Create Professional Logos in an Instant! | Adobe Illustrator

hi guys a big welcome to this envato tips plus course creating professional logos in an instant my name is Grace fossil I'm a graphic designer and I'm obsessed with branding design one thing that I've encountered a lot in my work is that clients often want logo concepts very quickly so they might ask you to pitch some ideas have been a week or even a couple of days if they want something really soon your instinctive reaction to this might be to panic and go into creative meltdown which used to happen to me quite a fair bit but honestly there are techniques that you can use to design incredible professional standard logos in very little time Pro design is working within agencies often use these time-saving techniques to create multiple concepts so we're going to take our cues from the pros and see how you can use this approach in your own work in this course I'm going to show you how to create a versatile logo kit a set of elements that you can combine in different ways to create a wide variety of logo designs I'll show you how to choose a style for your kit and how to sketch and vectorize designs for icons and frames creasing the key building blocks of your kit we'll finish up by looking at how you can save time by choosing typefaces that works seamlessly with your chosen style and also how to format your logo typography to make it look as professional as possible in the next lesson we'll make a start by taking a look at how to pick a design style for your logo kit so I'll see you there in just a moment hi there so I want to start by talking to you about where to begin with your logo design process so let's say that you get a brief from the client and they want to see a variety of logo designs for their brand the first thing you need to do is learn a little bit more about the brand and their sector let's say as an example that the client is a park service so the very first thing you need to do is get online and look them up do they have an existing brand is it pretty developed in which case you need to accommodate that when designing or is it actually a bit sketchy if the latter you've got a bit more freedom to explore some new ideas take a look also at the brand sector and their competition what sort of logo style colors and typography are used by the brands competitors to appeal to their audiences making notes of a few common things that you can spot now that you know a bit more about your brand you can start to match that up with a logo style all logos need to be not only appropriate for the brands industry but also they need to look at temporary choosing a design style which is gonna suit your brand is a sensible first step let's take a look at some of the dominant trends in logo design at the moment to give you some ideas vintage and hand-drawn styles are still going really strong they've got a nostalgic friendly appeal which makes them a great fit for independent businesses like coffee shops and small retailers another style which is becoming increasingly popular is the low poly geometric trend these designs are youthful and ultra modern and they make a great fit for start-up businesses or technology branding we're also seeing more cartoon design Styles emerging in logos at the moment which add a bit of fun and personality these would be a great fit for the right sort of brand if the brand you're designing for has more of a formal corporate feel than a style which uses abstract shapes and color gradients to give it that slightly 3d effect might work really well the style that I'm going to work with in the lessons coming up is one of my favourite trends out there at the moment line arts is a really simple minimal style but it looks really fresh and cutting edge and it works for a wide range of brands and sexes we're going to work towards creating these logo designs and I'm going to show you a basic three-step process which you can use after you finish the course to tackle just about any logo design project with confidence so now that we've done a bit of research about our brand and chosen a design style to think suit it we can make a start on the first building block of our logo kit which is creating icons for the lessons going forward you'll need to have access to Adobe Illustrator which if you don't have already you can download a 30-day free trial of software from Adobe com of course if you prefer using other vector software like Inkscape or Coral drawl that's fine - the interface will just be a little bit different but you can still put the logo designs together without a problem okay so in the next lesson we're going to get started straightaway so I'll see you there hi there guys welcome back we're gonna dive right into the first creative stage of designing our logo kids we're going to start with creating a series of icons which are the symbolic or image based building block of a logo design running with our fictional brief of designing logo concepts or a park service let's say that we're going to take nature as a broad theme for our logo kit the first thing that I would like you to do is to pick up a large sketch pad anything around a three or bigger is best plus a pen or pencil so what I want you to focus on is taking just 10 or 15 minutes to draw some very rough sketches of icons so what I mean when I say icon it's a very simple graphic which is made up of just a few lines or shapes as we've decided to opt for our line art style and the nature theme you can use these as starting points for drafting some of your own ideas so try drawing simple minimal icons to represent nature elements like trees flowers birds animals mountains so get started on that now you may want to find a quiet spot away from your computers to get really creative with your drawings and given the theme you might also find it useful to draw outside so go ahead pause the video and we'll review our work in about 15 minutes time okay so how is that did you genuinely take only about 15 minutes to your sketches or did it take a bit longer if it did no worries drawing minimal designs takes practice and you really do have to get used to moving on from one idea to the next very quickly which can be difficult at first let's take a look at your sketches as an example here's mine so can you spot any designs in your own work which looks stronger than others you can see here that I've scribbled out a few of mine which didn't work so well but there are a few of us here that I think have some potential once you've got a few maybe