This is so true with graphic design. You can start small with nothing but a laptop. But with each new piece of hardware you pick up and learn to use, your speed and efficiency will increase. Let's start with the core of your operation, your computer, and your display. Currently, I use two Samsung U 28 590 displays connected to a 13 inch Macbook Pro. This allows me to easily unplug the device when I want to go and work on location like the beautiful Australian sunshine. But when I'm plugged in, my desktop layout gives me all the screen real estate I need. My laptop is over here on the left, which I definitely don't use for watching Netflix. And you can put your notes, your client's home run statement or other reference material here, scan over while you're working. And each of these displays is also raised up off the desk with monitor arms, which gives me extra desk space for external Drives, Sketchbooks, and my peripherals. Right now, I'm using three devices to control Adobe Illustrator, my keyboard, mouse, and a macro pad. Firstly, let's talk about my mouse. I won't be covering drawing tablets in this course because personally I've found no use for them. I used a Wacom tablet for a short while, but I struggle with cursor accuracy. And also we've covered that I can't draw, so it's really a waste of money for me. I used the logitech MX master three S mouse for a number of reasons. First of all, charge it and use it at the same time. So take your magic mouse and use it as a paperweight, because that's about all it's good for. Don't get me started. This mouse has a clickable scroll wheel, which by default, if you hold down, allows you to pan around your art board with one hand. It also has a side scroll which you can use to zoom in and out of your workspace. There are these two buttons by your thumb which are set to undo and redo by default. There's also another gesture button here, which I personally don't use because I find pushing down with your thumb kind of unnatural. But the main thing is that you can customize any of these buttons to do almost whatever you want per application. So you can have different setups for Illustrator, Photoshop, Premier Pro, Google Chrome, you name it. I use another logitech product as my main keyboard. I actually have a number of different keyboards depending on my mood. But the main point of the logitech set up is that there are customizable keys along the top row which I can assign illustrator shortcuts and actions to. In the logitech software, I can pick a key and give it a shortcut string or assign a feature to it. Again, you can assign the keys to do different things per application. We'll get into specific shortcuts later. Finally, I have a bit of a fancy toy. This is the creator mic grow from work louder and I am in love with it. This tool is my little genie. And I have it customized to do all sorts of illustrator specific goodness, which we'll get onto in a minute. It's not the cheapest product, so if you're looking for something similar on a budget, just search for macro keypads and you'll get a load of different options. And there is free software you can use to map specific keyboard shortcuts to your buttons. This bad boy uses a program called Via which can take a bit of getting used to to get set up. But once you have it up and running the time you will save. I've included a full list of my hardware and the show notes along with my set up files for the creator micro. If you end up getting one, take a look through and maybe consider finding at least a keyboard and mouse set up that might suit you. There are tons of options, but if you need a place to start, definitely consider upgrading your mouse. The undo redo buttons and side scroll wheel alone are worth it for speed and efficiency. So let's talk about how I use all of this hardware macro pad included to get me working faster in Illustrator. 6. Artboards & Workspaces: Now that you've seen the hardware I'm working with, let's get into some specifics inside Adobe Illustrator and your screen real estate. Everyone is different when it comes to Illustrator layouts. More illustrative designers will need quick access to the brush panels. Shaped designers will need ready access to the Pathfinder tools. And because of this, Illustrator, thankfully, allows you to completely customize your workspace. If you go to window workspace, you'll find some default options to start from. Each of the panels can be activated from the Window menu and then floated to the position you need to give you as much screen space as possible. The simple fact is, the more screen real estate you have, the less you'll need to move about your artboard to see things like reference images. My set up looks like this. I use one display face on. This is where I keep my artboards, usually as full screen as I can get them. And on the second monitor angle to my right, this is where I float all of the tools I regularly use, Illustrated by keeping all of the tools out of the way over here. It allows me to use the entire monitor just for designing, free from all clutter and distractions so I can focus just on my art boards. Now, I've shared my set up a few times on social media, and there are some that don't agree with it. I've had people argue that sliding your mouse all the way over here to select a tool might actually be slower, and the properties panel might be quicker for you. If you don't have a second monitor, then the properties panel is going to be your best friend. Select an object and you'll usually find what you need in here. But I've designed my own workspace and I've learned it. And like using keyboard shortcuts my muscle memory allows me to use these tools almost without looking where they are. And for me, this feels like lightning. If I go to Window Workspace and click on my custom option here, my tool panels all float to my second monitor in exactly the positions I know and love. Pause the screen now if you'd like to see an in depth look at my workspace. But this was created by dragging and resizing these tools into position. Going to Window Workspace, new workspace, and then giving it a name if I'm working on something that requires repetitive use of a tool, let's say when I'm exporting logos and need ready access to my artboards to name them, I might drag that box over to my main monitor. When I'm done, I've created a shortcut to reset this workspace. I just use command forward slash. And you can set this by going to edit keyboard shortcuts, toggling down the menu commands and searching for reset current workspace. Resetting puts the workspace back exactly how it was, which is handy if you disconnect your monitors for when you need to work on the go. When I was freelancing at agencies, I would often have different workspaces depending on if I was working with one external monitor, or two, or even one for just using my laptop. And I would name these accordingly. Next, let's move on to artboards and the working area itself before I discovered illustrated templates, which we'll touch on later. When I used to start logo design projects, I would work with a landscape view of the web, large blank document preset, and Illustrator. This is handy when it comes to creating presentations, hero images for websites or even video content, because the artwork is at 100% scale. When I paste into somewhere like Photoshop or exploring for Premier Pro or after effects, and under a number of artboards, I set this at 42. When we create the new document, you'll see that the artboards are neatly fitted in a 6.7 grid right in the middle of my document. And I love this layout. I used to start with one artboard and then duplicate it to the right when I needed more. But very quickly you start to run out of room on the right because Illustrators pasteboard is only so big. And then you're having to move art boards or rearrange them in the artboard panel, which causes issues If you have anything overlapping to artboards. In all my days of logo design, I've never used more than 42 artboards. So this is plenty. Just start top left with things like your reference material and you'll always know where to go. Now here's a bonus tip. Go Illustrator preferences and under user interface, you