Inkscape Tutorial: How to Design a Vector Logo

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial we have a special tutorial because it is the first time that I am creating an ink scape for a video and I've done in the past I've been doing in for the past eight years and so a lot of you have been asking if and when I was going to be creating Inkscape tutorials the answer is yes and it's today but of course before we get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always I have tons of video tutorials and help articles on here so definitely check that out I also have a brand new Inkscape help articles section where you can check out help articles on Inkscape and I'll also be adding a tutorial section for Inkscape and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon you'll get some awesome and Inkscape extras in return so you can support us at patreon.com slash davies media design here is the logo i'll be creating in today's tutorial i'll also make the custom palette available for download in the description of the video all right so let's dive into the actual logo tutorial and this is actually a logo I did in in an earlier tutorial on my channel the reason I want to do it in Inkscape is that Inkscape is actually a better program for graphics like this so when you're doing logo design it's best to use what's called a scalable vector graphics program which is exactly what Inkscape is that means you can scale your graphics up or down pretty much to any size without losing quality so this is great whenever you want to have branding options available in numerous sizes for things like business cards billboards etc it's just better to do your graphics inside of an SVG program so that being said here is our final logo and I'm going to start with this tutorial by coming over here and going to file new and I'll hold ctrl and use my mouse wheel to zoom out a little bit here and Center up so you guys will notice that my canvas looks a little bit different than the default canvas I do have a couple of Inkscape help articles to go along with this video tutorial that I recommend you check out one of those is how to make your canvas look like the illustrator artboard that's how I came up with this default canvas here in Inkscape but I'll come over here to my layers dialog you can also click this icon right here and you can see here that my default file has two layers layer one which is going to be the layer where our designs will be and the background layer which is going to contain our white background and so this if I unlock the background layer is actually a square I'll hit ctrl Z all I did was take the square tool and I just dragged from the top left corner to the bottom right corner and I just made sure that the size of my rectangle up here was 1920 by 1080 you can also come over here click on the alignment option and if you already have it open it'll be over here on the side panel and then you can just align Center vertically in align Center horizontally that'll Center up your rectangle on your composition here and then of course you can click on your white swatch in your swatches panel to change the color to white so speaking of the swatches panel I also imported a custom swatch for this tutorial check out my Inkscape help article on how to import custom swatches but once I had that imported I just clicked on this arrow right here and right here is my West Mountain brewery logo swatch and that's what brings up these colors here so this is only six colors that I'll be using for today's tutorial but coming back over here to my layers panel I actually unlocked the background layer and selected this rectangle for a reason the main reason is that I want to duplicate this rectangle and use it to create some center guides that's just going to make it really easy to Center up our composition while we work so to do that I'll just hit ctrl C while I have my rectangle selected if you don't have your rectangle drawn again just come over here and grab your rectangle tool and just draw it from the top left to the bottom right of your entire composition you're going to need to do this part anyway even if you don't want your canvas to look like the illustrator artboard but once I've copied this with ctrl C I'll hit ctrl alt V to paste in place or you can go to edit paste in place I'll come over here to object transform that'll bring up my transform dialog and now what I need to do is I just need to make this rectangle half the size of my current composition so all I need to do is come over to the scale tab and I'm going to change the width and height two-fifty that represents percent you can see the unit right here and I'll come over here and hit apply now we need to align this to the top left i recommend coming over here and turning on the snap to page border option we're gonna be using this later in the tutorial as well so I do recommend just having that on for the rest of the tutorial and then just click and drag this until it snaps to the page border you'll see there's a message there that says corner to corner so once you hit that just release then come up here and go to objects objects the guides and now you'll see we have Center guides here we also have these 2xs guides you can actually just drag these off of the page over on top of the rulers that'll make those disappear and now you'll see we have Center guides here on our background layer so come back over here to my layers panel so everything happened on our background layer I'll just lock that in place and now I'll come up here to my layer 1 layer if you guys don't have a background layer that would have been your layer 1 layer that you were working on just come down here and create a new layer and that will be our layer 1 you can rename this one background by double-clicking on it but anyway just be clicked on layer 1 for the main design portion of this tutorial so now I'm going to make the main circle background of our logo to do that I'll come over here and grab our circle tool and then I'll come over here and I'm gonna hold ctrl