- [Voiceover] Most logos by their very nature
lean towards a simplified aesthetic.
This is true because they need to communicate with
an audience quickly in most real world interactions.
So when your faced with the logo design that requires
the use of a complex thing,
you have to learn to iconify it.
Saul Bass said it well when he defined logo design
as the ability to symbolize and summarize.
Let's take a look at how we can create a symbolic logo
that summarizes reality.
On this project, I worked with an agency down south
and this was a branding project for a law firm,
and for whatever reason, the law firm had been using
a pineapple symbol within their logo for a long time
and they wanted to update their logo and
improve their overall identity.
When I work on something like this,
in terms of a pineapple,
it's a very complex shape, there's inherent pattern
with how the bottom of the pineapple looks and the top
of the pineapple is actually really tall,
this is a very tall vertical type of shape
in terms of its proportion.
Even the crown of the pineapple where the stem is
with all the leaves kind of protruding off, that's a very
complex shape.
It's my challenge on this project to simplify these
shapes and forms and to still them down into a graphic
motif that people can look at and immediately recognize
as a pineapple.
I want to show you how I approach this project
in simplify form and shape to represent a pineapple
and communicate that,
without getting all the complexity
that's in a real pineapple.
As with everything, it starts with a drawing.
And this is all I drew to start this project
and because a pineapple is very symmetric,
I can utilize symmetric drawing,
and that's what I've done here, I've only drawn out
half of it as you can see,
and I dropped down a guide to show where the center point
of my design will be and I'm just gonna build some
basic shapes.
You can see these basic shapes here.
Now if I zoom in on this, you can see the crown,
the leaves of the pineapple, I think they're called leaves,
I'm not completely sure about that but the top of the
pineapple where the green stem comes out of,
it's a lot taller than this,
so I've already immediately started simplifying the
complexity by simplifying how many stem protrusions
there are and kind of iconifying that down in terms
of its content.
Now I'm just gonna do some simple shape building,
which means I'm just gonna select some of these shapes,
like these, and I'm gonna clone them,
command c, command f.
Then I'm going to unite them together with the pathfinder
here like this, so it's one cohesive shape.
Just so you can see what I'm doing, I'll color it orange
or yellow here.
Then I'm gonna go to object,
I'm gonna go to path,
I'm gonna go to offset path,
and we'll see what seven looks like, that might be
yeah that's too much, so let's go down,
let's try four.
That looks good, so we're gonna go with four.
Let me go ahead and get rid of the fill now,
and get rid of our original shape,
is I'm gonna use this to cut off this one here
to form the final shape on this.
And it's gonna cut into this one as well,
but I also need to do the exact same thing with this shape,
so we'll do the exact same offset with this one.
We'll go offset path, we'll go four,
then I'm gonna select these two
and I'm gonna clone this again,
and we'll fill it so you can see what's going on.
Then I'm going to unite them.
Since this is breaching both sides, we need to take this
shape and clone this first.
Use the reflect tool, and we're gonna reflect it over
to this side,
now we can select these shapes,
unite them together,
and then I'll select the top stem part,
and then I'll trim it off, and this forms the final shape
we need for that.
Then I'll go back to the original one we made,
and this one I'll select
the second stem and I'll trim that.
We can get rid of this one.
So that's all I'm doing here,
is I'm creating the negative space to separate these
pieces to further simplify form and shape,
and make communication of the image better.
We're also gonna do this on the pineapple shape itself
because we need to trim these two parts right here.
We're gonna do that now.
We'll go to object, path, offset path,
and we'll go forward,
and on this one
I'm gonna go ahead and clone this offset shape,
select this stem,
and we'll trim it
and then on this one
we will trim this as well.
So this is what we end up with, and that's what we're
going for is to add this nice negative gaps in here
to communicate the detail without getting overly
complex with it.
We're gonna keep coming forward,
so I'll turn on this next layer, and you can see I've
done a little more building on the stem section here.
All I've done is created segments of it so I split them
in half and this is gonna aid in our coloring efforts
to add some nice subtle dimension without getting
too complex with it.
Now to build the content or the pattern of sorts,
that's on a pineapple because a pineapple has somewhat
of a cone pattern going on it,
I don't want to get super complex with that
because it defeats what I'm trying to do,
so the way I've handled his is I've just used the
ellipse tool here to create just two simple large
circular shapes,
and all I'm gonna do is create what I call slivers,
that are gonna serve the purpose of creating the illusion
of complexity without actually adding complexity.
So I'll have this circle and I'll subtract it from
the shape below using pathfinder to create this.
That's what I want to get.
Just so you can see what I'm doing,
I'm gonna colorize this blue and I'm gonna turn on
the other shapes that I used the exact same method to
create those and you can see how this looks.
