Transcripts
1. Welcome: My name is Ryan Brodsky. I'm a graphic designer and today I'm teaching a class called Typographic Logos. In this class, I'll be showing you my beginning to end process for designing a type based logo. These are the logos that you can use as company logos, t-shirts, product packaging, book covers, marketing, any thing. Everything from how to come up with an idea to sketching out your concepts and then bringing everything back into the computer. Anyone can use a font to type out of basic logo. But to create something truly special, I'll show you how to move things around, create new letter forms and make an appealing composition. Plus, I'll show you how to add dimension, color and texture to your designs. I'll show you some of my best techniques on how to quickly dial your proportions, letter forms and overall composition. So let's go ahead and get into it.
2. Why make custom lettering?: The thing that I like to do is customized type. Because anybody can buy a font and just type out something on their keyboard. But what I think really makes graphic special, is when you can manipulate those letters, and change them, and draw over them, and just make something new and different that nobody else has. I'll start out by talking a little bit about designing corporate logos. The thing about corporate logos is they need to stand the test of time. They tend to be more conservative, and they also tend to be very clean vector graphics. The reason for that, is you need to have something that's really small and will translate on a business card, or it might be painted huge on the side of a jet or something. So it needs to be a really flexible icon. The kind of logos that I like to do, or I should call logo types, or word marks, and all that means is it's a type based logo. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. The next thing I'm going to talk about is doing graphics, logos more for like t-shirts, hats, and anything where it's not a super permanent identity. The neat thing about that is you can take an existing font, and stretch it, and put some things that'll give it depth and dimension to it and texture. I'll give you an example where you don't need to be able to have really good drawing skills to be able to pull that off. Then, I'll also get into talking about hand-drawn logo types, where it is a little bit more drawing intensive. I'll talk about proportion, and texture, and dimension, and color, and all that good stuff. When you design a logo and you put your special sauce on it, it really just helps convey the message that the brand, the person, the company, or whatever you're designing it for, it conveys that, that's also a special thing.
3. Typographic terminology: Getting a little bit to talking about typographic terms and what they mean, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time or really split hairs. Let's just start out by talking about typography. Typically typography, you're talking about a whole alphabet, a to z, uppercase, lowercase, and something that you can type out on your keyboard and just make a word. Basically that's also what a typeface is, a font is a subset of a typeface. A typeface might be Baskerville and a font of Baskerville would be Baskerville Light or Baskerville Italic. Lettering is more custom type, is things I showed you on those t-shirts, it can be hand-drawn, it can be vector drawn. Another good example might be this book cover, with a type that's got the arch to it, so that's more like lettering. Logotypes again are word marks or company logos that are just the word, to give you a really good example of that would be the Coca-Cola logo. The Coca-Cola logo is the word Coca-Cola and that type Coca-Cola. There's no separate icon or anything like that that represents Coca-Cola other than just the word. Another good example would be Google. Just to differentiate, we're not really going to do this in this class, but I'm talking about logo marks, and a good example of that would be the Nike Swoosh. Sometimes you cobble up a logotype with a logo mark and you'd have something like this, Nike. In that case, the logotype can stand on its own, the logo mark can stand on its own, or they can be one thing together.
4. The business of logo design: A lot of people ask me about how much can I charge for a T-shirt design or a logo design. I would say it really depends on what you're designing it for. If it's for a T-shirt, if it's for a book cover, if it's for a corporate logo that's going to be used for years and years and years, is a company big? Is a company small? To really just break it down, typically a T-shirt design, a simple logo graphic would be 300, 400, maybe 500 bucks. If you're a really good illustrator and you're doing a painting that's going to be applied to a T-shirt, maybe it's 800 bucks. I don't know. It all depends on what you can negotiate. For a logo design, you can refer to the trustee graphic artist guild Pricing Guide. Basically, I'll just tell you what it says is, you can charge anywhere from say $1,000 on the low end, all the way up to $50,000 for designing a logo. But some people charge more, some people charge less; all depends on what you feel is right. This is the logo type or logo done by Paul Rand for Steve Jobs computer company in the 80s called NeXT Computers. Paul Rand was a very well-known designer and he charged Steve Jobs about $100,000 for two weeks worth of work. I like this quote. It really just puts you into their mindset. When Steve Jobs was talking about working with Rand, he said, "I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, 'No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don't have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people'''. So Paul was sort of in a position where he could name his price and name his terms. Maybe one day, if you get well-known enough and your skills are high enough and you're in-demand enough, you can do the same thing. In contrast to that would be Nike's logo, and the lady who designed it charged Nike $35 for this world famous design and we all know Nike went on to become a huge multinational company. Luckily, the story ends well, Nike ended up paying her in stock and she ended up making, I think about $600,000 for designing this. So she actually made more than Paul Rand, and that leads us to section two, which will be inspiration in planning your design.
