Inkscape Tutorial: Design a Logo

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can design this logo using Inkscape and at any point in this tutorial you could look down at the bottom left hand side of my screen to see which mouse clicks and keystrokes I'm using so I'll minimize this and I'll get started the first thing we'll do in Inkscape is just make sure that the view is set to custom and then we'll zoom in at a hundred percent and then I'm going to open up the align and distribute menu with this button up here we're going to want last selected chosen from that drop-down and then we'll open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button up top there so the first thing I'm going to create here is a polygon so come over here to the stars and polygons tool and up here in this toolbar I'm going to choose polygons and corners I'm going to choose six and then I'll hold you I'll just hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and click and drag on the canvas to create a polygon where the corners are going vertically like that we don't want it sitting flat we want the corners going vertically like that and then we can let go of that and we'll go back to the Select tool I'm just going to take the opacity of this and bring this down about in half and whatever the width of this is I'm going to come up here to the vs. W that's the width I'm just going to click and drag over that and highlight it and just hit ctrl + C to copy that whatever that width is go ahead and copy that and I'm going to turn on this lock icon so that when we change the height or width values up here the rest of it will scale accordingly in proportion so once we've done that I'll put this over here to the left a little bit off to the side I'll come over to the circles and ellipses tool and I'll hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and click and drag to create a perfectly round circle like that and I'm going to turn this red and I'll go back to the Select tool and I'm going to take this whatever the width is here I'm going to click and drag over that and highlight it press backspace and I'll just press ctrl + V to paste that paste the width of the polygon in there and then hit enter and now the width of the circle should match the width of the polygon and with that circle selected I'll hold shift and click on the polygon and in the align panel I'll Center it on the vertical axis and then Center it on the horizontal axis and I'll put this back over here towards the center of the page and then we can click off of this deselect everything so what I'll do now is I'll click on this circle and then I'll right-click that and go to duplicate and then hold shift in the keyboard and click on the black polygon so we have them both selected and go to path difference and then paths break apart and with that and what that did was it I'll click off this deselect it broke that up into all these different little pieces here so let me put those back and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this bottom piece delete that by pressing delete on the keyboard same thing with this one here to the bottom right delete that and I'll take this one and press Delete on the keyboard to delete that as well and then I'll click and drag over all of that right here what's left and I'll unify that together by going to path Union and there we have the general shape of what the logo is going to be so I'll go back and I'll show you we have that general shape here set now what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this a little taller I'm going to make the vertical height a little higher so what I'll do is I'll go to the edit pads by nodes tool and click on that and I'll click and drag over these top nodes right here and then I'll just hold ctrl on the keyboard and click and drag this up just a little bit just to make that a little taller a little higher let me go back to the you know before I do that let me zoom and show you something there seems to be like these little nodes here like these little nodes where they're not supposed to be where the the circle and the and the pieces of the polygon were once connecting like these little leftover bits here I'm going to get rid of those by going back to the Select tool I'm going to go to path break apart and actually no there aren't any okay all right so what you do is you go to path break apart and when I did this when I was planning out the tutorial I broke it apart and there was all these little tiny fragments in here and it didn't happen this time I created it so if you do have those little fragments selected there you could just hold shift and click on that black shape to deselect it and those tiny little fragments will be what's left selected and then you just press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of that and it's not necessary that you do that I just like to do that because it keeps everything clean and simple so I mean other than that you could disregard it so what I'll do next is I'm going to take this gray I'm going to take this shape here and right click that and go to duplicate and I'll turn this red and I'll lower this beneath the blue at the out of the black shape by clicking the button this is lower selection one step click that a few times where you just click lower to the bottom and then I'm going to give that a red outline by holding shift in the keyboard and clicking on the color red and that should put a red outline going around it and we're going to change the thickness of that red outline by going to the stroke style tab and I have this set to 17 because that's what I previously use let me see how 20 looks all right Tony looks pretty good so that about that thickness is pretty good and once you've done that we could change that from a from an outline to an actual path by going to path stroke the path path break apart path Union and then I'm going to do that one more time I'm going to right click on that red shape and go to duplicate and I'll turn this one black and I'll lower that to the bottom by clicking this button this is lower selection to the bottom and I'll give this a black outline by holding shift and clicking on the color black and then I'll leave that at the thickness that it is that's a pretty good thickness right there that's still at 20 and a little bit of path stroke the path path break apart path Union okay so we have the general shape here so the point of that was to create this little border that's going around the shape right there so what I'll do next is I'm going to put some wording right here and just for this tutorial I'm going to write logo design so I'm going to grab the text tool I'm going to click on the canvas so the cursor starts blinking and I'm going to use all caps I'm going to write logo design you can write whatever you'd like I'm just