- Hey everyone, Christian here
from the Student Success Centre.
- And Elaine from Lyons New Media Centre in Mills Library.
And today we are gonna be showing you
how to design a logo with Adobe Illustrator.
Throughout this video, we will be showing you
some design fundamentals such as line, shape, and symmetry,
and how you can consider these in your design.
- Ideally, before you begin your logo design,
you wanna conduct some market research.
That means doing a Google search
or going onto ServiceOntario
to see if the name's already taken,
or if there's any other logos that are similar
to the ones that you're designing.
There's a lot to consider when designing a logo
for a company or for yourself,
as this will be your main signifier for years to come.
For this tutorial, we're gonna be creating a logo
for the fake company Orange Digital Skills.
As a side note,
if there is a company already using this name,
we're in no way affiliated with them.
This tutorial is for demonstration purposes only.
- Before we begin, let's learn a little bit
about what Adobe Illustrator is.
Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based design software,
versus something like Adobe Photoshop
which is a pixel-based design software.
A vector is a line created by joining points.
Vectors can be scalable to any dimension
without losing resolution.
Versus a pixel image,
because you only have so many pixels to begin with.
For a logo design, a vector image is preferred
because you can resize your logo
for something really small like a business card,
or something really huge like a billboard,
and vectors offer this flexibility.
If you don't have access to Adobe Illustrator,
you could look into using Inkscape,
which is a free and open source vector editing software.
Now, with all of that background information out of the way,
let's hop right into the tutorial.
- [Christian] So we're just gonna
open up Illustrator here, and we're gonna
create an art board for us to design our logo.
If you go to the right here, you'll see that there's
a bunch of different measurements that you can choose from.
We're just going with inches here,
and we're gonna go and create a square art board,
and it'll kinda set it up like this.
I'm working on Windows here,
so I'm gonna press Alt and scroll out
to see what that looks like.
So in order to set this up, we're gonna go to View,
and we're gonna show Rulers.
I like to double-click the rulers up here
just around the centre mark
so that we can kinda split that nicely.
And our first tutorial is gonna be for text,
so we're gonna be nice and we're gonna name our layer
So we'll start here, double click and write text.
And that'll be our first layer.
So grab the Type tool here on our left.
Click and drag to expand.
And this will give us some that lorem ipsum text,
we'll go to the Properties panel.
And right now it's our text is Myriad pro,
we are gonna press Delete,
and we're gonna write all in cap locks, orange, O-R-A-N-G-E.
Now, generally, what you're gonna wanna do
when you are designing a logo is you're gonna wanna do
some kind of like have a blank art board and just draw
as many different logos as you can
and then kind of get feedback on those designs.
But for the sake of this tutorial,
we're just gonna go with a simple
Orange Digital Skills logo, and we're gonna create
an orange icon to fit where the O is in the word.
So we're just gonna centre these words.
Right now.
If you wanna click Shift and drag,
that will move it in line.
What we're gonna do is we're gonna expand
the word orange, we'll say about like, 30 points.
And then for digital skills,
I'm thinking that it's looking pretty good at around 12,
we're gonna do is we're gonna go back
to our selection tool, click over both,
and we're gonna go to a font called Lemon Milk Light.
Now, this is a really nice font
and it's available for free on dafont.com,
and it's free for personal use, but for commercial use,
what you're gonna wanna do, is leave a donation
and we can have a link in the description for that
if you wanna download it in these free fonts.
So these are looking pretty good.
Right now we're just gonna move up digital skills
and kind of position that to where we would closer
where we want it to be.
We'll go more to the layout a little bit later.
- One of the basic elements of design is the line.
Lines can be straight, wavy, jagged, diagonal, dashed, thin,
thick, and all these different styles, directions,
types of lines can indicate different messages or feelings.
Type is essentially composed of a bunch of lines.
As the type is chosen for this design is simple.
It has sharp and thin lines
that are moderately spaced apart.
These lines have a clean look to them,
and provide a sense of freshness or modernism.
A perfect choice for a digital media company
named after a fruit.
- [Christian] Okay, so now the second part here
is we're gonna go into the colour.
We had already picked a few colours,
that I'm just gonna bring these over onto my other artboard.
So I have them here.
So these are the colours that we're gonna be using
for our logo.
And what we're gonna wanna do is
we're gonna wanna make the word orange
in this like orange hue here.
So we're gonna grab the eyedropper tool.
It's just the letter I on your keyboard.
But not when a word is selected.