5. Examples of type and lettering designs: When you're designing a logo for a client, you really need to do research and find out what they're all about, what their values are, also find out what their competitors are up to, and what differentiates them from their competitors. Then what you'll do is start to look around for visual reference. I'll just go ahead and show you a couple of my designs and maybe some of the inspiration where they came from. Sometimes the inspiration is purely aesthetic, and sometimes it's more of like if I wanted to do a logo out of the '70s, it would have to look like a '70s era type style. Here's a logo I did for the Vector Lab, my website. This thing was hand-drawn, and I smeared the ink in it, and this is during the process but I'll show you where I got the type style. It was off of this photo, it looks like apartment building logo. I ended up just taking those letter forms and redrawing them in the computer and then printing it out and doing all neat little texture things to it. This was an O'Neill script. It's got a photocopy texture applied to it. This was a logo I did for Billabong, and it may look familiar because it is inspired by the ApocalypseNow logo. Let's talk a little bit about copying. I think when you're a new graphic designer, it's actually very important to emulate styles that you like. The reason I say that is, you need to get to a level where if you have a style in mind, you need to be able to translate that to actually making it and the best way to learn that is to actually just copy. Take the Coca-Cola letter forms, and see if you can write your name in those letter forms. Depending on what you're copying, you may not want to let anybody know, I wouldn't copy the Coca-Cola logo and try to sell it to somebody as their logo. That would be bad news. It also depends on if you're emulating something that is current, and the person who created it, if they would be mad that you copied them, then don't do it. But if you say, emulating a vintage style, I think it's totally fine, say something like Herb Lubalin, who's a great graphic designer and a type designer. He's passed on since the '80s and copying him is almost like a tribute, where copying, say somebody that's out there right now trying to make a living, that's bad news. So there's a fine line and just use your common sense. Again, my gauge for the whole copy thing is if the person who you're copying, saw what you did, would they be mad? If so, then don't copy them. If not, then I think it's fine. This is a type sell I did for for Billabong. The inspiration is "The End" tidal cards for movies out of the 1930s. Again, it's something I copied, it's a movie from the '30s. Nobody from the '30s is going to care, they'll probably be happy that I like their style. This is a logo I did for Billabong Pipeline Masters which is a surf contest every year in Hawaii. This is a different year, this is a very bouncy free-form, break all the rules, logo type I did for O'Neil, for T-shirt. There's another one. It's not going to win any design awards but there might be a kid out there wearing it that thinks it's pretty cool. This is a type sell I did for O'Neill and I like doing these where you take an existing typeface and I just chopped off the serifs on one side. So on the left side, it's a sans-serif and on the right side it's a serif, and I put a little crossbar on the end and just did a few special things like that to trick it out. Back to Herb Lubalin, he is probably one of my biggest inspirational people I look at. This guy just did amazing work, he did The Sound of Music logo, he did a really whimsical one. He designed the Avant Garde typeface, beautiful typeface, Avant Garde is a typeface I like because you can go in there and tweak things and build things actually like this that look really awesome.
6. Using Pinterest for inspiration: Let me show you a little bit on Pinterest. I like Pinterest because I think it's the best way to just catalog things like I can pin something two years ago and I don't know if Pinterest existed. I think they existed two years ago, but it's always there to go back to and you can categorize all your pins. Let's have a look at my Pinterest page. My Pinterest page is pinterest.com/thevectorlab and I have a board called topography. I'll just scan through and show you a few things. I just pin everything on here. There's a classic typeface Stiller that's really beautiful. There's some current guy's doing some nice 3D work. This guy looks like he took a regular typeface and made U out of a J. There's some Herb Lubalin stuff. Really nice hand-on script, hand done in the way that it wasn't built off of a typeface I don't think. Really cool ornamental letters, surrogacy looking. I've got just every thing pinned on here, just hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands actually. If you're looking for a type inspiration, this is a good place to go and I'll pin things from Tumblr or design inspiration or whatever. The one thing to be careful with the Internet is if something becomes popular, then everybody sees it and everybody's inspired by it. So your role as a designer is, how do I take that and maybe pull something from it. But not just totally knock it off because there might be a lot of other people just totally knocking it off and all of a sudden, all your stuff looks like everybody else's stuff. The more you can go to bookstores and find old type books or go around the city and just take photos of things, the better because the Internet is like a fishbowl. Everybody sees it. It's your job to go out there and just find the little cool things that nobody else is really paying attention to.
7. How to apply your inspiration: The next thing I want to get onto is, now that you have your inspiration, how do you apply it? How do you make something your own? I'll go through an example of something I did a couple weeks ago. This was a logo for a product that I sell. The nice thing about doing logos for products that you sell is if you do a really good logo, it'll probably sell better just because it conveys that your product is special, that you've put extra time and effort into it. Let me open that up. Okay, so in this example I want to show you how I take inspiration and I get a bunch of, we call them tears. I get a bunch of tears or inspiration pieces, put them up on a mood board. What I was going for here is, this is a product I have called Time Machine textures and its set of textures for Photoshop and Illustrator that makes your graphics look old. I wanted to go for a groovy Austin Powers type design for this. In the upper left is a Herb Lubalin design. That thing is just absolutely beautiful. Cream, yes these are '70s bands. This letters thing is a very nice '70s style, for the Jimi Hendrix tear, I really like the psychedelic spinning background. The secret code, the art group, those are just cool, '70s groovy designs. The lower-left, I'm not sure what the word is, but that's a Nathan Yoder design that's just awesome. I designed most of my logos little just, an idea will pop into your head and you just sketch it out. Usually it's not perfect or even close. But, a design is really small thumbnails, so that says Time Machine. Again, I'm just trying to get an idea down on paper, then I'll refine it. This is to give you scale, that my pens in there, so that's probably a sheet of copy paper. I've just gone in and hand-drawn everything. You can see where I made eraser marks and all that thing. Then in the process, in blue I've just drawn out all the vector lines. Typically if I'm doing a script and obviously just a san serif or serif font to, I'll draw all the letters separately. That way you can move things around and I'll get into that a little bit later but I just wanted to show you my process. This is the type with just basic no 3D or dimension to it. I'm playing around here with some outline strokes, and then eventually I get to this one where I've put in some shading, and now I've got the psychedelic background, I got the colors dialed in. Anyway, that's just a preview of the process I will show you later on in this class.
