Inkscape Tutorial: Golden Ratio Logo Design

[Music] this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can design this vectorized bird logo and constructed out of circles that follow the golden ratio and without getting into too much detail the golden ratio is a ratio of 1.618 and it's been used to soar eclis throughout design and architecture to create designs that are just more appealing to the human eye and in order for us to create this logo out of golden ratio circles we're first gonna have to construct a golden ratio grid which I will be demonstrating here in Inkscape so let's go ahead and getting scape opens up by the way if you'd like to know how you can make Inkscape appear darken with these custom icons I'll link to that information will be in the description of the video so the first thing we want to do is set up our document to make sure we are all working with a similar view so we'll go to document properties up here file document properties we want to change the display units to pixels and where it says show page border I'm just going to turn that off and then we can close out of that we'll go to view make sure we have custom selected and then we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 and I want to up I want to turn on these icons up here where it says snap to custom nodes we're gonna want that turned on and where it says snap snap smooth modes including Quadra points of the ellipse is we want that turned on we want both of those on for the duration of this tutorial and over here where it says when scaling objects scale the stroke width by the same proportion we want that turned off and finally what we want to do is open up the alignment distribute menu with that button we're gonna want less selected chosen from that drop-down and then we'll open up the Edit objects colors gradients to stroke menu with that button up there so what we're going to do first is create a square so we'll grab the squares and rectangles tool and I'm gonna hold ctrl and shift on the keyboard and click and drag to create a perfectly symmetrical square like that and I'm gonna bring the opacity down about in half I'm gonna change the I'm gonna change the color of this to red I'll grab the Select tool over here and where it says when locked changed both width and height by the same proportion we're gonna turn on that lock icon to lock the proportions when we scale things and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this rectangle and I'm gonna duplicate it by hitting control D and I'll turn that blue and then I'll just snap this right on top of it like that and then I'll hold shift and click on the other one and with these both selected I'll hit ctrl C on the keyboard to copy it or you can go to edit copy I just think it's easier to hit ctrl C so once we've done that we can click off of it to deselect take just this blue rectangle I mean Square and hit control D duplicate that we'll turn that green and we'll go to edit paste size paste height and then we could snap that onto the right side of these two squares right here and once we've done that I'm gonna click and drag over both of these and hold ctrl and shift and scale them down a little bit and I'll click on them a second time to get our rotation handles and I'm just going to hold ctrl and grab one of these corner arrows and rotate this around 90 degrees so it's sitting vertically like that and then once we've done that I want to copy all of this by hitting ctrl C click off of it to deselect everything and take just this blue rectangle here and duplicate that oops duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and we're going to edit paste size paste height snap it onto there and we're gonna do the same thing click and drag over all of this click on it again to get the rotation handles and hold ctrl to rotate it around 90 degrees and we if you want you can click on it again to get back to the scaling handles and hold ctrl and shift to scale that down a little bit and once we've done that I want to copy all of that B hitting ctrl C click off the deselect I'm gonna take this red square duplicate that we'll go to edit paste size paste height and snap that on there and we're gonna do this one more time so we'll click and drag over all of this click on it again to get the rotation handles and hold ctrl and rotate this around 90 degrees click on it again to get back to the scaling handles and just scale it down a little bit copy it by hitting ctrl C and click off of it to deselect everything I'm gonna take this Blue Square and duplicate that and go to edit paste size paste height and snap it onto there and then I want to take these three small squares right here hold shift and click on each one of those and just flip them vertically like that with that button there and what we have here is you know what we should do let's click and drag over all of this and let's turn off the fill color by clicking the X over here and then hold shift and click the color black to give that a fill and I'm gonna bring the opacity of that all the way up I'm gonna change the stroke style over here I'm going to change that to pick up pixels and change this to maybe like a two-point stroke and click off let's deselect everything and what we have here is we this is a golden ratio grid so what we're gonna do now is create circles that fit perfectly within each of those squares so to do that I'm gonna grab the circles and ellipses tool and I'm gonna snap the cursor up here to this top left corner and then click and drag until it snaps to the bottom right corner and then let go and we now have a circle that fits within that square and we're just gonna go ahead and do this for the rest of these squares you might want to zoom in on this by holding ctrl and rolling up the mouse wheel go ahead and zoom in and go go back to the select tool press one of the keyboard to zoom back out to a hundred percent and I'm gonna click and drag over all of this and go to path object to path and if you want what you have now is this is a perfect representation of the golden ratio if you want you can save this as a template to use it in other sorts of design work otherwise I'm sure what I'm gonna do now is click off of everything and I'm gonna start deleting the squares because we don't need the grid we just need the circles within that grid so I'm gonna click on the squares and just press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of them get rid of that and I'm gonna get these two small circles right here I'm gonna get rid of one of those as well because we just need one we just need one circle that size we just need one circle of each size and we're good and what we could do now is