can change your canvas color to white. This is so handy if you don't like to be bound by the constraints of artboards, as you can design anywhere inside this massive pasteboard. And Illustrator, which is something like 16,000 pixels tall and wide. Then go to Window Navigator to open up this little preview pane of the entire document. And you can use this to move around your Artboard at whatever zoom level you're currently at. Personally, I like to use artboards to navigate quickly to 100% scale using the keyboard shortcut command or control one. I'll also use command or control zero to fit and center the artboard to my screen. But the best shortcut of all, if you have a keyboard with page up and page down buns is shift page up and shift page down, cycle through your art boards. Huge timesaver. There's one more setting that I'd like to change within Illustrator, and that's the size of the anchor points and handles. By default, these are absolutely tiny and trying to select them quickly is really annoying and just generally slows me down. Thankfully, you can change the default size of those handles by going to Illustrator, Settings, Selection and Anchor Display. And then down here, just bump that slider up now. Those are nice and big, and I'll have absolutely no trouble of grabbing hold of them as I'm working and as my eyesight gradually disintegrates over the course of my career, now we have our blank canvas all set up and ready to go. Let's go through some of the fundamental tools I use and how we can speed up working with them. 7. Illustrator Fundamentals: The next phase of speeding you up an Adobe Illustrator is to discover which tasks you perform the most, and then go about either automating or eliminating the repetitive steps to perform these processes. Or creating shortcuts to make them faster. Over the course of a career, little steps that you perform daily can really add up. For instance, expanding a stroke path to make an outline by going to object, expand, I'll probably do that about ten to 15 times a day. Yes, it only takes a couple of seconds. But over the course of a career, I'm losing hours of my life selecting a drop down menu that doesn't have a keyboard shortcut, and our time on this Earth is precious. Instead, I can set my own keyboard shortcut command, option E to expand my selection and I never have to go to that drop down again. This is the thinking behind the next couple of chapters. We're first going to go through and discover the tasks we do all the time. And then the next chapter, we're going to map shortcuts to these tasks. Let's talk through the fundamental tools I used to design something like a logo in Illustrator. Now obviously, Illustrator is an enormous program with hundreds of tools at your disposal. But to build shape based logos, you actually only need to grasp four or five fundamentals. This chapter might feel pretty basic to some of you, but I'd encourage you to open Illustrator and follow along inside the software just in case there's anything you might have missed or a tool you haven't used before. Number one, shapes, creating basic forms and elements in a logo starts with shapes. Shapes are formed with anchor points and paths or lines that connect to them. If you can learn to combine shapes, subtract shapes, or manipulate anchor points and paths, then you can build almost anything. There are five main options for shapes. Just click and hold on the rectangle tool to select them. Ignore the flare tool. In almost 15 years of designing, I don't think I've ever used it. Let's draw out a rectangle now. The first thing we notice is that it draws a white box with a one pixel black stroke or border. Any logo designer worth their salt designs in black and white. First, to make sure the design holds up in one color, having to change the properties of every new shape we make from a white field to black. To remove the black stroke is going to eat away at our precious time. This is one of those annoying defaults we can change in Illustrator, but we'll cover this in way more detail later on. When you draw a new shape, you can drag from corner to corner and hold shift to constrain proportions, which for a rectangle makes a square. If you want to draw out from the middle of a shape, hold down Alt or Option. With the polygon or Star tool, you can press up or down on your keyboard to increase or decrease the number of corners. And with a star tool, hold down control or command to change the depth of the outer radius. Number two, selection and alignment. Now we've started making basic shapes, we can start to manipulate them. The V shortcut is the most common tool I use, which is just the selection tool. I use it so much that the V key is the first to wear away on my keyboards. V allows you to select objects, so when you finish drawing, brushing or whatever you're doing, an illustrator hit V to bring you home the direct selection tool, shortcut A is V's number two and allows you to get into finer detail. Use A to select anchor points, path lines, or drag to select groups of them. As we work on our designs very quickly, you're going to find that objects get in the way of your selection as you start to overlap other shapes on top of your work. Selecting shapes, lines, or path points underneath these options can quickly become annoying. The first tool you need to get comfortable with is Outline mode, which is access by going to view Outline or just by pressing command or control Y. This switches to the display to outlines only, and stops any shape fills from getting in the way of anything you can see. So now we can drag and highlight these path points directly. Whereas before this would have selected the shape over the top, Outline mode is your best friend. It's like the x ray of Illustrator. Start getting comfortable switching between this mode so you can access small details when we work on the design together. Later you'll see how much outline mode comes into play while I'm working. Sometimes objects are simply too close together to select individual sections without accidentally grabbing other elements. When this happens, it's often easier to lock the object you don't want to grab. This happens all the time if you add something like a colored rectangle background to your design, because your selection will always grab that background. Now you can either select this background, drag it to a new layer by moving this little.in your layers panel, dragging the layer underneath and pressing the lock button. Then you can do this across your entire set of artboards to create canvases with dark backgrounds. Or an easier way is to select your object and just hit control or command two. This locks that object to stop it from being selected. And then you can either unlock objects individually by right clicking on your object and pressing unlock. Or you can add an Alt or option into your shortcut. For me, that's command option two, which unlocks everything in your file at once. When it comes to aligning objects for a logo, symmetry imbalance is often essential in a logo. For me, the alignment panel is always at the ready. But what's important to note is the reference for your alignment. And there are three to be made aware of. If we go down here and select Artboard. When we select an object and press horizontal and vertical, align, center, it's going to put our object slap bang in the middle of our artboard. And this is always a good starting point for our logo projects as we can build out from the middle and balance elements around this central point. It's also handy when we reset our zoom level using command one because it will put what we're working on front and center. If we select two objects, by default, Illustrator is going to set our align two parameter to selection. When we horizontal and vertically align, these objects will meet in the middle of where they were, but not in the center of the artboard. So we can change this, align two back to upboard to fix this, finally, and I didn't know this until embarrassingly late in my career. But we can align to a key object. Here's how it works. Let's say I want to align this circle inside another circle, but I want that first circle to stay put. Just