- [Voiceover] There are a lot of graphic trends
that come and go.
The good ones tend to stick around,
and once such style that has a nice, clean aesthetic
is what I call fat line logos.
That is using one continuous weight of stroke
on all the line work in a logo motif.
Let me show you how to approach this type of logo design.
So we're gonna create a graphic mark.
It'll end up being what I call an encapsulated logo,
a badge, if you will, and this one is gonna be based
off of the theme of welding.
So that's what you see in front of you
is the elements that are gonna be used in this motif.
So I have an anvil, I have a hammer,
and I have a pair of pliers or wrenches.
I'm not even sure what they call those
for doing smithery with fire
and molten steel and all that,
but it's what you grab the piece with
and then you hammer it on top of the anvil.
But these are all the elements we're gonna use
in this design, and this is exactly how I approach it.
I create outlined shapes like this.
I'm not worried about fills.
I'm not worried about the thickness of the strokes
at this point.
It's just composing the overall shape and form
of the pieces I'm gonna use.
On this design, if I select these images,
I know I want the outline to be kind of this gray color,
so we're gonna go ahead and color that gray,
and I'm also gonna bring up Stroke here
'cause we're gonna want to go ahead and work on this.
Let's zoom in so we can see this a little better.
I'm gonna crank this up.
I want this to be pretty fat,
so we'll try eight.
No, I think I'll go nine.
I think that looks good.
When you're working on this, the key to this style
is obviously the fat line nature of the graphics,
but what you're gonna have to do is
when I create the initial shape,
these proportions seem to work well,
but when I apply the fat nature, a nine point stroke
on this art, you can see that you just have this sliver
of area showing through on the base.
So this is where you'll wanna go through
as you're building, when you notice this area,
and you'll either have to rebuild some of this content
or, in this case, just nudge it down to make adjustments.
So we'll nudge this down.
Let's see, one.
I think that looks good right there.
So this is what I do when I'm building this.
I think that looks far better than what we previously had,
and it feels nice and beefy,
kinda going with the nature of this.
We'll go ahead and select this.
Actually I should point out,
once you have this built like this,
one thing that I do to make working in this style easier
at this point is I'll put a white fill
in the middle of these like this.
Then I'll also bring up my Graphic Styles right here,
and I'm gonna just drag this into my Graphic Styles Palette
because what that allows me to do now
is I can just select these shapes
and apply this style,
select these shapes and apply this style.
So you can see how fast it goes
in regards to doing that.
Now, when I did that, the hammer, once again,
I think the inner space of the handle itself is too thin.
I want there to be more white space showing
so I'm just gonna select the areas on this side.
Let's see, we'll do it evenly on both sides.
We'll try a couple on each.
Yeah, I think that looks better.
Then on this one, because all of these kind of merge down
because of the thickness of the stroke,
you get this big gray area at the bottom.
I don't like that, so I just wanna select this
and just bump it out like that.
Just so you get more white showing.
And I'm using the Nudge keys
by using the Direct Selection tool,
selecting the anchor point by dragging it over it,
and then just nudging it.
In this case, I nudged it five points to the left
and five points to the right.
I think that looks good.
So that's all I'm going to do
for my entire design motif, which is this.
And once again, if I select all of this
and apply my path, you can see how quickly
a really cool composition can come about working that way.
Once again, if I go to Keyline view,
all of these are just simple shapes,
and right now they're sitting on top of one another,
so when I deliver final art,
we'll want to convert those to outlines.
I'm gonna show you that shortly.
But this is how you can compose the general look and feel.
Now, as I was progressing this forward,
here's some type I added to it.
I also worked in where it's the same outside element.
All I did is I selected this banner.
I selected the shield, the elements in the crown,
the tools on each side,
and then I combined it into one shape.
Once I had that, I went to Object, Path, Offset Path,
and that's how I created this offset shape
that I have selected here.
With that offset shape selected, I just made a copy of it,
slid it down and filled it with the same gray color,
and you can see how it adds a nice dimension
to the overall motif going on here.
This design is done in terms of its visual appearance,
but it's not done in terms of creating the final art
that I would wanna provide to a client,
and I think that's important to cover
when we're talking about this style
because you would not wanna give a client this artwork
with strokes in place.
The whole reason for that is because
if you go to Illustrator and you go to Preferences
and you go to General, there's a feature
called Scale, Strokes & Effects right here,
and what happens is by default that is not checked,
so if you send this file to a client
and they happen to not have that checked
and they scale this up or down,
the size of the stroke is gonna change,
and it's gonna ruin the aesthetic of your design.
So that's the importance of building this out
and converting the paths.
So I just wanna show you how I do that.
I'm just gonna select the shape in terms
of this anvil right here.
What I wanna do is I wanna go ahead and go Object, Path,
Outline Stroke like this,
and then I can select.
Actually, before we do that,
right now we have the white fill.
Let's get rid of that by making it empty
so it's just the stroke now.
I'll select all of them, go to Object, Path, Outine Stroke.
Now I'm just gonna go to Pathfinder,
and I'm gonna unite them all together,
and you can see that it creates a final design
that's just made up of one shape
that has a compound path in it.
We're gonna select all these anchor points that it adds
because it's fusing together multiple shapes,
and we'll just select those,
and then I'll go up at the top and I'll remove them.
Once again, I like to do that kind of cleanup
as I'm working, as I'm creating.
That way I don't miss something going along.
So this is the final art.
This could be colored anything, but in this case,
we're keeping it gray.
And if I go to Keyline view, this is now a shape,
this is still path, so we have to continue
to do the other ones.
Sometimes the process can get a little messy,
so what we're gonna do is we're gonna fill it with nothing,
and then we're gonna go ahead
and we're gonna outline these top ones.
We'll go Outline Stroke.
I'm gonna unite them as one shape like that
with the Pathfinder.
We're gonna color this something different
just so you can see what's going on now.
And you can see that this shape
is showing through the other one.
So when I expand this path by Outline Stroke,
what I want to do now is I just wanna take another shape,
and this is what I call a throwaway shape,
and we're creating it for no other reason
than to edit another shape.
I'll select these both.
I'll shear off the part we don't need
just so nothing's peeking out.
Then I can select both of these, fuse these together,
and now it's one coherent shape.
Now if we go to Keyline view,
we have nothing but shapes.
Fills, no strokes, that's what you want.
That's how you wanna set up your final art on everything.
And it just takes time to build it this way,
but I always keep a copy of my outline
just in case I wanna go back and reuse it for something
or modify something,
I can go back to the source artwork and do so.
When it's all said and done on this design,
this is what the final looked like.
You can see on the left it's purple,
and on the right almost like an eggplant color.
This is when I was experimenting with color.
Now, if I zoom in on this,
I also added a nice kind of subtle gray,
which I think looks really good,
but eggplant isn't cutting it,
so I'm gonna change this to more of a color
that represents forging,
which forging is like glowing hot metal,
so that's kinda what I'm thinking here.
I kinda like this orange color better.
Initially it started off as gray.
I thought I'd keep it with gray,
thinking metal and fabrication,
but then after I got to this point
and started playing with color,
I think the orange one looks really great.
Now, this specific aesthetic of design works great
on a colored background because it's so simplified.
So you can pull off something like this,
which looks pretty cool with a fat line logo.
Some have referenced to this style of logo design
as hipster logos, and that's all well and good.
That said, I think it's very effective
and a legitimate style that can apply to a wide range
of clients, and in my opinion,
that makes it a valuable, creative option to consider.