- [Voiceover] All logo design starts with thinking
through an idea.
Once you've captured a solid concept,
you have to produce the graphic art
to carry it forward into an actual logo design
and this requires Vector craftsmanship.
I like to say, practice doesn't make perfect, process does,
because if you practice the same flawed methods
over and over, you only get good
at creating marginal results.
The process I want to share with you now
is one you can use for a lifetime
that will only improve your results over time.
And once again, a drawing is gonna reinforce
and facilitate this process.
This was for a client based out of the UK.
He's a video producer and he kinda has
a self-titled moniker called Lord Maude.
And his approach to my branding brief
that I gave him was that he just said,
"I just want it to be so cool, people'll want it
"on a t-shirt."
And I replied to him, saying I think I can pull that off.
So that's a fun project to work on.
So in this case, I wanted to go over the top
and just create this, like, really cool image.
So this was the ideation I came up with
and it was the type of project where I didn't do
multiple iterations.
I didn't come up with five different logo concepts.
I just came up with one and sold it to him
kinda like those Saul Bass stories you hear
of days gone by or Paul Rand, where he pitches
the Next logo to Steve Jobs and said,
no this is your mark.
That's kind of how I handled this.
Now this client is a little unique in that respect.
But he loved it, he went for it,
and I wanna show you how I built the artwork,
because once again, you come up with a great idea,
you need to follow through it and create great artwork
that's gonna capture that idea and do it precisely.
So on a drawing like this, I set the opacity
to about 20%, lock the layer, and this is just so
I don't move it.
And then on a layer above it, I usually call it building,
as shown here in the layers palette.
I'll go in now and then with the pin tool,
I wanna go to my graphic styles
and you can see I have graphic styles set up here.
And all this does was it sets the line to a magenta.
And this is usually how I build.
And I use magenta just because it's a color
that I really won't use for anything else.
And this is where you'll wanna zoom in
and you can pick anywhere to start.
In this case, I'm just gonna start building
with the pin tool on my art like this.
And notice, I'm not worrying about the curves,
because I can go back in the next phase
and adjust the curves.
I'm more concerned about placing my anchor points
exactly where they go.
And this shape couldn't be easier,
because wherever the shape comes to a point, gets a point.
This is an easy one to discern.
I'm gonna select the anchor point tool in Illustrator here
and just bend the path into place.
Now, you have to have CC or above to use this tool.
Older versions of Illustrator, this functionality
won't be in there.
Now even though I use this tool,
I have to be honest with you and tell you
that in my day-to-day work, I never use this tool.
It's because I prefer a plugin for Illustrator
called Vectorscribe and it has a specific tool
called Pathscribe, this one right here.
And I use this because if I double-click it,
you can see how I can customize it.
This is why I use it.
I make it behave the way I want it to.
And it works the same way.
I can grab a path and distort it,
but it has a lot more sensitivity than the one
built into Illustrator.
Now you can use either, it's your choice.
But in this course, you're gonna see me go to Vectorscribe
and use their plugin a lot because in my opinion
it just works better.
And I'm gonna show you a few examples of that upcoming,
but there's also some great features
that come with this plugin that
you just can't do in Illustrator.
But either way, this is how you would go about
building this specific artwork.
Let's get this to a point where you can see it easier.
So that's how I would build that path.
Now when it comes to something more organic,
such as the eye here, this is even easier.
This is where you can just simply get an elliptical shape
and we can just quickly build this eye
or the pupil of the eye, then we can go ahead
and just create another shape with the same tool.
And I would just go in and start moving my anchor points
to get that exact form that I have captured
in my drawing and carry it forward in my Vector building.
So you can see how fast it goes if you just
think in shapes, that's the key here, is thinking in shapes.
Now when you're creating other components,
such as this eyebrow, this is where you'll have
to discern where to put in your anchor points.
And I just pull out the bezier handles
just far enough that I can see 'em,
but I don't worry about forming the whole path.
Once again, I'm just trying to get the anchor points
in the right location and I will build this path,
then I'll go back and then I can start playing with it.
Now this is one reason why I don't use Adobe.
As you can see how it changes and moves the paths
on the other one, I don't like that feature.
This is why I go to this one and then I can pull this
and it doesn't move that top one.
And then if it breaks the anchor,
like this is no longer smooth,
I can pull this down and you see how the S appears.
It fixes that curve and now it handles it the way it should.
So I'll just go back in and I'll adjust
these bezier curves like this.
Notice how this white thing shows up.
That's what's called a ghost handle.
It's another nice feature of this plugin.
And I can just pull that really quickly.
So it makes the whole process go a lot faster
and in my opinion, it's far more precise
than the tool provided in Illustrator.
But that said, the same principle,
the same methodology is gonna work either way.
