- [Voiceover] I'd say second only to drawing,
type is the most important visual communicator
in the field of design proper.
And within the context of logo design,
it's paramount to establishing well-crafted brand logos.
Now, when I approach any assignment,
any type of branding project,
whether it's for a large agency,
or in this case, a small business owner in Oregon
who runs a fitness center,
and they approach me about designing their logo,
one of the first things I do after I've gathered
all the information and I understand the context of
who they are, their personality, their target audience,
and who they're trying to market to,
and I'm starting the design process
and I need to work through ideation
in terms of picking an appropriate and well defined typeface
that's gonna work with my design,
I handle it just as shown here,
where I start going through my library
and I'll pick out different iterations of typography
that I think might have a potential of working well.
So this shows most of the typefaces
that I considered for this project.
Now the actual font, the actual end typeface
that I end up going with is this one.
It's Geometric 415 BT Black.
And this is the word typed out using that font.
Now when I'm working with existing typefaces like this,
I try never to just deliver it as
is in the final logo design.
I try to customize it in some way, shape, or form.
That might be using unique ligature
that I hand-craft and add to it,
or that might be as simple as some detailing
such as rounded corners,
and that's what I'm going to do here.
Once again, I'm gonna use the dynamic corners tool
by Astute Graphics, it's a plugin I use,
and in another movie, where I'm gonna go over
subtle rounding techniques on logo designs,
I'm gonna show a comparison and show you how to do it
in Illustrator natively, but also explain to you
why I don't use the native tool in Illustrator.
So we're just gonna use this rounding tool.
Everything I'm gonna show you here though,
you'll be able to do in Illustrator out of the box
without any need for any plugin,
I just happen to prefer this plugin.
And I'm just gonna grab a corner here
and then I'm gonna round it
and we'll do it about, I don't know, right around 17.
I think that's fine.
Once I set one, though, I can just
go to the next letter and click it,
next letter, click it, go to the E, click it,
and now I have all my customizing
for this specific brand typography done.
It goes that quick.
That's why I love that tool.
I actually use that tool every single day
for a lot of different branding purposes.
Now on this design, this is how
this mark ended up coming out,
and I also created a encapsulated version of this mark.
Now, on this design, I'm playing off of the
E for Experience and F for Fitness.
And because Fitness is all about
movement and staying healthy,
I used a wing motif to kind of carry that idea
and concept forward, that's the thinking behind this mark.
But I also created an encapsulated version
and it almost forms the shape of a torso.
That's kind of what I'm going for here.
But the client loved it
and it worked great for their purposes.
Now it doesn't matter what kind of project I'm working on
in terms of taking existing typefaces and customizing them.
I do that for small business, as shown here,
but I also do it for large agencies.
So I worked on a brand with an agency
and the brand is called Helper,
specifically, think Hamburger Helper,
like the Hamburger Helper Hand character, it's that brand.
And they were exploring refreshing that brand.
So once again, I started with the base type,
in this case it's Trade Gothic Condensed number 20,
and this shows you it typed out.
And then, I'm just simply going in
and I'm going to customize these letter forms
in order to create a more unique brand mark.
So we'll turn than on right now
and you can see that's what I've done here.
All I've done, so you can compare,
is I've altered the L and the P
and I used, what I call Shape Recognition
in order to make them appear as what I envision them to be,
in this case a spatula and a pan
because those are the two utensils used in cooking
and using the Hamburger Helper product.
I also used it to form somewhat of a smile face as well.
That was one of the characteristics they wanted to capture
as relayed in the creative brief that the agency gave me.
Now, in this case, you're not seeing the Hamburger Helper
'cause I really don't have permission to show that,
but I can show you what I'm showing here,
the Hamburger Helper hand would fall into this area
in the top-right of this motif.
Now I'm going to show you a couple more
examples of the same project, so we'll turn this on.
And this uses the typeface Neo Contact D,
it's a serif typeface,
and I handled it in much the same way
in terms of changing the letter form to a spatula,
but nesting it within an encapsulated shape
that kind of represents a platter,
represents a plate that food is distributed on
and almost like the server, like,
ta-da, here' hamburger helper,
is kind of the thinker here.
And once again, the brand character would fall in right here
and actually makes a nice breakout
of the container shape as well.
So let's show you another example,
this is where I took a nice script font,
Creamy Script, is the name of the typeface,
and all I did, this just shows you
what it looks like typed out as is,
I improved the kerning on it, that's important,
don't go with just what's built into the typeface,
you'll want to customize even the negative space,
the kerning, and make sure you're removing
any possibility of visual tension
to improve the communication,
and this shows the design and lock up of how I handled that.
I also italicized it, I skewed it, that is,
and if you want to do that, you can just go over
and use the shear tool to select typography
and simply, you can modify it to skew it,
much like I did there,
and that's how I pulled off that effect on this typography.
And I also added a nice inset highlight
to give some volume to the typography as well
and once again, carrying a nice smile factor
with this motif.
Now, in the next one, is using
the Trade Gothic Bold Condensed 20 again.
With the spatula, with the pan, I'm reusing this again,
but I'm nesting it within an encapsulated motif
of a dinner set, of plates.
So that's how I'll take
existing letter forms and alter them,
whether it's using shape recognition, as shown here,
or whether it's adding subtle rounds
or italicizing, or improving kerning,
it's all about taking an existing typeface and improving it,
making it better, making it more unique
to the specific client and purpose or product
that you're designing it for.
