when logo designing in adobe illustrator there are some technical aspects to keep
in mind however most of these apply to pretty much all vector-based programs but let's jump
right into things today with grids yes grids can be insanely useful to us logo designers
and a quick way to make a grid is by using the rectangular grid tool now you can change the width
and the height of your grid but importantly we want to adjust the amount of squares on our grid
and once you've done that make sure to hold down the shift key and click
we will also want to add a stroke color to the grid and likely lower the stroke weight as well
i personally like to make the grid quite light in color so it doesn't distract me from the logo
artwork that i'm gonna make and also don't forget to press command or control 2 to lock the thing
down we're soon going to talk about some downfalls with this grid but let's take a closer look for
now and see what's what so as you probably know pressing p brings up the pen tool but i also like
to press caps lock which uses the cross hair x kind of icon here and if you switch on snapping
settings in the preference settings menu this grid will help you so much when creating logos
we can also see that illustrator is telling us when we're above the grid path or intersection
so yeah grids can help us align things and create logo shapes really easily but what about that
downfall that i spoke about so here's a logo shape and the logo type is seen below but let's set up
the logo shape so it's flush with the grid and in line and once that's been achieved most designers
will go ahead and make sure to align the logo type to the grid so the logo is balanced with the shape
okay so technically speaking this logo is now balanced and perfectly aligned
but take a look at it properly does the logo type feel or appear balanced below the lego shape
to me it doesn't and that's because of the specific lettering on this design the r has
a hard straight up left edge whereas the l has a lower section extending out to the right with free
open space in the top right this creates the illusion that it's not aligned and it's unbalanced
so if i duplicate the design and then nudge the logo type over to the right a tiny little bit we
can see that visually speaking things look a lot better or at least i hope you can see that they do
it's important to spend time paying attention to things like this on your logo designs when
working in adobe illustrator but we can even go a bit deeper still if you see here the text has
a bounding box around it now sometimes designers will select the logo type text and then the logo
shape and just click the align button relying on illustrator to perfectly do everything for them
however illustrator has ignored the lettering itself and has used the bounding box as a guide
and which as you can see it doesn't actually touch the edges of the text but if i go ahead and
outline the text and then repeat the same process we can see that we get a different result again
so yeah my point here is that don't rely on illustrator to align your logo designs
and don't even rely on the grid to do it either the best way to align something
is to just use your common sense and your eye in combination with these tools yes of course
there are instances where the grid will be the best choice mainly when working with shapes but
think about the context and which method is going to be best for what you're doing
so here's a tip that's going to save you a lot of time when working in your logo design projects
we commonly use the pathfinder tool a lot when creating logos one of the most used processes
is the minus front operation that cuts one shape into another the thing is that once we've done
that we cannot easily play around with the layouts because we now just have one shape instead of two
so what i like to do with my logo design workflow is i simply fill one of the shapes with the
background color or the artboard color and then i play around with the layouts to see what i like
and of course that's with eye on your keyboard which is for the eyedropper tool
now you can arrange your design in different ways to see what might work and what doesn't work for
your logo and you can also maybe duplicate them many times over to test out various
different layouts there is another way though a different method so let's go back to the minus
front operation as we know and the design does end up being one shape with the cutout section
but here we can access the direct selection tool and then hold down shift and select the
inner shapes we are then able to manipulate the design whilst only having one vector shape
you can also press v for the selection tool while you're doing this at the same time
next up a handy tip for when you're working on a client's logo and this is to create and save
custom swatches for each individual clients to do that you simply open up the swatches panel
and then add a new color group here and this is handy because you can use color groups on
various different projects devices and even share them with a client or other designers
but i like them mostly for the reason that i can work on a client's logo in the future and i can
just simply come back to their swatch group and have access to the correct brand colors
a lot of the time i personally use pantone because it's a safe bet
when working in different parts of the world or on different computers
next up something i think that many designers forget to do and it does cause problems and you
can be working on a design for many hours and many days and you never see it in different situations
if you export your design as a png or svg or something like that and then take a look at
it on a different screen or different window or different device then you might notice problems
that you first missed you will be surprised at how different alignment and balance can look once you
export your design and open it up somewhere else for example here i've opened my svg in firefox
it's just a way to prove your work and just get a different perspective on things whilst not being
into that zone in illustrator but yeah there are some technical tips when you're working on
logos in adobe illustrator if you want to check out more videos and learn more about graphic
design do click the video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace
you