- [Voiceover] Nothing is more thrilling
in context of logo design than discovering a clever idea
in the midst of working out
and building your design directions.
Sometimes you can strategically plan it,
and other times it just is a happy coincidence.
So let's take a look at methods
that will increase your possibility
of using this type of graphic approach to logo design.
Now, when I approach a client
and I gather all the information up front
through a creative brief, through follow up questions,
through my own research of their industry,
I discover aspects or conceptual connections
that relate to visuals
that I can capitalize on to create a logo.
That's what logo design is all about.
Now, when it comes to creating
an intriguing negative space logo,
you have your traditional compositions
that really capture that well,
and you've seen some of those that I've created
already in this course I did for Gallo wine,
I'm gonna show that again and show additional explorations
because that project was strategically planned
in that their creative brief said
that they wanted a negative space logo,
so I really focused on that.
But negative space can be your source of inspiration,
you don't have to always strategically plan it
to try to force it to work in that respect,
it could be something that you do by the mere fact
that you're observing letter forms like this A here.
The name of the brand is Apex Outdoors,
and so I looked at the negative space,
understanding the context of Apex meaning the topmost point
of any kind of mountain peak for example,
and that gave me an idea.
I saw the negative space of this A and I said,
"You know what, this would work well
"to drop a mountain in there."
and so once I've done that, I can go in on a shape like this
and further customize it by rounding it,
you've seen me do this in other movies now,
demonstrating the round, but it's really gonna improve
the overall aesthetic of this mark
by adding these nice little subtle rounds.
Even tiny, little subtle rounds right here
is gonna drastically improve this mark
and really make it look nice
and bring forth the aesthetic that I'm after in this design.
So that's how I quickly will add that kind of detailing
to a mark like this, and then the final context
of the presentation of the brand system,
this is how the mark works in both a vertical
and a horizontal format.
So, that's one aspect to letting the negative space
on, in this case a letter form, inspire my choices
of what I could do visually to communicate in this context
the client in that they're outdoors,
so that makes sense, having a mountain.
Now let's take a look at an alternate
where once you have it, you can also further explore,
and reinforce that is, the concept of a design.
So I used color here to communicate outdoors.
I think it works better than the brown
and the blue motif, so.
All of these principles kind of work together
so even though I have a separate movie
that focuses on rounding, all of those things
come into context when you put them together
and work out a logo design.
You'll consider negative space in every project you work on
because it might reveal a clever way to handle it.
Let's take a look at another one.
Here's the two letters that abbreviate this company name,
and the company name is called Talon Rescue,
and it's all about rescuing injured birds of prey
and facilitating their recovery
and then release back into nature,
so it's a really cool project.
But in this respect, I'm looking at this,
and I was thinking, "How can I form a nice, unique, strong
"bold logo mark based off of these letter forms?"
And that's where I bring in
what I call the negative components.
It's not that this negative shape on its own
will reveal what I want it to reveal.
Sometimes that happens, but most of the time
it's forethought or considering how you can force it
to do that, and that's what I want to do here.
I'm just gonna take these shapes
and I'm just gonna move them over into place
where I think they're gonna work best.
I'll take these, and I'm just gonna bring it over like this.
And on this one, I'll just bring these over.
I'm gonna basically fuse the T and the R together like this.
We'll got to Pathfinder, we'll unite 'em.
And then on this one, I want to bring this over,
and this is gonna replace the negative space
of the middle of the R,
so I can get rid of that,
and this is the motif I'm kind of creating here
and I'll color this white just so you can see
what I'm doing here.
So that's how I'm handling the negative space,
I'm kind of creating it, but I'm still trying
to have a loose tie to the original typography,
T and R, but doing it in a clever way,
using negative space and composing it
so what I end up with, my final mark is this.
And so I have a nice horizontal and a nice vertical format
with this mark, it's working well,
the colors work well together, and in the final context,
it works great on their marketing pieces
for this foundation and the outreach and what they do.
Now, earlier in the course,
you've seen me showcase how to use symmetric compositions
to build incredible-looking logos,
and I this iteration for Gallo wine.
Now this project was purposeful.
Their creative brief specifically stated
that they wanted the negative space
to form some kind of concept related to wine.
In this case I made it a wineglass
and the actual wine itself in that glass
makes up the shape of the head of, in this case, an owl
because that was another part of the creative brief,
because the line was called instinct,
they wanted to focus on flying birds,
whether it was an owl or a crow, just birds in general.
I picked an owl because it worked well
with the formatting and proportions of a wineglass.
