- [Instructor] Sometimes the focal point of a logo
is a single, abstracted letter,
either by itself
or in the context of a word.
Here I am going to create this stylized N.
I'll start by converting the type to outlines.
And then with my rectangle tool,
draw myself a rectangle over the type,
fill that with another color,
send it to the back.
Now with my direct selection tool,
I will select the N.
And I want to break the path into a series of segments.
I will de-select the top right anchor point on the end.
With one of the anchor points on the path selected,
I will now have this option
to cut path at selected anchor points.
That's going to cause things to look a bit weird.
And so that we are not seeing fills,
I will press Shift X
to switch my fill and my stroke.
Having cut the path at those anchor points,
I'm now in a position where I can select the diagonals.
And I'm holding down the Option or Alt key
in conjunction with the direct selection tool
so that it functions as the group selection tool,
selecting both of those.
I'll now come to the layers panel,
and create a new layer.
And I am going to move those segments
onto that new layer.
I'll also change the color of that layer,
so there's no confusion
with the red of our background.
That's not absolutely necessary.
I just want to segregate this artwork for a while,
which is why I'm putting this on a new layer.
For the next thing,
I need to be very accurate.
So I'll zoom in,
nice and large.
And then I'll come to outline view mode
where I see just a wire frame.
I'll get those diagonals,
and I'm going to extend them.
Extend them beyond the edge of the rectangle,
but making sure that we keep them on the same trajectory
that they were already on.
I should mention that I have my smart guides turned on.
Useful most of the time.
Sometimes it's good to turn them off.
But in this case,
they are proving very useful.
I now going to press Command or Control Y,
and this will take me back to my preview.
With these two diagonals selected,
I want to increase their stroke weight.
And I'm going to use a stroke weight,
in this case, of 40 points.
Now the stroke weight is center-weighted,
so half of that value goes inside of the diagonal
on the end that I want to retain.
For this reason,
I'm next going to outline the stroke,
which will convert those strokes to path.
I'm now going to toggle back to my outline view mode,
Command or Control Y.
I'll select the first of these diagonals.
And I need to move it up
so that its
bottom edge
connects with the diagonal on the right side of the N.
And I'll just zoom in to make sure
that I'm completely accurate there.
Then I need to do the equivalent
with the other diagonal,
bring that down
so that its top edge connects with the vertical.
At this point,
I can toggle back to preview.
I'll switch to my regular selection tool,
select all of the artwork.
I want to make sure that
none of the artwork has a stroke,
so I will apply none.
And now,
for the final reveal,
I'll choose my shape builder tool,
hold down Option or Alt
and swipe through
those segments that we don't want.
Black is currently my fill color,
so I'll click on the middle section to apply that.
Then come and change my color,
and I can combine these segments together.