even just five or so sketches that have some potential you can move over to illustrator so what I'm going to do is show you how I'm going to vectorize some of my own icons based on the sketches that I've got here if you want to use your own sketches as a starting point instead that's fine too you can also find the final vectorized version of these icons in the resources accompanying this lesson if you want to open those up and have a look at them okay so for this stage we're going to need Adobe Illustrator so let's open it up and once it's open head up to file new keep that all as it is and then click OK alright so let's take a look at our sketches and choose one to vectorize first sometimes if the design style is a bit more complex I like to scan in the design and trace it in Illustrator using the shape and line tools but for these line art designs which very simple is quite good practice to create these by sight alone I'm gonna start with this little owl sketch she's pretty cute so I look first for the sorts of shapes and lines which make up the design and then match these to the right tool for the job so I'm gonna start would be ellipse tool which is here on the tools panel inside the rectangle tool menu holding down shift is going to keep that circle perfectly proportioned cool so mark out the center point of the circle I'll need to bring in some guides so to do that go to view show rulers and then drag a guide down from the top to the center point and one from the left ruler to okay great then for the curved lines of the beak I can create this using the arc tool which you'll find here in the line segment tools menu I'm just going to draw out roughly and then I'm going to switch to the direct selection tool which is a on your keyboard to manipulate the anchor points directly then to create symmetry I select the line I edit copy it and edit paste then right-click or control-click if you're on a Mac and transform reflect and choose vertical okay and then we can move that over into position then for those cute little BOTS and eyes let's take the ellipse tool again and hold shift get that about the right size and then copy and paste that over to the other side so as a quick exercise I'd like you to either download the vectorized icons provided with this lesson and take a look at how those have been put together in Illustrator or if you have a bit more time on your hands have a go of vectorizing a few of your own sketches in the next lesson we'll look at how you can refine your vector icons by adjusting details like stroke caps and color okay so you might have drawn up a few of your sketches on illustrator and they're probably looking really nice but there are a few things that you can do to make your vectors look particularly professional the panel that's going to be super handy for this is the stroke panel and this is docked over on the right side of your workspace over here or you can find it up in the window menus so the first thing you're going to want to play around with is the weight of the stroke so for line art designs it's particularly important and often you'll need to apply a slightly heavier stroke weight to make sure that your icons going to stand out and be visible at small signs I'm going to increase the weight for the circle and arcs that make up my hour icon so you can judge the sort of fitness that works for your own logo you want designed to look nice and bold when viewed from afar so a higher start weight usually looks bit better if you're creating a series of icons within the same style you should note that you'll have to make the weight consistent across all the designs as well the next thing to tweak is the cap of your lines so the cap defines how the ends of your lines will appear switch into a round cap I think just has this really nice smoothing effect which just helps the icon to look a bit more professional this is the central option by all means stick with a straight ended cap if it looks better for your style because I want to get my logos more friendly contemporary look around and it's just going to edge it into that sort of territory okay that's looking good so just these little tweaks can make a really big difference to how professional your logos look right now let's look at the color of this owl now one thing you have to allow for when you're designing logos is that in certain circumstances you might find that your logo can only be rendered as a black and white silhouette or a grayscale image and this can happen when people want to produce print items like letterheads very quickly in house so as long as your logo design can work in black and white as well as color then you've got a really versatile logo design on your hands having said that most logos look a bit better with a little bit of color and even if you're wanting all or part of the design to stay quite neutral in color adjusting it from a harsh black is going to look a lot better first thing to do is to expand the color panel and click on the panels new at the top right and just check that you're working in CMYK mode RGB is fine if you're just creating a logo design but online then expand the swatches panel which you can also find dr. over here to the right of the workspace and head into the panels menu and choose new swatch I'm going to show you this really flattering gray swatch which just softens logos which you might otherwise set in black so we want process color for the type CMYK for the color mode and let's adjust the levels to cyan 53.5% a magenta 44.5% yellow 42 and key which is black 28.5% we can name this logo gray and click OK and now you can see it's been added to the swatches panel so let's apply it okay nice the last thing you need to do to make your icons ready to be used as part of a logo design is to make this image into a vector hole to do this drag your mouse across all the elements making up your icon and right click and choose group then head straight up to objects path and outline stroke and finally go to window and Pathfinder and in the window that opens choose the first option on the left which is called unite it's a now you'll be able to scale your design up and down without losing the proportions of the stroke okay fantastic so now head up and file save your work as an illustrator file name it something like icons I'm going to come back to this in the next lesson so keep it open if you're heading straight over to the next video I'll see you in just a moment hi guys welcome back you'll find alongside this lesson that the resource file