A lot of companies are simplifying their logos.
Pringles, MasterCard, even Firefox Creators like Brandon Shepherd, Divinity
and so many more. Go subscribe to them
have been trying to add more detail to make these logos better.
Instead of that, today, I'm going to take these three complicated logos,
strip them down and bring them into the minimalist realm.
Starting with Nando's, quite a not terribly complicated logo.
It's got a cool design, but I think we could oversimplify this down.
I have a logo designer after all, and this is my job to simplify things.
Okay.
The first thing I want to do is take this visual here.
We could simplify this down to just a heart or just to
this part of the chicken.
I don't even know what this chicken is for.
Let me just check something.
The logo, also seen as a sort of mascot,
depicts the rooster of Buffalo's, one of Portugal's most common symbols.
I did not know that.
Okay, well, we could take this, but I'm going to just simplify it down even more.
First of all,
I'm going to take the head of this chicken that did this make an eye real quick.
Now, the trick when simplifying it is the least amount of parts possible
I've found. So I take this, I move it down.
Now I want to get the love in there somewhere.
It seems to be one of the main visuals of the icon.
So I'm going to just take this color for a second.
Take this, make sure this is all got a stroke.
Let's give it a little beak.
I have no idea how this will turn out.
I do not expect this to be a rooster.
I thought it was a genuine chicken.
Oh, my goodness.
This is taking something it never was meant to be.
Having a black stroke always helps make it a bit more cartoony.
We do want to keep the simplification of the head,
put the heart on the head, and I might just steal that.
Well, we could create our own, actually.
I've just made a heart there.
Let's just do that.
We could try and make this into the heart is in.
Make this the rooster head.
That's sort of a beak there.
This might not turn out very well.
This is why they don't simplify these types of logos.
This is all character. Okay.
Bring the V in.
Okay. Now, I'm not. I'm not happy with this.
I'll tell you what we can do, though.
We could use the heart as kind of like a background.
So make a little copy of this.
Or we could put the heart in as the gobbledy things.
What are they? Let's move the heart down here.
Scale that down.
So we've got with all those kind of root.
What does this thing have?
Yeah, it does have that red gobbledy thing.
That and that's fine. Okay.
I'm going to create the thing on the side of it, which I'm seeing.
Copy this to make sure I don't ruin it.
Okay. We'll take this heart and
merge it together.
I'm not sure what's happened with the shape builder there,
but I have a feeling we'll be okay.
Okay.
I mean, it does look kind of cute.
I'm not going to lie that, I mean, is not.
Is it terrible?
I think it's terrible, but let's see what happens.
Okay. We've got the icon. I'm kind of happy with that.
I mean, I really should keep this head.
But I think getting the heart in there is more important.
You kind of need these gobbledy things in there, too,
that does need to be in there if you just scale it down
enough, maybe squidgy a bit because that looks even worse.
This is not working out.
I mean, when does when does a rooster ever look like this?
I mean, it looks like a cute little mascot.
It's not it's not overly terrible.
I think we need to fix the bottom here and make it a bit less like
give it a bit of a silhouette. Okay, now it's the tie.
If I need to fix the tie, what do I do?
That we could steal the tape.
Or we could try and find a good font for it.
So Nando's.
Now, if you're going to go into the super simplistic round, there's always a font
that you could use as a designer, and you'll never be told us that is Helvetica.
I don't think it will work very well.
We'll get it like this. Get rid of that stroke.
That looks terrible.
Let's just move this down, okay?
I don't like that. Let's choose another one.
This one's more in line with the actual analogies logo,
but it feels like it doesn't work very well.
I mean, simplification is a difficult thing.
Let's take this again.
Free vectors just keep copying and pasting and changing until something happens.
I do feel like there needs to be a stroke around this,
so I'm going to go back and like try and get a stroke around this.
That looks terrible.
Breath.
Look, this one is quite difficult to simplify.
I think with that by that, I'm just going to get rid of all of that.
Then I'm going to bring the stroke around this
and we're going to scale it down to where it's close to this one.