8. Analog tools: Now on to materials, and these are the materials I use, you may already have your preference, these are just what I've found works for me. I try to keep things really simple, I have my core supplies and if I'm doing a special project, I may try some new ink, or paper, or material, or paint, or something like that. But let's start out with the core basics. First, we'll start out with analog. I recently got onto these field notes and I don't know what it is about these things, I've had mole skins, and the dot grid journals from Behance, but there's something magic about these. I don't know what it is they're just really thin, there's a dot grid on the inside, and it's just awesome for sketching out ideas, or to do lists, or whatever, and go through billion of these things, and the creator of these, is actually a graphic designer named Aaron Joplin. Look him up, he's awesome he's really funny too. Along with that, I love these Muji pens, the Japanese pens, you can get them on Amazon, or if you live in a big city bet you might have a Muji Store, and I really like how the ink goes down and you can buy a whole set of them. I just buy them in these bags, and they end up getting lost, or worn out, or run out of ink eventually. Mechanical pencil, really good for just sketching out precise things really small, I'm not too particular on the brand, just have a good lead and a good, I do like the metal, the heavier weight ones versus the plastic cheapy ones, I just feel like I get a better drawing out of them. For doing shading work, I love these prismacolor pencils, the ones without the erasers. They have a really waxy lead and you can go really light, or you can go just really heavy and just super black with these things. These prismacolor pencils work best on marker paper. I love marker paper because I don't have to have tracing paper, and sketching paper, and this or that, like I pretty much do everything on marker paper. The reason is it has a great tooth, and it's also semi transparent so you can put a design underneath and sketch over it. It's great for sketching, and then scanning it, or rendering it out if I need to, for actual final art. Not quite as much, but if I'm going to use a marker pen, I use a prismacolor water base marker pen, these are nice because there's no fumes, and they won't make you sick like some other markers will. That's it for analog, and copy paper. For just real, if you're just trying to get an idea down and you're blowing through paper, copy papers what you want to use, because this stuff it is little more expensive.
9. Digital tools: So let's talk about digital. One thing I don't have on here actually is my iPhone, I will use that instead of a scanner. So let's say I've drawn out a design, instead of walking over to the scanner, scanning it, bringing it into the computer, I'll just take a photo of it, try to get it lined up, and then I'll just e-mail to myself and that way is the quickest way to just get a sketch into the computer, if you're not too worried about how it's going to look. I would never do that for final artwork, it's just for bringing sketches into the computer. Obviously I love Macintosh, I like being monitors, I like Creative Cloud, Photoshop and Illustrator. The nice thing about that is it's a subscription service, you don't have to spend 7- 800 bucks like you used to all in one day just to buy the software and then all of a sudden a year later, it's out of date. When I was in school, school is expensive enough nobody wants to pay even the student prize for the software but now it's really affordable and if you do one freelance project a year, two freelance projects a year, you can pay for the software and I think that's good karma. The other tool I use a lot is Bitmap textures, I'll talk about that later. Photoshop brushes also talk about that later but what these are, these are textures I've already got scanned in, they could be watercolors, spray paint, grunge textures, they could be texture from cracked plastics all on a shirt and I'll have those ready to go because a lot of these projects, you just want to knock them out really fast and you don't want to be basically waiting for paint to dry every single time. If you can have these textures at your disposal you can get really good effects really fast and so those are my basic core supplies. A lot of times with logo work, especially for t-shirts or things that aren't so serious, you wouldn't use these for corporate logos, but a spray paint is awesome. I have a little printer, I'll put the name of that in the show notes, but it'll cut out stencils out on paper and then you can just take spray paint and spray paint your logos, and it looks awesome and everybody is impressed. India ink, it's just black ink that you can say print out your design and then you can use that, or you can use watercolor and have everything bleed and get a really good effect. Sometimes I've had success actually printing out my design in one color on black, on an inkjet and then running over to the sink really fast and pouring a little bit of water on it and smearing the ink around. That was that vector lab logo that I was showing you before, that's how I did that and that's about it. So there might be other supplies depending on the project, but those are my core things that I get to that I know how to use. The next section we'll be structure of a type based logo, so the shapes, letter forms. So I'll see you in a second on that.
10. Letterforms and compositions: Lesson 4 is called Structure of the Type-Based Logo. What I'm talking about here is the shape of the letters themselves and also the actual composition, and the thing about logo type design, t-shirt design that differentiates it from say print is logotypes designs for shirts, stuff like that, they need to be a self-contained graphic where if you look at designed for print, it bleeds off to the edge. You have a canvas that chops off, where a t-shirt graphic typically is something that's centered on the front of the shirt or on the back of his shirt. Logo is the same way, they just need to be able to stand alone. A lot of times you'll contain them in a shape, a diamond, a circle, a rectangle or square. Let's go on to letter form shapes right now. With letter forms, in classic typefaces, there are serif fonts, there's san-serif, there's script, and there's a whole lot in between, but basically those are the main three. Serif fonts have sort of a base to them where at the bottom of the letters or the top, they have like a little crossbar. The opposite of that would be a san-serif like avant-garde where it's just the straight letter with no little crossbar pieces on the top or the bottom. This is a nice script here. This is an example of something that's in between. It's taking a serif typeface and almost trying to get into a script by connecting the letters with these little lines. Stencil font. San-serif. Back to talking about the structure of the composition of your logo type. This is a good example of something that's in a circle. This is a good example of something that takes up the shape of a diamond. This is a nice wave shape to the script. This is designed by Dan Cassaro, amazing designer, just nailed it with this. He's taken this Deus logo and just fit it into a circle. It's just so perfect.
