- [Instructor] To build precise logo marks in Illustrator
requires using a combination of tools and functionality.
In this movie we'll showcase freeform vector building
using the Pen tool along with shape building methods
to create our logo design directions.
So let's get started.
So on this specific direction, this is where it started,
this was my thumbnail sketch.
Once again, I like to use a pen when I do thumbnailing
because I don't want to get bogged down in the details.
I just want to capture the essence of an idea
and draw it quickly and not erase.
And using a pen prevents me from overthinking it.
So this was where this specific design direction started,
with the thumbnail,
and then working through the drawing process,
I create the final refined sketch.
And this is going to aid me in vector building now,
because it's essentially going to work
like a roadmap for building my vector art.
So the first thing I usually do is select it,
and I'll adjust the opacity to around 15%,
and I lock the layer just so it won't move.
And then on the layer above it,
this is where we're going to build our vector art.
Now, when I create and build my art,
I have certain default styles I use.
We're going to click on this,
and it's going to load this magenta color.
This is the color I use to build all my base vector shapes.
So that's what we're going to do now,
and we're going to work on the profile of his head
and the core aspect of his body.
So I usually zoom in.
You always want to zoom in when you're building
so you can see what you're building.
And I always tend to start at a corner.
His ears are going to be separate,
but it's going to guide our building
having it drawn out that way.
So let's go ahead and grab the Pen tool,
and we're going to start,
wherever it comes to a point gets a point.
Those are easy.
And the way I usually build
is I try to discern where those anchors are.
I don't worry about the curves at this point.
I'm just placing my anchor points
where I think they should go.
When you get to a curve,
this is where you discern to put another anchor point.
But because this curve is so shallow,
from the top of his head all the way down to the back
where it hits the wings here,
this is where I'll just put one line.
And I'll go back and adjust these curves to finesse them,
but at this point, this is going to work.
Here we're going to have the shape of the wing
kind of come down, so I'm not going to worry
about transitioning this curve.
I'm just going to find an area over here
where I can place my anchor point.
And I think right about here is fine.
And then once again, we have to discern the curve.
We have a curve going down here,
and it subtly goes up over here.
And this is, because it's so shallow,
we don't need to put like a curve here.
I don't think we need to do that.
I think over here somewhere, like right here,
we'll drag, and I hold Shift down.
It'll be wobbly like this.
If you hold Shift, it locks it
into a 90 degree position like this.
So I'll just pull it out.
And I won't pull it out all the way,
just enough to have that available.
So this is a smooth anchor point.
There's only two type of anchor points in Illustrator,
and that's a corner and a smooth.
We want a smooth one here, because we're going to transition
down to his hindquarters over here.
And somewhere right around here,
We're going to go ahead, and we'll place it right about there.
And then it doesn't really matter
between here and the bottom here.
We can go straight across if we want to.
And I'm going to place an anchor right here.
And once again, this curve is going to go subtly up.
We can do that with the Bezier curves.
I'm just trying to find the balance right now.
So we're going to go down here,
cause we want to form this curve underneath his belly.
So I'll click and pull once again,
holding Shift down to get that 90 degrees.
This will come all the way up
to this point, right about here.
And then as we go around this curve,
because this is such a steep curve,
we will want to have an anchor point
right about here on the tangent
that would be a circular shape.
And then we close it out.
So this is the rough build that I do at this point.
From here, I'll just adjust the Bezier curves.
And you can do that using the native Anchor Point tool
in AI, which if you hover over,
notice, I have smart guides turned on.
So it says path if you're over a path
or anchor if you're over an anchor.
And you'll want to toggle that on and off as you build.
That's Command + U.
So if I grab this path and I start pulling it, you see
those Bezier curve handles are immediately available.
Then I can isolate them and pull them out like this
to form that arch that makes his head.
So I don't try to do this as I'm building.
I just focus on the anchor point placement first,
then I go back and I do all of this kind of adjusting.
And you do this using the Anchor Point tool.
Now I happen to use a plugin
that existed prior to Illustrator even adding
the Anchor Point tool functionality.
And that's called PathScribe.
It's part of VectorScribe plugin.
And I like it just because,
let's zoom in so you can see this better.
So if I select the tool called PathScribe,
that does the exact same thing, I should point out,
as the Anchor Point tool,
notice how it puts these white dots on here.
That's because I don't even have to pull the path out.
I can just grab those.
Those are called ghost handles, and it works really great
because I can just pull them and immediately have access.
I can also pull the path.
So if I want to grab the path and adjust it,
you can do that too.
It's a great plugin.
It's part of the VectorScribe plugin by Astute Graphics.
I highly recommend it because there's a lot
of functionality in there that you simply cannot do
in Illustrator out of the box.
And it improves craftsmanship and the ease of building.