shift and hover over the very center of our guides make sure you also have these snap guides option turned on and so I'll just hover over the center of our guides and I'm gonna hold ctrl shift and I'm going to draw my circle and you'll see this will help us draw a perfect circle I don't want this being the entire size of the document so I'll make it a little smaller than the document and release now we have our circle and of course I need to just click on this color right here that'll change my main foreground color to this blue color and I can hit shift ctrl F or in my case I can click right here on the sidebar and that is going to bring up my fill and Stroke dialog and here you can see the exact color I'm using so in Inkscape we have the typical HTML notation but then that's followed by two values right here and these values represent how the Alpha channel will be displayed so you guys can type this whole thing right here that'll give you the color by FF which means this will be a hundred percent opaque of course I do recommend downloading that custom palette which is going to be linked below but the next thing I'll do is I'll grab my select tool here and I'm just going to make sure that I have my circle selected and I'll hit ctrl C and once again I'll hit ctrl alt V to paste in place so this is going to be the inner circle part of our logo and so I want to turn this actually into a stroke I want there to be a white stroke around the outside of the circle so what I'll do is I'll come down here and I'm going to actually hold the shift key and click and that is going to fill my stroke area with white and if I come over here to stroke style you guys can see my settings so I have the order here in terms of how my stroke is displayed set to markers stroke and fill but while I have my circle selected you'll see I have some transform handles here so I'm going to click on this one in the bottom corner you can really click on any of the corner ones here and I'm just going to drag it inward but I'm going to hold the shift and control key while I do that to make sure that this maintains a one to one aspect ratio and also transforms from the center so it scales from the center I'm just gonna go with the bout right here so once you have this position you can come over here to your stroke style and I'm gonna change the weight of my stroke I'm gonna go with 20 and that's not enough so actually let me go with 30 here that looks pretty good so one other thing is that this shape is actually still filled in with this dark blue color I actually don't want this to have a fill at all I just want it to be a stroke so if I come over here and click on this X that will empty out the center of my circle here and that will actually make our stroke look a little bit larger just based on the fact that part of the stroke was hidden behind that fill so actually what I'll do is come back here and try this out with 20 again I think that looks a little better and I'll also come to the align and distribute dialog here again you can use the shortcut key shift ctrl a and I'm just going to make sure this is aligned still next we need to draw our mountains so in the tutorial I use the paths tool Inkscape actually has the same tool they just call it the Bezier curve tool it's going to accomplish the same thing so I'll come over here and I'm going to click on that Bay's EA curve tool and now I can just draw my Mountain shapes so these can just be pretty much random looking Mountain so you just need to create these mountaintops here and have them be varying in shape and you'll see that my first node was created outside of the biggest circle here and then my last node same thing created outside and then you want it to wrap around outside the circle as well and then you want to connect those first and last nodes so here we have our mountain it looks a little sloppy right now so I'm going to come over here and grab my edit paths by nodes tool and I'm just going to edit the nodes here and I'm just going to make them look a little bit more appealing and I'm probably gonna come back here later and adjust these once again but I just want these to look a little bit better that looks all right for now so I'll come back here and grab my select tool and I'm going to click on this orange color here inside of my palettes to fill our mountains in with orange and then I'm going to shift click on the light blue over here and that'll make the stroke of my mountains turn to light blue and I'll come back here to the fill and Stroke dialog I want to increase the size of my stroke here so I'm just going to manually increase the width and I can always just type a value here so let's go with 20 I actually think that looks pretty good but now of course our mountains are spilling off of our logo and it doesn't look good so what I can do is I can clip the mountains based on the shape of my circle here so I'm gonna grab the stroke or the inner circle and I'm going to hit ctrl C and then I'll hit ctrl alt V to paste in place so now we have the inner circle on top of our mountains and now we can clip our mountains to this so I'm going to shift-click on the mountains and you'll notice that my mountains layer is below the stroke layer you want to make sure that this is the order of your objects because otherwise it's going to clip incorrectly and it's going to take on the wrong colors so if the objects are not layered correctly what you can do is for example you can click on the mountain layer and if you need to lower it in the object stacking order you can hit the page up or page down keys on your keyboard so I'll just shift click again on our stroke layer and now I'll come over to object clip set and that will clip our mountains to the shape of our inner circle and now I need to lower the mountain object and I'll do that by hitting the page down key and now that'll go behind a stroke layer or our stroke object and our mountains are no longer spilling outside of that inner circle so now we can start working with our text I'll come over here and grab the text