11. Thumbnails and bringing your design into the computer: Okay, now let's get to the fun stuff. In this video, I will show you my process A to Z and we'll create a typographic logo. I've gathered a bunch of tears. The reason I like these is they're all scripts. They all have a certain thickness to them. Some of them have some dimension and that's the qualities I want for this typographic logo. Last night, I did a few just real little thumbnail sketches and since these are super imperfect, we don't really need to scan them so I can just take a photo and email it to myself. I'll take a photo of both of these actually, I'm not sure which one I'm going to us and then I just email those both to myself and bring them into the computer. So typically I work from left to right and I just make new art boards as I go and I save everything in my process just in case I want to go back. I'll just drag a new art board over and get rid of these things, and now I can just drag in those thumbnail photos I just took, then I'd just take down the opacity a little bit so I can type over it. I lock those. So now they don't move. Let's zoom back in here and one trick I have for doing really fast work is, you start with a thumbnail and then bring that into the computer and then type over with an existing typeface that you just have in your computer. The reason I like to do that is, if you're using a pretty good typeface, it'll help you keep your proportions, your letter spacing like your canning and also the thickness of your letters. It'll help give you a structure. I'll manipulate that type to fit my thumbnails here, and then what I'll do is I'll go back in and sketch over that and create new letter forms but I'm just using that type as a base. So the type that I'm going to use is called Gelaton script. A little too bubbly for what I want but that's okay for now. I'll just roughly size it and I'm going to squash it just a little bit and that's okay. Typically you don't want to just squash type but in this case we are drawing over it, any weirdness we can fix that with just some hand drawing. Let me go ahead and create outlines and that just takes our type to a path and I'll just use a sheer tool, give it a little sheer. I've got a bit of arc to this type that I've sketched out. So let's try to match that a little bit in the computer. That's way too much. I'll just do it like three percent and then don't forget to expand appearance. I don't like how that T is leaning quite so forward and then you can go in here and just start moving things around. I still haven't decided which one I want to use yet. So let's just take all that we've done. Drag a copy down and it looks like my letters are a lot more bunched up on this bottom one. Again that T just seems a little leaning back, kind of tweak it. I'm also thinking there might be a way to interlock these. The two capital letters. Right now looks terrible but we can go in and figure out a way to get those to play with each other. I'm actually starting to like the bottom one now. I'm using my shear tool that just italicize or deitalicizes your letters, that's starting to look pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that bottom one so far. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep the top one just in case I ever need to go back to it, make this the main one. Now what I want to do is just print that out on my inkjet printer.
12. Sketching techniques: Now we've got our translucent marker paper, I put them out, clean up. It's a little hard to distinguish everything but we're not going for just an exact copy, I'm just using that as a basis and I'll just start sketching over it. Let's go into fast forward mode now so you don't have to watch me sketch because it might take a while. That was our sketch and there's a couple things I want to point out. First of all, when you're drawing this out, you're trying to maintain the width of your lettering, the width of the actual letter forms themselves. The other thing is, unless you have really bouncy kid-z playful type, you want to maintain either a straight line or a nice arc to your lowercase letters. You may have noticed I drew out some lines like this and that was just to hold those lowercase letters in place. The other thing that I'm doing, you'll notice that this type is very bubbly and what I did was I straightened off some edges and hardened things up a little bit, that's to make it look a little more masculine and purposeful but it really just depends on what you're going for. There's one other trick I want to show you that I learned in Design school that's really underrated. You'll probably get a lot of use out of it especially if you're new to sketching and you're having problems with proportion. The trick is, once you've gotten your design drawn out on your marker paper or semi-transparent paper, just flip it over and look at it. Instantly, you'll see any proportion problems that you have, any line weights that are too thick or too thin compared to the other letters. What you can do is when you notice those, go in and actually draw over backwards. There's two reasons this works. One reason is that your mind does something funny when you draw, things are usually skewed on one side. The more you draw, the better you'll get and you won't have that problem so much. But the other thing is these are letter-forms and your mind sees them as a letter t or a letter p, and when you flip it over, now it's just a shape, so you don't have that bias going into it and you can just fix everything that way. There's a little tip, try it and you'll realize it's actually really useful. Now what we're going to do is scan this and I'll draw all the vector lines in Adobe Illustrator.
13. Making vector lettering: All right. Now we've got our initial refined sketched on, and I've got that scanned in. Let's bring it into Adobe Illustrator and draw out the paths with the Pen tool. It's already light enough, it's not going to interfere visually with us drawing the paths out. If your sketch is really dark, you might want to take the opacity down so it doesn't just bug out your eyes. I'm going to do a letter or two in regular speed and then we'll speed it up just so you don't have to watch the whole thing. When you come to a point, you can just click and then you come to a curve you can just click drag and then release. Everybody has their own method of drawing paths, but I think the main key is, do as few points as possible to get your letter shapes. Because if you have to go in and move things around, if you move one point it's going to get all weird if you have a point right next to it. Now I'm going to just go ahead and speed things out, so you don't have to watch me draw these paths out. Even though this is a script, we want the letters to be separate. The reason is I might discover that I have some proportion issues where I have to move a letter over or I find a way to create a ligature or a connection between some letters that I didn't see before, and if we had the letter separate then it's easy to move and is easier to change things. The other reason that I want my letter separate is, I'm going to be doing some dimensional shading to this. If you have one letter that overlaps another, it's really easy to put in shading if you have that. Doing this kind of lettering isn't nearly as precise as designing a typeface, where you want it to be just super perfect. This is type for fun so we don't want to stress about it too much, but we do want it to look good. Make sure you save your document, just in case it crashes. Now that we've changed all those strokes, the fills, you can start to see how the type is beginning to look. There's a few things I actually don't like about how it's coming out, I think some of the curves are a little off, I think the T is a little bit weird, and some of the other lowercase letters are not quite perfect. What I'm going to do now is shrink this down. I will change it to just a medium gray. This is 8.5 by 11, our board. What I'll do is I'll make a few copies of it. I'll print that out, and I'm just going to sketch over it, noodle a way and just figure out what I need to do to make it look good.
