In this lesson you'll learn the basics of color in logo design as well as how
to apply different kinds of color. So I have a couple of panels up here on our workspace and
I want to go over some of these and then also Color Modes and why you need to
know about that in logo design. So up at the top, it says Color Themes and these are some
things I actually got from InDesign magazine layout and so it's pretty neat
the way Creative Cloud works with Adobe is that you can create a color theme
over in Adobe InDesign, then bring it over into Adobe Illustrator.
Now there is a little link here where it says Launch Adobe Color Website and bring
that over a little bit so you can see. So if you click that, it will bring you over to
Adobe Color which is a really helpful website. It's color.adobe.com. You can see
I'm logged in here and you can come up with different color schemes. So there's
Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, Complementary. So if I just choose one kind of color
here like this kind of has a base that I've got selected and I do Monochromatic and
you can see it change here, and also up here on the color wheel. Triad and then
Complementary. So two basic ones are Complementary, it's two colors on the
opposite side of the color wheel, and then Analogous is around the edge of the
color wheel, and they just are harmonious. And you can see down here we'll talk
about this, the hex or hexadecimal color codes
and then RGB, red green blue. I'm going to go ahead and close the Color Themes panel out and
bring this up here. Now we have Swatches, Color guide and Color up. If you don't have
any of these just go to Window and then you select them there as usual. So I've been
selected color here throughout this course. We can do that, you know, if there's
just some kind of color you want, or you can double click over here on the Fill
and it'll bring up the color picker. Now if we look over here, there's H,S,B R,G,B
C,M,Y,K. The ones we need to worry about if you're going to print. A lot of printers
will require it be in CMYK mode, but as far as the color, these are going to correlate with
each other. So RGB, red, green, blue. This is just for light on the screen,
you know, red light, green light and blue light added together. And then CMYK is the
opposite. They add together in a different way and it's mainly for print.
So when I worked at a newspaper years ago, we actually had these different plates,
these kind of bendable plates you'd feed into a machine and there was a cyan plate,
a magenta yellow and
K, it's not for black, it's actually Key and it's basically so you don't have to
combine all these to have black on a certain area. It just has a black plate.
So that's short for black but it's technically short for Key and then Cyan,
Magenta, Yellow and so you would see almost it looks like a negative of a photo
so you'd have this large layout out for a magazine or newspaper, whatever and you would
have, it would just have degrees of transparency or opacity in different areas
to make up a photograph. So you combine those together and you can get a lot
of different colors. RGB is more for the screen but some printers will print RGB
files but it's red, green, blue and then down here the Hexadecimal. If you click
only web colors, that will show you only colors that are safe for the web meaning
you can make the background color and the coding of an HTML page of a website
so it would just constrict it to only those. So I'm going to hit Cancel there
and I just want to go over the Color Guide.
This is helpful in Illustrator. A lot of other programs don't have this, and you can add
a color scheme. You don't have to go over to Adobe Color. You can actually use this
right here. So if you have a color selected like I do here, click this down arrow,
then there's Complementary, Complementary 2, Split Complementary, Left Complementary, Right complementary
and then Analogous and all those. So you could choose one of those and apply it.
So if you just want to apply it to say, this over here and I created this cube
here by just creating a line and, say you're using the Pen tool and you're sketching, just
create a line and then ALT or OPTION click and drag it to duplicate it so you know
every single distance is the same. And then you can just click and drag around the
corners there with the white Direct Selection tool and do CTRL or Command J or
Join. So that's how I made that. Just a quick tip there. So if I want to apply this, I click it
there and I click this one over here and click here and then they're Analogous, alright.
You can click this one, say you want it a little bit darker and then that one alittle bit
darker, just a little bit different, then you've got a nice shape. So experiment with
different color schemes there. Many different ones and you just reset
it by, you just set the different color and you'll be able to reset it to
different colors, but it will be the same type of rules like Complementary, Analogous.
You can also save an entire group to the swatch panels. If you click that down at
the bottom of the Color Guide so I'm going to close that out.
Now swatches, of course, if you have a color that you like, that you're using,
click and drag it over, drag it over right there and then we'll add it to the Swatches. You can switch between
these types of color modes pretty quickly so if I click this and go over here, pull it out a little bit
so you can see it better. CMYK and then you can switch to RGB and it will
give you that Hexadecimal code so you can switch back and forth. But if you go to
File and then Document Color Mode, this is really the color mode that we're in.
So there's CMYK and then there's RGB, so in another lesson in a little bit
you'll see that I send CMYK color for Illustrator file because it's the print
context and then RGB we're going to have for some rasterized versions of it that
are High Res if they want to put them on the web. Because for example, if you have
a PNG, you can't even save that in CMYK mode, you have to say that in RGB mode.
It's meant for the screen. Now another thing to consider when it comes to color is
when you're printing on paper,
depending on the type of paper, it's going to look slightly different, and to try
to bring more uniformity to publishing and magazine ads and things like that.
They do have some industry standard color swatches. So on the Swatches panel
here you can just go to Window then Swatches. If you don't have that, just
click in the upper right hand corner
like so and you'll see Open Swatch Library, and then go to Color Books,
I'm going to bring this way over, Open Swatch Library, Color Books and then Industry Standard.