That's why Adobe lets developers create secondary plugins,
because they're able to get more precise and specific
with the craftsmanship aspect of certain tools.
So I just wanted to show you this.
And once again, we're just going to go in on every curve here.
And everything I'm doing, even though I'm using a plugin,
you can do the exact same thing with the Anchor Point tool.
So if we grab that for this one,
we can grab this path and pull it out to get this curve.
So same functionality.
I just prefer using Astute Graphics
because it's been longer.
And frankly, it was the inspiration
behind that functionality in the Anchor Point tool as well.
So this is one context why I like it.
Because in my opinion, I think this was pulled out too far.
So if I pull this in, and I'm using the plugin,
I can just immediately grab this anchor point,
this ghost handle for the anchor point,
and pull it out and do that.
If I'm using native AI, the only way
to get the anchor point out of here with this tool
is you have to distort the path.
But notice how it distorts the opposing anchor point.
That's pretty much the reason why I don't like
using that tool to do this kind of building.
I can do it this way,
and it doesn't mess up the previous one.
Once you get an anchor point location,
you might finesse it, maybe go this way more,
or you bring it this way more.
In this case, I think just to left a little more like this.
We'll go ahead and finesse this round here.
We'll go down, let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit.
We're a little too close.
And we'll just adjust his belly kind of like this.
Grab this handle, and this is another thing.
Notice this anchor point
should be smooth, but it's a corner.
And with this plugin, if you move it up,
once it hits that angle, it'll give you an S.
And that means it's now a smooth one again.
So it behaves the way it should.
So I like that feature, because that's just happens
when you use the Pen tool in Illustrator.
You're going to break a corner like that
pretty much all the time
when you build freeform shapes like this.
And that's something that happens
that they realized in Illustrator,
and they built that feature to easily resolve it.
So it's really nice.
And you can see how we're just forming all these curves.
We'll go ahead and do the hindquarters and call it good.
So we'll pull this one down,
and we'll pull this one over to form his back,
and we'll pull this one over to form his hindquarters.
So that's how I would approach building
these type of freeform shapes in a design like this.
The other thing I'll call out right now,
is I don't try to build everything out of one shape.
Meaning I wouldn't want to build the wings
and have them fuse to the body at this point,
because it's easier to kind of break it up
into more manageable parts.
So we're going to keep moving forward here,
and I want to show you one other aspect I use,
different functionality.
As I'm moving forward and I'm building out
different elements, in this case his tail,
it's far easier to just build one single stroke
that follows the center point of that tail visually.
Then I can select this stroke,
go to the stroke, right now it's 0.75 points.
And that's another thing, I always build in points.
I don't build in inches.
And what it's done over the years,
is I now think in points when I'm creating vector art,
and I've gotten pretty good at guessing
how big something should be point size.
And it just, it's more metric-based.
So it makes measurements
and figuring out sizes a lot easier.
So that's one reason I do it.
But we're going to punch in a size for his tail.
You know, a Panther's tail isn't too thick,
but it isn't really thin either.
And we're also going to round the cap,
because on the end, you want it to come to a round.
You don't want it to be flat.
That just wouldn't look good.
So I think this is going to work well.
Now that we have this, we're going to expand it.
We'll go to Object, we'll go to Path,
we'll go to Outline Stroke.
Actually, this gives me a good opportunity
to show one panel that's in CC 2020,
and that is the Properties panel.
So when you have a shape selected,
you might want to just glance over at the Properties panel
and see if it gives you any quick actions
that you can do with a path selected.
So you can offset the path, you can join, recolor, arrange.
Unfortunately, there is not a shortcut here.
But you would definitely want to check it
as you're building, cause there will be shortcuts on it.
For example, if I select the body,
it'll say we can go to Offset if we wanted to do that.
And it's really quickly to access,
rather than going to Object, down to Path,
pulling over to Offset, then bringing it up.
So always check that to see if there's a shortcut available.
In this case, I find it a little odd,
they don't have Outline Stroke as a shortcut.
But they don't.
So we'll have to do it the old fashioned way.
Object, Path, Outline Stroke.
And now if we go ahead
and just match the styling of the body,
you can see it's a path now.
So I just wanted to show you that,
because a lot of people try to build this with the Pen tool,
and it's going to take you a long time
to get it really precise.
And if you do it this way, it's way more precise.
So now that we have that,
I would just grab this anchor point
and move it up and snap it to the other one.
And if we go here, since this one is going smooth
this way to the right,
and this anchor point is going to the left,
it's pretty easy to figure out, just to snap it.
And so now these two, when they're merged,
it'll just be a nice continuous flow back into his tail.
Now you might want to make some adjustments over here,
in which case you could even select anchor points.
And here's another reason why you use plugins.
Because you can't do this natively in Illustrator.
They still don't have smart remove.
