Lessons

Lesson Info

Logo Explorations in Illustrator

All right so I've got my my sketches here um one is for my dog and the other is just for the composition of the logo so we're going to bring those in um obviously not gonna have timeto to both of them and have it look perfect so um I'd like to use thes settings with the art poured because me center lines and then marks that come in from the center so I can keep track of well nothing's were centered right someone a place each one of these and make it a template actually I'm not gonna make this one I'm gonna have much time I'm actually just gonna use the tracing feature of illustrator and kind of use it as a placeholder so don't do that first and then we'll use the other one is just is a drawing template oh I expect sometimes um the size it which you render who haven't render this affects the quality so you kind of play around with that sometimes it actually does a better job um if it's smaller because it if you want it catches too much detail and about way more anchor points and stuffin...

g it so I wantto go under image trace uh all right I'm gonna change my work space here for a second because I wanna I wanna be able to like adjustments so I want a tracing real quick well it should be it should bring up the the palette that how here is uh image trace maybe that was a I have never seen that before um when I when I switched just creative cloud I could not find this dialog box until I went to the work space and changed tracing I thought they took I thought they'd taken it out which I found hard to believe but all right so this is going to give me a preview uh it's just the default um you can mess with the um threshold of the black black and white and I've got the preview button selected well I definitely wanna knock out the great but you also have some custom settings here um like black and white logo all right we'll just have to live on this have to live with us I guess and so I can say expand and it converts that paths um I want to get rid of this no always puts a box around it all rights all that stuff is grouped together it might actually be a compound path all right so one thing I can dio um and this is one of the negatives of using this tool um and I'm sure if I had more time I could get a cleaner scan but you see all the anchor points I mean there should only be like three anchor points in here and same thing with the ears um one thing I can dio to help that out and just like in photo shop where you can hide the the hide your selection you can use um command h and illustrator and it will hide this election um but a really good thing for working with traced images where you converted converted it to pass and you have way too many anchor points is to go to path and simplify um it defaults to fifty percent which if I preview this at fifty percent it's not anything look it's a bunny right now it's a bunny rabbit there's a trick s o you always want to kind of back this up to one hundred and then come down and you can um come on hide things but you can see you can also show the original path so it's not gonna let me on hide while I'm in this but basically what it's doing is it's removing anchor points and so um I'm gonna live with us um because I have had a fair job looks like I've got like two copies for some reason so I don't see what's going on there. All right? So I said I'll live with it for now go ahead that much with the anchor points so here's the here's the version that's been changed, I click on uh there's the original but they still may be a group together and not sure I'm just gonna for now, it was going to group this pull off to the side I'm going to use it assize much smaller than that so now I'll make that my I'll make this my drawing layer so I'm gonna create um a template layer lock that select us um some import my sketch and if I click template, it's automatically going to, um, lock it and reduce reduce it um produced the my capacity so that I'm not like trying to draw on something that's black but it's too big. So, um, I guess it's not long um that's not a bad size, so we'll leave it there. I defaults to fifty percent. If I'm importing something it's black, I can take it to twenty percent and still have you know what I need to see and it's uh, less obstructive on, especially if I'm blind drawing with a black stroke or something. All right, so this is my drawing layer I'm going to create again. I I would actually this sketch is rougher than what I would probably work from. I would probably like the banner is not gonna be like the banner is not gonna be hard to create, but I would probably, um, you know, just like refined that refined that ball until it looked right rather than trying rather trying draw and manipulated in here because it's just easier to do real quick with tracing paper so I would do it a little cleaner version than this all right so I'm gonna start I'll draw the banner first um actually I'm gonna try and center this a little bit higher although I'm not sure it's since that sketch is necessarily symmetrical but I'll say all right so I wanna draw something that's close to the ark of the banner and I'm not going to try and um anytime you're doing something that involves cemetery where you've got two things are equal just draw one hat just draw half of it and then flip it and merging together no sense in drawing it twice it's on extend this down napoli the curve a little bit all right I'm gonna give this again I'm sure that my banner is not you know, in a farm like thick all the way around so I'm gonna give this a stroke and I think I'll give it a different color stroke okay, so I want now one of that stroke like kind of match the thickness of the banner. All right, so I'm gonna flip this