select both objects and then single click that first circle. This adds a thicker selection around that first object which denotes that this is the key object. Now I align the second circle will move into place. This is so handy when you're working on a lives of design and you need to align something to an individual element within that design. These Align two options are really important and even more so when you use the distribute tools in the Align panel as aligning to art board or selection has a massive difference. Number three, Pathfinder and Shape Builder. A common way to create complex shapes in Adobe Illustrator is to perform Boolean operations. Now if you studied higher maths at school, you'll have heard this term before. It's commonly used in computer programming. But an Illustrator, it's basically referring to the logic you'll find in your path finder window. Here you'll find four common operations, Unite minus front intersect, or exclude. We're going to use two circles here to demonstrate these. Unite combines two shapes to form one minus front subtracts the top shape from the one underneath. Intersect leaves only the portions of the shapes that overlap and exclude removes only the overlap. Using these four operations, you can create almost any flat shape using another shape to combine or throw away material from your design. I use these four operations so frequently that I have them all assigned to dedicated keys on my macro pad. We'll get into how to do this later. Once we understand how these operations work, we can understand how the Shape Builder tool works. Think of the Shape Builder as the ultimate in Boolean operations. Typically with the Pathfinder, you'll normally be working with two shapes as the logic starts to get a bit complex. With more than this, with the Shape builder, we can combine or remove material across multiple shapes in one go. This is hugely time saving. With multiple shapes selected, we can click over here or just press Shift M on our keyboard. Now all we have to do is draw across two or more sections to unite them. Or we hold down Alt or Option on our keyboard to subtract them. The shape builder will pick up whichever style you have selected in your Stroke field panel and apply it to your new shape. By using this, we can overlap multiple shapes and create entirely new objects by drawing a couple of squarely lines on the screen. Now, if the shape builder is so powerful, why don't we just use it all the time instead of the Pathfinder tools? And that's a fair question. The answer lies in processing power and tidiness. If you use the Shape Builder tool across designs that use a lot of overlapping shapes, you'll find quickly that your computer starts to struggle. The more complex the final shape, the longer it takes to process each little change. And this can get really frustrating. So it's often easier to chop things up bit by bit. Also with lots of shapes, you'll often find that it leaves a lot of unnecessary path points and stray lines that then need tidying up or simplifying later. So basically use a combination of both. But remember to keep your designs tidy and unnecessary path point to a minimum, as these can cause manufacturing problems when cutting your logo using CNC machines or etching with lasers. Quick tip to remove straight path points in your Illustrator file. Go to object path, clean up, then just check stray points and press. Okay. Easy as. All right. I know there was a lot to handle in a short space of time, but I've taught you the basics of Illustrator all in one go there. Or at least the tools I use all the time. Now I'd encourage you to go through and make a list of maybe the top ten tools in Illustrator that you use frequently. Because in the next chapter, we're going to start to assign these tools to keyboard shortcuts, or apply actions to automate those common functions that we use constantly to speed us up in the software. 8. Shortcuts & Actions: In this chapter, we're going to map some of our repetitive functions and operations to keyboard shortcuts and actions to help us work faster. But first, we need to touch on the difference between an action and a shortcut and when to use each. Now there are a ton of out of the box hock keys and shortcuts that we should learn or that you may already know from the get go. And some of these are platform agnostic, for instance, command and control. And V for copy and paste is probably the most famous across most of the Adobe packages. We use V to select objects for the type tool, A for direct selections, like grabbing hold of pattern, anchor points B for the brush, and so on. But we can customize almost anything inside Illustrator by going to edit keyboard shortcuts. Now most importantly, this is your workspace. So you need to figure out what's the most important to you and what is going to save you the most time. I'm going to show you my set up and then you can cherry pick from my suggestions and apply your own settings. If you can find a command from any of these drop down menus, you can assign it to a shortcut. So one of the first shortcuts I assigned myself was the expand command. We touched on this earlier. But expand converts all strokes and fills into outlines. And I use it so regularly as I imagine everybody else does that I can't believe there still isn't a default shortcut for this. In our edit keyboard shortcuts menu. We're going to change this dropdown to menu Commands and find our expand option under the object dropdown. I like to use command option for this inside the little shortcut box. I'm just going to key in that shortcut. Now usually your simple shortcut is going to overwrite something that Illustrator uses by default. Before you commit this, just double check. You're not overwriting a shortcut you already use frequently. Once we're ready, we just hit okay and we're done. So instead of having to go to object, expand every time, I can now just hit command option E on my keyboard. And at the top of the shortcuts menu, I can give my shortcut set and name and save it so that I can apply this again if I lose it. Another command I use all the time, but there's no shortcut for is reflect. When I want to flip an object across the vertical again, I can go to Edit keyboard shortcuts and find object transform Reflect under our menu commands and I use command option for reflect for this. Crucially you're the one who needs to remember the shortcut for this. Assign a key that works in your head for that command if expand after reflect works for me. Now when I reflect an object, quite often I actually want a copy of this object. This happens all the time when you're making badges or designs with a lot of symmetry. But to do this I would now need to use my reflect short cut and then additionally press the Copy button instead of, okay, that's way too many steps for an action I perform 20 times a day. Instead, I'm going to use an action to help me automate those steps. Simply put, an action is a series of steps that I can record an illustrator and play back with one key. Command actions are so powerful and they're especially helpful if you have a massive string of processes. You need to repeat across multiple objects or designs. But we're going to start small with our flip and copy action. Let's go to Window Actions to bring up our actions panel. We'll select our object. And now we're going to hit this Create new action button. Let's give it a name, flip and copy. And then we're going to just press record. Now we just perform the steps we want to repeat. So I'll go to object, transform, reflect, or I could just hit that shortcut we just made. Then I'll press Copy. And now back in the actions panel, I just press the stop button. Now if I want to perform this action again on an object, I can just press play on this action here. And it repeats the steps for me. Now crucially, I can select this action, and up here in this menu, I press Action Options. I can give this a name and assign this to one of my F keys as a keyboard shortcut. Let's do another 11 of my favorites is to center something to the middle of my artboard. Normally I would select my object, bring up the aligned panel, and press a line to artboard. And then