And we've got an end that doesn't work well,
even if we just take the whole Nando's logo type so it doesn't alienate too much.
And we could do
the ultimate simplification by right clicking and pressing simplify.
Okay, so that was Nando's, I think I could have done a better job.
Let's move on to the next one.
The ye olde famous Starbucks.
Now, Brendan made this realistic.
I wanted to try and bring this to a simple level.
How do we do that?
I'm still struggling in my mind
to work out how to make this look good simplistically.
First of all, I'll copy it so I can always go back
and we're going to do this little trick I'm going to outline or offset the path.
And the reason why I'm doing that
is because I want the shapes that I cut out of this logo
that I'm going to pick out the face and the main features of what I think
could constitute to be a decent, simple design.
Okay, so we've got most of the face there.
So I've got that to play with.
And now the crown. I want this.
Now this is a siren.
Everyone knows that dangerous creatures never go near them if you hear them.
So the problem we have,
if we're going to simplify this down, is that if it's in its positive
space like this, it looks strange because it's not meant to be.
We would have to completely redesign this like, completely.
Another thing we can do that today. I don't.
I have the powers to do.
I'm thinking we just use the space here inside of a box.
Let's make this white, let's make an icon.
So around those corners.
Okay, so that does one that's pretty simplified already.
Maybe instead of looking at the face, we look at something different.
We've got these fins that could work.
I mean, it could over encompass some text.
So let's bring some text in like Starbucks.
I'm going to use a front
that I've been working on called Only SANS will be available soon.
I will change this to be a green.
Then what I'm going to do is take this crown.
We can put it on top.
Oh my. That doesn't look too bad at all.
It kind of does look a bit strange if we look at the images here.
Starbucks like a type.
It's just Daniel with a massive siren in the middle.
So we're going for a very minimalistic logo type.
And instead of using the face of this siren, we can use the crown or the tiara.
I don't even know what that is.
I could, like, you know, make it a bit nicer if I want it to,
but I want it to come over the s, the other option we have is we could take
this and expand it and contract it slightly, bring the crown in.
And I know it's not geometric.
That's the problem with simple logos.
Everything's like geometric and it's very difficult to do with these illustrations.
They've done a pretty good job simplifying this down already, being in a circle
at all.
So why don't we just bring this into another circle?
Kind of looks creepy without, you know.
So to bring this down, I'm not sure if this will work,
but we can always see I don't know.
It kind of looks freaky. Is it called comedia dell'arte?
Those masks that you are?
Yeah, it kind of looks like this to me,
but a bit more of a simplistic, like an anonymous face.
It's like the anonymous Starbucks.
We could move this down a tiny bit if you take the handles down a little bit.
Oh, no, I'm ruining it already.
Now, backspace, that that's not going to work.
The problem is the face is quite thins I want to do is like this sort of
and here again you don't have the viewing of a siren
that doesn't look like it, but it's still kind of work.
I guess.
Normally all these minimal logos that we do,
it all goes like the left on top, like we start.
But because this isn't a perfect circle, our definition, I don't know.
Which one do you guys think works? Really?
Any of them work very well
because since you know the brand, you don't really want to change it.
Kind of creepy.
I've got to write that.
That could work.
Okay. That is the Starbucks will let me know what you think.
Now, if you're a designer and you don't have a portfolio, then you need one.
Squarespace is sponsoring this video because unlike many other web builders out
there, Squarespace doesn't require you to know any code to make your website
fully customizable and look exactly the way you want it.
With thousands of fully customizable award winning design templates
that fully customizable, you can make your own portfolio
to get client work and even have your own online shop
to are any digital resources
that you may want to sell to make a bit of money on the site.
If you click the link down below, you'll get a seven day free trial
where you can create your website before even paying for it.
Then you get 10% of any purchases with Squarespace, that's
including a domain name.
So down below, if you would like to get your own website
today, the next oversimplification I'm doing is Gorilla Glass.
I mean, this one is pretty complicated.
It's got a lot of characters to it,
and there's a couple of ways we could simplify this down.
I'm going to start with the less simple way, I think, which is to keep
the same composition throughout and make it a little less detailed.
