- [Instructor] In this movie,
I want to show you how I approach taking existing type faces
and modifying the letter forms
to produce custom logo type designs.
This is better shown than explained, so let's get started.
Whenever I approach typography in general
regarding a branding project
in my build file for all my design directions
that I'm creating,
I usually have a layer called typography.
And if you look at that layer,
this is what you're going to see.
I have all these typefaces loaded in,
typed out with the name of the company,
and I'm considering each of these typefaces to use
and which ones go best with certain design directions.
I try to make the styles match
so they work well together
and they're harmonious in that way.
These were all the type of exploration
I was considering for Cascade Lakes.
They're pretty clean.
I tend to default to a sans-serif type.
I prefer that over serif type,
and these are all the ones I was considering
for that project.
I did the same thing for Elevated Culture,
and here's some of the typefaces
that I was considering for that.
Now the one specifically that we're going to deal with
is going to be this one right here.
So that's the one I want to show you.
This specific type face, the name of it is Berthold,
and I'm probably going to slaughter this name,
Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended.
It's a really long font name.
I like font names that are just one word.
This is almost like a sentence
to describe a pretty straightforward type face.
It's an extended type face, which I wanted in this case,
so it wouldn't overpower the motif it's going to go with
as you're going to see shortly.
But when I type out the name and expand that typeface,
this is exactly what I'm left with.
And one thing I want to point out is
some type faces have really good spacing in it.
The kerning in the fonts, it's been done very well.
A lot of craftsmanship is put into certain fonts.
And when you're designing a font,
there's something called kerning pairs.
That means for every letter in a font,
you've done kerning pairs
for it to relate to every other letter
in the font, both on the left or on the right,
and that's what makes good kerning pairs.
That takes a lot of work and a lot of time.
And there's a lot of font developers
that just don't invest that level of time.
They just do it in a general sense.
And this one isn't so great,
'cause if you look at the space in between the V and the A,
in my opinion, it's way too big.
And other areas, I think, are a little too open.
So we want to first improve the kerning.
And all I do there is if it's a font like this,
I'll just go in and I'll select letter forms like this,
and I'll move this over until I have
what I think is a good spacing between the V and the A.
I even do this at times.
I'll go over almost a monotype type approach
where I'll decide I'll snap it
to an anchor and just I'll use the nudge keys,
and I'll figure how many nudges does this take.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10,
mm, 11 maybe.
And then I go, "Okay, I knew I did 11."
So maybe here coming from the E,
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight
nine, 10, 11, I'll compare and make a decision.
If that looks good.
In this case, I think it looks okay,
but I'd probably move these.
I'd probably make it nine or so like this.
This one I'd probably keep 11.
One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, 10, 11,
kind of like that.
And I'll make these kind of edits
once the font's converted to paths
just to perfect that spacing.
So if we look at what the raw font is,
look at the front part of this, and then compare it,
here's what the final adjusted kerning was.
It balances everything really well.
There is no obvious gaps where your eye is directed there.
And this takes time to figure out kerning,
because my kerning in the past wasn't so great.
So I've kind of taught myself some of the rules.
That said I tend to break a lot of typography rules.
And some of you might be typophiles watching this,
and some of the things I'm going to show you,
you might cringe a little bit,
but, hey, that's the way it is.
And one thing I do all the time is I have a lot of type
that goes back quite a few years.
I have a big font library now,
well over 5,000 fonts.
I don't use all of them by any means, but if we zoom in
on this letter V here, notice if we go to the key line view,
notice you have this kind of detailing where it flares
and bends in, and it elongates.
This isn't a straight line
from this anchor point down to the vertice.
I've heard this described a few ways.
Somebody, a type specialist,
said this is an interior vertex,
in which case, it may be.
I'm not completely sure, but the reason why type designers
in the past would do this,
was because it would be called an ink trap.
If things were being printed traditionally,
ink would build up in the corners,
and it would make this look weird.
So they would build this little ink trap,
so if ink built up, the letter forms still read correctly.
That's not needed anymore in a digital age.
This also tells me this typeface was constructed
before digital became mainstream.
So there's that as well.
But notice we also have these Bezier curves here,
and it really doesn't need to be here.
So one of the first things I do is
I'll select these anchors like this,
and I want to retract all these Beziers,
so it's just straight lines.
There's no easy way to do that in Illustrator.
This is, once again, why you use plugins.
I'm going to go to my PathScribe plugin here,
and they have this, which is a retract handle.
So I'm just going to click that and it gets rid
of all those handles, doesn't destroy the path,
so everything's absolutely perfect.
And then the next thing I'm going to do
is more about the aesthetic.
I'm going to add an anchor point.
Oops.
Let's get rid of that.
We don't need that one.
We're going to grab the add anchor point tool.
Now I'll add an anchor point
to this path and an anchor point to this path.
I'm going to select these two.
And I have smart guides turned on.
So it's telling me I'm on a path.
It's telling me I'm over an anchor.
And I'm going to slide this down
to where the other anchor was right there.
And then I'm going to do the same thing this side
and slide these two down like that.
We can get rid of this one.
So all we've done now is we've removed that ink trap.
If I go back to preview mode, this is what we're seeing.
And it's at this point, I'll just unite with pathfinder,
and it fixes that.
I'll select these extra anchor points,
clean up the file by deleting those,
and now we have a better looking V.
So that's what I'll do
in regard to this design just to clean it up.
And this would apply the letter forms like Y
more than likely an uppercase Y that is,
would have an ink trap,
and any letter form that comes to a point.
There might even be one on this A
now that I'm thinking about it.
Let's check.
We'll select here.
No, that one doesn't seem to have one.
So, just pay attention if you want to get rid of that detail.