and copy it make sure those points in the same place and he's the direct selection tool in just dragged over those two points just to make sure they're exactly on top of each other I'm goingto average them um command option j or under um object path it can average it so now I know they're right on top of each other and then I'm going to join them so that's one path now um again since I might want to come back and revisit this I'll either make a copy of it or once like a toe a certain point all just like create and I'll just copy the layer and then turn the original layer off so that I have earlier stages of it to go back to but I'll go and expand this um yes what does expand due to the object so it's it was a stroke to path which can be changed so now it's it's an object so if you look at that instead of being just like one stroke and having a weight that goes on either side of the stroke uh now it's it's an outline object all right, so I'm going to use um he was the pathfinder tool I'm gonna create this bottom part of the banner so I put I'm just dragged a box in front of that so I'm going to subtract that from the back I'm not going to use this piece because when I get this finished let me back to a stroke so I can see underneath there yeah I'm just going to put this again but before I do I want to finish the bottom of this to get this ribbon effect come on certain pathfinder tools you actually have to have it like to do the minus front and minus back I believe you have to give it a fill you can't won't work what's your strokes I spend half my time looking for stuff that's actually on my desktop uh oh here's out minus the front I know this is centered yeah, I feel that um my banner treatment um see I'm going to see if I can't get this outline shape I could use two ways I could give this a j j joy enormous stroke and then outline it so I had the original and the stroke or aiken dio I actually offset the path to do that which is sort of just taking one step out of the process food a path and offset path and it's nice to get a preview so I can kind of see good um and again I'm going to go back to my strokes that I can see underneath this so I'm gonna end up combining that with us on bone shape at the bottom and then my columbus canine type will go in here and all have academy in the bottom right? So I'm gonna try and draw something real quick with pathfinder tools that's gonna have to that's gonna have to survive for now so flippant copy days I'm gonna get my fellow and merging together now I'm going to draw a shape to connect him no, we need to connect him at the top because I'm going to merge these shapes together group those um I can use the eyedropper tool instead of killing nfl so like these and merging together um I've got an outline of this so I'm gonna offset the path again about a stroke all right? I also want to offset this so I kind of create a window in here so since I'm going inside that I want to go and a negative number no, I want that so I'm just using the pathfinder tools you know, weird scenario going there but all right, so I want to get rid of this have to manipulate this curve and I'm just manipulating it by dragging both those handles up equal amounts on the other side all right? Huh? Bring the dog in kind of hide my claire so it looks like it might be a bit big. All right, I'm gonna go back and change my red to black okay? So now basically it's just a matter of, uh adding type doing some finessing a little a little better clean up um again step away look at your design with fresh eyes um also helps that I said to print out and like, put it up in the wall and stand and stand back from it the other thing like won him at this stage um before I get into refinements and I have my students to this would never have alluded design project for the critique I have them fitted in a large square and that will tell you you know that will tell you if it's going it's going to be readable if it's got too much detail you have stroke waits here the tooth you know, too thin. Um if there's not enough negative space between things where things you know, start filling in and coming together that's a good that's a good litmus test because that's, you know, those are some of the refinements that you're gonna have to you're gonna have to make even like when I present logos to clients and there you know, they're in the states where they need to make decisions it's like I tell them it's like live with it for a couple days in a week, you know, post him up, look at him every once in a while and I'll take the majority the time the one that they gravitated towards and the meeting is not the one that is not the one you end up with and hopefully, you know, they see the rational more the rationale behind the one that you think is the strongest and end up going in that in that direction reduce your logo to an inch to see if all the elements are readable um, until straight. You do have to be careful when you reduce things. Um it's, not a preference. Whenyou getto me just so I can show him out on screen. But if I click on the scale button and bring up the dialog box, there's a button in there that says scale, stroke weights and if you've got something its got a pattern in there there's that button will activate. Um, otherwise, you know, if you've got a ten point stroke and you reduce it fifty percent, that stroke should be five point. But if that button's not checked it's still, you know it's still a ten point, and, you know you normally catch it when you're going that big a difference. But what can happen is you can do like ten or fifteen percent and not really be pain. Real close attention have changed the stroke. Wait, so you always wanna make sure that that's you said that as a preference.