A lot of times we'll be using Pantone. You've probably seen one of those books, Pantone
books, that people have, either other graphic designers are you might have one,
or you've seen them, sometimes even at paint shops or home improvement shops.
And it just has color codes for specific colors and it's meant for uniformity
across different media. You can also get there by going to Window and then way at
the bottom
Swatch Libraries. You can't really see it here but it just says Swatch Libraries and then go up to Color Books.
Same thing. So what we going to do. Let's just say for this one and let me give you an
example real quick.
IBM. This is IBM's software brand identity guide. It's well known in the
logo design industry that they use a specific Pantone color and you can even
see them mention it right here at Pantone 2718 whenever possible, and
they have a guide and this is actually pretty useful because it's a guide for
its own employees and other publishers to say, you know, make sure you use that
Pantone color. In fact they will pay extra when they have an advertisement in
a magazine and let's just say it's processed colors like CMYK and it
can't get exactly that color. But for branding consistency they pay extra to
actually have that Pantone color applied right where the logo is and then the
rest of the photo advertisement actually is using processed colors, CMYK. So this is
just some branding identity guidelines like where to put the trademark symbol,
the R and so on and it also talks about how you don't want to put the IBM logo on
certain types of colors where there's not enough contrast from the background and then
obviously there's no outline version. You don't want to distort the logo.
You want to put the logo as part of a saying or even like a slogan, something like
that. You don't want to confuse it with other companies. you don't want to put it over a pattern and
you don't want to link it to a specific subdivision within the company. So it
needs to stand alone and just look like that. So this is an example case study of
using color consistency. They use this specific Pantone color and they'll even
pay extra to have that available if they're using CMYK in a publication.
They'll just pay extra to use that Pantone color. So if your client knows they want
a specific color, you can go ahead and use that in the Pantone. You just go over
here, click here and then go to Open Swatch Library. Two different ways to find it but,
Color Books, Pantone, +Solid Coated.
All these different colors over here, right. I'm going to close this one here and you can add
them to the Swatches Library of course and you can save swatches but for this one,
let's just say, instead of the Stroke, I'm actually going to set that to None.
I'm going to add a Fill and you can just hover over this and it
gives you the name, and you can sort it by certain ways like sort it by name and so on.
And so we can actually just hover over here and get specific color. Remember my client
was talking aboutm he wanted some kind of traditional blue. So I can just click on
it and it will apply it.
This text that we have over it though. You go to Object, Arrange, Send to Back.
That's obviously not going to need to be black. I think that would not be as readable.
So you would want to change that to some of other kind of Pantone color as well. So we could do
Analogous color scheme os it's, or even Monochromatic if it's close enough.
So you can experiment with those different colors. Another thing you might want to try
is a gradient, right. So what if you wanted a gradient with this kind of digital design over here?
Well if you go to click and drag over it all, and then you get the gradient here.
Just click it and you can double-click it and bring up different gradients. Just go with
this orange yellow. The problem is, see how it adds a gradient within each shape?
Well if you want it over the entire group of shapes you've selected,
make sure you have them all selected, and then use the Gradient tool over here and
click and drag. Then it actually goes across the entire shape and that looks a lot better
obviously. Gradients are one of those things that can be overdone make
something look dated, so I think if it's subtle, if it's more of an analogous
color scheme, just use a color guide if you wanto to look for analogous color schemes.
Just use two different shades or values of the same group or the same group
of hues. With this one here, I was thinking if we did this one right on top
of that one and then this one right on top of that one for the F and the E and then
what we could do is take that there and go to Window and then Appearance panel.
And we usually associate this with Photoshop but we can also adjust this in
Illustrator which is kind of a Blending Mode. So if you go to Normal and just try
different blending modes. The problem is that this color is black right now.
So what you can do is double click in there and bring it over here and I'm just going to
double-click, grab some kind of color. Obviously if you have preferences from
your client, you can enter them in here if they have CMYK levels or RGB but
part of your job as a logo designer is often going to be to make suggestions about
their color, right. So if I want the same exact color could, I add that as a swatch
or I could just take this hexadecimal code there
or you could write down the RGB or CMYK levels.
But I'm just going to paste it in and then it turns into that blue, and HSB by the way is, Hue,
Saturation, Brightness or other words the color. You know the hue and then how
saturated it is and how bright it is. so I'm going to hit OK. So now that we've got slightly different
color there, I click the Appearance panel and then I do something like Screen.
It's just going to have a specific effect.
so if I jusat go to Overlay
and then I can go over here and do the same thing,
Overlay, just to kind of give you an idea of the different possibilities.
I think with this one
I'm going to put the words really small Fuson Enterprises bleow it and then
send something like this to him as well. And on this one, it was, it was a little
bit different. Let me me actually just grab that from over there so I can use the
Eyedropper tool if you remember and then we'll do that one.
I think for these, we'll actually try that color so it's kind of the side of the box but it's
not quite and I think they should probably touch in the front there, alright.
So something like that just to get that box, simple box look since it does deal with
shipping and online shipping. So I'll show you next any suggestions from the client and
then the final product and also we'll go over in this section
what filess to send the client because that's important. You need to know what kind of
files as far as raster and vector files you need to send them whether they're
going to put it online or in print. Thanks.