Design a Gradient Logo Illustrator Tutorial

hello there you're watching Danski the place to be to develop your creative skills and grow as a designer in this tutorial we're going to learn how to draw a colorful play logo in Adobe Illustrator so the logo that you see on screen now is the previous danske logo and that's what we're going to create so let's remove the dark background move this over to the left and we're going to create our version in this space here so selecting the polygon tool left-click on the artboard specify three is the number of sides and click OK then with the main selection tool just hold shift to scale up your triangle and again hold shift to rotate in set increments so it points to the right and you can drag in from this right anchor point just to adjust the width so we can make that a little bit narrower next if we go to edit down to copy edit paste in place we can hold shift and alt to scale towards the center and that will create a copy at the same time and then we can give this the color white and if we select the black triangle we can round off our corners in a number of different ways for using cs6 or older go up to effect down to stylize select round corners specify your radius and click OK you can then edit the radius or the round corners from the appearance panel as you like if you're using it illustrator CC or newer you can select the little dots inside the edge and just left-click these quickly and easily round off corners so let's round these off and again we can make this bigger by holding shift and alt to scale up from the center and with our white triangle we can again do the same so holding shift alt and scaling upwards now ideally we want the width around all three sides to be consistent so let's just move this white triangle to the right a little bit and we can zoom in a little bit more and let's make it a tiny bit bigger so there we go and we can drag over both of them and just bring these in a tiny bit as well just to make it a little bit more narrow similar to the existing logo on the left so once you have something that you're happy with what you can do is select the black shape and in the Pathfinder panel just select the top left option which is unite now this will mean that you can't quickly and easily round off the corners anymore however it does sometimes avoid complications further down the line okay so we've effectively created a play symbol what we're going to do next is soom in and we're just going to create these curves here so we're going to add these in so with the pen tool selected and your smart guides turned on you can go to view just look for that little tick there and you can left-click on this anchor point here you'll see it nicely snaps in place and then left click over here on that left edge and left click and drag and just drag out that curve and let go now automatically wants to follow this up with another curve however if you hold down alt and just left-click on that anchor point it will cut that for us and if we go into outline view that's command or control Y you'll see that we've created that curve absolutely fine and what we can do is just remove the fill on that as well so you can't see it here but it's definitely there and we can do the same again here so select the pen tool and we can actually create this in outline view so we're just going to create this next curve just left-click and do that try again left-click drag that out and let go hold alt and left click and it wants to carry on here but what you can do is go up just select deselect and that's definitely a shortcut worth learning and it just removes that selection okay so we're starting to get there next we're going to create this gap here so let's zoom into this bottom part and again with the pen tool we're just going to left-click and draw this line out until it meets the edge and just click anywhere out here it doesn't matter what kind of shape you create make sure that this line we're about to create now is parallel to this line here so we don't want the width to be getting thicker or thinner as it goes in it needs to be consistent so just left-click and then complete this shape back to the beginning so if we come out of outline view we can select this shape give it a white fill and it will blend into the background but give us a good idea of how it's going to look so you can see that I've made it a little bit thick there but what we can do is with the direct selection tool just hover over these points left click to select hold shift and select this other Anchor Point and then I can then use the arrow keys or my mouse to just nudge this down to adjust the width and now I can select the white triangle in the middle hold shift and select this new random white shape we've created and unite these in the Pathfinder palette so now these become one complete shape next what we're going to do is select both the black original shape we created and the white shape and now in the Pathfinder palette select subtract or minus front and what this will do is it will remove the white from the black so now if I lay a color behind this shape it's no longer white in the middle it's actually transparent so there's nothing else there so we've essentially created the symbol now the logo in a single color this is now one complete shape with these additional lines here what we're going to do is drag over all of these now and select the Live Paint Bucket tool this may be hidden under the shape builder tool so just select this tool and it doesn't matter which swatches we use at the moment just pick a swatch from your swatch palette and you'll see that it shows which segment we're going to color and we can just start to color up the different parts of our shape as I say it doesn't matter which colors you use at the moment but once you've done that just drag over everything and go to object expand leave everything selected and click OK and we can then select our shape double click to go inside it and individually select the different elements using the direct selection tool and something