- [Voiceover] When you approach any
graphic design assignment,
be it a logo design, iconography, or illustration,
drawing is going to play a huge part
in the creative process of not only
thinking through your ideas
but actually practically constructing those ideas
and building those ideas.
But when it comes to logo design,
many aspects of logo design is really graphic
and simplified iconic, if you will,
and it doesn't require precise drawing.
If you look at this thumbnail sketch,
this is an ideation for a brand icon
that I'm developing for a conference,
an ideation for a conference
and I didn't have to draw a perfect circle,
I just had to capture the essence of an idea.
And that's what a thumbnail sketch is,
it's not so much figuring out the exactitude
of a given graphic that you need to create,
it's all about capturing the essence of that graphic.
So, this is where I started,
this is as far as I took this one.
I didn't have to work it out anymore detailed than this.
I used it as a foundation to build
precise graphics in Illustrator.
All these are, are just simple elliptical shapes,
circles, and rectangle shapes here.
And these are easily built using those tools
to pull that off that you can see here
which is this is the rectangle tool
and I also used the elliptical tool.
So this is very easy, basic shape building
and once you have shapes like this,
it's very easy to select the shapes we want.
So in this case, I'll select all of these shapes
that make up the inner detail of this logo motif
or go to Pathfinder and I'm going to unite them
all together into one cohesive shape.
Once I have that I can select the
background shape of the larger circle,
go back to Pathfinder
and I'm gonna remove from that shape
or as I like to say, "punch through it",
almost like a cookie cutter to get the base shape
that I need for this logo design.
So, logo design doesn't have to be difficult
and drawing can help you to figure out
an approach and a methodology to pull off your graphic
but you don't have to draw it precisely
when you can build it precisely with shapes.
And on this logo mark,
we ended up coloring it like this
and the total brand system for this direction,
I did multiple directions
that I presented to this client.
This was for a conference on Open Source Security
and this was one of the iterations for that.
So you're gonna see a lot of these
kind of examples going through
and this is what I call a brand system.
And we're going to go over that in more detail
in an upcoming movie,
but you're going to see this consistently
put forward in all the movies in this course
and this is just one of them.
Now, let's take a look at another thumbnail sketches
that is, and this was for another client
called Movie Droid.
This client individual works in the movie industry
and he wanted to develop a website
that other people working in the same industry
could come together,
post the project they're working on
and make business relationships with other
professionals in the movie industry.
And his name for this was Movie Droid.
These are some of the thumbnail sketches
that I created to capture the essence
of the idea to move forward with
and build it out.
Once again, thumbnail sketches aren't about
exact and precisely drawing shapes,
it's about capturing the essence of an idea.
In this case,
I focused on this thumbnail sketch showing here,
but it's not precisely drawn,
but once again, it's gonna guide my building efforts
and because I can build in Illustrator precisely
using Vector Tools to create all the shapes,
whether it's this circular shapes for his eyes
or these shapes that encompass
the various elements in this motif,
it's relatively simple to do that
with the drawing guiding me.
It's not exact.
You can see how below the eye on the drawing
is very inproportionate to what it actually is gonna be
because I can build it precisely.
So, drawing will guide you,
drawing with help you facilitate your creative process
even when it's not perfectly drawn.
You don't have to be a master fine artist
to pull this kind of style off in a graphic sense,
but for logo development, it works great.
This is how the color exploration on this one went
and once again the brand system,
and I'm gonna explain that more coming up,
but a brand system is nothing more
than multiple iterations in various formats
to make the flexibility of usage a lot easier.
Now, there's different kinds of drawing
that you can utilize to pull off a logo design.
And this one isn't precisely drawn, once again,
but once again, it captures the essence of an idea.
I used this to build my final precise artwork.
This was for a company called The Seed Collective
and they grow and harvest seeds from various plants
and then they sell them to farmers
and other people who want to grow them.
So it started off as a crude sketch,
but it guided me and helped me to build
precisely using all the precise tools
in Illustrator such as circles and triangles
and the pen tool so on and so forth.
Now, as you're working on a logo design
it might not always be graphic
in terms of non-realistically proportioned that is.
And this is another project where I used
a symmetric motif.
In this case a cowboy hat.
And I had to build this one
but because it's such an iconic image
and the positioning and the format of this is symmetric,
is that I only have to build half of this.
So, I only have to draw half of it.
And what I do is I just build out all of my shapes.
So, I've used both point by point method
with the Pen tool to build out this shape.
And the brim of his hat here.
And then I use the Elliptical tool
just to create this band here.
Once I've created all the elements needed
and I should point out you can see the detailing
on the hat where there's an indent,
even though I've drawn it out
the more I was thinking about it as I was
building the shape I thought,
"It's almost adding too much detail.
"I don't need that detail."
I wanted to simplify it so you can make those
decisions as you go along.
But once I have all the base shapes,
it's very easy to select shapes,
in this case I'm gonna use the Pathfinder again,
and punch out of that.
And then we'll select the brim of the hat
and I'll go ahead and I'm gonna fuse these shapes
together like this.
One thing I should point out when you're doing a
symmetric composition like this
is that times when paths
are directly on top of other paths,
it'll leave little artifacting
if you're kind of punching through it
using the Pathfinder like this.