press horizontal and vertical align. Again, that's way too many steps for me. I bring up my actions panel again, select my object and create a new action. We'll call this one center to artboard. And when we're ready, we just hit record. Center the object to our artboard with the two buttons in the aligned panel. And then press Stop. Now I have a keyboard shortcut that re centers my work for me. Let's do a more complex one. Let's say I have a design that is a combination of strokes and fills. But I want to convert this into one outline vector in one color and remove our white background to maybe save this as a logo file or to send somewhere like a cutting machine. Again, just bring up the actions panel, select your artwork, Hit Create New action again. And we're going to go to Object. Rusterize press. Okay, we're going to hit Image Trace. Then we're going to bring up the image trace options. Leave this on black and white. Twirl open advanced options, Check ignore, color, sample the white. Close our options and then press Expand. Now in our actions panel, we press Stop. Now we can assign a keyboard shortcut that converts a really complex piece of artwork into an outlined vector for export in one press. And we could even go further and have that action run a few more steps and export the file somewhere we choose as something like an SVG. Now here comes the beautiful part. My macro pad, like most macro pads, has the ability to assign complex keystrokes to one button. You'll notice on mine I have ten of these set up already, so I don't even need to stretch my fingers to hit shift command F. One. All I need to do is hit one of these buttons and it performs my action for me. Obviously you can set your own, but here are the ten commands I have as quick actions on my creator micro using their custom keycaps. We've got flip and copy and next to it here, just flip on its own because a lot of the time I don't need an extra copy of my object up here. We have center to artboard back along this road. I have expand here. I have fit Artboard to selected art, which is super handy when it comes to exporting things like logos. This one is export selection. And then along this road, I have all my Pathfinder tools, unite, minus, front, intersect, and exclude. Now, if you want to get serious about speeding yourself up an Illustrator, I definitely consider purchasing a macro pad. They range anywhere from one single button attached to a cable all the way up to something like a stream deck which is a few hundred dollar and has customizable little screens per button. Just do a search for macro pad and see what works for your current situation. But you can pick up a six button, one from Amazon for something like $40 al right. That's the power of shortcuts and actions and how automating simple procedures we do all the time can save us hours and hours over the course of a career. Next, we're going to run through our Illustrator defaults and assign these to Illustrator templates, so we never have to change them again. 9. Defaults, Preferences & Templates: I've worked with hundreds of clients over the years. And for the longest time when starting on a new project, I would open up Illustrator and create a new document from scratch out of the box. Illustrator settings are defaulted to all sorts of annoying things that I would normally have to change each time I used a new tool. For instance, if I open up a text box, the default font is Myriad Pro and the text is tiny. I don't think I've ever used Myriad Pro, so I immediately have to go and change this to one of my brand fonts every single time I open up a textbox. And again, over the course of a career, this is utterly maddening. Now, I mostly use Futura PT bold across my social media and my client presentations. So it makes sense for me to change the default style to something new. To do this, go to window type character styles, then open up the little menu and go to character style options. Then under basic character formats, I changed my font and bump up the character weight a little bit. Now when I draw out a new text box, it's in my house style and I never have to think about that again. Another example of this is the default stroke and fill options when I draw out a new shape. We touched on this earlier. And for me this is set to a white fill with a one pixel black stroke. And I always need to go up here and set my stroke to none each time. Again, it's so annoying. Now you can actually fix this with a couple of key commands. So if you didn't know, sets your stroke fill to the default, X switches between stroke and fill and shift in X switches the values of your currently selected object. Also, forward slash sets whatever is selected to none. To change the shaped style to black and no stroke, I could just press shift in X and then forward slash. That's quick enough, but even quicker would be to just change that default shaped style forever. And we do that by first changing your shape to whatever style you want as your default. Go to window graphic styles. Now, with your shape selected, just press new graphic style. And holding down Lt option, drag your style over the top of the default option. And that's it now every time you start a new shape, it'll be in your new style, right? So this is all well and good, but there's one thing to note when you close Illustrator, those defaults will revert back to the way they were before. It's one of the most backward things ever, and you'd think the illustrator would just remember how you'd like to work. But annoyingly, whenever you start a new blank document from your new document profile window, it'll just go back to the way it was. Now you can actually overwrite your new document, profile files on your hard drive, but it requires finding a few locations on your machine which can be different for everyone. The Mac versions won't save unless you drag and drop the file. And then worst of all, when Illustrator CC updates to a new version, you'll probably lose all of those changes anyway. The best way I've found to work is to save your document as a template somewhere on your machine and work from this each time you start a new document. There are other great reasons why we should do this. But first, let's just go ahead and do it. So go to file, save as, and change the format here to illustrate a template which is an IT file. The beauty of this is when you open up your template in future, start working, then save with command or control S. It will automatically try to save as an AI file, which then won't overwrite your beautiful new IT file. So here's how I like to work and this is something I picked up when I worked for a, when I start a new client project. I just double click on my client zip folder. Here inside here is a folder structure already created that I like to work with, including places for client contracts, different source files, and client exports. And in the AI folder is a pre made AIT file, which I like to call client logo ideas. This file is preset to all of the defaults I just mentioned, the 42 artboard layout I talked about earlier, and it also includes some more goodies. There are a few spaces in here to remind me to include some reference material while I'm working. One of these is the old Client logo. I always forget this step when I'm working on a rebrand. But having an example of the old client logo is great because you can do it before and after on your portfolio at a later stage. But often clients will rebrand with your design so quickly you'll lose access to that old logo, so you can keep it here for use later. Just remember to embed your images so that the image is actually stored inside the AI file and not as a linked asset as that link might get broken later. To do this, go to file, place, and unchecked link. When you place your next image, Illustrator will remember you like to embed. Now you can just drag and drop or copy and paster images into Illustrator. Just be mindful that your file sizes will go up as it's storing that information inside your AI file. Another goodie inside of my Illustrator template is this bank of Common fonts. These 30 So fonts are the tried and tested stock, standard typefaces that have truly stood