*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
On day two of the brand boot camp. So I'm really, really excited. Today we are going to be going over logos.
But yesterday we talked about brand strategy and all things that you need to know. Okay, not all the things, it was only 30 minutes, but it will be really well encompassing for you. So go check out the replay if you haven't seen it already.
It should be Alex Lazaris. Brand design or Brand Strategy 101 I believe is the name. Check it out.
You don't know who I am? I'm Alex Lazaris. I run a little design shop called Lazaris. We are a brand experiential design studio.
We work on everything from physical retail stores to campaigns, creative. Anything you need, we pretty much do. So today I'm going to be walking you through how to build a logo.
So come on into my screen. We could check out a little bit of like yesterday's brand strategy stuff. Won't go through it, but you can essentially just go through the yesterday video and read all about it, all the theories and strategies that we put into it, wordboards, things like that.
We essentially looked at how I would critique my own business and how we built our logo or brand and business and stuff like that in the past. Today is all about you and having fun and getting into the actual creative flow of it. So today we're probably going to focus on making some logos, maybe around the bold authentic stuff, but not really.
Today is about teaching you the tools that you need to know for the logos. So yesterday we did a little quick recap on kind of the mood board and things like that. If I was to go about building a mood board and things that I'm interested in and I love, today we're going to be looking at logos.
But in case you don't know about logos, I'm going to give you a quick crash course on what types of logos there are out there. This is not an exhaustive list, there is tons and tons of different logos out there, but I think you can pretty much categorize every logo into this style of thing. So looking at this screen, we've got these kind of typical logos that you've seen from like Visa, Coca Cola, Google.
We would call these kind of a logo type because it's a logo, but it's also mostly just driven by type so that's easy to remember. Logo plus type, logo type. I also like to refer to type within a logo that contains a mark also as the logo type.
But these are logos that are specifically built around the logo type themselves. Pictorial is where you start to depict things that's pretty self explanatory as well. But just really helpful for you to know abstract would be it's a little bit harder to understand.
Maybe there's a little bit of a message hidden in there. BP has this kind of like flower thing. Pepsi has these shapes, and Adidas has the three stripes that everybody knows and loves as well as the like.
I think it's a flower originally, but again, kind of hard to pick up if you don't know it immediately. Mascot logos, your KFCs, mr. Peanut, your Kool Aid man all these things are super duper awesome.
And then you've got combination logos. You might have a mascot in there, you might have a shape in there, and then you've got your logo type built in. Obviously, in a modern logo world, you probably have multiple different logos that go on different collaterals.
Maybe your Instagram, maybe you're a Favicon, your Social, you name it. You have a lot of options these days. But before I jump fully into this, hello, everyone.
In Chat, I see Ted, Steve, Wade, Z, George. Hello. Hello, everyone.
Welcome back again for day two. If you are wanting to ask questions, please put them in Chat. I will get to them when I see them.
And if you are typing and you're on YouTube and you're wondering why I can't see them, it's because we're over on Behance and that's where we're reading Chat today. So make sure you go to Adobe Live, and that's where I'll be reading the chat today. All right, let's get into it.
So I love Illustrator. Illustrator is one of my go to products for pretty much all things creative. I obviously use Photoshop, InDesign and the rest of Suite Express, after Effects, Premiere Pro, all those other things.
But really my go to is Illustrator. So if you're not familiar, what I'm going to do here is I've got artboards already set up. You can press Shift O, and it will pull up your artboard layer.
I have artboards for the mood boards, for the strategy documents and things like that. I can just drag and make another artboard if I want. But when I'm making logos, I like to be pretty messy.
I like to finger paint a lot, do all those kind of crazy things. So what I'm going to do is actually press Command Shift H, and I'm going to open up the artboard. It now is not showing the artboards themselves, but the whole thing is now white.
And this is what I like to do when I start designing logos, because it allows me to just be messy and get things all over the place and have a lot of scraps and things like that. So just by moving the screen over, it looks like a brand new starting point. This is what I'm going to show you.
So logo design, logo design can be as complicated as you want it to be, or it can be as simple as you want it to be. And I think there's a beautiful tension that happens between the two. So what I'm going to show you is some of my favorite tools.
What we're going to do is we're going to go straight into the marquee or the rectangle tool here. And you can just see if you hold down your shift key and pull, you get a beautiful square being made. If I just make another one, I can make it a rectangle.
You have so many different shapes. We're going to start with just simple shapes to give you kind of the idea behind the mark itself. And then tomorrow we're going to talk about type.
All right, so we can treat this as a business logo for myself, but I think it's more important just for you to understand how you can put these things together to make your own logos really quickly from home. So that's the square tool. We have also got the ability to go into the rectangle tool.
Sorry. And you can go into your lips or you can press L and you pull out the Ellipse. If you press Shift, it will go proportionately.
