i'm going to show you the seven best tools for editing and making logos in adobe illustrator
and these are ones that i use every single project but not only am i going to show you the tools but
also a lot of them have handy hidden hacks that will increase their power and your workflow
and sponsoring today's video is a trusted friend of this channel the web browser design tool ready
mac learn more about that and a neat little discount later in today's video the first tool
or function that i often use for logo designing is the view options functions now as you can see
here i have a view dedicated to a specific part of my logo design now i can just click this view and
snap to that point and work in detail something that is super powerful and useful when working
on a logo design now setting up a view is very easy you just click view and then scroll down to
new view the thing is let's take the views to a new level if you've seen some of these tools
before or heard about them in a previous video stay tuned as you might actually learn something
new about their tool there is a specific way that i work on logos that is unique and pretty awesome
so head up to new window and then click that option there this will essentially open up
the same document but in two different windows then go ahead and arrange them so they are tiled
this is what i like to do in my workflow and i will zoom into a part of my design so for
example here our custom view and then on the other window i have a kind of overall view of the design
but there is more on that overall view i select everything and then press command or control h
and this will hide all of the anchor points so i can clearly see what is going on
so now i can work both zoomed in and also zoomed out at the same time next up some tips with grids
command or control and apostrophe will bring up the standard grid and also hide it
this can be useful when logo designing but i do prefer to make my own grids
so press m for the rectangle tool hold down shift and make a square across your entire artboard
covering it fully then split this stroke shape into a grid via this drop down menu here
in the new panel you can apply your specifications and then just hit ok
ok cool but let's take this even further and select everything
right or control click and then turn the entire thing into a guide
i then like to lock the guides down and if i don't want to use them i will just hide them
at some point i personally prefer working with guides but each designer has their own preference
now again this tip has an added bonus attached to it but first it's no secret that logo designers
often are working on multiple artboards with the variations of designs now if you want to
save each of these designs as a separate document you can check the save each artboard to separate
file option so i will then have three different ai files however to help you with organization
when you make a new artboard like so make sure to give it a relevant name
now if you give each artboard a different name when you save them separately
each file is going to have a relevant name and thus you are going to remain more organized
another really important aspect of illustrator that many of you know about is the export screens
function as a logo designer this is a huge huge time saver you can set up all of your file formats
and then control the scale of the size that you want to export so i can have the same
design at different scales say for example png svg and so on it's very very very useful
okay so i have some file formats ready to go but watch what happens when i select my entire design
and then drop it into the screens option one of the ears has been allocated as a separate entity
and that's because it isn't grouped with the logo mark itself if you want everything to export as
one single thing group it together with command or control g but it is also wise to export logo type
separately too so how can we have a list of logo design tools without mentioning the pathfinder
i've spoken about this thing so much on the channel we all should know by now that the
hotkey for the compound paths is the alt or the option key when using the pathfinder
function this is a non-destructive workflow process the pathfinder is so good for creating
new shapes from other shapes and that's something logo designers do all the time
an honorable mention also goes to the shape builder tool which i do use from time to time
and then finally the appearance panel possibly one of the most powerful parts of illustrator
because you can do so much from one single vector path in this panel and i've made an entire video
on this tool about four years ago now and if you want to take a look you can find that linked in
the top right corner in the cards but what you can take away from this video is that the appearance
panel will save you a lot of time and it can work magic for logo designers there's not enough time
in this video to get into that right now fully but these are the main tools that i use as a
logo designer and how i use them so thanks to readymag for sponsoring today's video
readymag is a design tool that helps you create awesome websites but you don't need to download
anything at all it works directly from your browser which is pretty neat now it utilizes
an intuitive drag and drop editor so you can just add whatever you want to the canvas and then just
start editing you also can of course choose from a huge library of customizable templates
it's also wise to check out the inspiration page for ideas or you can just see what is possible
with ready mac now you can also create animated features for your websites and
just really make it come to life with scroll hover and click animations these features are
available in all of the raider mag plans and for typography lovers out there you have great
precision when it comes to fine tuning your text and also access to large libraries of web fonts
from typekit web type google and so on also if you need any assistance you can check out the
learn page where you will find useful video tutorials some of which are interactive sandbox
style tutorials and these will just help you grasp the basics and more now you can try ready mag
right now for free just sign up for the free plan without the use of a credit card but of course
the studio plan offers some perks such as being able to map up to five domains on your account
and the ability to create as many projects as you want now the first 50 users who use
the promo code satori 50 can try the studio plan for only 20 dollars so yeah give ready mag ago by
clicking the link in the description box below if you want to learn more about logo designing
or illustrator just click a video on screen and until next time design your future today peace
you