If I select these two,
and I want to just remove the anchor points,
I can go up here to the toolbar here we have
and click this Remove Anchor Point feature.
And it'll remove them, but it will also destroy our art.
So I don't use it for that.
What's nice about plugins
is that they allow you to have functionality
that will make your life easier and build more precisely.
So I'll select these two anchors,
and I'll go to PathScribe,
the same plug-in I was showing you earlier,
and they have a smart remove feature right here.
So I'll just smart remove it.
And look at how it knows what you're doing,
and it retains the equity of your creative relationship
to how you built that shape.
It doesn't destroy it.
And then we can adjust the curve
if we feel it looks better like that.
And we might even want to pull this one out a little more,
just to improve it, and then we can adjust this.
So all of those types of adjustments
you can finesse and tweak, but that's how I'd use strokes
along with Pen tool building
to improve the process, make it easier.
So multiple methods are going to improve something.
Now we want to do an offset here,
and here's the shapes I built for the wing.
Now, as I was moving forward,
and I wanted to build the other shapes,
I realized I want this negative space
in between each element, the feathers as it is, of the wing.
And I didn't want to freeform build this on my own.
I want it to be precisely the same.
Even though I didn't draw it
so it's exactly the same negative space,
I do want it that way in the final logo to be more precise.
So I'll select this shape, and we'll go to Object,
we'll go to Path, we'll go to Offset Path,
and we're going to punch in a number here.
I want it smaller than this, and you can preview it.
And that looks pretty good.
So we'll kind of commit to that.
Now what I want to do is,
I don't want this to stay fat the whole way.
I want it to taper right about here,
so right about where this anchor point is.
So it goes fat and then it tapers
and it hits right about there.
So all I have to do is, I don't want this anchor
so we'll smart remove that.
And then I'll take this anchor
and I'll just move it up and snap it there.
Now I'm going to have to make some adjustments
with the Bezier curve to make it look good.
So we'll grab that, and I'll just adjust this
until I get a nice, tapered look.
This will be the top edge
of the next feather going down like that.
And let's go ahead, just so you can see it easier,
we'll select this and we'll apply a different color to it.
We'll make it a blue color like that.
We'll go ahead and we'll build the next one.
And this one, I'll just select here, go down here,
I'm going to have a nice curve coming into this one,
and we'll do the same thing here.
Then this one doesn't matter
because we're going to use the shape we offset to trim that.
Then I'll just finesse this curve,
and I'll finesse this curve here,
to get the bottom of the new shape kind of set up.
I think that looks good.
We'll take this shape now.
And just so you can see what I'm doing, I'm going to fill it.
We'll bring this to the front.
And by the way, if you don't know how to bring to front,
Object, Arrange, Bring to Front.
I have an F key, so I just select the object and hit F key.
I never have to go here and do this.
Those are keyboard shortcuts.
You should set your machine up with those
to make life easier.
So I'll select these two,
and now we're just simply going to use Pathfinder
and Minus Front, we're just trimming that.
And that's how I'm going to build
each of these pieces of the wing.
So I'm using a lot of different functionalities set up here.
And the next thing we're going to do
is I'm going to turn this on,
because this is going to be his front leg moving forward.
And we'll use that Offset feature again.
So I used a tolerance of 7.5 offset on the wing,
and I want to keep that tolerance
consistent throughout my mark.
That's really important when it comes
to building logo marks.
So we'll go to Object and we'll go Path,
we'll go to Offset Path, and I'll do this once again.
I'm going to go ahead and fill it so you can see it,
and then Bring to Front
and make sure we're on the right layer.
We're on the wrong layer.
So I'll move it to the right layer, select the leg,
and I'm going to trim it to put that gap in between the body.
And this will denote that it's behind,
it's the leg to the furthest back.
So that's how I'll use various methods
to compose and build my logo design on this specific design.
All the base vector art looks like this,
and this is where I'll just simply select the shapes,
such as his tail, the main torso,
I'll go ahead and select this back leg.
And just so you can see what we're doing,
we'll go ahead and unite those.
Let's go to Color, we'll color it.
We want to color the fill like this.
And let's go ahead and cut it.
I'll select everything and paste behind.
So once I start building, I know I'm going to have this
and I want it to notch out or cut out from the main shape.
I'll do that.
We'll take this one.
I want this to do the same thing,
kind of knock a notch out of the main shape.
And then this one as well, we'll bring to front
and I'll knock this one out as well.
I had originally created the gap
by offsetting it and doing this.
So we'll go ahead and redo that to get the notch.
This will be a notch on the head.
We'll bring this to the front and we'll notch that out.
Now I can take all the shapes of the ear,
the body, the legs, and we'll go ahead and unite this.
And let's go ahead and cut this
and paste it behind.
So we have the body done now, we'll just knock it out.