If you press from option and shift, it'll go from the center. That works for all the tools. But I'm going to just make it the same as the square above.
And then I'm going to make another one and make an oval here, trying to match the sides of the marquee above it. Boom. Very simple.
Very easy peasy to look at. All right, so we got a bunch of different shapes we can do a lot of really cool things with. We got the Hexagon tool, but if you want, you can actually go to the polygon tool and you can press the up arrow.
So right now, I'm just really sizing this. If I want to, I can press the up arrow on my keyboard and it's going to add more points. So you can see 123456, just constantly adding more.
The more you add, the more circular it becomes. But you can also strip it down if you want and then just pull it the opposite way. And now I've got like a square.
I've got five sides, square four, three for a triangle, and that's the lowest I can go there. But you can have as much fun with it as you want. So that's super nifty.
You also have the star tool. So the star tool also, same thing on your arrow keys. You go up or down and you add more points.
These are always fun to do with, like a Buy now thing. If I wanted to do, like, Buy Now, I can throw that in there. I know Chat is dying because I haven't seen me design since yesterday.
So I'm going to throw in some comic Papyrus. Chat knows it's my favorite. It's a classic.
Looks so good on everything. Boom. Buy now Cineric, make a little marquee.
Boom. And then I'll just adjust the spacing really quickly. Boom.
So if I wanted to, that's an option. We have lots of things we can do with this. Just boom.
Feels fancy. We have so much we can do with the star tool. So I also like to do it from just like a star tool perspective.
Always fun for you can do a triangle. You can also use the Hex tool. Like I showed you the plug on Tool earlier as well.
The difference between the two is that the star tool, because it's treating it like a star, will give you points. You can see these anchor points right here. The blue highlighted section, right in the middle is their anchor points that are given in the middle of it.
So you can start to play with the shape of the star because it's treating like a star. But on the polygon tool, you don't have those middle anchor points. So it's just funny things to think about when you're designing the stuff.
It's nice to already have the anchor point in the middle of the triangle. So if I wanted to do an arrow like the Delta logo, it's always helpful. So things to think about.
Earhole says wait. Comic fires? How did I not know this? Is this I'm in love? Yes. You need to watch more Adobe Live Streams, apparently, because I go through Comic Papyrus all the time.
It's my favorite. It's the beautiful marriage between comic sands and papyrus. We'll talk about type more tomorrow.
I won't derail the stream too much. All right, so we've got shapes now. What do we do with these shapes? Right? So we have options when we're designing logos.
You can do a filled logo like this, or you can do a stroke logo like this. So I just switch it. You can press Shift X to change from stroke to outline.
Sorry, filled to outline. And then I adjust the stroke up here on the top left of my screen. Those are super helpful, right? So that gives you options as well.
You can do very minimal things. You can do abstract things. What you could do is play with this, maybe like make an asterisk.
So what I'm doing is Command C, command F. So I'm pasting in place, and then I'm just rotating it by shift drag option to do it by 45 degree angles, increments, I think. And that's how I get across with across, I can do another one and duplicate it.
And I can have an asterisk there. Super easy peasy. We can start doing is once you've got these kind of, like shapes here, if you want.
What I can show you is you go to your Pathfinder tool and if it's not on by default, what you'll want to do is you'll go to your window. I think it's view. Let me see pathfinder.
So go to Window and turn on your Pathfinder button. And then you'll have it there. What you'll do is you'll highlight all the shapes and then you'll press the Unite button and then you have one solid shape.
So now, instead of having all these little one off pieces, you have a full shape, right? Here. Another thing you can do with it is you can have a lot of fun is say, maybe I like this, maybe I want to create some more like, interest. What I can do is very quickly just paste it over and then I can start to mess with some of this stuff.
Let's see, will this work for me if I simplified it? Maybe I like the arrow there. Maybe I want that. Something like that.
You can always kind of like drive points of interest. So when you're making a logo, besides just building the foundational shapes, which I think is super duper important, I think shapes and logos kind of go hand in hand. They become the building blocks for a lot of great logos and great pieces.
And it just becomes how much complexity do you want to add? So not only can you be very additive like this, where it's just adding additional elements, but you can also be very subtractive. So by adding and subtracting, you can start creating some users who shape. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to actually just take this and then I'm going to knock it out.
And now I've got an empty space there. Just by adding that one kind of spot, it starts to create like a bit of a negative field of play. So use those tools.
Now I'm going to go back to the rectangle tool because I think there's a lot of really fun pieces for you to be able to play with here. So what you can do is one of my favorite tools is the corner selection tool. So if you go up in the top corner of any of these angles, it has the corner tool.
And you can customize this tool. You can pull it in, you can change each of them. You can change the full one by going to the corner section.