And actually on this one, I go back in and adjust this
kinda like that.
So that's all I'm talking about in terms of
building precisely.
Now if we go back to our layers,
let's jump to the, we're gonna turn this off,
I'm gonna turn this layer on.
And you can see how I built the hat and I built
the shape that makes up his right claw down below.
Now this is what I call rough building, this stage.
This is all I do initially, then I'll go back
and I'll shape 'em, which means I'll go back
and I'll use the tool, such as the anchor point tool here,
or if you're using the plugin you can use pathscribe,
and I'll bend those paths to form the actual shapes I need.
And this principle that I'm using here
to discern where to place anchor points is
what I call the clockwork method.
So if we zoom in on the eye here,
you can see that at the top here,
this represents a 12 o'clock, a nine o'clock,
a six o'clock, and a three o'clock.
But it was based off of the initial elliptical shape
that I created.
And as we zoom out here, you can see if you look
at this clock and the color-coding for
the various points on the clock, this is how I discern
where to place my anchor points.
Now any time your art comes to a point, it gets a point.
Those are easy to discern.
But when you get into more organic shapes
that have curves and forms, it gets a little trickier
to figure out where do I place my anchor points.
If you think of a clock in terms of the shape association,
it's gonna help you figure that out.
Now this is a very quick overview of this process.
To see this in more in-depth, make sure to check out
my original Drawing Vector Graphics course.
And there's some nice animation within the movies
of that course that really define this process well.
So we're gonna move forward here and this shows
all the base Vectors for this design
and then once I get to this point, I can start
selecting different points like the hat here
and the brim and I'll fuse them together using pathfinder.
So I'll do just some simple shape-building techniques
until I have my final art shapes built.
I'll colorize it as shown here.
And now the next thing I wanna show you
is how you can combine the clockwork method
with simple shape building.
Now this design, Lord Maude, was a fun one to work on
but the next one was one of my personal favorites of late
and it was for my favorite podcast called
The Futility Closet.
So this shows my rough sketch and this shows
just some basic anchor points.
Now if you look at this shape, this one was very freeform
in nature, it's not geometric in how it was created.
The only points that come to a point
are right at the tip of his beaks on the top and bottom
and on the inside of his mouth.
Everything else I had to discern where do I place
my anchor points and once again, the clockwork method
helped me to discern how to place my anchor points,
where to place my anchor points.
And so it's a simple process.
Think of it as a Jedi mind trick for doing Vector art.
That's all it is.
It's about thinking in shapes and discerning
where to place your anchor points.
Now on a design like this, it's not hard
if you also combined with freeform shapes,
such as the inner detail of his body here.
This is a very freeform shape, especially where
his fin is, going down to the bottom.
But when it gets up to the top, I wanted it to be
very geometric, because he's wearing a monocle
and I wanted to base it perfectly centered off of that.
So I combined a freeform shape with a geometric shape
and then I just used pathfinder to fuse 'em together.
Now notice when you do this, it creates extra anchor points
like this.
This is where I'd like to use the pathscribe tool,
so we're gonna open this up.
And you notice it has this tool.
This is a smart remove anchor point feature.
Now I can remove anchor points by going up here
in Illustrator and clicking this, but notice how
it messes up your artwork.
It doesn't do it smartly.
So let's command Z.
I'm gonna click this and you can notice
how it removes it using pathscribe
and it does it smartly and it retains the quality of my art.
So that's why I use that plugin.
It just works really great.
So that's how I'll combine both geometric shape building
and freeform building point by point
using the pin tool to form the shapes needed.
Now, that's not to say that I don't have
other simple, basic shapes, such as the monocle,
I have this shape, I have the inside of the monocle
shown here, and so all I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna select this monocle shape
and I've made a clone of it.
Command C, command F, if I pull this off
you can see there's a copy of it there.
I'll select this kinda highlighting that I have
made up of two rectangle shapes
and I'll just go to pathfinder and I'll go intersect
and then that's how I'll create those shapes.
So simple shape-building techniques, I created the in line
that's the kinda the cord that comes off the monocle
and falling down over his shoulder just by using
a simple shape and offsetting it using the offset feature.
So if you select a path and you go up to object,
you can go to path and you can go to offset
and then you can set it for how many ever offsets you want,
one after the other, and that's how I created
all the base shapes needed, in this case,
to form my black and white artwork as shown here.
So once I have it at this point,
it's just a matter of doing some color exploration.
Here's the color mark and the final logo design itself.
So building precise Vector art for logo design
isn't necessarily hard, it just takes
purposeful determination to adhere to a systematic process.
The end result is impeccable logo design
crafted with precision and care.
Once again, make sure to check out my
Drawing Vector Graphics course,
which has more helpful movies on the clockwork method
and how to construct your Vector art in this fashion.