the test of time. We've got Din, we've got Futura, we've got Gotham, we've got Hell Vertica. And I'd like to just throw in the client name with a quick find and replace to check how their name holds up in one of these styles. Go to Edit, find, and replace. I type your type here into this panel and then my client name in here, hit Find, and then replace all. Maybe I'll use one of these type faces in the final product. Maybe this will spark an idea for a different one. I'll usually also duplicate this entire list and change it to upper case to check this style too. This gives me a really quick reference and steers me in the indication of style that works for this name and the industry that this client's business is in. I've included my template in the project file, so make sure to download that folder structure and check out the template illustrator file. Most of the typefaces in there are either linked to Google fonts or Adobe fonts. So you'll need to license these yourself to get them working. But feel free to take this file, use it as a starting point, and build on it with your own preferences and time saving shortcuts, okay? My default file and preferences are all set up and ready to start. Now we're almost ready to start working on our logo, but before we do, I have one more bonus chapter for you before we start. 10. Bonus Tips: I want to throw in a few bonus tips that I've picked up over the years. These tips don't really slot into the previous chapters, but I wanted to include them because they're super handy and you might not have seen some of these before. They're going to go quick. So get ready in at number ten is paste in place. Copy something from one artboard switch to a new artboard and press command of control F to paste it in exactly the position it was on the previous board. This one you probably already know. But if you've ever seen this behave weirdly and it doesn't paste exactly in place, make sure that firstly, your new artboard is actually selected by clicking on it. And secondly, when you make your selection to copy, make sure that your mouse is inside the artboard bounds and not outside of it. This should keep things exactly where they need to be. When you paste in place number nine is the repeat tools. No more rotating your object and pressing command D to repeat around a circle. Just select your object, go to object, repeat, radial. You can play with a start and end point, the number of instances around a circle, and if you double click into one of them, you can even add more elements. There's also a really great grid and mirror tool which you can stretch to fill your space. Just go to Object Repeat Options and start playing number eight. We have a special way to delete anchor points. Press P for your pen tool and then press minus on your keyboard for the delete anchor point tool. Now if you delete an anchor point from your object, it'll re draw your path to match the handles of the next two anchor points. Unless you press down shift before you click Illustrator will do its best to adjust the path to its previous position by repositioning the handles. Game changer number seven is the Curvature tool. While we have the pen tool selected, press Oltor option, hover over your path until the cursor changes to this Curvature tool icon. Now you can move and bend your path to your will. Number six, we have a relatively new feature in Illustrator, the retype tool. This converts your outline font back into live text for editing. If you've outlined your life type already by pressing shift command o, you can now get your life type back by going to type retype. Just select the option you think is closest and it'll convert and resize your type back in place so you can fix things like spelling errors, long after you've forgotten the font that you used, number five as the appearance panel. I can't get into everything that the appearance panel can do. It's just too powerful. It's like Pandora's box. Just start playing with it, trust me. But here's a quick one. Go to window appearance to bring up the panel, add a new stroke, change the color, and add another one. Change the color, drag them underneath. Now you can add this as a graphic style and apply this directly to anything including live text. Also, try playing with offsetting these strokes with the transform effect to create some cool three D styles. Number four, we have rounded corners. Just select your object and move these little handles until the corners round off. Hold down Alt option with a direct selection tool and click on these to change the styles. Number three is the Recolor Artwork tool. Select an object with multiple colors and click this little color wheel up here. Or go to Edit, Edit Colors, Recolor Artwork. Now you can tweak multiple colors at the same time, or you can use this new generative recolor option here and type in some prompts to generate some out of the box color palette ideas. Better still, if you have a reference or a group of colors inside your illustrated document, You can sample those colors using this Ey Dropper tool. And then press to shuffle those colors around until you're happy. In a similar vein at number two, we have global Swatch colors. If we use a lot of the same color across multiple artboards, we're can assign a global color inside our Swatch options. Just hit new Swatch. Double click on the color and make sure this global checkbox is checked. Now when we want to change this instance of color across our entire artboard, all we have to do is double click into this color, tweak it as necessary, and watch as our color changes all at once across all of our artboards. And finally, int number one is the tiled window display. If you're working on a design that has fine details at a small scale, you might find that you're constantly zooming in and out to check how those small changes have affected your design as a whole. Instead, go to window, new window and then window arranged tile. Now you have two windows that reflect the same design but can be set at different zoom levels. So now you can make small tweaks on one side and watch those changes reflect in the other. Make sure you press command H in the zoomed out window to hide the transform handles so they don't obstruct your view. Still with me. Hopefully some of those are new to you. Alright, we're ready to start working on our logo. Grab you trusty sketchbook, and let's start making a bloody logo. 11. From Sketch to Vector: Okay, this is going to be slightly different from the rest of the tutorial videos. We're going to record this one live screen recording Adobe Illustrator. And also I'll get my phone over the top of my desk to record any sketching that I'm going to do as we go through this process. We're going to be working from my illustrated template here. You'll notice inside here we've got a few spaces for some things that I do all the time. Okay, this is my illustrated template. It reminds me to do a few things as we go through the logo design process. The first thing is to grab the old client logo. We've talked about this before, but this is something I always forget to do when you rebrand clients. Often so proud of their new brand that they launch it immediately and you forget to get the old one, which is annoying because on your portfolio you want to show the old versus the new. Also maybe something to steer clear of while we're designing. We've got our old Billy Bears nursery logo in here. We've also got our success statement that we talked about before to create a professional yet playful logo that is instantly recognizable as a nursery and incorporates a variation of the color scheme used by the parent brand. Over on the right hand side here, we've got our actual color scheme that I've lifted from the current clients website. We'll have that as a reference. Once we've done our single color logo, we'll then start implementing colors using this color scheme. What else have we got? The logo should look modern enough to represent the high standards of the facility and inspire trust, leading to an increase in new sign ups. The logo should not be too childish and needs to work well when embroidered onto uniforms and printed onto internal stationary and