In this lesson you'll learn from some of the best logos designed in the world.
A lot of these probably seem very simple but creating an effective logo that's
distinct and memorable is a lot harder than many people think. We'll be going
over some quick techniques to create similar logos and some of the techniques
that they might have used to create these are included in this lesson but
it's more than just the techniques. In this course you'll also learn
Best Practices in terms of color. You'll learn to explore creativity and sketching,
to come up with original ideas for logos. But to get started, let's look at some really
well designed logos for inspiration and also we'll have some quick wins, some
quick techniques to learn to inspire you to learn even more throughout this course.
One of the most well known logos is the Nike logo. Now in some versions of this
and older versions it had just the word Nike above it, but in this one it's very
simple. It's just the Nike swoosh, that's what they call it
and to practice the pen tool,
this is a great logo to mimic. Of course we're not going to use this logo,
you know for a client or for ourselves, that is trademarked but it's a great logo to try
to copy in terms of just stretching your skills with the pen tools. So go ahead and open
up Illustrator. Go File, New, Start New Document and just go to the Pen tool
here and then you can choose some kind of stroke here, the border and then set
the Fill to None and just click it and then hit None right there and if you don't see
the Tools panel or the Color panel, just go up to Window and make sure Color is checked
as well as Tools and you can also go to Control. Make sure that's checked up at
the top. That will give us some of the options of the tools. So to create something
similar to the Nike swoosh with the Pen tool, just click and then come up here,
that is a straight line, right. If we just click and let go, we don't want to click
and let go.
You need to click and drag. I messed up and didn't go too far up enough. So go to the
Direct Selection Tool, the white arrow at the top and just drag it up.
Now you can click on it here and just keep going. I'm going to click and drag
and then just click and let go.
Now I need to reset it back this way. I'm going to click and drag.
It doesn't look like it at all obviously but it's just fun to practice with.
You can flip those so it has a fill and the cool thing is you can use the white arrow and
keep adjusting it so, if you're like, well it's starting to look like it, we just need to bring this down
a little bit, may bring that over so it's getting a little bit closer right? So again you just go
to the Pen tool. Click, click and drag way up there and if you need to reset,
see how this is going straight up like that and it's going to curve back down almost like
it has velocity or momentum. Resembles, say a train is going on tracks here and it can't
just stop here and turn back. It's going to have momentum so we need to stop it.
So click there, then reset the angle. Now you can click and drag and then click right there.
Alright, that's the Pen tool. We'll get into it, more detail, just options and
shortcuts using it in best practices using the Pen tool, but the Nike Swoosh logo is
an excellent logo and it's a landmark case study of just effective design that's
memorable. So when you see that you associate with Nike. So they've been successful in
creating a memorable brand with that. It is a logo with simplicity and there are other
simple and effective ones like the World Wildlife Fund and this is just,
your mind fills in the blanks, right, with the Panda there as well as the Apple logo.
It's very simple. So how did they create, you know, that kind of the bite out of the apple?
Well, to practice that, you can create a shape. If you click and hold on
to the Shape tool in the Tools panel
and go to Ellipse tool. Click and drag out and you click and drag another one on top of it.
You select both of them and then right here on the Pathfinder panel - To bring
this up, just go to Window and then Pathfinder and then just click that second one,
Minus Front, and then it puts that bite into the Apple. Another way to do
that is if you just draw out a shape
and then you can click and hold on the Pen tool. Go to Add Anchor Point Tool and just click
right there, click right there. Just add some new anchor points or something like that,
then use the white arrow and just bring it in, right.
It's not going to be as clean as what we just did though.
You could actually probably adjust that a bit, the handles there, alright. And yet another way
is to use ... you'll learn in this course that there's many ways to do the same thing often.
Sometimes the results are a little bit different, but so just create another
circle or some kind of ellipse and then click and hold onto this Width Tool and
go to the Bloat tool. You want the center of that tool to be on the outside of
the ellipse and then just click and hold, and there you go. That's kind of small so you can just
double click over here, make it larger so you could make it pretty large like 400
width and height. There you go, alright. So many different ways to do similar things in Illustrator
but the Apple logo, I mean it used to be very complicated.