You can see here all the detail in the gorilla.
You got different colors in the nose and the face.
You've got all these gradients here, you've got the hands covering this,
The type is cool and the typed on here is pretty, you know,
for a logo, it's more of a badge of a logo.
It's not bad, but that's not going to stop me simplifying it.
Okay.
First of all, let me trace over the Gorillaz face for a minute,
because I think we could make this a lot simpler by just tracing over it.
So I'm imagining if I was to work for Gorilla
Glue on this project, we wouldn't change lots of it.
We would just go ahead and essentially just make clean up from here.
Let's get the eyes and let's keep them geometric.
Why not get them like this? Rotate it a little bit.
It's going to be a bit more cartoony.
I think that's the way to do this one.
Okay, I've got the colors.
I'm going to use this color there.
Start coloring these in and see what happens.
This create a bit of a body shape here and that will be the last stock
across the can. Okay.
You guys are going to have to trust me with this one.
Okay.
We've got the ape or the gorilla, should I say right now?
Okay.
I think we're missing a detail to put some ideas in.
I don't know how I've done this, but it doesn't look right.
Okay, let's add the mouth, and hopefully that will make a difference.
Yeah, that looks better. You can see the gorilla in there.
He doesn't look as good. That's fine.
Okay, let's just go into the typography that we're going to make this flat.
I think we should move this out like, so we're going to do the same thing
with this.
I think this batch design is going to look really good
and add some anchor points here.
Just bring them in and it will be gorilla glue, not the typeface.
I'm going to use for this is unreal.
Let's try Rock grotesque.
The reason why is because we've got so much
we can do with this to make it fit out correctly.
We can get the exact weight because it's a variable font.
We can make sure it fits.
I can tell this is going to continue to be fine
tuning things, but we haven't got time.
Okay, this is get this is looking good.
A bit more simple.
I'm going to simplify this down completely by just writing the word gorilla.
Now, a little trick that I like to do will take this print this out.
We're going to do some type of a path.
We'll go to this
because it needs to sit on the base, on the center of it, should I say.
So we just get it to sit correctly in the center.
What I like about this variable font is you can change the weight
and the weight to make it look good and fit correctly.
It will do that.
It will rotate this right durable.
Or is it strong and strong, isn't it?
Yeah, I think needs to have the ability to be a bit bigger.
I mean it doesn't look good, but it doesn't look awful.
No, it looks pretty bad.
Let's go for even more simplicity.
I think that's the that's the problem.
We didn't go simple enough.
Take the type.
It will go extra thick.
Not as wide.
Let's sympathize. You can't mess around with it too much.
And I'm going to do this sort thing.
I do attacks now this is just make it look a little less professional.
Does it mean it'll be any less simple?
But we can try a go.
I mean, this isn't like simplified at all.
Do some negative space action here.
Maybe move his head down, his hedge quite big.
I know that's the anatomy and all, but his head was quite big.
The examination of Look, okay, a bit different.
Yeah, I'm happy. And then underneath we could even write good.
Have three or four caps there.
Okay. Okay. I think we're getting somewhere.
We could put glue in the side.
I'm happy with that, I think.
Okay, so we've got the original logo for Gorilla Glue.
We've got the one that is
sort of a bit simpler, hasn't got loads of the textures in there.
Move that ladder up a little bit, and then we've got the ultra simple one,
which is inherently just the type.
And I picture a bad picture of a gorilla.
So what can we learn from this?
Well, certainly not every logo needs to be simple.
Simplicity works a lot.
Companies do it just because they want more people to memorize the logo.
They don't want the logo to be offensive.
Normally, simple shapes are easy to remember, easy to draw,
but it doesn't necessarily have to be simple.
You can tell by just looking at the work here.
They have none of the character of the original design,
especially the Starbucks siren Makes no sense.
It's nice cover and people recognize it as an iconic design.
Nando's Yeah.
Don't even talk to me about that one. Never mind me.
Now, if you want to watch we do crazy things
with other logos, click this video over here.
You won't regret it.