signage. Okay, so it's going to have to be instantly recognizable as a nursery, but not be too playful, which could be quite tricky, but we'll test some stuff out. We've also got our client brand nouns that they agreed on. The bear, the BB characters, building blocks, and the house or home icon. There's a couple of competitor logos in here that the client pulled out that they like the look of because they were not too playful. They like that, they were in professional looking. The middle one there, this family first one, does instantly look recognizable as a nursery, but is professional enough. So that's the kind of style we're going for. I also pulled in some reference material here, just some illustrations of bears that I kind of like the look of. Maybe I'll want to take those as references to do things like size, maybe a bear's face, or there's a really lovely looking font down here. I like that. It was still a professional font, but they tweaked it to be playful. I really like that. Maybe that's something we can play with also, these building blocks here, this playful drawn style of them. I thought that was pretty cool as well. This will all stay up at the top of our documents, will always have that as a reference that we can revert back to. One more thing to note is these test to typefaces that we talked about before. Sometimes I'd like to just throw in the client's name into these type faces just to see if any of them stand out. We'll do that just by going Edit, find and replace. We'll put in your type here, we'll change this one to the client's name, Billy Bears Nursery Press, Find, and then replace all 32, 32 fonts in there. That just gives me instantly an idea of how the brand name is actually looking in these very standard typefaces. One thing also I like to do as well as just to grab this copy that we'll go to a new artboard. Click on it and press Apple that Paste over here. And then in our character panel, I'll just drag this over, you can see it. We'll just press upper case all caps. And that way I can instantly see which one is working. So maybe there'll be something in there, maybe they won't. It might just give us an idea of the types of type faces that are working for this client. I mean, instantly this one is kind of screaming out at me. It's kind of similar to that reference image we saw before. Maybe this one as well, that's contralto big and ski black. Okay, so we'll leave that for now. We're going to work on the logo mark now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to my sketchbook. I'm going to keep my brand nouns up here on the screen. Bare BB characters, building blocks, house and home. I'm going to dive into our sketchbook and to start boshing out some ideas. Brand new field notes, book work with here. We've got bear. Let's write these out. Bb, building blocks and house home. I'm just writing these out here so that you guys can see them. While I'm working instantly, what comes to mind for me is the B and the bear. Okay, I'm sure there is something with a B and maybe a reversed that might be able to resemble a bear looking a bit like a fox, something in that. Let's just try and refine that a little bit. Maybe I'll leave a little space between them. It's not looking like a. I'm just going to actually just draw a B. Okay, that's. Take that shape and reverse it. Maybe there'll be a teddy bear in there, maybe not. Let's give this one a go. I like the idea of this. I think that's pretty clever. This reversed B turning into a teddy bear. I had this idea while I was on the phone with the client, so I'd like to just see if this one has any legs or not. Okay. So I'm going to take a picture of this. Put it on screen so you can see it. That way we'll be able to sort of work in Illustrator with that so that you can see it. I probably wouldn't do that. I'll just leave this as a sketchbook and leave it on my desk and just try and recreate this. But I'm going to bring this onto screen so that you guys can see it while we're working. Okay, so back in Illustrator, let's take our idea here. First of all, let's find an actual font from here. Maybe we can use one of these S as a starting point. We can use the start point of the B and the way that it's curved to try and actually recreate a bear here. Let's maybe take this copy that I'm using, my mouse here with the scroll wheel on the side to zoom in and out. Okay, let's paste this. And I can use my keypad here to center align this, stretch that out. I'm going to keep this font duplicated over to the side here so that we've always got a copy of it. That way we know which font we're using. So if we want to make any changes, we can go back. I'm going to press Shift Command and to turn that into an outline, grab my rectangle. I'm just going to cut off the first part of that. I can press minus front, then my macro pat, I can flip and copy flip that over looking like an eight. I'm not sure this concept is going to work immediately. When you flip that over and mirror it up, we're getting an eight symbol here. Before we move on, I don't think this one is going to work because immediately that's a problem. That eight is coming out is too obvious. It immediately not looking like BB anymore. No, first concept doesn't work. Before we go on, just want to show a couple of things that we could have done. I can take this circle here, duplicate this down, click on that, press minus front, and then click on my button and flip that over. So you see how quickly I'm working here to create the ears. Center that on page. And maybe what we could have done is put some arms and some feet in there. I can just hold on option, duplicate that over. All right. I mean, actual concept was good but immediately we're getting this eight standing up for me. For me that's a no. We're going to go straight back to the sketchbook and start again. Shift our keyboard out the way back to the sketchbook. I like this idea of the house in home and I had an idea to try and see if we can get this shape to work as a nose for itself. I wonder whether there's something in here. Let's just redraw take home shape here, see if we can do something. Um, so basically when we were looking at our reference imagery on our illustrator document, there was a lot of abstract shapes. Has this circular element to the face with a nose underneath it like that, that is instantly recognizable as a bear. Just that very abstract couple of circles. I want to see if we can maybe get that home shape into this rounded portion. And then maybe that block can be the mouth area of the bear. I'm not sure on that. If you put a smile in there, definitely comes out a little bit. Try one more of those. Make sure that that isn't too steep to apex of the roof. Pop our nose in there. Smile and a couple of eyes. Okay, let's try this. We'll go back to Illustrator now and see if this one has any legs on. I'm just going to go over to a new artboard. We're going to get our square tool, rectangle tool. Draw that out. I'm going to press my center, a line button just to bring that in. Now if I press command one, that's right in the middle of our screen. Anytime I press command one, if I move around or power or do anything like press command one, this is going to come back to the middle for me. I'm going to press Shift. Turn this into an outline. I'm going to bump up the stroke weight of that just by putting my cursor into the stroke panel shift. Up and down. Goes up in increments of ten. Make that nice and bold and thick. We'll take the pen tool now by pressing, I'm going to put an extra anchor point. Press the plus symbol just to make that into Add anchor point. And click that in there. Now with Direct Selection tool, click on that hold down shift and that's going to snap that up in one straight line. Let's just move that up to look like the apex of the roof. Don't want that too steep. Also I want to press a for direct selection. Drag on the bottom two path points and shift up cursor just to nudge those up. It's more of the actual home shape itself, is more square looking, as tall as it is wide. To get my circle tool or lips tool, now you can press L for that. I've never learned the keyboard short for that. I should really learn that one from the