We'll also talk about the importance of simplicity without being too simple and then later
iterations of it of course were much more simple and I think more effective.
There are other examples like Visa logo and the Hawaiian Airlines logo. Hawaiian Airlines
that's a great silhouette, a simple shape. We'll talk about simplicity in
Logos but also effective color. You want color to be relevant to the brand of course.
We're going to be going over color harmony, different color schemes and if you want to explore
some possibilities, you can go to Window and then of course Color, but you also have
Color Guide so if you have some kind of base color selected to begin with, and then
over here get many different ways that color can harmonize. We'll be going
over that and so just practice with some of the shapes.
So you could draw a shape out and then draw another one out and you can make it another color
according to that color scheme. We'll also be going over Adobe color and then
color swatches like Pantone as well.
Another well-known logo is the Walmart logo actually. So this is a good example of
making a radial pattern to the side of it, so a couple of different ways to create
that pattern. So if you click and hold onto the Rectangle tool, go to to the Ellipse Tool over here
and I'll just click and drag a shape there
and then you can hold down ALT on the PC or OPTION on the MAC and click and drag
so it's the same exact size and color and size for now.
We're actually going to make this a little bit larger. So hold SHIFT and click and drag, and also
hold ALT or OPTION, right so their centers are perfectly aligned
horizontally and I'm going to make this a little bit different. Color and I'm going to blend these,
right, so instead of using Transform each, we could actually use the Blend tool.
We'll be going over. So just go to Object, Blend, Make and then you can go to Object, Blend,
Blend Options and you can choose how many specific steps are in between.
So if you change it and then toggle Preview, you can see the before and after.
so I'm going to hit OK.
I'm just going to bring this one over a little bit. With the white arrow, just stretch it out a little bit and zoom out.
Control Command Minus on the keyboard. Then you can just click and drag around
all of this. Now we could do Transform Each but another way is to use the Rotate tool.
So go to the Rotate tool and set the middle, see how that little rotate point right
there. We'll need that over here so just left click over here and then hold down
ALT on the PC or OPTION on the MAC and then click and we got a 30 degree angle, that's good
because that's divisible into 360. You want something divisible that would fit
exactly into 360. So I'm going to hit Copy and then press CTRL D on the PC or CMD D on the MAC and
get a nice little radial pattern. You know its symmetrical, you know it's perfect
spacing in between all of them. So that's one way to create that.
Another one is negative space and logos and we go over that. You know the FedEx logo. It has ...
this is the most famous example but this has that arrow right in there in between the E and the X,
getting from point A to point B basically. Since they really should have
a theme of, you know, shipping so how would you do a quick negative space technique?
Well if you draw out some kind of shape and then you draw another kind of shape
inside it so you can draw it to the side or you can draw it, you know, on top of it
right away. Let's just say there's some kind of spoon that we were going to draw off
and then you just click and drag around both of them, Minus Front in the Pathfinder and
then you got quick negative space. You can of course use negative space with text, you know, if you type
something in, click and drag it out here, and you can have it go up the side. In fact click and drag
around both of these, Minus Front, it's not going to work, right. What I need to do is right click
over Create Outlines
We'll be going over the importance of that and then click and drag around both of them, Minus Front, there we go.
The BMW is another landmark logo case study. Now alot of times you need to do circular texts
that might not look as professional but there's is actually a good example. So how
do you type on a path? We are going to be going over that as well so if you use the Pen tool
you can click, click and drag
and then click and hold onto the Type tool and go to the Type on a Path tool.
Then you want to hover over and then you can type in your text, make it a little bit larger here.
"Logo goes here on this path". Alright so you've got Type on a Path technique.
If you want it on a circle like the BMW one, you can click and drag and hold Shift with the Ellipse tool.
and then use the Type on a Path tool.
Click right on that path and then you would have your type on a path.
So hopefully you've learned some quick techniques and quick wins to hopefully
inspire you to learn a lot more in this course. You're not just going to be
learning techniques in Illustrator even though you will be learning that.
You'll also be learning sketching both on paper and in Illustrator, best practices
as far as color and type and much more.
But first we're going to be going over what makes a logo great and I'm going to
be using previous student examples from my university students, many of whom are
graphic designers now. So I'll see you in the next lesson.