writing this for the sake of this tutorial and then I'll open up the text editor menu with that little T button up there and the font I'm going to use is called Lee gothic and I'll have a link to that in the description if you'd like to download and install that font click apply there we have that and I'll go back to the Select tool and I'll put this over the the shape right here I'm just going to hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and click and drag to scale this thing up we want this thing to be about that big relative to the other shapes there we want it to be sticking out of the sides a little bit and once we have that how it is I'm going to hold shift and click on the shapes want any one of those shapes and I'm going to make sure the text is centered on the vertical axis and the horizontal axis so then click off of it to deselect so what I'll do now is I'm going to I'm going to grab the squares and rectangles tool and I'm going to click and drag and create a rectangle going over this text right here maybe about that size and there's a you can't really see a bit but there's a 20-point black outline going around that I'm going to get rid of that by holding shift and clicking on the X to get rid of that and I'm going to turn this green just for now and I'll go back to the Select tool and I'm going to lower this one step so it goes beneath the text and then I'll hold shift in the keyboard and click on the wording so we have them both selected and Center it on the vertical and horizontal axis and then we could hold shift and click on the wording to deselect that and then we'll just have this green rectangle selected and with that selected I'll right-click that and go to duplicate and I'll turn this red and I'll lower this beneath the text and the green circle so I'm going to lower this two steps one two and then I'll give this a red outline as well by holding shift and clicking on the color red and I'll make that one a little thicker I'm going to make this maybe 24 all right that's pretty good and then we can convert that outline to an actual path by going to path stroke the path path break apart and path Union and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to click and drag over those three those two rectangles and the end the wording right there so I have them all selected and I'm going to hold ctrl and shift and just scale this in so that it's resized to a width that I like we don't want to stick it out too much like that we don't want it in words like that we want to stick it out about that much to just try to eyeball it and get an idea and I'd say that looks pretty good and if you want to zoom in and out like I'm doing you can just hold ctrl and roll up and down in the mouse wheel okay so I'll leave that how that is that looks pretty good and what I'll do now is I'll click and drag over those three items again the two rectangles in the wording and I'm going to click it a second time to get the rotation handles and instead of using the rotation handles I'm going to use these little side handles I'm just going to click and drag this up a little bit just to give this a little bit of a slant as you can see here in my thumbnail I gave the wording a bit of a slant move that up a little bit maybe that's that's pretty good and then we can click off of that to deselect everything and then we'll go to the Bezier pen which is right here or if you just press B on the keyboard to grab that and I'm going to turn on the snap to cusp nodes for now I'm going to snap the cursor onto this top left corner of the red rectangle and then click and then hold control and bring the line straight up diagonally at a 30 degree angle and it's going to show you what degree the angle is down here at the bottom of the at the bottom of the page in that menu so as I'm scaling it up it's showing a 30 degree angle and that's pretty good I'll click and then I'll let go of control and bring the line through the center of that rectangle and click and then back to the starting point click and I'll turn this red I'll bring the opacity down I'll get rid of the black outline by holding shift and clicking on the X and we'll go to the Select tool and lower this to the bottom with that button up there lower selection to the bottom and we're going to do the same thing down here so we'll go back to the bezzie a pen I'll just press B on the keyboard to get it I'll snap to this corner and click hold ctrl bring this down at for this one it's not going to be a 30 degree angle it's going to be a minus 150 to 150 degree angle that's pretty good click let go of control bring this up through the middle of those rectangles and click and then snap it back to the starting point and click and now we could turn off our snap to custom nodes we're done with that and we'll turn this red and get rid of the black outline by holding shift and clicking on the X bring the opacity down in half and then go back to the Select tool and send that to the bottom and then we'll click off of it to deselect everything so what I'm going to do next is I'm going to bring the the banner with the text down a little bit there's not enough space up here so I'm just going to click and drag over those objects I'm sure to hold ctrl and click and drag this down a little bit maybe to there that looks pretty good and then click off of that to deselect everything so we're going to do now is I'm going to put some wording down here going along the bottom of this circle this rounded shape I'm going to put the word in going in the shape of that circle so to do that I want to find out what the width of this black shape right here is so I'll click on that with the select tool and it's going to show us what the width is so again I'm going to highlight all of that and copy it ctrl see you might actually still have it copied to the clipboard but I'll do it again just to be assured and we'll come over to the circles and ellipses tool and click and drag on the canvas to create a perfectly round circle and I'll make this blue just for now we'll go back to the Select tool and again I'm going to highlight all of this and erase it ctrl V to paste in that height there it is and I'm going to hold shift and click on this black shape here in the middle and center it on the vertical axis and then align the bottom edges and then we can click off of it to deselect everything so let me show you here if you notice I have text going in a circle taking the shape of that right here this is what we're going to do here we're going to use this circle as a reference point for the text so let me zoom in and show you a little bit we don't want the text sitting exactly on the circle we want to take this circle and hold ctrl and shift and just scale it in a little bit so there's a little bit of padding between the text and the edge of the