So if I just click this shape and I go to the corners section, click all these corners and go to corners, I can round them up here if I want to. It's a good way to keep things consistently. Or you can use a rounded rectangle tool if you want as well.
Be warned, if you're pulling two anchor points together, it cannot go past the unifying point. So once you have a rounded circle there, you're kind of explain, lost my train of thought on that one. But essentially you have options.
So let me see if I can pull this guy down here. Cool. So now you've got like a question mark or maybe a chat bubble or something like that.
So it's super easy. Start playing with that shape. What you can do now is, okay, I've got an interesting shape here.
What I'm going to do is just duplicate it by dragging the shift option over. And then I'm going to do this. I'm going to right click on it and click transform, reflect, vertical and it's going to transform in space.
And essentially what I can do is to do is pull this down and pull it up and boom. So now I've got kind of an easy kind of just within a couple of minutes, using basic shape language, you've got kind of an interesting, compelling mark. So many things you can do with this.
Go here. Oh, Shauna is in Chat. What's up, Shauna? How you doing? All right.
So we're going to pull over, boom. Make even more wild. We can also start to play with individual pieces.
So I'm going to take the ellipse. Circles are one of my favorite shapes. So what you can do is you can take the ellipse.
You can click on anchor points and delete them. I'm just deleting this to make a half circle semicircle I'm going to extend. Right now, this line is not filled.
It looks filled, but you only have this path kind of not completed. So what I'm going to do is actually take the anchor points and pull them together like that. And then I'm going to make it filled again.
What this gives me an opportunity to do is also I can just start to mess with the pieces if I want. I can look here and know that I've got like my center point. So what I can do is also delete this if I want.
So I got this half circle, delete that, and then I'm going to do the exact same thing again. I pull the anchor points over. Let me do that in an outline mode so you can see exactly what I'm doing.
Shift X. And then I'm going to just delete this anchor point because I have this anchor point here already. I'm just going to pull that back and then delete this point.
And then I'm going to stall this anchor in. Boom. Now I've got this piece here.
So with that, I can start playing again if I wanted to stack it. A lot of people, if you look online, you can start pulling inspiration from Behance. We'll talk about that in a bit.
But you can really start creating some really fun, interesting shape language. So if I like this, maybe I need to just keep running with the stairwave approach. That could be a thing.
Or if I want to see, okay, this is fine as like a shape, but it's not necessarily the strongest. Then what I'm going to do is essentially just go in, add a stroke, and see if adding any negative space to this actually starts to help translate things. Oftentimes, especially with this, I don't want to lose the inside shape.
So I'm going to change the stroke from being aligned to center to being outlined. Sorry, that's interior click and go to the outside. That way I can keep the same shape of the top and the bottom piece.
So it gives you an option to start playing with as well. Your all says what are you using to add the lines to connect the two points? I was using the pin tool. So the Pin Tool you can press P to do and then you can start to control.
So Pin Tool is also a really great way if you don't want to use your own if you don't want to use shapes as a starting language you can start with the Pin Tool. You can freeform it every time you put down anchor point. You can control the anchors so you can make some Blobs.
It's a great way to start tracing your like maybe you have a logo that you've already made or drawn out at home or in your sketchbook or whatever. You can start playing with these pieces and start tracing it. If you've done an illustration you can also use it for this purpose as well.
Super easy as well to use. Love the pin tool in illustrator. Think it's great.
You can also use the Blob Brush Tool or just the Brush Tool. But I don't think for the purposes of today using it for a logo is going to be helpful for anybody. So we're going to just focus on Pin tools and shape language and things like that and then add an abstracting to give you a logo or mark that you want.
I love leveraging kind of unique geometry to make things happen. So I'll see what we can do here. There's options we can pull in like just highlight one side of the circle or one side of the rounded rectangle corner.
We got this. Maybe there's a piece here that we want to play off of more so maybe we want to just start to align this, the bottom left of the corner. If you're looking at this you're like, why are my edges not lining up, what's happening? Well, you can click both of these pieces, and then you can click the Option tool once you have both of them highlighted.
And then you click the layer that you want to align to, and then you can go to your align tool and then you can click horizontal align and bottom align and it's going to tighten up those edges for you perfectly. So now you can start messing with things. Let's see here.
So we can shorten this if we like this but if we think it's too long, what I'm going to do is just highlight these anchor points with the A tool and then I'm going to pull it over so you can do that again. If I don't like that, I can pull this in as well or I can duplicate it. You can start to play with finger spaces.
You can do inverses of it. Start making things like this. You can start to play with like consistent spacing as well.
Is a great way of kind of reinforcing your language across the logo. If you're making logo type that's also helpful for letter spacing maybe that's not there. All right, let's see here.
What am I going to make real quick? We've got circles. Grab a circle. We'll do a stroke logo this time.
