10 Tips to Get Better at Logo Design

designing a logo can be great fun especially when you have an effective workflow for turning clever ideas into polished vector designs in this video i will share with you tips and techniques i picked up and developed in the last 15 years working as a graphic designer [Music] it is almost impossible to create something exceptional without first having a really good brief and it doesn't only apply to logo design it's pretty much true for every kind of creative project so your responsibility as the designer is to really make sure that you got every detail right before you get started on a project so you have to sit down with the client if possible or talk through the brief or the objectives that they gave you and if anything is not clear make sure you ask questions it really depends on your relation with the client whether they want to see some examples of your work before and maybe point out some things that they like from it or maybe even look at competitors logos and again ask the client which are the ones that they prefer however normally i prefer to stay away from the creative choices in the beginning and concentrate on things like the target audience who are the typical customers that the client would like to impress and want to get their attention and also it is very important to set the expectations right at the very beginning so you have to agree on the deliverables what you are going to present how many variations the client can expect from you also how many rounds of revisions you will be able to supply for the agreed price and finally of course you always need to ask for a deadline that's a good thing for both you and the client because it's going to keep things moving and it will give a structure to your creative process now before you agree to anything always remember that you should never over promise so make sure that whatever you agree to you're not only capable to deliver but also you most likely will be able to exceed the expectations for instance if there is a tight deadline and you know that you can do let's say three logo variations in a day then instead count and promise only two for each day that you are going to work on the project this way you can keep your client happy and they will become a return customer because again you exceed their expectations and for this video the project that i'm using as an example is just a fictional creative brief one of many creative projects that we provide to our pro member students and i'm going to talk a little bit more about this program but first let's move on to the second most important stage of the logo design process which is the research phase or gathering inspiration now for this i normally use milanot which is a brilliant online tool where you can really gather all visual assets or examples that you would like to use for a project and if you're not familiar with the tool the link is in the description below so go and check it out now of course you can also use pinterest boards or even create mood boards in photoshop whatever you are familiar with the important thing is to collect as many examples as you can and organize them into themes or categories whatever is going to make sense for you you can prioritize looking at competitors logos and logos from the same industry however that might give you a little bit of a tunnel vision and it's good to have a wider spectrum of examples so for instance with this project even though it's about a farmer's market i would broaden my search i would look at examples for organic food healthy living even outdoor activities whatever has a similar type of audience is going to work for research and besides seeing many examples the main reason why you are doing your research is to be inspired and to have ideas laid out in front of you for this brief i organize my research into six main categories based on their style and i always make sure that i don't let myself influence too much by the examples that i collected or the categories that i created they are great for setting some direction and give a bit of a structure for my process but i always keep myself some freedom to explore and to even cross in between these categories that i create the next stage of the process is definitely the most fun and the most creative one this is when you start sketching now if you're not good at drawing don't worry because your sketches can be very simple they can be rough thumbnails instead of being very detailed and to be honest it is not good to create too detailed sketches anyway because again they might force you to really follow everything and add all the same details once you get into illustrator so instead it's good to keep them a little bit rough and depending on your drawing skills you can judge what works for you but please remember never to jump into illustrator straight after you've done your research you can start sketching already while you are researching because if an idea comes while you see some cool examples you should note it down and you should record it because it is so easy to lose and forget some of those brilliant sparks that you get from looking at some inspiring work also it's good not to limit yourself how many sketches you create i would say minimum 3 is good and probably maximum 20 but you can have as many as you want and if you have more than 10 i would always say it's good to filter the ideas down already maybe select around five six that stands out and that you feel like is worth developing further now once you have your sketches ready it's time to jump into illustrator and what i would normally do is to set up a template layer so that just helps to keep the sketches in the background and have everything faded so i can work easily on top of it so here you can see i already placed in these images they are just simple jpegs and then i'm going to double click on the layer and choose template and then set the dim to around 20 you can keep it higher or lower whatever works for you but i prefer to keep it quite low in terms of visibility and this layer can easily be turned on and off but by default it's going to also be locked so that just allows you to work easily on a separate layer on top of it and it's important to create that empty new layer because illustrator won't let you to work on a template layer now once you start working and adding details you will still see the template underneath and occasionally you might want to just turn it off and turn it back on to be able to see it without