top apex of that house there I want to hold down shift option and click and drag out. That keeps the center point of that circle where it is, so that I know that the start point of that circle is right on the top of that apex. Now we can do something a bit clever here. We can use the Shape Builder tool. If we select the press shift and hold down option, just cut the top bit away there. We can also click inside here. And we know now that that central point, if I add a fill to that. One thing I can also do is drag this shape down. Press command Y to get to outline mode. Just so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to zoom in a bit here so you can see I'm going to press a for the direct selection tool and just delete that top path point away, command Y takes it back. There's still a fill on this here, so I'm going to turn the fill off. What's the shortcut for that forward slash? There you go. I even forgot that one. Forward slash removes the fill or whatever color is selected over here. That's of course we've got our smile in there. Now we can hold down Shift option. Click on the bottom here and just shrink that down just a little bit. Cool. Then we'll just add in some eyes. I go from the point where that nose is and do our shift option out. We can just shift x to swap those over. Expand that out a little bit. Alter option drag, so I can just group those two together with command G. And I can press my button on my micro pad to center align that to the artboard. Bring that back. Okay, there is a bear in there. It's starting to take shape. I'm not quite liking how hard these corners are. Let's just select these with a direct selection tool. We'll use the rounded corner widget there just to round those off a little bit. That let's keep that accurate. 40 pixels for the corners. We can now click on the top of this shape here, type in 40 and our corner box at the top to keep that the same. There we go, we've got a pretty abstract looking bear there with a home shape in the middle of it. I do like this as a concept, but I'm quickly seeing that the style isn't holding up for me. It's quite weak as a logo. There's a little bit, maybe too much going on, I'm sure with a bit of tinker and we can get this to work. But I'd quite like to try one more option before I spend too long on this. Because if I'm honest, I feel like this might be too much work to get to a final point. I think it's a bit too abstract. It might need to have things like, I don't know, maybe an ear. I'll be here to kind of really make it look like a bear. And then at that point, we're adding quite a lot to the design also. Let's just try this out really quickly. Flip and copy of our micro pad. So there's something there. I don't know. I'm not sure. It's too sort of line based. For me, it would be quite tricky to embroider this one onto a uniform, I think. And considering that's really important to the client, I think I'm ready to just explore a few more options here. We're going to go back to the sketchbook one more time for purposes of our demonstration anyway, and see if we can come up with something a bit better. All right, back in our sketch book, we're going to flip to a new page now let's try something different. I like the idea of the building blocks. Okay? Especially this shape here. Because this shape is so recognizable as a building block shape for children's play toys. There's also a few other things. This is cool because the building blocks have a lot of different shapes that we can work with. The triangle, the circle, like the cylindrical element of a circle as well. And also a square, or maybe even a cube. Maybe there's something within these shapes that we can use to come up with something that looks like a bet. There was one thing I wanted to try, which was to use this shape here, these arches, to leave maybe something in the negative space. Because obviously the bear itself, the design of the head looks something like this. Okay, so we could then use these building blocks to maybe come up with something that resembles a teddy bear in the middle. Within that space. Here we've actually got something that resembles the teddy bear's head. And then we could add the nose, maybe some eyes on a mouth, something like that. I love this negative space treatment though, that the actual, these blocks would have to be different sizes for this to work. But let's give this one to go in Illustrator. Okay, let's go over to another artboard. Actually we have a reference image here. Let's grab this reference image because it's got a lovely looking, a few examples of those blocks. So we've got some triangles. We've got that lovely art shape that we want to use to pull into the corner so we can see. So I press command one there to center the work to 100% keeping this centered. And I'll just pull that reference into the top corner no matter how I move about the artboard. If I then press Apple one, that's going to come back to where it was. Let's draw out with the rectangle tool, our block shape. Just fill that with black. We're going to grab a circle lips from the middle of the shape. We're going to shift option click, turn that shape to white. Now one thing that's quite handy to do if you were to use the Pathfinder tools, let's say minus front, that cuts that shape away and it's very destructive. Okay, That shape is now cut in that way and you can never get it back again. That's one thing you can do instead of just minus in front. Let's say we'll just bring up the Pathfinder tool here. If we hold down Alt or option before we press minus front, it does the same thing. That shape is actually now cut away, but it's now a compound shape. Meaning if I double click into here, I can actually change this as we go on and make changes live to the shape, but the actual shape itself is still a compound path. It's really handy for like making non destructive edits of objects so that we can change them later on. We've got our bear. Let's just check our sketch again here. Duplicate the shapes. I'm going to command option. I'm going to rotate this round hold down shift which is going to snap to 45 degree increments. We'll make that 145 degrees. I'm going to shrink that down. Holding down shift, we're going to try and get this to a point where this is actually looking like a bear. If I press copy on my, let's just touch these together. Maybe we can shift and drag and see if these actually will touch and then still look like a bear. So what's happening is that for these to touch, this is quite pronounced. The ears are too far wide. Let's just shrink this down a little bit. It's cool, there's definitely a bear shape in that negative space there. I am going to double click this shape. I'm going to shrink this down a bit just by manipulating that block. Press the skate to come out of that press a for direct selection tool. Just check these two and I'm going to go shift up and right, so I know that they are in 45 degree increments. Just delete this one. Flip and copy on macro pad back over. Touch them up, it's cool. Let's just touch those to the block, see if we can get this block to look like a bear. I'm loving that. I'm going to press command forward slash for my keyboard shop to reset my work space, it gets rid of that pathfinder. Everything's over on the right hand side. I'm sorry, you can't see that but you know how I'd like it to work. Let's draw in a nose. In fact, let's do going to make this an oval And I'm going to Command C and command to paste in place. So we've got another version of the nose underneath we press command Y. See what we're looking at. Let's try send this to the back shift command left square bracket. Sends it to the back. Our compound shape is getting in the way a little bit. Now I'm going to do object expand appearance, which basically takes away that compound shape and commits that change. If I send my square part of the nose backwards again, change this to white is pretty cool. I'm liking this. I think one of the issues this is actually really working the shape. Move this down a little bit. One of the issues I'm having with this though is that because it looks inverted, the nose should be black. This section maybe should be white. What I might