So one trick that I do is I'll go up
and I'll take the segment tool
and I'll grab this path
and I'll just pull it over
so I know it's overlapping that point even more
and with this selected now,
I'm gonna select this shape,
which is on top,
select the bottom shape
and then I'm gonna punch it through like this
so I end up with the final shape you see here.
I'm gonna clone this.
And when I say clone,
all I mean is I'm gonna copy, Command C,
and I'm gonna Paste.
So, I'm gonna go up here.
You would Copy it
and then you would Paste in Front, Command F.
You can do it this way,
we can go Command C and then go up to Edit
and go Paste in Front, Command F.
You're gonna see me do a lot of this in this course,
but I have an F key set up to do that command
and it's attached to an action I created.
And if you want to know more about that,
make sure to check out my original
Drawing Vector Graphics course.
I explain how to set up your own keyboard commands
but it helps the process go a little faster.
We're gonna go over to the Reflect tool now,
and select that.
We're gonna Highlight on a central anchor point.
And I have smart guides turned on
so it tells me when I'm over an anchor point.
You can enable those by going Command U
and we're gonna click on this anchor point
and then I'm just gonna simply flip it like that
to create the graphic I want.
And once I have it flipped or reflected,
we'll select both of them
and we'll fuse them together into the final mark like that.
So, logo design doesn't have to be complicated
and when you use a process like Symmetry,
it makes the whole process go faster
because you only have to create half of it.
Now, on this logo mark,
I colorized it like this.
Now, it's not gonna stay in this color format
because the name of the company
dictated the color of the hat
because the name of the company
was called White Hat.
So, this was the final motif using this.
Now, not every logo design is gonna be
iconic and simplified like this.
Sometimes there will be a requirement
to be more illustrative with your design.
And this is where drawing is really gonna be
important to pull off the given style.
So, there was a client that approached me
about creating a brand for a new distillery
they're putting together based in Idaho,
and it was called Printers.
And the whole, kind of concept behind the name
of the company was that printing
on the Pacific Coast started in Idaho,
and this was one of the founders
of the first print shop there.
And so one of the ideations I came up with
was kind of playing off with that character
and creating him into a brand character of sorts.
And it started with this reference image
that the client gave me.
Now, based off of this,
I drew out my refined sketch
where I simplified the form.
So it's a process of looking at a complex image
and then iconifying it or simplifying it.
We're gonna cover this in more detail
in a upcoming movie on how to go about doing that.
But this is what I did here
and I created my base sketch as you can see here.
Once I had this base sketch set up
this is when I'll go in
and I'll go to Transparency
and I'll set it to an opacity like 20%
so I can see it and it can guide my building efforts
but it won't get in the way.
And then all I do is I simply go in,
if I zoom in on this,
you can see that all I've done is I've let my
underlying drawing guide my building efforts
in terms of the Vector Shapes, using the Pen tool
and this just takes time to build it out,
but it's not hard.
We're gonna cover the clockwork method
in a upcoming movie which shows how to pull off
this type of Vector building.
And once again, if you want to know more in depth
about the basis of Vector building like this,
make sure to check out my Drawing Vector Graphics course
where I go over that in detail.
But once again, drawing assisted in iconofying
this character to create the base vector shapes
needed for putting together,
in this case, the brand mark on this character.
Now, when I'm working digitally,
I don't always stay digitally,
so at this point once I had my
black and white artwork worked out,
I actually printed it out
and I go back to analog on a print out
and I draw out all my shading.
So if I zoom in on this sketch,
you can see where I printed it out digitally,
but I've gone back in with a pencil
and just drew out all the shading
on how I'm gonna handle this.
This is more efficient
and it makes the process go faster.
It's not always the easiest thing to try
to figure out on the fly in a computer program
like Adobe Illustrator.
Sometimes, it's more efficient just to print it out,
figure it out in analog, scan it back in,
align it with my underdrawing
and then, as I did with my base art,
just simply start building those shapes
off of the drawing that I figured out
outside the box, outside the computer.
So, analog and digital skills go hand in hand
and really improved the creative process
if you handle it in a manner like this.
Now when it's all said and done,
this is what the brand character looks like
with all the Vector Art build for the shading
and it's gonna work really well for this project.
Now, movign forward, as I nested this character
into a motif that's gonna work for the final mark,
I didn't have to show his full body.
This guy is just mast inside of a shape
to pull off this motif.
And make sure to check out these source files
and you can deconstruct to see how all of these
are composed if you're not completely sure.
All of these are the actual source files
I used in both the exploration process
and the final art that I gave a client.
And this was the final direction for this exploration.
So, drawing is gonna benefit you
in terms of pulling off any type of design
whether it's iconic like the original mark we created
or a little more grahic and geometric
like the one we did for the Movie Droid.
Symmetry is gonna help if you're creating
a mark that requires something looking straight on
and you can reflect the image to create the full art
but you only have to draw half of it.
Or, it could be illustrative
like the brand character I showed you.
So our industry may be digitally driven,
but ideas are still best developed in analog.
And drawing is arguably the most important
creative skill you can develop as a designer
because it will help you fuel ideas
and facilitates a greater degree of craftsmanship
when executing those ideas in Vector form.
In other words, drawing is design's best friend.
So remember, never stop drawing.