called icons which has a trio of finalized icons including the owl that we looked at in the last lesson and also a deer head and a tree design as well as before for this section of the course you can either work with these icons alongside me or use your own icons and apply the same sort of techniques that were looking at here ok so now we've got our icons ready we've outlined them and United them to make a scalable design and now we want to move on to the next building block of our logo kit which is to create framing elements now frames aren't essential for creating logos you can easily use an icon on its own or you can pair the icon with just a simple piece of typography but in many cases particularly with these minimal sorts of logos a frame is just a really nice way of pulling the design together and making it look really polished ok so let's have a look at where to start with your frames to make all oger kits really flexible you can create a set of standard frame shapes that are going to be interchangeable and work with a number of different icons and type arrangements let's make a really simple example to start with okay so a frame doesn't have to be a rectangle or a square it's really anything that's going to frame the focal points of your design which are the icon and the text so I'm going to head onto a fresh page and use the line segment tool to create a nice straight horizontal line across the page holding shift down while I do that and then copy and paste that below give it a bit of space you might want to bring out guys and the rulers to make sure you've got the two lines perfectly lined up with each other and then you can format these to match the style of your icons so let's set the stroke weight from the stroke panel does something quite similar to but a bit less than your icon stroke quite I'm gonna go for 13 1 3 points and adjust the cap to a round cap to match it as well if you've done that an easy way to bring over the matching color is to head over to your icons canvas select one of the designs and copy and then head back over and paste that in go to the swatches panels menu choose new swatch and ok and then apply that to the stroke color of the lines to make this frame work really well for a logo we can allow for the main brand name between lines and a little gap below for a subheading like an establishment year or a motto so to do that take the scissors tool which is C on your keyboard and snip once here to the left of the lower line and then select him delete the right hand section of the line but copy and paste that short line over to the right side to mirror it and just as we did with the icons to make this whole thing scalable select everything and right-click and select group then head up to objects path and outline stroke okay so that's a very very simple example of a framing element and I'll give you a little sneak preview of the final product so this can give you an idea of the kind of layout that you could put together using this sort of frame okay so ready to try putting together under the frame awesome so another framing style is to take a shape and then make this into a usable frame in Illustrator you've already got a few ready-to-use options by using the shape tools which you can find over here in the tools panel under the rectangle tools menu so circles using the ellipse tool polygons too can look really good and you've even got a star shape here too which is pretty fun but you can also make custom shapes using the drawing tools yourself so let's say we want to create a triangle shaped frame the easiest way to create custom shapes is to use the pen tool and get very familiar with using guides so take the pen tool or hit P and click once again and three times to bring that shape together now you want your triangle to be completely even so bring out a guide from the left-hand ruler to the center point of the triangle and then select the triangle and bring down a guide from above to the horizontal center point now you want to use the direct selection tool which is a to select the left and right hand anchor points and shifters about until is looking symmetrical okay cool let's format strokeweight make it a bit chunkier and let's add a dash of color as well so go to the swatches panel choose new swatch and make a gold tone by setting the percentage levels to nine twenty 384 and 24 let's name it gold and click OK then when you're happy with the frame head up to object path and outline stroke as with it before okay super simple and as an example here's how that shape might integrate into a whole logo design so here I've used the scissors tool two simple way around the edges of the tank and the antlers to give the effect that the frames being pushed behind the deer and the type so I hope that's given you a little taste of how framing elements can add that little extra touch to your logos and how easy they are to make it can be as simple as a couple of lines or be a shape or a badge or a border it can have strong angles like this triangle or have a more fluid curvy design and each of these frames are going to bring a different quality to your design in the next video we're going to move on to the final and a really important building block of your logo kit and this is typography so make sure you save your frames document in Illustrator and I'll see you over in the next section in just a moment hey there although your kit is really starting to shape up now we've got some icons ready and some frames to help pull the design together but there's something that's still missing and it's gonna be keys to giving you a logo personality clarity and a distinct voice and that thing is typography when it comes to typography for your logos you've got two choices you can either create custom type which is going to be completely unique to your logo and in very particular cases such as if you're designing for quite a high-profile business or a big branding budget this might be the best choice but in general is absolutely fine to use an existing typeface it's just dependent on a few conditions first of all the font has to be licensed for commercial work so this means that the typeface designer has agreed that you can use that font for designs that are going to be distributed or sold so sometimes on font sites we'll see that you can use a font for personal use or commercial use if you're going to create a logo for someone else you need to have a commercial license the good news is that you don't always have to pay for commercially licensed fonts