- [Voiceover] At the end of a logo design process,
you have to deliver your final art in all the various
formats needed to make the usage as easy as possible
for a client or project.
Let me show you how I approach condensing my colored
logo designs down into a simple black and white format.
So this is one project for a masseuse in Portland, Oregon,
and if you've ever watched the show Portlandia,
that's what the name was kind of based off of,
so I kinda went with it.
Portland has a whole vibe, and actually, their slogan
is "Keep Portland Weird", so I kinda played off of that
for this logo iteration.
They ultimately went with a different iteration,
but I really like the character and personality
of this one.
But you can see I have multiple colors in this,
it's actually a three colored design, so it would work
well for spot colors if you handle that in this fashion,
but if I simplify this down into a black and white,
there are several features in Illustrator that can
make this really easy, so right now we have this kind of
darker, reddish brown color that serves as the base color
for most of this design, and the way I would change
everything to black is you could start selecting shapes,
and going over here, and coloring it black, so on and
so forth, and it wouldn't take a whole long time,
but if I wanted to do everything a lot faster, I could
select a shape with that color, I could go up to Select
in the menu, I could go to Same, and I could go
Fill Color, notice is have an F key set up, Option F key,
to do this very task, that way I don't ever have to go
to the Select menu to do this, but if I click the
Fill Color, it's gonna select all the iterations
of vector shapes in my composition with that fill color,
and then I can simply select black, and it will color
in black.
So that's how you can quickly start moving though this.
Once again, I have the F key set up to do this, so I can
select green here, and Option F1, and it will select all
the green you can see throughout my design, and in this
case, it's gonna be white on this coloring, so I'll
do that, and I'll select this tint of the green, which
is kinda in this circle, and once again, Option F1,
it'll select all the iterations with that tannish color,
and I'll apply white to fill those in, and I'll just do the
same thing with the color, like this pale orangey color,
Option F1, or Select, Same, Fill Color option from this
Select menu, and I'll color this one with, oops,
actually this one is both colored white and black,
so in this case, I'm gonna deselect the elements
that need to be black, and I'll go ahead and color the
rest of 'em white.
We'll then select this banner and this type down here,
this will become black, and then on the detailing,
in the words, I actually don't want to make these white,
if I color them white, it just makes the type busier,
it's not as subtle as what it was in the color, so I'll
just click into this, and once again, I have this set up
using Groups, so it's in Isolation Mode, so I can isolate
various elements in my design without moving or
manipulating, or messing up other elements.
Select this in line detailing on the type, and just get
rid of it, and then I'll do the same thing down below.
Click into that through Isolation Mode, and select it,
delete it, and so this is how I'd reduce this design
down into a simple black and white fashion, using
a couple of easy tactics that you can capitalize on in
Illustrator.
Let's take a look at a different style of logo design,
you've seen this in another movie, it was an exploration
for a city called Jena, which was founded by Spaniards,
and we did this nice modeling on a flat motif to give
it some dimension.
But now if I had to simplify this down, I would definitely
select elements like the shading, and I wouldn't have
that, I would just have it simple black and white,
I would lose these, I would select the areas that are
blue in this motif, I would make those white, and then
I would just lose the outer periphery around that,
I'd select the drop shadow, get rid of that,
and then everything else that's brown, would become black,
and this is how I would simplify this one down into it's
simple, black and white format.
Now I could create a grayscale of it, and provide it to
the client, so they have the same aesthetic almost
as the full color logo, but it's handled in various
tints of black, which make up a grayscale.
But, I have to be honest, I rarely give a client a
grayscale, it's usually color iterations in both CMYK,
Spot Color, and this simple black and white.
If they ever need grayscale they can approach me and I'll
give it to them, but I've maybe,
twice in 14 years I've
ever had to do that, but I wanted to show that
as a possibility nonetheless.
So, here's another design I did for the videographer
in the UK, and on this one, it's more illustrative,
so I'm just gonna select areas that I've applied color,
and in this case, this blue I can just select it and
get rid of it, because we're not gonna retain that
color, we just want access to the base black and white
to simplify it.
Now I'm gonna select these inner areas of the hat,
and these will just become white, and then select the
detailing, which is just subtle on the brim, select
the detailing on the skull, we can get rid of that,
the eye is gonna turn white, the inner monocle,
the kinda highlights, will become black as well, and then
the detailing on the teeth, we can lose that altogether
and just simplify, and on the claws itself, these little
highlights that were blue, will become white, and then
the secondary type elements will become black, so this
is how I would kind of bake this design down into a simple
black and white form, even on a composition that's more
illustrative design, like this.
But once again, as I stated before, you could set this up
as a grayscale, it's just in today's context
of reproduction, I see less and less need for grayscale,
it's just so cheap to print full color, most people
don't even bother to do grayscale anymore.
Now, if we move to a different kind of design,
here's the printer's mark that was used for the distillery,
this was the final mark, and this is their final
brand color, which is kinda like a copperish type
color, now because I'm using the color to form some
of the key elements in this design, I simply don't want
to select these, and color them black, because if I do
that, it's not gonna give me the look and feel I want,
so if I do that here, I don't like how it makes this
look really fat now, and it's not working, so this is
one example where I don't have to do this on every
design, but just because of the way I handled this
motif, I had to add some additional elements so the
black and white artwork is very subtly different than
the color, and I'm gonna turn that on now.
And if you look at the seal area, notice how I've put an
additional white rim to separate it, and make it work
well in a black and white format.
I've simplified the type, and I've used the highlight,
turned it to white in this case, but I got rid of the
drop shadow because it made it too complex and so now
it works really well in black and white, and this
was the artwork that they used so they actually have
this stamped in one color on all the boxes that they
ship out their product in, so we live in an age
where onscreen graphics are now higher resolution
than offset printing methods.
Some of the old rules are constantly changing, and as
I stated previously, I almost never deliver grayscale
versions of my logo work.
But I always keep simple black and white in mind
when I design and then deliver my final art.