click and drag over all of these and Center them up on the vertical and horizontal axis and what we have here are a bunch of circles that follow the golden ratio and these are the circles we are going to use to construct our bird image and it's important that when we're using these circles it is important that we do not resize them at all otherwise that takes away the whole point of everything we just did in the first part of this video so now that we've done that let's click off of that to deselect everything I'm gonna take the second biggest circle right here I'm gonna duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I'm gonna bring this over here and I'm gonna start constructing the bird and I'm gonna make another copy of this so I'm gonna hit ctrl D and I'm gonna hold ctrl and just move this to the right a little bit and if you look at the intersecting area right here this is gonna be the top part of the bird's head right here and this part out here is gonna be where the birds beak begins maybe I'll move that to the right a little more that's pretty good let me just make sure they're centered up on the via horizontal axis there and what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to take the big circle right here I'm gonna duplicate that by hitting control D and I'm gonna take the right side of this circle and snap it onto the right side of this left circle right here so one should go ahead and snap that onto there until the custom nodes snap and then I'll duplicate that big circle again by hitting ctrl D and I'll just take this and snap this over here to this left side of this right circle like that and if you look at let me take these and just move these out of the way of the other circles if you look at the intersecting area in here if you could try to envision right here this is where the bird's body is gonna be right in here in this area so what I'm gonna do now is this area going out here is gonna be the beak so I'm gonna put a little shape in there to finish that off I'm gonna take the third biggest circle right here I'm gonna duplicate that by him ctrl D I'm gonna take this left side and snap it onto the right side of this circle in here so as you can see in there this intersecting area right here is gonna be where the beach is and I want to give this bird and I let me go back to the image over here to show you this is where the beak is this is where the body is we're gonna create a wing for this next we're actually gonna put the eyeball in here next and we're to put the wing right here as well I'm gonna show you how to create this in both variations so that you have the design by itself and design with the keyline grid like you see here so let me go back to Inkscape what I'll do now is I'll take the smallest circle right there and I'll hit ctrl D to duplicate that I'll put that right there that's gonna represent the eyeball let me zoom in over that and what I want to do now is hold shift and click on those two circles that it sits within just so we could Center it up in there I'm gonna click on the undo the distribute panel here I'm gonna click the button over here that says make horizontal gaps between objects equal and it's gonna it's just gonna Center it up in that area now we can click off of that and zoom back out and what I'll do now is I'm gonna take the biggest circle over here I'm gonna duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I'm gonna take the bottom portion of this circle and snap it onto this intersecting area right here so I'm take that and snap that on to there and that's this area right here it's gonna represent the top portion of the wing so we're gonna have to duplicate this circle again hit ctrl D and I'm just gonna move this down over here like this and this intersecting area right here is gonna be where the wing is if you can try to envision it with the rest of the bird and this sort of technique of designing things it's usually easier if you have your own design idea in mind and you go about if you're following along with my design idea this may not make much sense to you it may be a little tricky to envision this but if you can get like pencil and paper and sketch out a design of your own maybe something like a rocket ship or a fish or something you'll notice if you can import that sketch into Inkscape you'll notice it's much easier to follow along and envision how these circles interact with each other when it's your own design so that's one thing to keep in mind if you're following along with this tutorial so with that being said we have now created all of the circles we need to construct our verge so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click and drag over all of those circles and I'm gonna move them out of the way of this over here move them over here and with them all selected I'm gonna go to paths combined and once I've done that I want to copy that by hitting ctrl C I want to grab the rectangles to one I just want to create a little rectangle going over that and then I'll go to edit paste size paste size I'm gonna grab the select tool and with that new rectangle that we just created with that selected I'm gonna click the button up here that says lower selection to the bottom so we go ahead and lower that to the bottom and I'm gonna click and drag over everything so we have everything selected and I'm gonna Center it up on the vertical and horizontal axis and what we could do next is go to path actually you know what what we want to do first is let's give this a red fill and then we'll go to path division and what that's gonna do is that's gonna break everything up into its own individual little piece and as you see here it's gonna be individual little pieces and we put them back and what we're gonna do now is we're to go through and find the areas we're gonna find the pieces that we want to make up the bird and start coloring them in so we can distinguish them from the rest of the the this mess here so what I'll do first actually I'll just take this big square and just get that out of there we don't need that let me zoom back in on this you notice here this top part this is gonna be the eyeball we can start there I'm gonna make that white and this part right here is gonna be the becomes gonna fill that in with blue for now that's just temporary we're just looking for a color that contrasts nicely with red I'm gonna go ahead and fill these in with blue all of these pieces are going to represent the beak right here and then we could start filling in these pieces with a bot where it's gonna represent the body I'm just gonna shift-click these so I can click multiple multiple objects at once and fill them all in see there's the bird's body