there are some great free resources out there and we'll take a look at that in a minute the other thing that you need to be aware of is that most fonts are only licensed for you to use that commercially so if you're designing a logo for a client and you're using a font in the design it's not legal for you to send them the font file they will need to pay for the license before using the logo one way of getting around this is to either customize an existing font to make it more unique so for example you might tweak the shape of some of the letters to give it a different design another option is to simply outline the text once you've formatted it and send this as a vector design to the client by outlining the font you're avoiding sharing a license font file itself so with this in mind the font world is actually your oyster as long as you're aware of the licensing requirements and how to share your final design legally with your client then you're able to select a typeface it's going to make a great team with your icons and your frames we're gonna have a little break from Illustrator and have a browse on why in this lesson I'm going to show you some my favorite sites for finding commercially licensed phonce so you might be able to find something great for your own designs in the future there are tons of sites out there that sell fonts or offer them for free but I have a few failsafe thighs I find it always come back to for a combination of quality variety and value as well one of my go-to ziz my fonts calm which is a great site for finding really cutting-edge stuff if you go to the hot new fonts page you get a real sense of the sort of type style for a new and exciting and starting to trend but the designers you can also find some fantastic fonts on and vaso elements and again this has a very current feel to it as we mentioned earlier it's really important for your logo designs to feel contemporary and relevant and a typeface that just feels really right for now is gonna give you that straightaway as you're browsing these font selections online you've got to start thinking about how a typeface is going to relate to the designs that you've already created it's got to match the style and the personality of the icons I feel like it's just a very natural part of the logo so I'm browsing on here and I'm just constantly analyzing the design and the mood of the fonts that I'm seeing and looking for commonalities of the logo elements I've already built so even though something like Addington is a really elegant serif it's not quite feeling right for my wine art style and actually something like Berg and sans feels a bit more in tune with the minimal but curvy style of my icons so that would be an option to consider I want to take you over to one of my favorite font sites which every designer on a budget comes back to a lot and that is font squirrel comm so what's great for us here is that all the fonts are not only free but they're licensed for commercial use too which is great so have a browse through what's hot what's recent and get a sense of the sort of type style that you're looking for when you can narrow down a bit more head over to the classification panel and choose categories that make a good fit so I'm going to choose sums geometric which i think is gonna find fonts that will match up well with my existing style okay so instantly I love the look of this font which called acre it's geometric and contemporary but it's also got something about it it's a nice rounded friendly font so we can get a comedian from font spring which is another really nice site and you've also got the option of testing your own logo text from here and purchasing other weights as well okay awesome so once you found the font that you think is the one then you can download it install it onto computer and you're ready to start playing around with formatting and we'll look at that in the next lesson hey guys so I showed you in the last video where you can saw some fantastic bongs to use on your logo designs and once you found a form that just had the right style that complements your icons it really does have the potential to transform your designs and make them look really professional in this video I'm going to show you the basics of formatting typography in Illustrator and take a look at a few handy techniques for getting the most out of your type the first example I'm going to look at is using the owl icon I crashed earlier to make a whole logo design for a cafe business conveniently for me it's called the owl cafe so here I am with my owl icon again you can use similar techniques with your own icon designs if you prefer for this logo I'm actually going to use the text as a sort of frame instead of using a shape or lines and this is a nice way of designing a logo if you have to drop in quite a bit of text let's start with the main brand name I'm going to position this either side of the icon and keep it nice and simple so take the type tool or hit T drag to create a text frame and type in the first half of the brand name in this case owl to format this you're going to want to head up to window type and character okay so let's increase the font size to get it proportional and then select your chosen font from the drop down menu at the top of the window so I'm going for acre and a medium weight okay cool now one thing that makes type always look better on logos is a bit of tracking which is the space between all the characters you can find this here and I'm going to make it really generous at 3 to 7 let's get our position centrally next to the icon and pull down a guide to identify the baseline of the text and then you want to copy and paste the text frame move that over to the right side and edit text to read the remainder of the brand name let's head over to the swatches panel and give this text a bit of color choose new swatch and create a green swatch with levels 80 120 949 24 and click OK and then apply this to both text frames awesome so said client wants to add a bit more text than the standard name alone for example they want to put the famous before the brand name and add an establishment date to let's do the date first I select one of the existing text frames copy and paste it and position below the out icon you might want to pull out a guide to check that's definitely central from the controls panel at the top of the workspace choose align Center for the text let's also reduce the font size a bit and pull the tracking down here to about 250 then highlight the text and edit