And once we do this, if I select this
and I go to the Appearance panel,
notice it's going to be a group.
This piece isn't connected, so it's acting as a group.
I'll want to change that to a compound.
Now I have an F key set up to change to a compound, F7.
But if you need to do that,
just go to Object, Compound Path, Make.
Notice I have keyboard shortcuts so I never have to go here.
I'll select the eyes, select the body,
and we'll Minus Front.
Now, the reason why I'm showing you this
is because look at Appearance now.
Now that we knocked out the eye,
it's going to reset itself to a group.
This really is a functionality in Illustrator
that kind of frustrates me.
I wish it would just retain the compound nature,
and not do that.
And it used to work that way for a while,
and then they changed it back. (laughs)
So that's unfortunate, because I think
it should always default to compound, personally.
So we'll take all the elements in the wing,
we'll fuse these together.
We'll leave them, just so you can see what's going on.
We'll colorize them the same color as the base.
I'll take all these negative shapes,
because all of these are,
we're going to go ahead and unite these together.
Select the wing, and it's just going to knock out
those shapes that create the gaps in the wing.
So when it's all said and done, if we color this black,
this is what we end up with.
So that's how I go about building this specific brand mark.
Let me show you one other one,
and we'll bring this to a close.
So this was another design I'd sketched out in thumbnail.
And my first thumbnail was this,
but I thought (laughs) it was looking like a Transformer.
So I said, okay, that, I like the idea behind the styling,
but I need to keep drawing on this.
And so after a few more attempts, I kind of hit on this.
And because I'm building it symmetrically,
I only have to figure out one side.
We'll build it and flip it here shortly
to compose the full design.
But I really liked this.
And then as I kept drawing, I realized,
ooh, it would be cool to have wings.
So we're going to do that as well.
So my refined sketch on this looked like this.
So I drop it in, by the way, some of you might not know,
how do I get these sketches inside Illustrator?
Well, I use a flatbed scanner.
I usually scan between 600 to 800.
And then I place that TIF image into Illustrator,
adjust the opacity as shown here,
and since we're doing symmetric, I drop a guide.
And now we're simply going to build on top of it.
And this is where you want to think in shapes.
Because many times you can build your content really easy
if you just think in shapes.
The eye was a circle, that's a no brainer,
using the ellipse tool we created two more ellipses.
So I'll select this, I'll select this one.
We'll Minus Front, we'll take this.
And making sure that's on top,
we'll select this part, this shape that we did,
and we'll Minus Front again.
Sometimes you'll have left over artifacts.
Just select them, delete them.
And this is how quickly it can go
to build elements like this.
It really isn't hard.
It's, if you think in shapes,
it's going to make the process a lot easier.
The other thing I'll point out
is when I'm building these wings,
it's pretty easy because I can start.
Once I determine the exact size or height
of these pieces, let's say it's that,
then it's really easy to build a wing shape like this,
because I can select this corner anchor
and move it over like this.
And eventually I'm going to create a shape
that goes through all of them
to define that angle like this.
And then I'll just go back to the original shape
and I'll trim all of them.
And then I can take the rounding tool in Illustrator.
Here's another plugin I use.
It's part of the same plugin I showed you,
has a rounding tool, pre-existed the one in Illustrator
by about six years, and we can go ahead
and round this at whatever angle we want.
I probably wouldn't to it that much.
You know, I'd probably do it a little more subtle,
kind of like this or something.
So I just wanted to point that out.
Those are easy to discern, those shapes.
So here's all the base vector art I created.
The only element that kind of flips
from one side to the other and is already fully symmetric
is the chin of this character.
Everything else, we'll just select those elements.
We'll clone it Command + C, Command + F,
and yes, I have a F3 keyboard shortcut.
So I can just select the shapes,
hit F3, now I have all of these clones sitting on top.
I'm going to go to the Reflect tool,
find a central anchor point,
and because I have smart guides on,
Command + U, it tells me I'm on the central anchor.
So I click, pull down, and now everything is flipped.
It's that easy to build a symmetric design.
I'll select everything, I'll go ahead and unite everything.
Once again, Appearance is going to say it's a group.
I turn it to a compound.
And then we can color it, in this case, black.
So that's how easy it is to build a symmetric design.
When it's all said and done,
the brand mark is going to look like this.
I do some subtle rounding on this.
So if you zoom in, you can see
I rounded off all the corners.
This just makes it look more handcrafted.
So take your time when you build your vector art.
Don't rush it.
You want your craftsmanship to be impeccable
and precisely formed.
Thinking through the shapes ahead of time,
in the drawing stage, is critical
in assisting you to now build it
without guesswork in vector form.
For more about vector building techniques,
I encourage you to watch my flagship course,
"Drawing Vector Graphics," where I cover the fundamentals
of vector building and how to think in shapes.