the sketch however if you have a large monitor or even better a second screen there is another method that you can use just go to the window menu and choose new window this is going to open the same document as a separate window so it is a linked document it's not a separate document you can see here on the top it will say version one version two and just so we can see together i'm going to choose arrange tile so that way we can see the two windows side by side and this is when you have a second screen you can just drag one of these windows onto that other monitor but for now i'm going to select this window here on the right and i'm going to turn off the template on that one which will only affect that window on the right and not the one on the left even though it's the same file having two separate windows allows you to even see different layers at the same time so you can continue working with either one of these and the changes will be visible on both of them at the same time this is extremely useful specifically for logo design but you can also use this method to have one of the versions zoomed out while the other one is zoomed in so you can work on small details but always keep an eye on the overall design and you should never forget looking at your logo from a distance anyway because if you are always zoomed in you will end up adding too many little details that won't even be properly visible once the logo is in use and printed on a small business card for instance so having two windows in illustrator is useful for many reasons and of course even though it's two windows you have to save it only once and you don't have to worry about accidentally closing one of them because as long as one of them is open you will always be able to maintain and keep whatever changes you made now before we look at the other designs i created for this project and also some other useful methods in illustrator here are some examples of the work that our pro member students submitted for this brief and i'm always amazed and impressed by the variety of different concepts and ideas that each student comes up we're very proud to have such an amazing community of students who are creative passionate and also supportive helping each other to improve i honestly feel like the best way of learning is by doing so besides watching online courses and learn how to use specific tools like illustrator the fastest way you can improve is by actually working on projects and the safest way to start out is not to work on real projects for real clients but instead of working on made-up briefs like this one which could be easily a life project it has its brief and its deliverables but instead of presenting to the client you are presenting to me and i'm giving my feedback that will help you to improve and most of our students have to go through one or two rounds of review before they get their logos finalized and approved and being able to accept the criticism and take on the feedback and improve your work is so important just like for professional athletes they have to push themselves to improve the same thing is true for creatives so you have to get out of your comfort zone to be able to improve now jumping back to illustrator you could see that i was drawing everything over the sketches and recreating everything with vectors however at this point i'm not adding any fill colors yet no gradients no colors just pure black and white details the main reason i'm doing that is to be able to concentrate on more important things that will define a good composition like contrast line density hierarchy and balance let me give you a quick example if i zoom closer on this design i remember originally i had these branches here at the bottom with the same stroke width as the rest of the details so you can see currently these ones are a little bit thinner than the other lines here on the top so if i go into and edit this which by the way is a symbol and i increase the size of the strokes to 5 which is the same as the rest of them it will update on both sides because it was set up as a symbol but when we zoom out we can see how it looks with five point stroke size and how it was with three points so once again there's the five point and there's the three points now it is a very subtle difference but you have to always ask yourself is this helping the composition is that an important detail there to have such a big emphasis on it because all of those compressed details the leaves next to each other really create a busy and dense detail there and the question is always do we need it is it helping the composition and in my opinion it works better with a little bit less density so the focus can move more towards the center of the composition where we have the carrot and the little illustration of the farm here is another example how important to get the line density right here i went with a little bit more traditional look for the logo but you can see again that i made a distinct division between the lines that are used for the actual carrot illustration in the middle and the thinner lines in the background which is used more like as a pattern so for instance if i select these lines and increase them up to two points to match the same thickness as the carrot it might get a little bit overpowering it's not making it worse for sure and maybe the client actually prefers this way however i feel like keeping the line density lower on the less relevant details is always helping to pop the important details and get those in focus now i briefly mentioned symbols and i would use them whenever i have multiple instances of the same object because by having a symbol setup you can just make changes on one and it will roll out the changes to all the instances it's like working with components in adobe xd and i can show it to you here on this design with the carrots and by the way besides using the carrots here as a radial pattern i also wanted to go for a little bit of a hidden meaning here which you might not notice when you first look at this but this thing here on the top together with the carrots is sort of forming a basket which is a quite nice symbol that goes with the whole theme of a market it's great if you can pack these hidden messages and metaphors into your compositions because with that you can increase the proportional density of your logo which is a very important term and you should definitely learn about it it basically means that the less elements you are using and the more meanings you can