I'm gonna select these shapes now, and I'm gonna clone them
command c, command f,
and then I'm gonna take the reflect tool,
go off the center point, find any center point, click,
and we're gonna flip those, so we're making a clone.
You can see how it's already starting to create that
illusion of a pattern, that's what I want, that's what I'm
trying to pull off here.
Now we can actually select all of these blue ones,
we can unite them together here,
and now we have a unified shape so if I colored this
something else, like yellow,
or let's do orange, you can see it colors everything
because it's considered one unified shape now.
It's a compound path.
Now that that's sitting on top of our other shape,
we can do some additional detailing.
Let me go up here and turn on a pineapple for a second,
just to show you some,
you can see these little parts here that stick up in
the middle of the pattern,
that's what we're gonna add now but we're gonna simplify
it in an iconic format,
so I'm gonna turn those on now.
You can see how all these are, are just little triangular
shapes I placed at the key point, the center point,
of each of these areas.
I'm just gonna select this,
select the pattern detail I created and we'll fuse
all these together like this, using unite in the pathfinder
and let's go ahead and recolor this the orange color.
You can see what that looks like now.
All we're gonna do is we're gonna take this pattern,
select the bottom...
Let's zoom in just so you can see this a little better.
We'll take this pattern, we'll select the pineapple
body shape and now we're just gonna subtract it from it.
That's all we're gonna do there,
and it creates the nice pattern.
We can get rid of this outline now.
We can toss that and you can see we've created
all the base artwork.
There's one last thing we need to do and then we can start
focusing on color and use that to create what we want.
Now if I go to the appearance panel, you can see this is
a compound path, and that's important because if it wasn't
you'd run into some problems when you path build.
So you always want to make sure you're creating compound
paths so when you use the pathfinder tool,
if you hold option down when you use any of the functions,
it ensures that it's gonna be a compound path.
Now I want to make a copy of this because
as with the leaves where it's segmented into two parts,
I want to do the same thing now with the body.
So I'm gonna find a center point
and I'm just gonna draw this rectangle and we're gonna
use this to make a copy.
I'll go ahead
and clone this, command c command f.
I'll make a clone of the rectangle we just did,
I'll select both.
Now I'll do intersect,
and you see it creates one half.
Now I'm gonna select the original rectangle piece,
select the original body, and I'm gonna trim it
so we only need that half.
Now I have both halves and they're separated like this.
So now all it comes down to is color.
Working out color.
We have all of our bass art and we can actually go down
now and turn off the sketch so we can see this a
little clearer.
This is where working out your tonal families in a
brand color is really gonna be helpful here.
We're gonna go ahead and start coloring this
and it's really easy to color,
I've simplified my color pallet.
I have one color here which is this golden color,
shown here in the swatches pallet,
but I also have a tint of that same color and that's
what we're gonna be creating here,
is if I select this you can see it's selecting the same
gold color but under the color pallet
it's a 75% tint.
I'm just gonna simply apply these colors to the various
shapes here and I'm keeping in mind lighting from
the left going to the right,
so the light side is gonna be the left hand side
of these segmented areas, and then using the eye dropper
I can just sample the swatch that I have here to color them.
Then I'll select the other side like this.
And I'll color this the gold color,
and then the bottom one is gonna be simple,
one side's dark,
and one's side's light, and one side's dark.
This is the final motif so
if anybody would look at this, they're gonna say
what is this?
They're immediately gonna say a pineapple.
That is if they've ever seen a pineapple, maybe they've
never seen a pineapple before but
it communicates a pineapple but if we compare it to the
real thing, let's do that now,
here's the original complex source image of a pineapple,
and here's how I iconified it.
So are they exact? Are the proportions exact?
No, that's the beauty of working in iconic style,
is it just has to carry some of the literal attributes
without being proportionally accurate.
We're not creating a stylized pineapple here that's based
on realistic proportions,
we're eluding to a pineapple in a graphic sense
and so that it communicates as a pineapple.
Even though the original is more complex,
the iconified version still communicates everything
that makes a pineapple a pineapple,
the pattern, the subtle detailing on that pattern,
and the offshoot at the top of the fruit.
So this is the final iconic mark.
Now in context of the logo design, which was a modular
logo, this is what this exploration looked like
that I presented to the client,
and eventually they ended up going in a different
direction with a different pineapple, but I'll show you
another exploration for the same project,
and it was the same type of approach I took.
I just took a slightly different style with it
to create this pineapple for another iteration
I presented to them.
So this methodology goes hand and hand with what we covered
in the visual deduction movie,
so this pineapple would align somewhere between iconic
and style wise I'd say.
It's not an exact match to the reference,
but it doesn't have to be.
If anyone has seen a pineapple,
they're gonna recognize it as such, immediately,
which makes it ideal for a logo design context.