and then right here we have the bird's wing color that it with blue as well let me press one of the keyboard to zoom back out to a hundred percent and what we could do now is when you start going on the red shapes and clicking the X to get rid of the fill just go ahead and just get rid of the fill from all of those in fact I'm gonna shift-click those it's like it's select multiples and get this done quicker oops grab that one that one too and then that one as well turn that off and oh can't forget about that little piece in there and like I mentioned a few minutes ago I'm gonna show you how to create two different variations one where we still have this key line grid in place and another without the key line grid so let me let's take them let's click and drag over all of this and put this off to the side and hit control D and take this copy and put this off to the side and with all of that selected we can just click the X so that it has no fill in there at all we're just left with that now we can come back over here zoom in and start getting getting rid of these extra pieces going on outside of here because this is going to be the variation without the keyline grid and to do this I'm just clicking each object and pressing delete on the keyboard get rid of that what that is you get rid of that and what we could do now is if you notice here these are broken up into individual little pieces I want to combine some of these pieces together to make this design a little more fluid let me go back to the design the thumbnail over here and show you if you notice these are these are nice fluid pieces they're not broken up into tiny little polygons like you see on our screen currently so let me go back to Inkscape and I will show you how to do that let's take this shape right here and hold shift click that shape right there I'm gonna unify them both together by going to path Union and I want to do the same thing with these two shapes right there so we have a nice fluid lengthy shape going through there the same thing right here I want to combine these two together by going to path Union and right here these two shapes that should that should be one shape right here so we'll click on that I'll hold shift click on the other one path Union and if you notice here at where the wing is this going this swoops all the way through that should all be one shape so I'm gonna shift-click on all of those and I think that should do it for those I think the rest of that looks pretty good so what we're gonna do now is we're just gonna color this in and as you saw on the thumbnail I colored a new with gradients so we'll do the same thing here let me click on this shape here I'm gonna make this a shade of pink I'll choose like a like a dark almost like a reddish pink do something like that then I'll come over to the fill tab I'll click on where it says linear gradient and I'll go to the gradient tool which is over here or you could press G on the keyboard click on that stop right there and I'll make that stop yellow then I'll take this pink stop over here and put this at the bottom oops click the wrong thing if you make that mistake just hit control Z you could always go back you could always undo everything by hitting ctrl Z so I'll take this stop and put this down here take this stop with this up here and with the gradient tool still selected I'm going to click on this shape give that the same gradient click on linear gradient and there it is in our list right there we just use that same gradient we just created put this down here and this up here like that and the beak is colored in so we're going to go through and color in the body now let me go to the Select tool let me click on this blue shape right here I'm gonna change the shade of blue a little bit maybe something like that or not maybe a little darker I'm using the HSL tab under the fill tab for this part of the tutorial it's more subjective you can color it in however you'd like you don't have to use the same exact specific shades I'm using here so this is just this is just my own personal what I think looks good so I'm gonna use that shade of blue I'm gonna click on the linear gradient I'll go back to the gradient tool click on this stop over here to the right and I'm gonna choose a shade of green maybe something like that that's pretty good I'll take this take this stop put this over here I'll take the blue stop and put that to the right like that then I'll click on this part and give that a linear gradient just go through like we did with the beak just choose it from the list same thing over here linear gradient choose the gradient we already created put this over here to the right I'm gonna hold ctrl to lock it onto the vertical app so the horizontal axis so it comes straight across like this click on this shape give that a linear gradient as well lock it onto the vertical axis I should do the same over here I got this gradient going diagonal it doesn't match the rest of it so let me fix that and that's good as it I shouldn't reverse this actually the blue has to be over here and this one over here let me go back to the Select tool and what we could do now is click and drag over all of that and come down here all the way to the far left where we have this X icon just hold shift and click on that X to get rid of the outline and then we can group it together with the group button up here and as you'll see we have our bird constructed so to make the other variation with the keyline grid i'm just gonna click and drag over all of those circles and group them together with this button group selected objects I'm gonna take this bird hit ctrl D to duplicate it and I'm gonna grab this bottom corner right here of the birds like tail and just snap it into place where it should be down there and I'll just lower that to the bottom clicking the button this is lower selection to the bottom and if you want you can click on the circles now and ungroup them you can go to the stroke style make them a little thinner maybe 0.75 and you can even give them a different shade maybe you'd like to link them up a bit I'll hold shift and click on like the color gray give them like a shade of grey or something like that and we could zoom out and as you can see we are pretty much finished creating our golden ratio bird logo using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 211,607

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape logo, inkscape logo design tutorial, inkscape for beginners, vector logo, vector tutorial, inkscape golden ratio, golden ratio logo, golden ratio design, nick saporito, logos by nick, logosbynick

Id: 1hhAXrxVMeU

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2017