So if you wanted to, you could take one of these rectangle shules. Grab a rectangle. I'll flip it.
I'm going to adjust just one side of it and see how it feels. If it's stroked, does the shape get more interesting? I'll pull this up. What you can also start to do is start to play with like connecting.
If I wanted to freehand some of this, I can. Does that work? Maybe not. Slide this out a little bit further so you can start messing with that.
If you want to add in additional elements, you can do that with the Pen tool. At the end of the day, though, whenever you're making your logos, you want to make sure that at the final end of the process of making a logo, whether it's stroked or filled, you want to make sure that you outline this. So what you're going to do is you can go up to the there we go, expand, expand tool in your edit options.
Then you click fill stroke as well. And what it's going to do is make these full. And then you would essentially just do what we did earlier and click the Unite button.
This way you're not changing things. The issue that I'm trying to explain to you is what happens when you do this and you zoom out and you make a gigantic logo and you just pull it all the way up and you're putting on the billboard. And then you realize all you did was you didn't outline the stroke.
And so then you've got really thin logo. You don't want that. You want to make sure everything is always uniform, never matter where it goes.
So by outlining it, what you've done is you've made it consistent and scalable for whatever size it goes in. So just things to watch out as you're exporting these logos. Always have fun with it.
Boom. Mess with this, we can do. We can also just use the Line tool if we want.
That's also a great way of doing it. If you're not interested in doing it from the Pen tool, you have lots of options. The other thing I want to show as well is if I took this and made another point, so let's say this point was going like this or something.
What I'm going to show you real quick, something that you always want to double check while you're building these logos, is command y. You want to make sure that all your points are touching. Sometimes they won't be, sometimes they'll be close.
Or if your pixel grid or your grid or whatever you're using is just slightly off, a great way to get these points to touch will be to grab the Join tool. And the Join tool is over here under the shaper tool and you just highlight over those two points. It'll tidy up that end for you and now you got them touching.
So you want to make sure that you're not leaving any potential weird points happening while you are working within your logo. So really quickly, I know we've kind of shown a bunch of different ways you can make a logo. I think that this is probably the coolest shape we've made so far.
If I was to take this, I would probably continue to riff on it a little bit more, make a little bit more interesting, probably play with the arrow a little bit or play with several arrows. You can probably separate these all out and make their own individual pieces. But a great space for you to kind of start looking for logos and seeing inspiration is what we did yesterday is pulled mood board.
We saw some of these really cool shapes that you can start making. A lot of these really great monograms over here, really thick, really communicative and bold. But if you're not familiar, you can quickly just go into like Behance.net
or Behance net and then scroll over here logos. And you can start checking out some of the top logo projects. You can see which ones have been featured in the graphic design section.
You can see a lot of people are making these really great logo folios. It's another great tool to search for. Like this person here did a logo folio by typeful.
You can see just by using some of these shapes that we've talked about today, you can start to put them together, make more intricate logos, patterns, textures, all these beautiful things. These are great. Now with all the tools that you learn today, you can literally do this yourself, which is cool.
So this one's awesome. I love that. So there's really cool pieces go in there, you can appreciate them, you can save them, you can add them to fonts logos, you can make your own mood board.
So if you say you had a project or a client thing that you needed to get done, you can go in there and be like, okay, cool, I'm working with a sports company and I pull all these sports logos. So what I'm going to do is I love those logos, I love the logo folder here. I'm going to click the logos section, not iconography logos, and click save it'll, add it to the mood board, and then whenever you go back to your behance page later on, not only because I've liked it, you can see what you've appreciated.
But also you can go to your mood board section and you can go through and look at the mood board. You can find all the projects you've been looking at. Let's go look at the logos folder.
Logos that I've liked over, I don't know, the ten years I've got behance some really cool pieces in here. Love the type. Some of these really fun shapes are cool as well, so you can really start putting them all together and really start to build your own brand and identity and start to understand what you're looking for out of your projects.
These are all great. Oh, these are on my advertising why did I get on my advertising board anyways? We won't go into the advertising board. I don't know why that pulled up.
Maybe I misclicked. Probably misclicked. Let's see here.
Yay, logos. All right, perfect. We're back in the logo section.
Some of the logos that I've liked over the years, some really great shapes, shape, language, think that's a pretty good understanding of the bare bones that you need to know for creating your own logo. I'm super excited about it. I hope you all are as well.
I can't wait to see what you all start making with these shapes and tools. Hopefully that gets you pretty close to the way. Tomorrow.
We're going to be focusing on type, and also I'll be pairing some of the logos that we made today with type and explaining why and how you'd be choosing different types for your brand. But stick around, we have a five day series, so we're only on day two tomorrow's day three. Stick around for the rest of the week and we'll see you soon.
All right, bye.