I think it looks a lot better not having that in there.
And now, if we go to the final,
there's a few other details I made,
and it's just simpler just to show you what those look like.
And you can see what that is here.
So before
and with the other details added.
You can see I even adjusted the spacing ever so slightly
and brought a few things in,
but I wanted the do this to be more unique.
So on the Es,
I created this element that cuts in.
I also rounded stuff.
So notice on the letter E from the old one,
everything sharp on the corner.
And I added subtle rounds.
That really improves the aesthetic, I think.
And I also took the letter V that we had fixed,
and I replaced the letter A with that
almost to add an element or a hint
towards the name Elevated as if this is pointing up.
So it's those types of things I do
to really create a customized logo form.
In this case, it ends up looking like this
when it's positioned with the brand mark.
And if we take the brand colors,
we'll now color the elements that use the secondary color
such as the spark of inspiration
in the state of mind aspect to this concept
and the type itself.
So, that's how I customized the letter forms
for Elevated Culture.
I want to show you one more,
and this is a completely different project I did last year.
And this typeface, the source type face that is,
is called Quatro Black.
And this is the fattest.
Not every typeface has a family of range.
So Quatro has black, bold, I think, medium, and regular.
So for members of that typeface family,
this is the thickest.
This is Quatro black,
but it wasn't quite as thick as I wanted.
So I wanted it to be even thicker.
So I'll convert to paths like this.
And then I'll go ahead and, in this case,
we'll color it black, and I want to beef it up,
so I'm going to add an outline to this.
And we'll take stroke.
And because I'm using this in this movie,
I build and always use whole numbers.
So we're going to take this.
Let's do this first.
Going to take this.
Right now, it's a one point.
I'm going to go up to...
This is going to be an odd number,
because the size I have it in this movie is a little larger
than what I had it in my build file,
but I think that looks good with the beefiness.
You can see it's added a little beefiness to it,
but this is where I would have to select the type now,
'cause you don't want to live stroke
to be on your final file.
So I go here to object.
I go to path, and I go to outline stroke.
And then for each of these
I would just unite all of those together to create
the new and improved more beefy version
of the letter form like that.
Now, one thing, and I'll do this on one letter form,
then I'll show you the final is on this one,
I didn't want this crossbar here.
So I'm going to move this up like this.
And what I want to do
is I want to create a styling here.
So if we take this crossbar
at this point like that,
and I bring it up like this,
this is kind of where I want this
to come to an in on this design.
And all I'm going to do,
so I'm going to take this anchor I added,
slide it up 'til it snaps right like that,
select this,
and I'm going to go like this.
I'm going to slide this over like that.
And since this is all going to be the same letter form,
we'll fuse it.
So all I did is I've just altered
the letter form a little bit
and just did that just to make it a little more unique.
I'm going to do that on the letter A as well,
but now we want to adjust kind of the spacing on this.
So I'm going to go like this, bring that one over.
I don't want this to make this gap.
So I'm going to go like this and create a ligature
where these two kind of form together,
but this needs to be over quite a bit,
so something like that.
I think that looks good.
And this one, the A is at an angle,
and the left side of the R is at 90 degrees,
so I'll do the same thing here.
I'll overlap these, so they all fuse together like this.
And I think the B is still just a little bit too far over,
so I'll probably move that over.
We'll select all of these now.
And I'm going to make one more change
on this one now that I'm thinking about it.
What I'm going to do is
I'm going to create a throw away shape.
I'm going to clone this R, Command + C, Command + F.
I'll color it this color, so you can see what I'm doing.
I'll go like this.
And we're going to trim off,
so we have this little triangle piece.
I'm going to go in here, put it here, snap to that anchor.
That's why I use smart guides like that.
And we'll add an anchor point here.
And I'll drag this over, so it's at that same angle.
Then I'll bring this up here.
I think that's cutting in a little.
That's cutting and a little too...
Well, maybe not.
Maybe that's a good a good cut in.
Oh, I just realized this angle's different.
So we want to match this angle
on the A.
So let's do this.
There's a lot of experimentation with this.
So we'll do this.
We'll color this gold.
There, that fixes that.
So we'll trim that to get the right angle.
And I think that's a good spot.
So we'll select this, and I'll punch this out.
We can get rid.
And this is what I always do.
I always clean up as I go along,
so I'll move that anchor point.
And I think that looks a lot more unique.
So now it's at this point, I'll select everything,
fuse them together once again, isolate anchor points
as I go along that we don't need, remove those.
So if we go here, look at appearance, it'll be a group.
I'll make it a compound.
I want to add one more attribute.
So I'm going to use the rounding tool
by Astute Graphics, which is called dynamic corners.
You can do everything I'm showing you now
in Illustrator Native.
I just find this works well for this context,
because of this.
I can sit here and look at this and try things.
Okay, is that good?
No, maybe a little thicker.
No, I can pull it back out and move it in.
It tells me how many points I'm in.
And so I go until I think it looks good.
Like that looks good.
Now that I have it established,
I can just simply apply it
to the other corners I want this rounding to be on.
And I think that looks really good.
Ultimately, my final design looks like this.
Added to TM, of course.
It locks up with the final logo designs,
which look like this.
This is a power tool company based out of Uruguay.
Here's what their packaging looks like.
And we also showed them how their new branding can work
on their corporate vehicles.
So, when customizing existing typefaces,
I try to do it with a deaf touch.
I don't want to alter an existing letter form too much.
Otherwise, I risk degrading why I like it
in the first place.
So find the right balance
when you approach this creative task.
A custom logo type like this is unique to my client
and cannot be replicated easily
by merely typing out an existing typeface.
So take in mind that
as you create your next custom logo type.