tool and I'm gonna click inside of my composition here and I'll put the caps lock key on for this I'm gonna type mountain and this is going to be part of the fictitious name of the brewery which again is West Mountain brewery totally made-up so I'm just going to double click on the text to select all of it and I'll come up here and I can change my font to any of the pre-loaded fonts in here or I can just download fonts the same way I would download fonts in and so this Anamosa font I've used in past tutorials I'll put up an Inkscape help article on how to install custom fonts for Inkscape pretty easy but once you've done that once you've selected your font you can now change the size of your font so in this case I know I want my font to be 150 pixels so I'll just type 150 hit the enter key of course you can come over here and click your text icon and if you already have it open it'll be over here and this will bring up some options for you to mess around with your text including being able to change the font size but I'm just going to stick with adjusting it over here for the most part so this is 150 I actually want the letters in between to be a little smaller so I'll just select those letters and I'll come over here and type 125 and hit the enter key so now those inner letters are going to be a little bit smaller than the outer letters and I'm going to hit my select tool here or grab my select tool and then I'm going to come down here and just click on the color white because I want my text to be white and now with that select tool I'm going to just position this into place a little bit better so maybe something like right here and we'll align this a little bit later but now I'm gonna do the next line of text so I'll grab my text tool and up top here I'm going to click and with my caps lock keys still on I'm going to type West and once again I'll select that I'll come up here and type Anamosa and I'll just change the font type here to bold and I'll increase the size of this font to 100 I'm going to click on here to change this to white and then I'll grab my select tool here I'm just going to drag this one into place so do about right here and then let me actually drag this one down a tiny bit more now we just have our third and final line of text so click on my text tool again click inside my composition and with the caps lock key on I will type Brewery this one will be a little different it'll be a little smaller so I'll come up here and I'll change this to actually let's go with 50 for the text size hit enter make sure that the font is Anamosa bold I know I did this out of order Anamosa bold here for the font I'm gonna grab my select tool again and I'm just going to drag this a little bit lower so about right here I can actually drag the mountain main text a little lower as well and actually let me click on this brewery text again there's one more thing I want to do here I'm going to click on this twice that's going to bring up some different transform handles and this one is going to be skew so I could basically skew or shear this so that it makes our text look like it has italics on it so just like that I don't want to overdo it but I do want there to be a little bit of italicizing on there and now I'm gonna come over here and click on my dark blue color because that's the color I want this to be next I'm going to shift click on all my text and I'll come back down here to align and distribute and I can just collapse the text and font dialog there I'll make sure a line is set to relative to page and I'll just Center this vertically like so and I'll leave the text there for now all right next up I want to create a Sun that's going to go behind the mountains and I want that Sun to appear as if it has a long shadow so there is a pretty cool technique here for accomplishing this so I'll come over here and grab my circle or my ellipse tool again and I'm going to hold ctrl and shift because I do want this to be a perfect circle and I'm going to click and drag and it's okay if this goes a little bit outside the circle at first so about that size right there I'm going to grab my select tool again and just drag this down a little bit I'm going to left-click on the dark yellow and then shift left click on the light yellow to change my foreground and stroke colors to that dark and light yellow then I'll come over here to fill it in stroke and I can adjust the size of my stroke if I want so let me type 30 I think that looks a lot better and I might want to lower this a little bit so this is obviously covering up the mountains we'll fix that in a minute but first I'm gonna hit ctrl C to copy this and I'm gonna come back to my layers dialog here and now I'm gonna come up here and create a new layer and I'll keep this one named layer two because we're not really going to use this beyond a couple of steps here and I'll just set the position to above current and click Add now that I'm on layer two I'm gonna hit ctrl alt V that'll paste in my son shape here on top of my entire composition on layer two and by the way you can click this lock icon here to just lock layer one for now but once again I'll hit ctrl C and then ctrl alt V to paste in place so now I'm going to create the long shadow here and there's a couple of things I have to do to make this effect work for starters I need to offset this shape a little bit so that it goes off the page and then we're basically going to connect the two shapes together to create that long shadow so to do this I'll come over to object transform that'll bring out my transform dialog and I'm gonna move away from scale and I'm gonna actually just make sure this is still set to 100 but I'll come over here to move and I'm gonna change the horizontal to a number that's going to make this move off of the outer circle here or off the main logo so I went with three actually one with 350 before and then vertical I need this to go 350 over and then 350 down and you do want these two numbers to be the same because that will create a nice 45 degree angle so now I'll come over