14. Refining the initial design: Now that I use my flip over trick, I'm seeing that there's probably a little too much space between the uppercase T and the Y. I also notice a little bit of weird negative space right in here. I'm not sure exactly what I'll do with that yet but the main thing is I want to get that T looking good. I'm wondering, comes right over here. Now I have to figure out what's going to happen with that G. Again, I'll just look at my reference and see if anybody has connected letters this way. Because sometimes you'll figure out a solution to a problem that somebody else has already solved. So maybe that T doesn't have a curly Q on the end of it. Maybe it just comes more of a point like that G and maybe we'll just loop out this G a little bit more, I think that could be our solution. That's what I was talking about when I was saying flip over your design. It just magically helps you see problems that you have. What if we did something with this P where there's a little piece that came out here, something, that looks cool. Those are pretty minor problems, I could scan this back in, bring it back into the computer, draw it back out but I think looking at my paper, I can just refer to that and that's enough visual reference where I can just go in and move things around in the computer and that'll save a few steps of going back to the scanner. But don't be afraid of drawing things by hand, bringing in the computer, playing with it the computer, printing it out, scanning back over that, just going back and forth until you really get it how you like it. Use a computer as a tool just like pen and pencil and it really can speed up the process a lot. I'm going to take a break now, come back to this with fresh eyes. Dial in those, this is my new details and from there we'll go to adding dimension, and then texture, and then color and then we'll be done. I pretty much always do this. I'll go outside and take a break, come back in, go out for lunch or even better just come back the next day. The longer you stay away from it and come back, the fresher your eyes are going to be looking at that design. I thought I was pretty good and then I came back to it and was like, I'm not really sure. So what I did was I printed this out a bunch of times and sketched over it and I'm getting a lot closer. I scan that back in, brought it back into the computer. That's what you see here. Next, I blew up the one that I like the most, which is here, one of the bottom corner and I just started pulling points and moving things around and each time I go through this process that it gets a little closer and closer. I did another little rounder revisions. What I've done here is I've just gone in and drawn some curves to act as guidelines that will keep my type more structured. It'll look more flowy, it'll look a lot better if you go in and do that. I even went beyond and did one more revision and I got rid of the hyphen, I made this loop down here a little bigger and I think it's looking pretty good so I'm pretty happy with it. I went in here and put in this type right here. Let me show you how I did that. I just started out with a sans-serif. I don't remember what font it was. Let's just use Futura Condensed and I'll turn that to white. I do like the spacing on it so I'll go ahead and type create outlines. What we need to do is I think do a little arch to it. What I've done here is I've pulled the horizontal distortion and that's what gives it that small to big shape left to right. Let's go ahead and expand. Let me show you what the paths are doing. So that's an effect. You can see the actual paths reflecting what's there. Let's go object expand appearance and it's more of like what you see is what you get. I'll use my shear tool and each time I make a change to the type, I'm going to make a new art board, save it and you'll have these files for your reference. Now we're on to adding dimension.
15. Adding shading: Let's start out by doing an effect that I like to put on somewhere I type. It's actually in some of these reference examples, and that's where the letters overlap themselves or overlap other letters. There's some dimension, and I'll show you what I mean. I am going to put this on a black background, and then invert the colors. This is also another good trick, by the way, is when you're trying to figure out your letter forms and how everything is looking, it's good to just flip it out, white on black letters. The effect that that has is actually it'll make your lettering look thicker, so just an optical illusion, but it's one to keep in mind. Here's my method of dimensional shading. I've got my type here and it's drawn in separate pieces, so it overlaps itself. That's good because that'll allow us to add in little shadows where the type overlaps itself. The first thing I want to do is duplicate this layer twice. Our top layer will end up being a clipping mask, and what that's going to do is that's going to help us get rid of a lot of extra points that we don't need. That'll be one of the last step. I'll go ahead and turn the visibility of that off. I will also lock that layer just to make sure that nothing happens to it. The very bottom layer is going to be our way to keep the type intact. The middle layer will be are working layer, and I'll be slicing that up, which will help us add in the shading, but we want to keep our type intact with that bottom layer. Anyway, I've just got the middle layer here visible and both other layers are locked. Next thing I want to do is I'll go to my little library of half-tone gradients, I'll give you this in the course materials. I just want to take one of these, copy it, and then I'll paste it in here. Let me go ahead and change that to a blue so you'd be able to see it. Then let me zoom in just a little bit more. This half-tone gradient axes and nice little shading piece, and what I'll be doing here is pasting in these shading pieces and then rearranging the portions of the type. In this instance, I'll bring this crossbar above, so the shading is below that. Eventually, I won't have this blue, it'll just be like a gray or black. But like I said, for working files, I'm going to leave it blue just so you can see it right now. There's a couple tools that I will be using mostly when I do this, and one of them is the knife tool, which is right here, it's underneath the eraser tool. This is useful for when I want to move certain portions of a letter back and other portions of that same letter forward, and I'll show you what I mean here. In other words, this vertical bar is below this horizontal bar, but I want the vertical bar to be above the G. I'm just going to go ahead and cut that with a knife. I also cut it here because it overlaps this G in two places. Next, I'll just paste it below that, and then make a copy. I'm just option dragging a copy over, and that's essentially making a copy of this half-tone. Let me slice this G out too. So where a letter overlaps itself, we want to use the divide tool. What that'll do is just wherever overlaps itself, it'll cut it into separate pieces, and that'll make it a little easier to work with. Let's use a divide tool, and as you can see, it just cuts it up into little pieces. I'll go back to my knife tool, cut that here, let me ungroup it, and then now I can bring that piece to the top. Hopefully, you're seeing how this shading method is working. Here, I want the shading to overlap that way, so I am just moving around layers that I go. The quick way to move around layering of objects is to select them and then hold down your command key, and then use your left or right bracket to move it forward or back, so I'm just toggling there. If you want to move something all the way to the back, or all the way to