I like to do personally is to select these elements individually and go to edit cut just come out of my shape here from the top left and go edit paste in place sometimes shapes in Illustrator get grouped together and it's quite difficult without going into the group and then into the group again it's quite difficult to work with them so I like to go into the group use the direct selection tool to grab the shape that I want for the element I want go to edit cut come back out the group go to edit paste in place and then I know that it's just that element that I've brought back out and the blue one here on its own is fine so we've now got these three elements and we can start applying the gradients so with the red one on the left selected in fact before I do that let's just go through the different colors if you are following along and you'd like to use the exact same swatches what I'll do now is I'm just going to go through the different swatches so you can see the values that make up those colors and then you can use them if you'd like to use the same colors when following this tutorial if not feel free to skip the video at this point so to create one of those swatches just double click on the color picker and then the RGB values that were shown can be entered in these three spaces here okay so let's select this red element here now I'm working with gradients in Illustrator personally I find it easier to expand the panels out just so you can view the swatches and the gradient panel at the same time so first of all let's just start by dragging the purple swatch on to the gradient slider and we've got a few already on there so we can just left click and remove these so now I want to add the dark red so we'll drag this into the middle we can type the location here 50% so it will put that dark red exactly in the middle and then we've got the lighter red and we can just drag this onto the green on the gradient slider and it will replace that color now at the moment the gradient runs from left to right that's fine but it's not quite what we want so we can't change the angle here and we can change that to 90 and if you want to quickly reverse your gradient you can select this button and it will flip it the other way around so whether it's left to right or top to bottom so there we go we've created one next let's select the yellow and we can just click the gradient slider and it will apply a gradient by default so now what we can do is we can just drag our lighter red onto the purple at the top and you'll see that it replace it and we've got the orange e mustard yellow color let's drag that into the middle and then the lighter yellow we can drag this one on to the end and lastly we're going to select the blue and we've got be very light green so let's just drag off a swatch we don't want move that green swatch to the right you can adjust these by the way as well you can move the location around freely or you can type in a specific location and next we have its color kind of a slightly different shade of green a bit more vibrant then we're moving into the turquoise we've actually got a few more colors within this last bar so what we're going to do is bunch these up and we'll bring this one to about here something like this so try and space these is consistently apart as we can and we've got this dark one on the end here and actually there may be another swatch so let's just move these up a little bit more just one more let's see if we can squeeze that in that looks a bit more like it so again we can type the exact values so 25% the blue one in the middle will be 50% and then this one will be 75 if you want to be exact with everything now we can see here that the angles a little bit different as well so what we can do is we can type ten is the angle and you'll see that it moves the gradient round a little bit let's just zoom in let's try a bit more twenty press ENTER and we can keep going until we get something that looks a bit more like the logo on the left that's try 45 right 50 I'm going to settle on 50 so there we go I think at the top here as well it should be this lighter yellow and I can always adjust the spacing a little bit more as well and actually if we bring these up a little bit we just get that very very light green on the end there so the trick is we're trying to run the colors into each other let's just space those equally apart here we go that looks a bit more like it in fact I think this second version looks a bit better than the first and then you can adjust those gradients as you need to to get the desired result so we're finished with the original logo now we can delete that now let's select the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle it covers the entire artboard and select the fill as the dark blue a very very very dark blue and go to object arrange and center back and then we can hold shift to select all of the different elements that make up a logo go to object group and then from the top of the screen we can select this little option here select align to artboard and align this both horizontally and vertically within the artboard and there we go we've created a colorful Play logo in Adobe Illustrator as always guys please feel free to leave any questions or comments below like this video if you enjoyed it take care and I'll see you next time

Channel: Dansky

Views: 1,424,986

Keywords: adobe illustrator, illustrator, illustrator cc 2017, how to design a logo, how to design a logo in illustrator, design a logo in illustrator, design a logo, logo design, logo design tutorial, learn logo design, illustrator logo tutorial, illustrator design tutorial, illustrator tutorial, icon design tutorial, how to design icons, logo, logo design illustrator, design, tutorial, adobe, monogram logo, monogram logo illustrator, icon, icon design, illustrator gradient tutorial

Id: W-p3MojvdBA

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Crealone]

Thanks for that tutorial and the short cuts!

[u/Feather-Flag-Nation]

Actually meant 15 minutes, not 5! But it is a great tutorial!