So we're just gonna have that, there digital skills,
same thing, we're gonna double click it,
go to our eyedropper tool, go to this and then for here,
what we're gonna wanna do is we're gonna wanna add
a stroke colour.
So we're gonna use the black colour here
but the same there.
And if you zoom in which would be Alt
and then the scroll key,
we're gonna see that there are some sharp points
on the like A and the N if you go to stroke,
you can change the cap around the edges
and that will give it like a nicer kind of feel
if we round that out.
- Colour Theory is what informs the intentional selection
of colours and design.
It is a great tool for the aesthetic of the visual
but also for the psychology of colour Association.
The colour wheel is a great place to start when selecting
the colours for your design.
Cool colours such as blue, green, and purple
are associated with calmness.
While warm colours such as yellow, red and orange
are generally associated with energy.
When selecting additional colours to be added to your design,
you could consider complementary colours
which appear on opposite ends of the colour wheel.
Or you can consider analogous colours which appear
beside each other on the colour wheel.
If you also wanted to play with different tones and shades
of the same colour, you could go for a monochromatic
colour scheme in your design.
There are many colour palette generators available freely
out there on the web.
So I would suggest checking these out when you can.
They're really great in helping you come up
with a cohesive colour scheme.
- [Christian] Now it's time for us to draw on the orange
that's gonna be sitting here in the O of the orange.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna go up here,
on our left, and go to our Ellipse tool.
Now what you wanna do is click and hold Shift
and drag out, and that will scale it proportionally.
And now if you let go shift, you'll see that it kind of
gets a wonky, but if you just hold Shift,
it scales really nicely.
And since the last colour we use was the orange set,
it's gonna be actually sized pretty well.
What you wanna do is bring that over top, kind of scale it
so it's roughly the same size.
Cool, so it's looking pretty good.
And we're gonna bring that up top here.
So now that we're outside of the text,
let's actually create a new layer
and call this one, the orange.
Cool.
So we're gonna click on this orange here.
And we now see it's in the text layer.
I forgot to add that in.
So we're gonna go there click to that orange there.
Right click it orange and then go centre current layer.
So now we're working on that orange there up top,
or unlock our text so we can't move it or grab any of that.
So now working with this orange here,
what we're going to wanna do is click
and then Alt and Shift and drag it to the side.
So now we have a duplicate, you can also copy and paste it.
But what we're gonna do here is we're gonna remove the fill,
and we'll see why that's important in a second.
So let's go to the pen tool and add a little bit of shading.
What you're gonna wanna do is grab a point here
and a point here we're gonna create like a crescent moon
kind of shape.
And we are gonna re click the anchor point,
click again there, I just kind of follow the outline.
Click the anchor point again to reset
and kind of follow the outline there.
And then we're gonna switch from our stroke
and put it towards our fill.
And then we're gonna go up here to the opacity
and kind of drop that down
somewhere in the 10% range just add 10 right there.
Cool.
So that's looking pretty good.
We're just gonna take this, right click it, and go, arrange,
bring to front so that now this layer is gonna go
right on top of that.
So that's looking pretty good so far.
And then the next thing we need to do is draw the leaves.
So we're taking the pen tool again here,
and there's many different ways you can do this.
You can go to Windows view and show the grid,
you can draw it that way.
But I'm just gonna go,
for just for the sake of this tutorial,
we're gonna hide the grid,
we're just gonna click a point here, go a little bit lower,
and then just kind of build this out
so that we're drawing the shape of the leaf.
Cool, and that's looking pretty good.
We're gonna click on our selection tool, which is option B.
Click the letter I for our eyedropper tool
and we're going to click on that colour
that we've chosen here.
Now we're gonna go back to properties go to the stroke,
sorry, double click here and fill that in with black.
That's looking pretty good.
We can also round those caps off again.
So it's kind of more in line with the rest of our design.
And let's click it, click the corner here, click shift,
so it scales proportionally and kind of push that leaf
a little bit lower.
Now, we're also gonna click Alt and Shift and drag another
leaf out of there.
And we can kind of position this one
a little bit differently, kind of off to the side,
but then kind of together, cool, something like that.
Or let's kind of bring it out this way.
And maybe we wanna bring this one to the front,
we can go arrange, Bring to Front.
I like kind of like the other way, so command Z,
it's in the back.
What we'll do is we'll select both
and make sure our fill is the same,
but a little bit less at .75, and let's group them together.
