- [Voiceover] When you work out logo ideas
one of the easiest ways to build your logo art,
especially for graphic symbols
is to use shape building technique.
So in this movie I wanna take you through
how I'm gonna build this graphic design
that you see here, it's the little peace dove type character
and it's simply using geometric shapes.
That's what shape building is all about.
It's using existing forms, existing tools
in Illustrator to easily craft these shapes.
So on this one it was just simply
using the ellipse tool to create this simple circular shape.
Now once you start working in this method
it goes really quick, it doesn't take a lot of time.
So if I select this shape here,
the first thing I wanna do is go to object,
down to path, and over to offset path
and it'll open up a window, we'll move this over
so we can see it, and you can click preview.
Right now it says 10, I think we need that
to be around 14 or so.
And that looks good, so we'll go okay.
So we're creating an offset, and this establishes
the back part up into the head
and then I have the part of his head going here.
Now to create the next part we'll go back
to elliptical tool, I'll just create
a circle shape, and this is where smart guides comes in.
You can notice how it's snapping right to the anchor
and it says I'm over the anchor, that's what I want.
I'm gonna go over here and snap it to
this part, so now I know it aligns with the back curve
as it goes up into the head.
But in this case I want it to be aligned up here
and then I wanna be able to take
this shape now, this circular shape,
let's go over here, and I'm gonna scale this one down
so it snaps right there to this side.
And once I have that I can keep building
different shapes, so the next one I wanna do
is actually, we can take this shape,
if I clone this, go command, c, command, f
or in my case I have the f3 key set up,
I can scale down to get the inner side of his eye.
Now you notice when you scale the lines become faint.
So this is why I keep graphic styles
all the time in Illustrator, 'cause I'm always
going back and clicking 'em just so I can see
how I'm building and how it's progressing.
I'll go over to the shape tools again,
I'll select the rectangle tool
and I'm gonna snap from this anchor point
up to this anchor point right there.
That'll give me that part of his wing.
I'm now going to go ahead and create this,
now I know I offset this 15, and if I select this one,
let's see, transfer, it says it's 14.706 points wide,
we want it to be 14 so it matches the continuity
that we have set up here.
And now I can select this circle shape.
And we're gonna go to the align palette now.
And I'm gonna focus the alignment on this circle shape,
so I'll hold option down and click on that shape
and you can see how it highlights it.
And now I'm just gonna center it to this shape like this.
Then I can select this shape and just rotate it
45 degrees like that.
And so I have that content built.
Now this is very simple building, it goes really quick,
you don't have to spend a lot of time on this.
Now, like a good cooking show,
I have all my shapes that I created
in that very same fashion set up like this.
And once I have these shapes set up, it goes really quickly.
In order to select a shape such as this one here,
and I'm going to select the body part of this.
And I will go down to the pathfinder
and I will shear it, or punch it out.
And now this is where I'll use what I call
a throw away shape, and you can see
I built that here.
And I'll select that, select this shape
'cause I wanna get rid of this top part
that, like a reverse moon goin' back here,
I wanna kinda chop that off.
And that's all this shape is being used for
is to make that kinda edit.
Then I can select this rectangle shape
and the head and the beak and I can fuse
all these together with unite like this.
So you can see how it's created the bird shape.
Now I can select the circle and this square
and unite these together into one shape.
Select the inner detain which is these thin rectangles,
unite these into one shape.
And then select the back of the wing and then I can
remove from shape or, as I like to refer to it, punch
and punch through like a cookie cutter.
And this is how easy it is to create vector art
like this, to create an iconic design like this.
It goes really quickly to have your base art.
And at this point it makes it easy to jump
to black and white, and you can see
how this is a nice graphic representation.
Also notice, if I zoom in, I put some subtle
rounds so things aren't completely sharp.
So if we show the original vector art
you can see how it came to a point,
but on the black and white I rounded 'em.
That's one detail that's really nice to do
in logo design, we're gonna cover that
in an upcoming movie, but I just wanted to
tangentially touch on that.
Now this design I ultimately used for a t-shirt.
So throughout this course you'll see more
examples of shape building in action
and how when combined with the point by point
vector building allows you to create
anything you need for your design.
You'll find even more information
on shape building in my drawing
vector graphics course as well.