graphic you notice here if you look where it says width Inkscape is a little bit of white space between that and the transparent border there so that's why I'm scaling that in a little bit maybe about that much is pretty good and then I'll come back to the text tool click on the canvas and I'm just going to put the caps lock on and right with Inkscape you could write whatever you'd like turn the caps off and go back to the Select tool and I'm going to put this above here just just try to eyeball it a little bit let me turn this green so I can see it compared to the the color of the other shapes and I don't want to make this text a little smaller so I'm going to hold ctrl and scale this down a little bit so that it fits in there and what I'm going to do next is I'm going to with that text selected I'm going to hold shift and click on the blue circle and go to text put on path and you'll see it put the text on the path but it's going along the outside of the circle so let me click on this circle click off of it to deselect everything then click on just this circle and we can click it a second time to get the rotation handles and you notice we can rotate the circle around and the text will rotate accordingly so in order to flip this so that the the text is going along the inside of the circle what we could do is just flip the the circle horizontally flip selected objects horizontally go ahead and click that and now it's on the inside of the circle so the problem we have here now is that these letters are a little too close together so let me zoom back out I'm going to click on that green text and then I'll go to the the text tool again and up here where it says spacing between letters I'm going to click on this up arrow just to space out the the letters there a little bit that's pretty good maybe a little more alright that's pretty good now we'll go back to the Select tool and I'll click on the blue circle and then click it a second time to get the rotation handles and I'll just rotate this around until the text is sitting evenly like that the top of the W and the top of the e are somewhat aligned and if you want to be precise with it you could even come up here to the this little ruler and click and drag to bring down a guide and put the guide over the top of the text there and then you can kind of just eyeball it and see that's pretty good right there so let me click off of that to deselect press one on the keyboard to zoom back out and I'll hover the cursor over that blue guide and press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of it so what we have to do now is we have to change this from text to an actual path otherwise anything we do to this circle will also happen in the text so if I delete this circle the text goes back to being flat text like that and we don't want that so I want to click on the green text and go to path object to path and then click on the blue circle and just delete that now that's uh now we have our text there like that so just in order to fill in this little area of space right here I'm just going to put like a star right there so come back to the stars and polygons tool and I'll select stars this time and it'll change the corners to five and for the spoke ratio you're going to want three seven five and then we could hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and click and drag to create a star I'm going to make it about that big for now and oh I forgot to mention up here for rounded randomize you want those both set to zero and we'll come back to the Select tool click on this a second time to get the rotation handles and just rotate this around until the star is sitting flat then we can take the star put it over here towards the graphic click on it again to get the scaling handles and hold ctrl and shift and scale it down about that much I'll put this in the center right here and then I'll hold shift and click on this black shape and just make sure it's centered on the vertical axis and then click off of it to deselect everything and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to click and drag over all of this and bring the opacity all the way up and then we could start to color it in so let's click off of that to deselect and click on this red shape I'm going to make that I'm going to make that black then I'll click on this green shape I'll make that white I'll take this red shape I'll make that back same with this red shape make that black and then I'll click on this red I'll click on this red shape here the outline and I'll make that white take the text make that white and then take the star and make that white as well and one final step is we're going to put some kind of graphic up here and I didn't know what to put in here so I just went and found some random silhouette of a bull online and I'm just going to add that into this graph you could put anything you want in there obviously but I'm just going to use this image of a bull this bull silhouette for the sake of this tutorial and I provided if you want to use that same graphic I've provided a link to it in the description just just go ahead and save that image somewhere where you can access it and once you do I'm just going to I'm going to minimize this and there's the bull image right there I'm just going to click and drag it into Inkscape go ahead and click OK let me maximize this window and there's our bold graphic and what I want to do now is this is not a vector this is a this is just an image I'm going to make this into a vector by going to path trace bitmap and I'm going to choose color quantization and I'm going to bring the color steps down to two and click update so we see a preview and that's pretty good if you don't see that preview if it's all white or all black try doing three or four steps and seeing if that works but I think two should work so with that said that's good I like that how it is I'm going to click OK and then click out of that up the trace bitmap menu and there we have our vector shape so let's take the original the image press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of it and here's our bull graphic we're going to change that to white and then hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and scale it down and then just fit it over here into the other graphic I'm actually going to flip that horizontally so it looks better like it's going along the shape of that banner there and that's pretty much it that's how you can create a very simple style logo using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 579,428

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape logo, inkscape logo design tutorial, inkscape for beginners, vector, vector design, vector graphics, vector logo, vector tutorial, vector icons

Id: hmaYeZ5iDPo

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2016