So that was one iteration, I already showed you
how I went about building that,
but in the process of doing this, I worked out other
kind of clever motifs to capture the essence
of a negative shape in the context of a logo,
and I pitched those as well,
and these are a couple more explorations.
Now the eye on the left is very engaging.
But technically it's not a negative space,
it's actually using the same principle
but on a positive space to reinforce the,
in this case, the middle of the eye,
but it's a wineglass.
So I want to show you one iteration once again
it all starts in drawing.
Here's another iteration for a label
and this is the one I'm building out so that
they could see how it would work on a label.
Once again my base shapes are all underlined
based off the underlying drawing that is,
and I'm using it as the roadmap to build my artwork.
So the more you can work out a concept,
a design and drawn form,
the better you're gonna be able to execute it,
because you're not making guesswork as you go along,
you're simply building it as you intended it to be.
Now in this case, I have the wineglass separated,
so in terms of this wineglass, all I have to do
is select it, select these shapes,
and then I can just punch through
and you can see how it creates the negative space.
So it's very easy building methods to pull off this style.
The final lock-up in terms of the type
and the brand artwork is like this,
and the final context for this design turned out
like this for the label.
So that was a real fun one to do.
Now, when it comes to exploring this style
and using negative space, there was another project,
this is actually a separate project
called Naked Grape for Gallo,
and this is my exploration for this.
So my sketch that I worked out
played off of the negative space again
and I made it wine bottles,
and then this is easy, simple geometric building
to pull off this mark.
So this is where I started, with geometric shapes,
and it's just simply selecting them
and uniting them together to form the shapes I want,
then I can select the bottle shape,
select the foundational shape and punch it out.
So it's very simple building methods to get my core art
and then I just went in and added some other
more organic detailing to make up the leaves and vines
that give it the illusion that it's a grape vine
that's morphing into this snake
that forms the negative shape of the bottles.
And notice on my drawing that I didn't like
the head that I drew, that's okay,
I can make that change as I go along.
So those kind of art directive decisions are important
as you develop, and then it leads to your final mark.
I thought this one was a lot of fun.
It ultimately wasn't used,
they went with a different direction,
and that direction is this one, which I like just as well,
it's more kind of compelling
because it's interacting with the form of a bottle,
and it worked really great on the labeling
for the bottle itself,
so that was a fun project to work on.
Now, you saw originally I showed you a letter form.
Now, I was working on a project one time
and I had to create an example
of how to imbue a logo mark
with a conceptual component,
but it had to be using a typeface to do that.
And so I was forced to create a mark based off
of diversity of an outreach program called Huemanity,
and it's cleverly playing off the name Hue,
as in H-U-E, so it's like different colors,
so Huemanity, the diversity of humanity,
and so I started with the letterform H,
and then from that I just started working out
how am I gonna form this?
And so I selected these two shapes
were profiles of different photographs I found
of profiles of people, and I just created
basic vector shapes that are kind of founded
on those profiles.
And now I'm gonna take these,
and I'm just gonna subtract it from this shape
and I'll take this, and you can see
how I have these shapes here,
so I'm gonna take these shapes now,
and I'm gonna subtract them like this.
And now with this shape, if I go back
to this original shape, let's go ahead and copy that.
And I'll go ahead and paste this.
Now with this shape, and you have to make sure it's on top,
so if you're not sure if something's on top,
you go to Arrange, you can go Bring to Front like that.
So making sure it's on top, I can select this bottom shape
and now I can subtract it from the original shape I created
and what I end up with is kind of an obscure H shape
but it's made up of a nice representation
of what I call Huemanity,
but it's kind of leaning towards an H shape,
and I created a nice kind of gradient blend
to fill into it, and with the type,
it really kind of comes to life, so.
That's just an example of how you can think about
not only negative shape, I know this is about
creating negative shaped logos, that's great,
but I think you can reinforce it even more.
The same principle applies to both positive
and negative shapes, it all comes down to shape recognition.
Looking at a negative space, whether it forms
the intended theme or profile that you want,
it might, that'd be a happy coincidence,
much like the FedEx logo with the hidden arrow in it,
but if it doesn't, you can still use the principle
you just have to take a slightly different approach on it
as I've shown you in this movie.
So, you won't be able to use this methodology
on every project, but having a great brand name,
genre or theme will of course assist
in discovering a clever way to pull off
a negative space inspired logo design.
So do some shape recognition and pay attention
to form and shape, and you might uncover
a great concept waiting to be discovered.