copy it but don't paste it quite yet everything in our design is looking ok but it's also looking a bit straight and bringing in a curve in some of the text it's gonna really frame that design so to do that select the ellipse tool which is L on the keyboard and drag to create a rough circle over the center of the design we want the text to curve above the top of the head of the owl icon now I'll go to the type tool menu and choose the type on a path tool click once on the top left corner of the circle and you've transformed it into a path so now you can edit paste to drop in your text and we only need a couple of tweaks or just the text content adjust the font size the tracking a little bit to to about 200 and awesome we've made a complete logo formatting your text like in the way we've just done is actually only one part of creating a strong typographic look for your logo designs you also need to consider the layout of the type and how the text is effectively going to be mapped onto your design so what do I mean by that well let's take a quick look at a couple of examples in this our Cafe logo example the text is mapped around a central icon and uses a mix of straight base lines and curved base lines to frame the icon in the middle you can see this as a sort of solar-system style layout with the icon being circled by type this example which uses two lines as a frame is a little bit different this encourages you to map the text inside of the lines making it central focus of the logo the tree icons are placed above this creating a top-heavy layout this sort of type layout is perfect for when you want the focus to be more on the brand name down on the icon this example is a little bit different again in the way that the text is mapped out as with the owl cafe logo the icon is the central focus but the type has equal weighting to the icon with it being placed both above and below the deer head the triangle frame is strong with it been set in a different color it feels more like a backdrop to the icon in text which is still center stage now that you have your logo kit building blocks in place you can play around with the arrangement of elements and experiment with different ways of mapping typography onto your logos the way that you choose to map the text out will depend on how much prominence you want to give the brand name as well as how it fits with the icon and frame that you choose in the next and final video we'll review the skills that we've covered in this course and also take a look at some tips for going forward with your logo design hi guys welcome back and congratulations is in order you've completed the sim photo - it splits course creating professional logos in an instant I've shown you how you can design awesome logos on time it's really short by creating a set of building blocks including icons phrase and typography this is a great way of showing a client lots of concepts with much less time and effort than having to reinvent the wheel for each new logo design so let's take a quick recap of the process for designing logos when you're in one of those time-pressured situations first up so you get the client brief and then you need to get online and do some research about their brand and also about the sort of branding adopted by other companies in their sector this is going to give you a pretty good idea of what sort of logo designs might be appropriate for the client then it's time to pick a design style for your logo kit it saves a lot of time by focusing your energies on one strong style which you think will be a good fit for the client whether you opt for vintage geometric line art or something else this is going to give you some direction for drafting your designs next up it's time to get sketching some ideas that icons which are the image based or symbolic parts for your logo design when you've got some ideas you can translate these into digital drawings using a vector program like illustrator you'll also need a nice selection of framing elements to use in your designs such as lines shapes and badges these don't need to take up a lot of your time but these simple elements can really help to pull your logos together finally you can add a finishing touch to your designs in the form of typography you can combine text with your icons and frames to create a whole design and taking a little bit of time to map out the typography well and format the texts are really high standard it's going to elevate your logos to a really professional level and there we have it that's a step by step process for tackling anytime pressured logo design project and to be honest even if you've got a bit more time on your hands following a work process that has distinct steps is always really helpful I will mean you don't spend more time than you need on certain stages of the project so where can you go from here well the logo design world is completely open to you and I hope this short course has given you some confidence to have a go at tackling professional logo design projects if you're still not ready to dive into some client work you can have a go at setting yourself a fictional brief or try using the process we've looked at to design logo concepts for your own freelance or small business brand try experimenting with different logo styles different time frames for completing the process until you really feel like you're getting into the swing of it and above all remember to have fun with designing logos it's definitely one of the most enjoyable and creative aspects of graphic design which admittedly can be difficult to remember when you're under a lot of time pressure but I hope you get a lot of enjoyment out of it and now have the confidence that you can create amazing logo designs whatever time you have to spare so a big thank you for watching and make sure to check out the other great courses and tutorials available on tips plus

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Keywords: Logo design, logo design in Adobe Illustrator, illustrator, adobe illustrator, logo design illustrator, adobe illustrator cc, text logo, illustrator logo design, logo illustrator, adobe illustrator tutorial, illustrator logo, illustrator tutorial logo design, logo design process, illustrator logo design tutorial, logos, how to make a logo, how to design a logo, logo design tutorial, how to design a logo in illustrator, logo design in illustrator, graphic design, envato

Id: C0t1bMhKZ0Q

Length: 35min 10sec (2110 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 29 2019