Let's take a look at how to create a handwritten logo.
I'm going to begin with this sketch,
which I have placed using the Place command.
I could, at time of placing this, have chosen Template,
but I didn't, which means that I now
want to come to my Layers panel
and convert my layer to a template,
and that's going to dim the image.
Now, rather than attempt to image trace this,
which is not really going to work.
It's not going to give us the kind of control that we need.
I am going to manually trace over
the letter shapes using the Pen tool,
so I will want to tear off my Pen tool.
And then on a new layer, because I can't actually
add content to the now locked sketch layer,
I'm just going to lay down anchor points,
clicking and dragging to create curves,
and of course I want to make sure that I'm
creating a path that doesn't have a fill.
So, I'm going to make the fill none
and then make the stroke black.
So, I'll go ahead and do this.
I won't worry too much about being
super accurate at this stage.
I just basically want to get from
the first letter to the last letter
so that we have something to work with.
And that gets me to this point,
and I now want to refine the strokes,
and there's a few things that I can
do here to refine these strokes.
Firstly, I'm going to pull down a guide
that will indicate the baseline,
and I'm going to pull down another guide
that will indicate the x height.
Now, this is a signature and by its
very definition it's non-uniform,
but we need to make it a bit more
uniform than it currently is.
So, now using my Direct Selection tool
I can select these anchor points and I can pull them around.
And where necessary I can convert
corner points to curve points,
or I can introduce more of a curve
by using the Anchor Point tool.
So, with a fair amount of back and forth
using my Direct Selection tool
and my Convert Anchor Point tool
I'm able to shape the letters into
something more like what I want,
but then I'm going to find that I end up with
quite a few unwanted bumps in the letter shapes,
and I'm going to sort those out using the Smooth tool,
which is going to give me more graceful curves.
So, after a fair amount of that, in addition
I will want to consider how the letters are spaced,
and like I said, we don't need this
to be completely uniform, but it needs to be
a bit more uniform than it currently is.
You can see that I've added a bit
of a flourish at the beginning
and more of a flourish at the end,
and on a separate layer I've added in
these spacing shapes just to sort of
keep me on track with making sure
that the letters are more evenly spaced,
and I've also added in this diagonal guide
to make sure that the slant of the letters
is more or less the same,
and to do this it was just a case
of drawing a line that indicates the slant
and then duplicating that, and then
we can select those and we can come
to the View menu and convert these to guides.
I'll just undo that, we don't need any more of those.
In addition, I found it helpful to have the word
typed out in a script typeface that is not the same
but is similar to what I'm aiming for.
So, now that we're happy with the shape of the strokes
it's time to add a calligraphic stroke to this wire frame.
Come to the Brushes panel, and I'm going
to start off with a three-point flat brush,
and then double-click on that
and change the options to these.
After some experimentation I found that I wanted an angle
of 35%, roundness of 50%, and a size of 10 points.
In addition, now's the time to add the dot on the eye,
which I don't want to be a perfect circle
but more of an oval.
So, now with the calligraphic stroke added,
to finish off the logo I'm going to select it
and then come to the Object menu
and choose Path, Outline Stroke.
That's going to make my strokes into fills,
and to remove the overlapping shapes
I will then come to my Pathfinder panel,
my Pathfinder tools are down here
but if you don't see them
you'll find them under the Window menu,
and combine the shapes together.
So, that's how you can create your
signature logo starting with a pencil sketch.