try and do is attempt an inverted option of this just to see if that style has re for rectangle. Draw rectangle across my artboard here. I'm going to press command two to lock that. That's not going to get in our way anymore. Drag this over. I'm going to duplicate that. Holding out option and hold down shift. Keeps that in place. Now I'm just going to set everything to white to see what happens. Bring that to the front. So shift command right, square bracket. Okay, immediately, that's working a lot better. Let's just change that nose to black, right? That is so much better. What I might have to do with this logo is make sure that this is always a light dark option By putting maybe like an app square frame around this or treating this in a way, maybe adding a border or something to make sure that this actually looks, looks good on dark. Now, we could be a bit playful with this. We could just make things a little bit jaunty, just change things off to an angle. And we could even upscale one of these slightly and just tilt them over and just touch them over the top really nice. And one of the beautiful things about this logo is that it's almost as tall as it is wide right away. That's a really, if we check the heightened width option here, 393 versus 357, that's really good. We could probably do something like that and tweak it in a little bit. I'd obviously have to tighten this up a lot more, but that's immediately really working. Okay, I'm actually really happy with this. I think this is in a good position to take this atom color to it and then throw this into a client presentation using a few mock ups. But yeah, I'm pretty tough with that. So that's the power of like sketching to illustrator. From sketch to illustrator, working really, really quickly like that, to check to see if a style has legs or not. If it doesn't, just go straight back to the sketchbook, try something really rough back into illustrator working really, really quickly and then we've got the basis of a beautiful logo. All right. I'm really happy with this. This has turned out really great, but I just want to touch on CC libraries before we finish because they have a ton of time saving features which I'm sure you'll find handy. 12. A Note on CC Libraries: If you follow me on social media or you've seen any of my older posts, you'll know how big a fan I am of CC libraries across the Adobe packages. I can't stress enough how handy they are, especially if you work with other designers. It's an incredibly efficient way of sharing colors, fonts, and designed assets between other designers, but also across your own different software packages. As a logo designer, it's also a really great way of creating a style guide for a job. And a place to store client logo files so you always have quick access to them later on. And if your client is designed savvy, you can even share these libraries directly with your client. For me, when I'm working with a client and creating their presentation, I can place the first versions of the logos directly into these libraries from inside Illustrator. Then I can pull the logo directly from the library to use inside something like a Photoshop markup when I'm making logo microbes for my clients. The beauty of this is, as long as I've placed the asset in the correct way as place linked, not place, copy. This means that if the client has a change to the logo, you can double click into this asset, make your changes in Adobe Illustrator. And when you press command of control S to save those changes will filter down to every instance of where you've placed this asset. Which means changing presentations or brand guidelines documents. An absolute doddle Photoshop mock ups are a fantastic way to showcase your logo to your client. And I'll often build my own using client photos and smart objects inside Photoshop. That's a whole other course. But for example, if I have this Photoshop mark up with my logo in place, you'll see that the asset in the layers panel is now out of date. So all we have to do is write, click and update all modified assets. And just like that our logo is updated and automatically re linked inside our client presentation. Another handy feature is if you use Adobe stock for your image assets, you can use watermarked versions in your designs before acquiring a license for the image. Once the client is approved and as long as you've not made any destructive edits to your image, you can go ahead and license that file directly inside your software and it will replace the high res asset in your design. I could spend all day talking about the power of CC libraries, so start incorporating them into your workflow. If you're not already, you won't regret. 13. Class Project: Now that you've seen how I'd like to work to produce a memorable logo, it's time for you to try it yourself. You can see the power of how splicing two objects or shapes together can produce something truly unique for your class project, I'd like you to take two nouns or things and create a logo mark that combines these concepts. These can be any two words, but it's important that they're nouns, because nouns can be represented as symbols, which makes things easier when it comes to design. For instance, designing a logo that represents the word secure is a lot harder than designing a logo using the word padlock. The idea is to get the client to approve a list of words before the design phase that they have no problem using to represent their brand. This way, you won't waste time designing using a concept, working it up in full, only to later discover that the client doesn't like the root idea. You could use a local business near you as inspiration. Maybe your local gym or coffee shop. Make a list of nouns that you think represents their business and design a logo mark that you feel would work for them. Or you could come up with a fake company and do your best to list out four or five things that represent that business to you. Or if you're really struggling for ideas, why not use the nouns that I came up with for Billy Bars, nursery a go using these to create an alternative vision to my logo. No pressure there. Once you have your nouns sketch, quickly dive into illustrator and use your new set up to generate ideas as quickly as possible. Don't worry about color. You can add color if you're really proud of the design. What I'm looking for is a design that works well in one color, fits nicely into a square frame as equal height and width as possible. So the design is versatile and is representative of the two nouns that you've chosen. Then submit your design using your title as your two nouns. Can't wait to see what you come up with. 14. Conclusion: That's it. I hope you've enjoyed this course. And once again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for signing up and following along until the end. I truly hope you got something out of it. And that some of the tips and techniques in this course will help you improve your workflow as a logo designer. We took a look at my desk set up using two external monitors, a mouse with more buttons and a macro pad. We then set up our software with our own custom layout to make the most of our space, and then use some new shortcuts and actions to automate and speed up those common Illustrator tasks. We use day in, day out. We then use this speedy set up to work design up in full, moving quickly between sketch pad and Illustrator before finally using CC libraries to build a beautiful client presentation. Again, take only what you need from these videos and apply what you think will help you. These are my techniques and workflow, but you need to take the time to find your own groove and to do what works for you. And don't forget to upload your projects so I can take a look at them. And if you'd like this course, I'd love it if you could leave me with review these help so much and I can learn from your feedback and keep upping my game for future courses. Thank you so much for having me keep in touch either via e mail at James, at Barnard.com on my Instagram or Tiktok accounts at Barnard Co. And best of luck with your logo projects. I can't wait to see what you create using this workflow. All the best, Take care.