the front, you just do a shift command and then the bracket key. Left sends it all the way to the back, and there it's behind our black background layer, and then the right bracket key brings it all the way to the front. The other thing you can do is select that half-tone, and then just go Command B to paste behind it. I'm either using that bracket method to move things forward or back, or I'm just cutting and pasting in front or pacing behind. That's how I move things front-to-back. Now that you know how my method works, I'll just speed this up so you don't have to watch the whole thing in slow motion. I pretty much have all the shading done. I will save this, and now I will go back to my very top layer, the one that we have not messed with yet. Let me just get rid of this little logos word that's not going to matter. What I need to do is make a compound path. The reason I want to do that is so we can clip out all this extra blue that's around the edges. Again, I'll just hide my middle layer there. Let me change this to black so you can see it. Now, I just want to select this whole thing, and I go to my favorite little thing in the Pathfinder menu, and that's the merge tool. I just click that and you'll see how it unifies every single thing. But it isn't just a black object now, so what it's done is it's unified all the black parts, but there's also these little in-between shapes that are also fills and we want to get rid of those. Let me show you what I'm talking about. I just assigned everything to orange and now, you'll see how it's filled in all that stuff, we don't want that, let me go and do that. I've got all my layers locked so I'm not going to lose anything here. Let me select that black with a magic wand, and then I just go Select 'Inverse" and you'll see if I assign that a color. I'm just selecting these red parts, delete it. Now, when I select that, you'll notice that it's just all black. Not that this really matters, but this is one compound shape. What we need to do is go object, compound path, make. What that will allow us to do, is use that as a compound path to clip out all the junk. Let me turn that middle layer back on and let me change our compound path to yellow just so you can see the difference between that and the distress. Now what we want to do, we want to make sure everything's unlocked. Let's grab that black background layer and just lock it, so that's not part of the selection. Let's select everything, and again, our compound path is on the top. Let me just select that and hit Command 7, all that's also object, clipping mask make, and you'll see what it's done is it's just clipped out everything, all the extra blue. Now what we want to do is just isolate it so it's only the blue, not the type below. Let's just select everything again, hit Merge, and that may take a second. You'll notice that it's added all these crazy points that you're not going to need. What we need to do here is just get our magic wand, select the blue, and then select inverse, and just delete everything that's not blue. Now all we have are these blue half-tones, and luckily, we saved our bottom layer here, and that's our type before we did anything to mess with it. Now, it's really easy to use because we have the white and let me just change that color so you can see that it's one nice piece, and then we have our shading, which is a completely separate layer. Let me just change that to a dark yellow. Everything's nice and clean and super easy to work with. This will help a lot when we get into colors. Let's just say we wanted to change this to blue type. Just change that to blue, and then select our shading, and I drop that blue and I'll just drag the slider down a little darker, so you can see that. The nice thing about this method is it just makes everything super easy to work with, and you don't have any extra paths that you don't need.
16. Making a 3D effect: All right. Now we have our shading in there and what I'll show you next is how to make a 3D effect with the type. This is just one of the things I like to do sometimes. Let's keep what we have here because that looks nice. I'll drag a copy of the art board over, change it to like a gray and I'll get rid of this black background. What we want to do is make a copy ''Command C'' ''Command V'' to paste and back. I'll just turn that into a black stroke and thicken it up a little bit. The next thing I'll do is I'll copy that the stroke and then paste another copy and back. Let's see here, let me lock that gray. I will select the one in the back. Now you've got a mess of strokes behind the gray part, which is okay. I'll take my blend tool and click on one of the black strokes and then click on the other group of black strokes. You'll see what it does is it makes a automatic 3D effect. Now, the nice thing about doing it this way, there's some drawbacks and then there's some advantages. The drawbacks are that if you zoom in really close to the edges, you'll notice a serrated edge. The reason for that is the blend tool is just making a bunch of in-between shapes between our two sets of strokes. Right now I have it set to 50 specified steps. There's actually 50 little copies in-between here, so I'll change that to three. You'll see one, two, three that there's three copies in between. The more copies that you make, the smoother the look but I don't ever create final files out of this because no matter what, it's close as you zoom in, there's still going to be that serrated edge even if it's micro. The only time I would do that is if our bringing my vector file into Photoshop and maybe putting a little distress on it. So you're just going to lose that edge. In Illustrator for final files, especially if you're delivering them to the client, you want really perfect files as perfectly as you can get without any weird little extra points going on. Enough about that. Let's change this back to 50. That's good enough for us to see this shadow and I might actually go with that as is but the nice thing about this is it allows you to visualize your shadow in different perspectives. In other words, let me isolate that and just select the bottom piece. I can slide this over and it'll update. It's really good for visualizing how your 3D is going to look. Now, I don't like this because there's too much white space between the letters, it's distracting so I'll just undo that and go back to what we had. Now, like I said, this isn't for production, so it's great for visualization. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to make a copy of that and then I'm going to take the one that's existing and I'm going to turn down the opacity. Let me get to my transparency menu here. I'm just going to turn the opacity down. Let's say 40 percent. Now, let me select that and then paste in front that copy that I've made, the nice black one. What I want to do is get rid of that blend shapes. So what I'll do is I'll just select the bottom one ''Command X'' to cut it and then I'll select the other black stroke, the one in front and then just paste that copy behind it. We're back where we started. Let me lock this distress just so it doesn't get in the way. Now I'll select those black strokes and go object expand. That leaves us with fills. What we want to do, because this is so confusing, we're using that transparent blend shape in the back or using that as a guide. You'll see what we're doing here in a second. Let me select both of those and hit ''Merge. '' The merge filter just collapses all the points and glues everything together. What we want to do here is match our black 3D part to our gray blend shapes. I'll go ahead and with the white arrow tool, I'll just start deleting these little in-between shapes. What we'll have to do is manually