- [Voiceover] When it comes to logo design,
one size does not fit all.
You have to create assets for specific types of use,
all the while, ensuring you retain the continuity
of the established brand aesthetic as well.
Let me show you how I create logo files,
so that they work knocked out
on a dark or colored background.
So, this is a logo mark I created for a client of mine
based out of Idaho, and it's for his business.
And the brand color we established is this nice green.
Now this is the final lockup on one of the iterations
I provided to him, but I noticed if he wanted to
use this on a dark background, if I just copy this,
so we'll just copy and paste a copy over here,
and I bring it over on the colored background,
we're gonna color it white, you can do it this way,
but there's aspect about this that I don't like.
One is that the hat, I think, should be dark,
the pupil should be dark, the inner part of the eye
should be white, not dark, and so there's elements
like that that aren't working, in my opinion,
and it's okay, I just don't think it's ideal.
The type is fine because I work darker light,
there is no readability problems, but when it comes
to the logo mark itself, and the character,
I don't like how it's handling it.
I want to capture the correct mood.
So I want to show you how I resolve this problem,
when I'm approaching the logo design and I need
it to work on pretty much any background.
I'll show you an iteration of the logo
that I create, to do just that.
So it all starts with taking your source art,
and first thing I want to do, is once again,
I have this set up as a grouped element.
So I can go in and isolate any part of this.
In this respect, we're gonna isolate just the hat.
I'm gonna copy it to the clipboard, Command + C,
and we'll back out of isolation mode,
and now I'm just going to paste it in place.
I'm gonna color it different colors,
so you can see what I'm doing here.
And we're gonna unite this with the pathfinder,
we can keep these separate, but I will unite this one,
just to form one cohesive shape.
Now that we have this, let's go ahead and just color it
an outline color here, let's see what size, that will work.
And we'll go to Object, we'll go to Path,
we'll got Offset Path, and you wanna select Round here,
you don't want any sharp midering to happen,
so we'll keep it on round.
And the amount, we're gonna offset it, I think we'll do 15,
take a look, that looks good, so we'll go OK.
And that's all we've done, is we've created an offset
of that, we can get rid of the original shapes now.
And that's all we're doing, is we're creating,
what I would call, a halo effect, around our artwork,
around the logo composition that we have now.
Now I'll continue to work this out, not only of it,
I'll use the Offset Path, some of it,
I'm gonna take some artistic liberty and
imply the same kind of outline, but I'll do that
just using basic shapes, as shown here.
I'll just take simple elliptical shapes,
and I'll combine them using the pathfinder,
and I'll just knock them out to create that,
and then we'll select these two elliptical shapes,
where you line them together like this,
and you can see, I've created a profile of sorts,
that's gonna work around the outside of that shape.
Now notice sometimes you get secondary elements,
like this, just click into it, into isolation mode,
isolate it, and then you can delete it.
That should be expected using the pathfinder.
Now some other elements, we'll turn those on now,
is I decided it would be cool to have this nice little
nesting shape for the text, that almost had that quality
of a vintage old sign, the nice (mumbles) effect,
that you see on old signs, so I did that.
And then at bottom, I just wanted it rounded,
so I just used a large elliptical shape, and on this case,
I can just lop off the part we don't need on top there.
So now that I have all the elements,
I can just select these two shapes,
and I'm going to clone all of these shapes now,
by Command + C, Command + F, and then we'll go
to the reflect tool, we'll find a center point,
and then we're just going to reflect these
to the opposite side, then we can select the hat shape,
the object we just reflected, and the bottom round shape,
and we're going to fuse those together using unite,
and once again, we can click into isolation mode,
get rid of the shape we don't need,
and now we have this nice, kind of halo effect,
that's around our centered logo mark.
And what we can do here, is we can select this,
and we can color it just so you can see what's going on,
like, I don't know, let's do it yellow.
And we'll paste it behind our graphic, like this,
and you can see how it's now going to work sitting
on a background, specifically,
we're going to color this white.
So let's look at colored background, with this nesting
shape in place, and how it looks.
So this is the reason why I did it,
it makes usage of the final logo mark far greater,
easier to adapt to any kind of context,
and it's gonna look great.
We actually used this on his business cards
to pull off this look and feel.
Now I also created a version that's just the head
of the character, as well, but I use the same
methodology to point that off.
So any kind of mark you're working on,
to work on a colored background, sometimes you'll have
to halo it, like this.
Here's another exploration for the Seed Collective.
I really like this mark, but it's multi colored,
and in order to pull it off in a reverse sense,
if I show you what that looks like,
this is how I use the reverse on this.
So I took the outline of the mark, and just made it
nonexistent, but it works really well,
and it communicates exactly the same information,
even though it's simplified, one color reverse
on a colored background.
Now here's my original Futility Closet,
the final mark I've created for that.
Now, I needed to use this mark in a context of some
promotional art prints I created for them.
Where I took public domain access engravings,
go back to the 17, 1800's, and then I did collage
illustration with them, along with quotes I had
the podcasters pick out, and I illustrated for each
quote, to represent the meaning,
but I needed a context of this logo that worked
in simple, one color, on a colored background.
So I used the same halo effect to pull that off,
and communicate the positive and negative in an
accurate way, that's gonna work in the final context.
In this case, here's an example.
One of the art prints where you see that reverse
logo in context, as shown there.
So, simply taking a black and white version of a logo,
and coloring it white, won't always work.
It will require additional craftsmanship to
construct versions of the logo that work well
on a colored or dark background.