- [Voiceover] Before digital tools were available,
logo designs were hand drawn,
inked at extremely large sizes
on hot press illustration board,
and reduced down into what are called slick sheets
on a stat camera.
This process at times would create
a nice rounding effect on shapes,
specifically corner shapes.
Today digital workflows create absolute precision,
and along with that comes shapes that are
at times too perfect, too sharp,
and thus lack that tactile human quality.
In this movie I want to show you how to use rounding
in context of not only shape building,
but also how to infuse your logo designs
with a little more humanity.
Now in other movies you've seen me use
the Dynamic Corners Tool by Astute Graphics,
which is right here,
and that is the one that I prefer to use
on a day-to-day basis as I do all my building,
logo and otherwise.
But I want to show you how the Corner Widget
works in Illustrator because if you don't have that plug-in
or don't want to get the plug-in,
I want to show you how to pull it off in Illustrator
out of the box.
I just happen to have some issues with the functionality
as they applied it to Illustrator,
and I'll explain that when I show you.
In this example right here,
we have these two graphic faces.
We're gonna zoom in on this one right here.
If I do select the Direct Selection Tool,
which is the white cursor up here, and I select my artwork
with the Direct Selection Tool selected,
you can see that these round Corner Widget controls show up,
these round circles with the dot,
a blue dot in the middle of 'em.
This is how you can control it.
Now to round any anchor point,
you just simply grab this controller and you move it.
But notice what it does by default.
Let's say I want to control the rounding
on this first anchor point
at the top of the head of this face,
it assumes I want to round everything
in my design at the same time.
I rarely ever want to do that
because I just don't work that way.
That's not the way I want to work.
So how do you select an anchor point
and just round it on its own?
Well, you have to click the actual anchor point first.
This isolates what anchor point you're rounding.
Then you click on the control
and then you can control the round for that anchor point.
What this means in Illustrator is you'll have to click
every anchor point and manually round it.
There is no way to copy attributes of one round
to the next anchor point.
So it's kind of time-intensive
because it forces you to go in
and especially you're gonna have to zoom in
to do this well to see the controls
and to get the aesthetic looks
exactly the way you want it to.
So it's not impossible, it just takes more time.
We'll keep rounding here.
We'll, let's see, we'll select the nose.
Let's say I wanted all the shapes in the nose
the same round but I don't want everything else
in the face to be rounded.
You could do it this way
and then you could control it once again.
It's all gonna be the same round.
If that's what you want, that's how you can isolate a shape
within the context of, in this case, this compound path,
which has all these various shapes.
You just isolate the anchor point you want,
grab the Corner Widget control and round it as you see fit.
Now let's say you come back the next day
and you want to change it.
It's dynamic so you can come back and you can move it out,
but you have to careful because notice when I move
this one out, it assumes I want all of 'em moved out.
That default on the tool that it assumes anything
is why I don't like this tool.
I don't like digital tools assuming anything.
I'm controlling it, I want to control it
the way I want it to work.
To use an analogy, if a construction worker
had a smart hammer and he went into work
and it assumed every time he picked it up
he wanted to hammer something,
that's not the case.
He might want to pull a nail out
with the other side of the hammer.
So I don't like the functionality of this tool.
I think there's a better way to handle it
and that's using the plug-in from Astute Graphics.
Now I use that and because I use that,
I turn off these abilities in Illustrator, the Corner Widget
by going to View, going to Hide Corner Widget,
going to Illustrator, Preferences,
Selection & Anchor Display,
and then I set the Tolerance to next to zero, 3%.
This ensures that this feature
is next to never gonna show up.
If I select my art on this one,
and I hit the Direct Selection Tool,
you can see none of those Corner Widget controls
are showing up.
That's good because I don't like them
because at certain zoom ratios they get in the way
and you accidentally trigger that rounding.
That's why I don't like it,
that's why I don't like using it.
This is why I use the Dynamic Corner Widget.
I just think it's more elegant.
It gives you complete control.
I can click on the Corner Widget and it gives me options
of controlling how I want it to behave and react,
which is also nice as well.
So I'll select this, I'll go in,
and the nice feature about this is
I can immediately start rounding and it assumes nothing,
and that's what I like.
Let's say I round this first one
and I want this exact same radius to be applied to this one,
then I just click that one and it will apply it.
That's the beauty of this tool.
I can go okay that works good there,
I want to use the same round on the tip of his nose,
and I can just click and it applies it,
so these rounds are exactly the same radius.
This is why this is such a great tool.
It's intuitive, it works well, it's simple to use,
and like the feature in Illustrator,
I can round something really absurdly.
Let's say I do that and I go nah I don't want that,
I can pull it out the next day if I come back to the file
and want to adjust it.
Now let's say somebody doesn't have the plug-in
and you deliver the artwork to them.
What are they gonna get?
They're gonna get the raw vector artwork
with all the rounds in it.
The rounds won't go away.
It'll just be embedded into the artwork
like a normal vector graphic, so that's good as well.
So in context of rounding, how do I use rounding
to pull off a better logo design?
We're gonna do some shape building here again,
creating a motif of an eagle.
You might've noticed an eagle shows up
a few times in this course.
It's just I like birds and I like eagle graphics especially,
so that's why I am kind of gravitating towards it.
Most of my examples in this course by the way,
I'd say 90% of 'em, are based off of real world projects
I created and I'm just showing you how I pulled that off.
This one is just something I created
to demonstrate shape building
and the context of using rounds.
So we're gonna go ahead and unite this shape here.
Once this shape is created, I'll Clone it,
Command + C, Command + F,
and I'll select the head that I have going here.
I'll intersect 'em to form the shape I need.
I'm gonna select this shape now
and this is gonna serve as a throwaway shape
'cause I'm just gonna cut out from the initial shape
I created to form the same angle
as the back of the wings to the front.