That's really important.
Don't just pick a typeface and just go with it
and allow anybody else who happens to use that same typeface
to get the exact same result as you.
You wanted yours to be unique,
so think of ways you can do to make it unique.
Now, if you want something really unique,
sometimes the best way to do that
is to completely customize it yourself.
And that's where this logo type comes in.
This is for a local TEDx event where I live
and for the last four years I've branded them.
So all I've done here is I just
start using geometric shapes,
and we're gonna zoom in on one part of this,
and I'm just gonna start building my shape
and creating exactly what I wanna create with it.
So I'll select shapes, I'll go to pathfinder,
I'll unite those shapes, I'll select more shapes,
I'll unite those,
and then I can take these two shapes here
and we can unite those, I can grab this.
And select that shape, and we can punch through it.
Now you'll notice that we have this,
so this is where I will use a throwaway shape,
so I'll do this, like that, and select this shape,
and then I'll just shear it off to clean this up.
Select the anchor points, I don't want, toss those,
and that's as easy as this methodology goes
in terms of building.
Now what I want to do is I wanna build these shapes,
all these are are simple circles
and I've just expanded 'em from the center out
to the same width that I have the letter form set at
so it's not hard to do.
We're gonna select this one
and we're gonna clone it, Command + C, Command + F,
and we're gonna select this and what we're gonna do
is we're gonna remove from shape.
Basically, we're creating a very thin doughnut here,
if you wanna think about it like that.
If I color it yellow, you can see what it looks like.
That's all we're doing here
is we're creating a doughnut.
And we'll do the same thing on the smaller shapes
so we'll select that, select this shape,
we'll punch through it once again.
We're just creating a very thin doughnut here.
So if I color this one blue,
you can see what that looks like,
and now we'll use further shape building by selecting the
rectangle tool snapping the smart guides turned on
and we'll create this shape like this.
We're gonna clone this shape, so we have two of them,
Command + C, Command + F, like this,
and I'll just select this,
select this shape, and I'll shear it off like that.
I'll select this shape, I'll select this shape
and we'll go intersect on this one,
and you'll see, this gives us
the O shape I was going for.
So that's all I did to create this entire letter form.
It's just simple shapes, simple geometric shape building
in order pull off the final design,
here's the black and white.
And now, when I was working on this,
and this is the beauty of doing your custom shapes,
and just working on just any kind of
logo project for that matter,
is you're gonna discover and come up with clever ideas
in the midst of creating.
You can't always think of everything in the ideation stage,
in the drawing stage.
Sometimes as you build, you'll reveal clever ideas
and when I did this,
and I looked at this R shape,
I'm going, you know what,
that R shape would make a really cool body
and so I just added feet to it
and I made it the brand mark for this whole design.
It worked out really, really well.
So it ended up being part of the overall brand system,
this is the specific logo design that I used it in,
and it worked really, really well.
Now, once again, I've been doing the TEDx
local event brandings for the past four years,
and I just want to show you a couple more examples
of how I've used custom logo types
to brand these events.
So this is one they did a couple years ago called Moxie.
And so, once again, I just created a customized aesthetic
for this logo type for this specific event.
There's another one that just took place last year.
And this is all about not being fearful
of the creative process, or trying new things.
So I forced myself to create this mark, initially,
by painting it with black tempera paint.
And if you wanna know more about that story,
make sure to watch my Drawing Vector Graphics:
Painting with Vectors course,
which I actually go over that,
and show you the process.
So that was kind of fun, but it was also
a fun way to brand this event.
Now when it comes to creating
what I call custom hand-lettered designs,
this is where drawing is gonna play a part again.
So if we zoom in on this,
you can see that this sketch,
let's go ahead and go to transparency,
and we'll just go to 100 so you can see this fully,
so this is the custom logo type for
a brewery here in Oregon called Deluxe Brewing.
And they wanted kind of a rockabilly, culture-type vibe
for their overall brand aesthetic,
but they wanted it to be kind of hard-core and approachable.
So I had to take all those kind of thinking and component
and put it into a custom logo type.
I didn't just wanna pick a font and go with it,
I wanted this to be specifically unique to them.
And that's what I created here.
That's what I did.
Is I simply hand-lettered this,
and if you wanna know more about hand-lettering,
check out my Drawing Vector Graphics:
Hand Lettering course as well
and it goes over all the methodology I use
to approach a project like this,
but in this case I'm gonna set it to 20,
I lock the layer,
and on top of it, I just do simple building,
so it's not hard, and drawing is gonna
guide you in this effort.
So that's why drawing is design's best friend.
It improves the process, it improves your ideation efforts
and in this case, it created the base art,
here's the black and white, and the next one
is the actual lock up of the logo mark,
with this typography in place.
Now this is what I would consider encapsulated design.
That said, it can work on its own.
So I can take this Deluxe type out of this
and create a whole new context, a whole new layout,
utilizing the same elements, the same branding,
but in a simplified, one color format.
So design without typography
is nothing more than hieroglyphics.
So whether you modify existing typefaces
or create custom letter forms from scratch,
it's important to align your aesthetic
with the logo design styling or genre you're designing for.
If you want to learn more about
creating your own custom letter forms, again,
make sure to watch my Drawing Vector Graphics:
Hand Lettering course.