draw in a few like these open ones, all the close ones we can delete. I'll just try to do this as quick as possible. We want to keep the white areas white. We just want to fill in whatever is gray in here. I'll finish all this off in fast motion and then get back to here in a second. Now I've got all the enclosed black shapes deleted. You'll just see ones on the edge that are gray and what I'll do here just so you can see a little better. I'll change the main type to blue. Now, let me go back, lock a blue type, lock the shading and I'll lock the transparent blend shape we had in the back. Again, that's just for a guide. The last thing we need to do here is to basically bridge these little gaps and we're going to do that manually and we do that by drawing a path from one to the other. Let me turn that stroke down a little bit and I'll just make a copy of that and use the pen tool that just close it back up. Now you just turn that into a fill and you have this little thing I call it a bridge piece, but it's basically just a little rectangle that's at that correct angle that all of that 3D is going. I'll change these to orange so you can just see what's going on. I'll zoom out and you'll notice all these areas that we have to span are the exact same angle and distance. You just want to snap those right into place. I would be pretty precise about it because, that's why we're doing this to get the paths really nice. You'll see how this one hangs over so I'll just get my white open arrow tool and just drag up one side of it. I'm not really worried about. I'll just move part of that, forgot to drag a copy. You hold down your option key to make a copy while you drag. Sometimes I forget to do that. I'll go ahead and speed this up and you can see how I've done this, but I'm using the same process. Again, we're using that gray blend shape in the back as our guide so we know what we need to close up. All right. Looks like we got all of them. I'll leave that art board like that so you can have this file and go in and look at it. Let me go ahead and save that and then drag a copy of that over of the art board. Again, I'll select the blue type locket, select the distress, the shading, lock it. I'll select the transparent blend shape in the back, lock that. Now I've just got the black 3D shading and then I've got these little orange bridge pieces. What I need to do now is change this back to black. Let me lock this little secondary type here too. It might look weird here for a second but again, I'm going to use the merge tool, which is that one right here. When I merge that it brought everything to the front above the type. We'll just move it back. Now, you'll notice all those little areas are encapsulated. So we can go in with our white arrow tool and just start deleting them. It's starting to look pretty good. You'll notice we have one area that I did not delete. The reason is I think those points don't actually touch. Let me just drag that over. I will hit merge again and now I can delete that little piece. Looking pretty fine there. Other thing I want to do is double-click on this black shape. Just select the black, hit select same fill color just in case and then select inverse. There's all these little interior parts that are separate strokes. That's just what happens with the merge tool so to delete and now when we select that black, it shows up as a black fill and we can go in and easily change the color.
17. Colorways: I guess what I'll show you now is let's do some colorways. The reason you do colorways, first of all, if it's for like a T-shirt or something like that. If you've always got a black shirt and a white shirt and maybe you have a gray shirt, a blue shirt, a red shirt and you want those colors to look good on all the different color shirts. The other reason is if it's a corporate logo, sometimes you need to print that corporate logo on white, and sometimes you need to print it on black and you just want to make sure it looks good on any possible combination. I haven't really thought too much about color or worried about whether the file is CMYK or RGB or anything like that yet. I'll go ahead and select that command C. I'm just going to create a new document. Let's do this one for Web RGB and I'll hit "Okay". I just pasted that in there. Let me show you what we've got here. Basically, on top we have the little shading layer that we made. We also have the blue type. Actually we still have that transparent blend shape, let me delete that. On the bottom we have our shadow. That looks like a mess just because we haven't deleted these little spaces that are underneath the blue type and then we have our little logos word that separate. One thing, just to clean this up a little more. Right now, I'll just select the blue lettering, make a copy of that, paste it right in front of the black shadow and then let's hit "Merge". Let me isolate that. Just select the black, select inverse and that's going to take everything that's not black and delete it. Now when we break apart this file, we've got shading, we've got blue type and then we've got this nice clean shadow, and then we've got our little logos word right here. Now we can have fun with color. I'm thinking about a few different little layouts. I like how this is in a nice compact shape. What I might do is try it with a circle background. Let's go with a gray background on that. You can still see the nice 3D shadow that we made. I also like it. Actually without that 3D, it changes back to black. There are absolutely infinite combinations that we can do with this. It can just be by itself like that too. The nice thing about how we've merged everything and separate it into colors is, it'll be super easy to do colorways. This also works really well with t-shirt design because if you think about t-shirt design, typically it's screen printing and you have separate screens and you change out, let's say this is a three color graphic, you change out each color. We can make that a yellow, make it all bright. We want that shading that we've made to be a tonal color of our yellow. When I make tonal colors, I like to go to the HSB, the hue saturation black slider and then you can just add maybe a little bit of black to it or that could go more orange and still look good. We'll just see what these colors look like. Play do apply different layouts and may be like this background circles actually like a dark brown. It's nice. Now on a light background, that's not going to work. Let's just pretend this is on a dark background and all of a sudden it looks good. I really like that brown actually, it's pretty nice. We can go through and just do combinations after combinations. But I think the key with doing colorways is you still want to retain the readability and the best test for that is just to squint your eyes and if you can read it then it's probably good. Let's try another one. I don't know. We could do orange, so your orange is red. Again, we'll do sample that same orange and add a little black to it. We can try different things like pop that logos word to the background color. We could change this to a brown. That'll look really nice. That's the concept for colorways. There's this infinite combinations. Just pay attention to, if you ever had a color theory class, just pay attention to color wheel and what are complimentary colors and all that stuff. I'll give you this file to you, you can go in there, play around with it. The next thing I want to show you is how to add texture or distress. When I add texture distress in Illustrator, I usually do it with Bitmap 2 files, and I'll show you about that. When I do texture distress in Photoshop, I do it a different way. I usually do with Photoshop brushes. We'll get into that in a second.