Then on this, you notice with these two,
actually let's go ahead and deal
with the beak part of this bird.
I'm gonna go ahead and select that and select the head,
and we'll go ahead and remove that to form the head.
Now with the head selected, select all the elements
that make up the back of the eagle and his wings.
If I fuse it together, watch what happens
where these two shapes overlap,
where the paths are sitting on top of one another.
It'll add all these anchor points in here.
I actually had a Adobe engineer tell me,
"Well, this is because Illustrator is too precise."
I don't know if I completely buy that,
in which case I don't want that to happen.
So what I usually do is just create
a throwaway shape like this
and then with this shape, I select the head shape.
I'll just kinda notch it out.
Then I'll select two shapes, unite 'em together,
and it resolves that problem,
so that's how I deal with that in context of building.
We're gonna select this shape
that's at the same angle of the wings
and just lop off this detailing
of the negative space of the wings.
With that created, we'll just select that with the body,
and we'll notch out all that detail.
That's shape building 101.
Now with the rounding, where does rounding come in?
Well, this is at the point I'll start rounding.
I'll just grab the Dynamic Corners Tool.
In this case I want that round here.
This one I want it to have contoured
continuation with the back,
so I want it to swoop nicely into the background.
Here, I want to pull it all the way over
to this anchor point so it makes a nice movement
from under the beak and swings up into the back.
We'll go ahead and make a round up here.
I'm gonna pull it out to about 41 or so, that looks good.
Here, you know what, I think this radius
is gonna work back here,
so we'll just click these corners and apply that.
That's another reason why I love this tool.
It just makes it go that much faster.
On these, we'll pull it out all the way,
and once again apply those here.
The last area will be his beak.
I don't want this too much, this looks about good.
So that's how I'll go about creating this shape.
It doesn't take too much more work
in order to clone this and I'll go ahead and flip it
and it ends up creating the final logomark you see here.
Now this isn't the only type of rounding I do when I build.
Let's take a look at another piece of art.
Here's a piece of art that's part of the iconography
that I created for the Deduction movie in this course,
and we're gonna take part of that
and use it to create a logomark for a haberdashery.
So with this stroke, you can work in strokes like this
to create the brim of the hat.
I'll just use the rounding just to add the nice round
and curl of that brim of the hat.
Then I'll go to Object, Path, Outline Path, select his hair.
These will be part of the same shape,
so I'll unite 'em together like this.
Now it's from this point on, I'll use other subtle rounding
in order to improve this design.
So I'll take the Dynamic Corner Tool
and I'll round inside here of his hair.
Actually let's try that again.
I just want to apply the same one to that side.
All I'll do on this now is I'll just go through,
and I like adding subtle rounds, so not lots
like those will match.
The nice thing about a symmetric design like this
is I can figure out the rounding, like that looks good.
Go over here and just click it.
Figure out that actually this works for all of them,
so that works good.
This one I want really subtle ones here.
Then I'll apply it to there
and that's a little too much.
That's good and I'll apply it there, I'll apply it there,
this one, that's good, and I'll apply it there.
Then if you ever want to reapply an attribute,
you can go up to a previous one you had and select it,
and that sets the attribute.
Then you can go down and apply it to other ones
if you want to keep your continuity going
in terms of what rounding you're using
on specific aspects of your design,
which makes once again the process go faster.
The nice thing about this is
when you have the tool selected,
it'll show on the art everywhere you've used that tool.
That's another nice feature about this plug-in.
Now we're gonna add type to this,
and it works great for any kind of vector shape.
So I always use this a lot on customizing type.
I'll go in and I'll customize this one,
that works pretty good.
Then I'll just apply it everywhere I want to apply it
in terms of the letter forms here.
I don't want it on every corner,
such as I don't want it on the corner of the e there,
but pretty much when it comes to 90 degree angles
is what I want to round off
because it's gonna just match the aesthetic
we have established in our brand icon.
So that's how I'll use to form that.
When it's all said and done,
it makes for a very compelling logo design
that has that nice attribute of roundness to it,
and it works in a lot of different contexts.
If this is a promotional graphic for Gent Haberdashery,
you know, the rounding effect just adds, I think
to the overall aesthetic.
Now subtle rounding is where logo design
is really great with.
So here's exploration for,
it was a law firm that specializes in law
for the horse racing industry of all things.
So this was the thoroughbred graphic I did
for one of the iterations that I explored
for that company.
They went in a completely different direction,
but in this case I used subtle rounding.
We're gonna go ahead and turn this one on above it.
I'm gonna go ahead and do just some subtle rounding.
When I mean subtle, I mean very subtle.
We'll zoom in quite a bit on this one.
This is where all these vector art
goes to a very sharp point.
I'm just gonna pull these up a little bit, not a lot,
but just a little bit.
Once again, once I've applied one,
I can just click on the next one to apply it to other ones.
Even in areas like this, I'll go ahead and round it.
Click this, do his hoof, like this.
I'll go through my entire art
and I'll go ahead and round things.
Now on this one if we compare,
it's not gonna be a huge difference,
but there will be a difference if you pay attention.
Look the mane of the horse.
So this is with rounding, this without rounding,
with, without, with, without.
So very subtle, but subtle is the name of the game
when it comes to logo design.
The more you pay attention to these details,
the better your aesthetic overall is gonna be
on your logo design.
The old school methods of graphic design
established this aesthetic, but it wasn't purposeful really.
They were trying to create sharp, clean lines
the best they could back then,
but due to reproduction limitations,
the beautiful side effect was a nice rounding,
a happy accident if you will.
Everything I've shown you in this movie
can be done with the Corner Widget Tool in Illustrator.
You don't need the plug-in,
but that said, I find the plug-in far easier to use.