- [Voiceover] Adding dimension to flat, logo motifs
can add a nice, engaging dynamic to a design.
Let me show you how to handle this
using both digital and analog methods.
So, as with all of my designs, it starts in analog.
I work out my logo motif, my design, in a drawn form.
I create what I call a refined sketch, as shown here.
Now, this particular client is part
of the skateboard industry
and their product that they asked me to brand
was called Dragon Bearings.
Their skateboard bearings
and so this was the brand mark
that I came up with, playing off the name Dragon,
but I also have a subtle reference to the letter D
in this mark if you look at it long enough.
It's a little more apparent when you see the final version,
but it all started in analog, all started in drawing.
This is gonna serve me as a nice roadmap
for building my vectors,
so just to reiterate some basic principles
about vector building that we've covered in another movie,
I take my refined sketch, place it into Illustrator
and I set the opacity to about 20%
and then I lock the layer and on the layer above it
I start building my vectors.
Now, when I vector build, this shows the rough build
of my initial laying down of anchor points.
If I select this path, you can see I'm not worrying
about the curves, I'm just putting the anchor points
where they should go.
Now, on this particular design,
I have a lot of areas where the shapes come to a point,
so it's easy to discern where to place anchor points
because wherever your drawing comes to a point
gets a point, those are easy.
Once I have my rough path built and laid down like this,
this is when I'll go to either the anchor point tool
in Illustrator, grab a path and I'll start adjusting it.
If we zoom in, you can see me doing
this with the front part of the dragon's nose
so I would go in here and I can start finessing those paths.
As I stated in a previous movie,
I personally don't use that tool a lot.
I use the Pathscribe tool which is the Vector Scribe plugin
by Astute Graphics and that's here
and it works pretty much the same way.
I just have a lot more flexibility in terms of
the features it offers
so that's why I use it,
but either process is gonna get the same results.
One just might be a little faster than the other,
but this is how it fundamentally starts in analog,
moves to digital, I start rendering my vector paths
until I have all of my base vector paths built
and if I turn these off,
you can see that it aligns pretty closely
to my underlying drawing.
Now, that's not to say I'm not gonna make art directive
decisions on my own design as I progress forward
because if I discover something that looks better
or works better, I'm definitely gonna work that in
and you're gonna see me do that in just a little bit.
Now, once I get to this point,
I can take my base vectors, such as shown here,
and I can colorize them.
You can see, I've created the tonal family
of a base color and a shadow color.
The base color is what this is gonna become
so if I take my eyedropper and sample this base color
and color the mark,
this is the base color that it's gonna be.
It's gonna be this nice red hue.
Now, I have a darker hue of red
and this is gonna serve as shading
and it's at this point that I go back to analog
and this is how this process works.
It starts in analog to create the design,
to work out the design, then I build it,
I get it to this point, and then I turn it into black
and white art with an outline, print it out,
and I literally draw on it with a pencil outside
the computer to work out all my shading to figure out
how's my shading gonna be formed on this
and this is the scan that I scanned it back in,
once again, placed it back into Illustrator,
and then if I go to, let's see, we go to the Blend Modes
and I'm gonna select Multiply, I place it over
the top of my underlying drawing
and this is now gonna serve me to, once again,
build the shading vectors.
Now, I'm gonna turn this down to about 30%,
that might be a little much so let's try 60.
Something like that.
Just so it's enough that we can see it
and I zoom in when I build on stuff like this anyway
and we're gonna go ahead and lock this layer.
Lock the shading layer and on the layer above it,
I just start building and we'll want to go back in
and just change this color really quickly
to a lighter hue just so that we can see
what we're doing like that.
Then I'll lock the layer and that way
we can see the shading.
We can see what we're building
and you can see that I'm just following, once again,
my drawing is serving as a roadmap to build my vector art,
to build the detailing of shading on this design
so it's not a complicated process,
it's just a dedicated process.
You have to stick with it
and the results are gonna be fabulous
as you're gonna see here shortly.
So, what I end up with by using this kind of process
is I end up with a really nice modeled logo
that isn't flat anymore.
It has a nice dynamic of some shading to it.
Now, one thing I do want to point out
is that initially on my drawing,
if I turn this off, you can see how I drew the shading
on the mouth area like this, but in the final
it ended up being like this because it looks better
and it works better and that was actually a friend of mine
who I had shared my design with and I said,
"Hey, can you give me some feedback.
I've stared at this too long."
He came back and he said, "I love it,
but do this on the bottom part, on his nose,"
and I'm like, "Oh, that's it.
That looks a lot better,"
so it's really good to get feedback
if that can help you in your process
cause it's easy to look at something too long
and you get comfortable with it
and you don't get as critical as you need to be
to make a good decision,
so if you have friends you can trust
who are good designers themselves
than by all means take advantage of that.
This was the final two iterations that I developed
for this client, both vertical and horizontal,
and this is gonna be used on packaging moving forward.
Now, I've used this approach for a lot of different projects
and I just want to show you a couple more examples
of how I've used this.
Here's a branding project for a small town called Jena
and it's in Louisiana and the town was founded
by a Spaniard so one of the explorations I took
for the pitch that we did for them
is I created this based off of that idea
of the founder of the town
and so this is my flat base colors.
It's this nice dark brown with a muted blue,
but when I add the dynamic of shading to it
and I did it in the exactly same process
I did it with Dragon Bearings,
it really kinda brings life to this overall logo mark
so I really like how this one turned out
and in it's final context with the text
it looks really nice as well.
One last one I want to show you
and this is more of a school mascot
for a college up in Canada that I worked on
and I gave them actually two poses.
I originally proposed it like that.
They wanted the head facing the opposite way
so I just gave them two options, you know.
He's looking back, looking forward.
What'd you say?
Looking back, looking forward.
Anyway, this was a great design to work on,
but the approach that I took on shading and detailing
this identity piece for them really came to life
when I added the shading in it.
It took it from a flat based image
and added a lot of dynamic character to it
and one of the final usages came out really great
is we isolated the head of the character
and that became the graphic used
on their football team's helmets.
It was a fun project to work on.
I've been using this process for over 20 years now
and it still produces great results.
Just because you create digital artwork
doesn't mean analog can't be used to help you discern
and create better logo design.