pack in your logo the better so it's basically like a ratio between the elements you are using and the meanings packed into your logo and the higher that number is the proportional density the better your work is but try to keep it at least around one which means that you are using around the same amount of elements as the amount of meanings that you packed into your logo but coming back to our symbols you can see here on the bottom right we have the symbols panel and all i have to do is either double click on one of these elements here to start making changes to it or i can also double click on the thumbnail here and let's just say we are going to move these lines a little bit closer so i'm just going to move that up and this other one also we will move down okay now if i double click outside it will immediately update all of the elements straight away in general whenever you work in illustrator you want to be efficient and do everything the smart way it's not only going to save you time once when you set it up but also whenever you need to come back and make changes after the revisions from the client so work smart and save time a good example would be how i do shading on logos or illustrations in general so for this all i need is to just duplicate an element in this case let's just get this fun little carrot character so copy and paste in front that's ctrl or command c and then control command f if we look at our layers panel we can see that there's two of the same objects and by the way i just double clicked on this group to isolate it and that's why everything else in the background is grayed out and now that we have this second version what i would normally do first is to change it to multiply blend mode and usually reduce the opacity maybe down to 50 percent now that's not always necessary it depends on the colors or the shading that you're going for but besides that i also like to slightly change the hue and maybe make it a little bit more warm or cooler again whichever you prefer but by doing this now we have two versions we have the original color and the shading color or the shadow color on top of it and now that we have this created we can open another important panel called transparency where we just have to click on make mask now by default this is going to completely hide this object which is great we don't actually need to do anything else apart from selecting the mask so here in this transparency panel you just have to click on that black thumbnail and it also shows in the layers panel it tells you that you are now working within the opacity mask of that object so there won't be any layers visible at this point but now to reveal parts of this object i am going to use the blub brush tool which is here in the toolbar shift b is the shortcut and with the square brackets you can increase or decrease the size of your brush and you want to set up the fill color to be white you don't need a stroke color here so we can just set that to none and by drawing with writing and opacity mask you are going to reveal all of those details that you paint over so what i'm going to do here is to just nicely paint over this section here on the right maybe just show a little bit more of the shading there just under the eyebrow and then probably i will make my brush a little bit smaller and just go over here under the other eyebrow and maybe under these lines as well just to add a little bit more depth and with a little bit even smaller brush size i'm just drawing under the mouth and maybe just add a bit of shading under the eyes as well so instead of using the pen tool to draw these details or using the eraser to delete out of the original object we have everything saved into this mask and if i change my mind i can even move these details around within the opacity mask so for instance i can zoom closer move these shapes around resize them delete them individually without affecting the original object there's just one thing that you have to remember whenever you work with an opacity mask and that is to get out of the mask so you have to go back to the transparency panel and click on the other thumbnail and make sure that you see everything in your layers panel again now we are still in isolation mode but to also get out of that i'm going to double click outside of the illustration so we are back to seeing our main layers and we can continue working as normal now i have one last tip for you and that is to keep in touch with your clients throughout the process so don't just wait until the very end when you have the color versions already send them even maybe the sketches but definitely the vector outline versions without the colors because this can really help you to find the direction that the client prefers so you can really focus your time and effort on those variations that the client liked and finally when you're presenting your work to the client make it look cool and include some nice mock-ups because it's always easier to visualize how it could look as a final product and that's all i wanted to cover in this video of course there's a lot more to talk about when it comes to logo design so if you're interested in this topic please let me know in the comment section below and i can cover different techniques and focus on more specific styles in the future if this is the type of content that you enjoy and finally if you fancy working on creative briefs like this one make sure you check out our pro membership for which the link is in the description below thanks a lot for watching like and share this video if you enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified whenever we release new videos click on the link on my right and start your membership today to get access to over 200 hours of training courses and personal mentoring by me and my team of creative professionals have fun learning guys and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 170,015

Rating: 4.964438 out of 5

Keywords: 10 Tips to Get Better at Logo Design, design, illustrator, design a logo, design a logo in illustrator, hidden messages in logos, logo design, 6 mind blowing logo design, graphic designer, getting started, yesimadesigner, adobe illustrator tutorials, graphic design tutorials, adobe illustrator vector tutorial, adobe illustrator tutorial, opacity mask, line density, design process, proportional density, logo design workflow, shading in illustrator, symbols in illustrator

Id: P_KnKGOzrLI

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021