18. Using bitmap textures in Illustrator: Distressing your graphic would be to make it look vintage or whether typically or just to add some texture. Let me take this one, I'll create a new document and we're in Adobe Illustrator still, and I'll blow that up. Let me put a brown background behind it. It's pretty close to that black. I think it looks pretty nice, then I want to change this to a unsaturated tan color. I think this is a vintage look. Okay, so that looks pretty good. With Illustrator I like to use bitmap tiffs, and here's the deal with bitmap tiffs, their Photoshop files are pixel files, but they're black and white, so there's no gray going on and if it looks like there's any gray, it's actually just like a diffusion dither or a half tone. So let me show you one of these in Photoshop and let me open up one called garage texture, and this is just like grunge texture. You can see how it's just a black and white file, and when you zoom in really close, you'll notice these are just black pixels and white pixels and that's it, there's no gray, like I said. So there's no transparency in this one when it's in Photoshop, but if I take that same file and just place it in Illustrator, you can either drag it in or do a File Place and this is a really subtle texture. Just lighten up that background so you can see it. The thing you'll notice is all of a sudden it's transparent, so whatever's black, you can actually assign a color. So I can assign this black grit like a background color and see how it knocks back to the background color. I don't know if you can really see this on your screen, so let me just change it to white and you see how that is. There is a yellow, but typically when you're adding distress, you either want to go back to the background color or shade of the background color or just a black. So I selected the background color and maybe I'll just add a little darkness to it. Let me actually add in another one, and the nice thing about these, since they're transparent in Illustrator is that you can layer them up. You can just put tack on layers and layers of this distress. This one's a really not very subtle distress texture. This is a bad photocopy texture, and this was made by basically a broken photocopy machine. The thing with bitmap textures is like when you open them in Photoshop, how, when I zoomed in and it was just pixelated, they actually look a little more pixelated when you have them in Illustrator, but it's just the way Illustrator displays these things. When you go to print, say on a t-shirt or if you go File Save for web, these bitmap textures actually look really nice. Let me zoom in here, so you can see that texture looks really good. It might be a little too overwhelming for this graphic, but I just put it in there to show you the effect. So that's it with Illustrator. Other than just that vector shading we put in earlier, I wouldn't mess too much with vector distress. The reason is, if you have a lot of it that flood your graphic, you're going to have a billion points. It's going to slow your computer down, and also the thing with vector distress is, it looks vectory, it looks streamlined or live traced and I typically think it doesn't look that good where bitmap tubes routine so much more detail and the really light on your computer, they won't make your files crash or anything like that. They won't make your file size really big, so they're just perfect for Illustrator, and so that's illustrator. Let me show you how I add distress in Adobe Photoshop.
19. Adding texture with Photoshop brushes: The good thing is since we built this so nicely in Adobe Illustrator, we should be able to bring it into Photoshop layers, then it'll be really easy to color up and also distress. The easiest way to accomplish this is to bring the separate parts of your type into separate layers. I'll take my top layer, which is this logos word, and I'll create a new layer, paste in front and we lock that. Then I'll take the next highest layer, which is our little vector distress, cut that, make a new layer, paste it in front. Then the layer below that is our type, and I'll create a new layer, paste that in front. Below that is our shadow, cut that, create a new layer, paste. Now that we've got this all on separate layers, we go to file export, and we'll save this as a Photoshop PSD, hit export, and then let's choose 300 DPI, have right layers clicked and maximum edit stability clicked, and then just hit okay. Then we go to Photoshop. Let's open that file. You'll notice in Photoshop how everything is in separate layers. Now, these are all in folders in separate layers and we don't really need that, so let's just select these layers and ungroup them. I'm doing a Command, Shift G, and it looks like I had some of the stuff in separate groups within those layers, so I'll just go ahead and merge those back together. We have our logos, we have our shading, we have a type, we have a shadow, we have a background. In Photoshop, I like to add distress by using layer masks, and the reason is if you ever want to change that distress or get rid of it, or just manipulate it, you haven't messed up any of your actual artwork. It's non-destructive. I like to paint the texture into those layers with Photoshop brushes just because it's so fast. We could paint the distressing individually with these layers and get really cool effects, but what I'll go ahead and do is I'm just going to regroup those layers all into one separate from the background, and I can apply a layer mask to that group. I'll go to Layer, Layer Mask, Reveal All, and I think I have some brushes in here, let me see if they're loaded. I'll give you some of these for free by the way. This is a plastitol brush and it's a plastitol texture. What plastitol is, is it's the ink on t-shirts and it's what gives vintage t-shirts that cracked look. Because what happens is the ink dries over time and you wash it a million times and it cracks and that's what gives it that Photoshop look. All I need to do is have black as my color that I'm painting, and I paint into that layer mask. You don't paint like a paint brush where you move it around, you actually just position it and click. Let me make sure my flow is turned up to a 100 percent otherwise we won't be able to see it. I just clicked once and all of a sudden we have a really nice texture that looks like cracked plastitol ink. I'll give you that brush. Let me go back in my history and I'll undo that let me show you one more brush. Here is a bad photocopy brush, so this looks like you ran the art through a broken photocopier. Just click once, super easy. I'll show you one more. I have a vintage book cover, it's actually a book I found on the street. It's just covered in mold and super gross but that makes for a really good Photoshop distress brush. I'll give you this brush too, all you do it's a ABR file which is a Photoshop brush file, just double-click on that and it loads it into your brush pallet. You can scale these brushes up or down with your little bracket keys. I'll just click once in there and we've got a really nice texture. The other thing we can do is because this is a vertical brush, we can use our rotate view tool, images rotate this 90 degrees, zoom out a bit, and this is actually distress I want to add to the background, so we'll just add a new layer right in the middle there. I'm actually painting straight into the background, I'm not painting into a layer mask. Let me just click that once and turn our artboard back to normal. Actually let's zoom in so you can see it. That adds a really nice background texture.
20. Closing thoughts: So now it's time to wrap things up. I really hope you like my class on how to design a Typographic Logo. We started out today by talking generally about typography and logo type design. Then we went to how to come up with an idea and formulate a Thumbnail Sketch. Then from that thumbnail, we went to refining our sketch, bringing that into the computer, and then refining that design until we got a nice, clean vector-based logo. From that vector-based logo, we went to coloring it, adding texture and dimension. The possibilities are endless and it's up to you now to what you want to create. Though, remember, you can always go back to the videos if you need a refresh and also be sure to refer to the links, to all the materials and resources that I mentioned in the class. If there's one more thing you could do, please leave me a review If you liked this class and always feel free to send me an email at re@thevectorlab.com.
Ray Dombroski
