- [Voiceover] When I work on a logo-design project,
I'd say that about 90% of the logo deigns are modular
in terms of their format;
modular meaning the logomark can exist on its own
outside the context of the type
or any other graphic element.
A good example of this is the Nike brand.
They also have an iteration of the Nike mark
that's a lockup with the word,
but they've come to a point in terms of their brand equity
where they can just show their graphic mark,
and it suffices.
Now here's a good example of that.
This is a project I did for Nike.
And even on this project, which was a t-shirt
for the World Series champions in 2011,
you can see that their brandmark is encapsulated here small.
Actually handled in the same manner
that it's actually handled on pro baseball uniforms,
just on the collar of the shirt.
So I use this approach in terms of doing brand identity,
a modular system that is,
for formatting logos and composing iterations
because of the sheer flexibility of this format.
So let me demonstrate to you why this format works so well.
So here's one of the explorations I did
for a company called Seed Collective.
Once again, they grow seeds and then they sell 'em
to farmers and people all around the globe
through their website.
It's not the actual iteration they went with,
but it's one of my favorites from the ones
that I presented to 'em, but I just wanted to use this
to demonstrate to you how flexible a modular format is.
So all we're gonna do here is build a couple more formats
using the same components that you see here.
So I'm just gonna copy this guy and move him over,
and I'm gonna select this type, and move this over.
And I like using smart guides.
We're gonna zoom in so you can actually see
what we're doing here.
I'm gonna grab the bottom of the C.
And this is how I'll snap it to the bottom part of his feet.
And then I'm just gonna start sizing it.
And, once again, I'm gonna make sure this aligns there.
I'll bring it over.
I'll bring this guy forward,
like this.
So this would be one iteration.
It would be more horizontal in terms of its format.
I think this guy needs to move over a little bit, like that.
Maybe back over, like that.
So that would be one iteration
in terms of the formatting that I would do.
Let's do another one.
So, I'll bring this down.
And on this one,
we're gonna handle the type a little differently.
I'll go up here, and I'm get the measurement for the height,
and I'm gonna copy it to the clipboard,
select this type,
and I'm gonna paste it in.
And we wanna make sure we have this linked
so it does it proportionately.
We'll paste it in here.
So that makes the collective type
the same size as the seed type.
Click that.
And we can make this a lot smaller now.
Then I'll take this.
I'm just scaling it down.
This is where it's all about just looking at it visually
and making a decision what's gonna look better.
I think it needs to move up a little bit
so it's not hugging his shoe.
And that looks pretty good.
So we've done another horizontal-based one.
And we're gonna do one more really quick.
So we'll go ahead and copy this guy.
Give us some room to work with.
And I'm going to align it with this type
using the Alignment Palette.
And what I wanna do here, and this is a little trick I do,
is I wanna put this Seed Collective type
in kind of its own nested shape.
And to make sure that it's gonna be even,
I take any letterform that's flat on top
and the one on the word
and any letterform in the Collective word at the bottom
that's flat on the bottom, and I'll snap to those corners
just to get my absolute dimension in terms of its height,
and then I'll just pull this out,
and in this case I'm gonna snap it to,
well, we'll do it to the C down here, like that.
Now, just so you can see what I'm doing,
let's go to Graphic Styles and I'll colorize this
so you only see a stroke.
We'll go up to Object, we'll go to Path,
and we'll go to Offset Path.
And I'm just gonna offset this.
We'll see what 14 looks like.
And maybe a little more, do 15.
That looks good.
We can toss what we previously had.
Select the path, go up to Object, Path,
and we're gonna Add Anchor Points.
And when you do that, that adds an anchor point
in the middle of each segment of the shape.
We're gonna get rid of the two we don't need
by deleting those.
And now we're just gonna select the corners on one side.
And we'll use the nudge keys on the keyboard
just to push these over.
We'll try...
Try seven, maybe 10.
And then we'll do the other side.
Select those,
like that.
And now all we had to do is color it,
so we'll use the Eyedropper, color it.
I'll select the type.
Make sure the type is on front.
Collective isn't showing so we'll select
one of those letters.
We'll color the word white.
And now all we have to do is scale our main character
up a little bit, like this, by a little more,
and move him down a bit.
That looks good.
Now we'll just kinda scale him.
And so you can see how really quickly
you can do multiple iterations using the same core art,
the same brandmark, but a modular system just lends itself
to the flexibility of composing
the different elements a lot easier.
You're not locked in to one direction
or one way of handling this.
And when I present and actually deliver the final files
to a client, I'll use this method to give them assets
in a broad range so that it can be used for multiple
applications, whether it's a header on a website,
which tends to be very shallow in terms of its depth
but very wide, so this one here would work well
to pull that off to use in that context.
So it's very flexible.
Lemme show you just a few examples of projects
that use this same methodology.
So here was a logo I did for Christopher Bean Coffee
based out of Florida.
And this is another iteration.
Because it's modular, even though the hierarchy here
is kinda nested and encapsulated into a motif,
it's separated as such that I could still modularly
compose it into a more horizontal format.
And in this case, we were able to use one of the iterations
on their packaging, as shown here.
Here's another example of that conference identity.
This was one of the additional explorations
I created for that.
But you can see, because it's modular,
I can create a horizontal format.
This just happened to have a lot of type in the logo.
I was like using a paragraph on a logo. (chuckling)
So modular helped to manage all those components
so it works really well.
Here is another one.
This is for a law firm.
They do a lot of law for the racing industry
down in that area.
So modular format assisted in composing
these iterations for their brand system.
Here's a user conference for a bunch of coders.
And once again, a modular system allowed me to create
multiple iterations to make use easier.
And the last one is, for the last four years I've created
the local TEDx event branding;
and this is for one coming up next year called Revolutions.
And so, once again, I used a modular system
to pull off multiple iterations so they can use
a different one on t-shirts as opposed to the website
as opposed to print collateral.
But it all works as a brand system, as a family of sorts.
So you'll see many more modular examples throughout
this course because it works well with almost any style
that you're gonna work in and it's by far the easiest format
due to its versatility of layout and ease of application.