here and change the vertical to negative 350 and I'm gonna come down here and click apply and that actually didn't move that off enough so let me just hit control Z to undo that let's go with 450 and see if that will move this off of the main logo so I hit apply and ctrl Z one more time let me just do 550 and there we go all right so now I'm going to hit shift and select both of these objects and I'll come over here to path object to path then I'll come over here to extensions generate from path and I'll go to interpolate I'm gonna make sure these options are set to 1 for the exponent 200 for the interpolation steps which is basically going to be the number of times this shape will be duplicated in between this shape you guys will see why that's important here and then interpolation method will be 1 you can always turn on the live preview if you want to see what this will look like so there you can see a nice long shadow so now I'll just click apply and that will apply our changes so I'll hit close now and because we have layer 1 locked you can come back here to the layers panel but we have layer 1 locked and we're on layer 2 I can hit control a to select everything on layer 2 and now I'm gonna come over here and go to object ungroup and that'll make all of the instances of our son object a different object or a unique object so that's why you could see all of these different boxes here but now we need to create a union between all these shapes so that they all become one shape so to do that I'll come over here to path Union that'll make them all the same objects so now this is one long object and then I'll come over here and click on this light yellow color because I want it to be light yellow and finally I'll hit control X to copy that because I don't want this to be on a separate layer from our Sun layer and what I'll do now is I'm actually going to just delete this layer too so I'll just hit the minus button which is the delete the current layer icon and now I'm on layer 1 let me unlock this and I'll hit ctrl alt V to paste in place and then with this object selected I'm going to hit the page down option and that will reveal the Sun we created earlier so next I need to get rid of any of this excess here that's spilling outside of the inner circle in terms of the Sun ray so what I'll do is I'll click on the inner circle hit ctrl C and then hit ctrl alt V to paste in place now what I'll do is I'll click to fill this in with white and then I'll shift-click to get rid of the stroke and then I'll go over here to path object to path and I'm actually gonna click on the sunray and do the same thing so path object to path now if I shift-click on both of these objects I can come up here and go to object clip and then choose set and that is going to clip out our object right here so if I hold ctrl and zoom in you can see the sunray no goes outside the inner circle it's overlapping in right now but that's not a big deal because we're gonna move this backwards so that it's below a lot of these objects so actually what I need to do though is make sure I'm still clicked on the sunray object and then shift-click on my Sun and come over here and go to object group and then I'm gonna use the page down key and just move that object down so that it is below the mountains so that looks pretty good there I'll hold control and use my mouse wheel to zoom out so just a couple of things left to do here for one I'm going to click on my edit paths by node tool and just once again adjust the mountains a little bit more just to make them look a little bit better so maybe something like that I just don't want them to cover up the Sun quite as much this is kind of optional right here alright so the last thing I'll do for this tutorial is just add a text row here to our main Mountain text and to do that I'll just click on this with my select tool here and I'll hit ctrl C to copy that and then ctrl alt V to paste in place now I'll come down here and shift click on this blue to give this a blue stroke you can also click on the X here to get rid of the white color here in the middle so now this only has a stroke and I'm gonna come over here to the stroke width and by the way make sure you are on the fill and Stroke dialog and I'll just type 40 if the answer key and now I just need to lower this layer so that it's below all the other layers so you may need to click off in real quick and click back on and make sure you don't lower the width of the stroke and then just hit the page down key until that goes below all the other layers and now come over here to my layers dialog and I can hide the background layer so this is what this will look like with the transparent background so now we need to save this file and Inkscape by default uses a dot SVG file type that ensures that our vector drawings are going to be available should we open this up in the future so we can always come in and scale this up or down without quality loss we can also send it to somebody like the printer with a transparent background here and so to say this I'll just go to file save and I can just navigate on my computer to where I want to save this and then I can type in the name of my composition so I'll go west and let me turn off my caps lock West Mountain brewery logo hit the enter key and now our file is saved as an SVG alright so that's it for my very first Inkscape tutorial hopefully you guys liked it if you did you could subscribe to my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can visit my website at Davies media design comm and you could support my channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 10,301

Keywords: Inkscape, Inkscape Tutorial, Graphic Design, Inkscape Basics, Inkscape Logo Design, Design a Logo Inkscape, SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, Vector Logo, Professional Logo, Inkscape for Business, Free Logo Design, Free Logo Designer, Graphic Designers, Open Source, FOSS, Illustrator Alternative

Id: jDIiq6JveOs

Length: 22min 48sec (1368 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019