Push them around here and then we're gonna arrange
and send it to the back.
- Another element of design is shape.
Shape, as you can guess it is any two dimensional area
defined by a boundary.
Shapes can be circular, rectangular or organic.
The shape created in this design is the circular shape
of the orange and the organic shapes of leaves.
The actual body of the orange is a perfect circle
to mimic the O in the word orange.
Shape is intentional here.
When we add light and shadow to a shape we introduce another
element of design called form.
Form is what turns a two dimensional shape
into a seemingly three dimensional object.
By adding a sense of depth and realism to the design.
Realism can be taken a step further with texture.
For this logo design, Christian intentionally didn't add
texture to the surface of the orange
because he was following a more flat design approach.
- [Christian] Now that we have this,
we're gonna go back to our Layers panel
and we're gonna change the alignment.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to
unlocking our text options here, or our text panel,
we're gonna go to the property section, click on orange.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna create outlines.
So this is really useful if you wanna scale something.
But you also know that the outlines are created,
you cannot type so I can't change any of the letters.
But what we're gonna do here is,
we're just gonna click on the O and delete it
and then kind of scale our orange right back into our logo.
So that's what logos generally gonna look like,
but we're gonna do is we're gonna move the letters
so that they kind of sit on the line here.
Then we have our orange so it sits on the line here,
and we're gonna just gonna try and play around
with some of the positioning and some of the spacing here
between the letters, which is known as the kerning.
So we're gonna do that.
We'll also go here to our guides,
and add just kind of like another guide in there,
just so we can see what's good,
it kind of is close to possible.
For this, what we're gonna wanna do is bring it up.
Now you can play around with the positioning,
but I think a little bit closer kind of push
pushes the whole thing a little bit together.
- Balance is achieved in a design
by distributing visual weight.
This process comes more naturally over time
and as you move objects around in your design
to see what looks best.
Sometimes when balance is achieved so thoroughly,
a design becomes symmetrical.
Symmetry is achieved by creating a design
that is mirrored along a horizontal, vertical
or even diagonal axis.
Asymmetry is also a design choice
and has been applied to the logo in this tutorial.
As we can see, the orange drawing is on the left
and it is what makes this logo intentionally asymmetrical.
And also helps establish a focal point.
- I think that's looking pretty good.
And from here, you know, now that you're playing
with them both layers, you can click and drag
and move them around.
If you really want you can go back to the properties here,
maybe like left align this see how that looks,
scale this one up if you really want to, you know.
But what's really good about kind of making a logo like this
is that your logo and your design is now reduction,
it's more of a reduction thing that you can do.
So you can choose to include the entire design
on like a brand new like business cards,
a thing like that, or you can actually just use
the orange by itself.
So if you click Alt and Shift,
you can just leave it like that.
So now we're gonna do is we're gonna add another layer,
and we're just gonna go to Google for a second.
We're just gonna create a really quick mock-up
and we're typing plain white t-shirt.
And what's really good here is we can just kind of
go to images here, click on the image that we like,
and then kind of create a very quick mock-up,
without actually having to go anything.
We're just gonna right click this copy the image,
and we're gonna paste it into our layer.
And we're gonna put this layer behind the text
so that all of our stuff shows
and we're just gonna click the corner here, resize it,
and then lock that layer, so now this doesn't move.
What we're gonna do is we're gonna click this,
group it together, and now you can actually drag this
on to your T shirt, kind of play with the sizing,
like maybe you wanna put that in the centre, you know,
and see how that looks.
Or if you wanna make it smaller and kind of put it over,
like where the pocket would be here.
And that's really looking good.
And if you ever wanna try it out too just with the logo,
you can put that on top there.
And yeah, just kind of see just like a rough,
like how it would look.
And it's really nice to kind of see what other branding
you wanna do, if you wanna put out business cards,
you can mock-up your own design and put it on there.
If you're trying to put it on a sweater,
you can do that too.
Just grab an image from Google just to see
roughly how it's gonna look.
Yeah, I think that kind of wraps it up.
Just make sure whenever you come,
it comes down to brainstorming the logos.
Make sure that you take some input from other people,
you know, sketch out your design, see what people like.
Because it is gonna be the face of your company too.
So, you know, you're gonna wanna make sure that
it's easy to understand.
Use good colour contrast so people can read it,
and you wanna make sure that it is easily recognisable.
Stay tuned for our next episode in the digital skill series,
where we move away from graphic design
and explore the world of video.
Thanks for watching.