Logo Design in Adobe Illustrator - for Beginners & Beyond

My introduction as a graphic designer with over 20 years experience in the industry. I'll tell you a little about my past work, what I've achieved and my style of teaching.

Grab the logo design industries standard tool: Adobe Illustrator to begin the journey of creating professional, digital logo designs!

The fundamental difference and primary advantage of vector vs raster (pixel) based graphics which under rules the value of the service you'll go on to offer.

A brief word before we delve into logo types.

We dive right into wordmark logos in this exclusive, inspirational slideshow of my work to discover how simple text logo can be designed in a way that looks highly professional and pleasing to the eye.

The most popular logo form is an icon paired with text. I'm going to reveal to you some of my past, finest textual iconic logos with a rundown of each for you to gain familiarity and a surge of inspiration.

An icon or picture formed with or nestled between text is what makes a combined logo and we're going to have an in-depth look at a series of them which I've designed in the past for you to soak up to develop ones of your own.

We jump in head first to discover exactly what makes an enclosure logo and the style of design we can employ to deliver one of awesome quality.

The world of logo icons is explored taking a look at its form and an array of examples with insighful meanings to inspire you to get your brain ticking over to develop your own.

An insight into what makes a great logo design.

An introduction as we delve into the world of colour.

Explore the wonderful colour wheel tool for simple colour selection!

Delve into the emotional world of green, purple and orange!

Pink, grey and black dissected for your understanding!

Discover the feelings which red, blue and yellow stir within us!

White and brown explored to uncover their impact!

Discover how much you've learned about the philosophy and use of colour!

A quick intro to explain the questionnaire.

Download a PDF (form) version of the comprehensive logo design questionnaire to send to your clients to complete, save and return!  Can be filled in using Adobe Reader only - downloadable for free.

The logo design questionnaire in all it's blank glory ready for the client to complete and return. You can rebard this document to suit your own needs inserting your own company logo.

Here we have a real life client questionnaire which we'll be using as the basis of our case study, to present a logo design project from start to finish!The questionnaire covers basics such as company name and tagline to prefered font styles and logo layouts. The questionnaire digs deep and covers all bases so you can develop and turnaround your logo design projects as quickly and efficiently as possible!

Analysing the completed logo design questionnaire by discussing each question in greater detail and the answers the case study client provides so that we can take the data to transform it into an artful masterpiece.

A quick summary of what we're going to look at in the forthcoming section.

The very start of harvesting material which we'll use to assist us in our logo design project to develop the mood board and pin board which we'll then use to develop a mind map. Using industry relevant keywords, we'll trawl a well know search engine to dive in and extract images which boast awesome inspiration.

We're constantly exposed to inspiration from many sources in every second of life. We take a look at the other valuable means of getting our hands on valuable reference material outside of the Internet t contribute towards our mood board and pin board.

Using the inspirational material we've gathered, it's time to put together the artistic collage of images known as the "mood board" which will serve to jolt our creative minds into concocting concepts that we can apply to our logo design project whilst we gain insight of the styles which are already in the marketplace.

The Internet is flooded with inspirational logo design galleries. Make use of them to discover alternative design solutions by conventional and off-the-wall designers. Here I provide a list of quality logo design showcase websites for you to dip into.

With all of our reference material gathered and arranged, we can now make use of our mood board and pin board to brainstorm in the mind mapping process which gives us precise ideas as we extend outwards from concept to concept. We explore both words and doodles to nail down quality logo design ideas.

Have you been soaking up the teachings of reference material and mind mapping?  It's critical knowledge, so lets find out!

A brief intro to explain the sketching process.

Logo design ideas should start out by using primitive pencil and paper since they allow us to work at significant speed in contrast to a computer. Take a look at the type of materials I use in the sketching stage of a logo design project.

An insight into other concepts considered for the First Point Surfing logo design project.

Here we look at the final sketches drawn out onto a single peice of paper and how they have been brought into their form with help of the mood board and mind map.

Our creative sketches are whisked away into the computer screen for more precise, digital treatment in Adobe Illustrator. Here we look into how we can take the sketch and use various means of achieving this with comments upon the best means for more effective results.

Here we'll see how much you've learned about digitising sketches!

A quick word before we get started with the software.

A quick note to Mac users in relation to upcoming keyboard commands.

Arrange your Adobe Illustrator panels in the same way as me to navigate through the remainder of the course with ease. With the panels arranged, you'll see exactly what I see on screen.

Discover the properties panel for greater control.

Many logos and logo elements consist of geometrical shapes and many start with a primitive shape as the base. Here I'll show you how to develop simple geometrical shapes and how to manipulate them into a desired state. We'll also be looking at selection of shapes and fill functions to bring life to the elements.

The pencil and brush are the primary, free form drawing / painting tools which allow for illustration resembling its real life counterpart. We look at how to draw with the pencil and how to wield the brush, as well as operating the eraser to clean up mistakes and the rotate tool to give our shapes a spin.

Develop the shapes used in the forthcoming video demonstrating use of custom brushes in Illustrator.

A paintbrush that looks the same with every stroke makes Jack a dull boy. Discover how we can design a shape to magically transform it into a continuous or repetitious paint stroke and "stamp" tool. The possibilities of the custom brush are endless so it's of vital importance you have it in your creative arsenal!

Sometimes when we develop a logo, we have creative freedom to use a variety of colours which we can blend. The gradient tool serves that very function and we'll be using it to do just that. We'll also be looking at text which is a vital part of logo design as a whole, as well as the eyedropper to sample colours and fonts.

The Pathfinder panel is the place we go to to manipulate groups of shapes. We'll be looking at how we can use the Pathfinder panel to deduct shapes from one another, how to merge and divide to name a few. You'll also learn how we can easily allign shapes and space them equally.

Much like painting, we are graced with a series of layers to work with in Illustrator. In order to keep your graphical elements aranged in a coherent form, for both yourself, your client and the people they may work with, it's vital that we make use of layers, especially for high detailed projects. Learn all within.

The pen tool is the holy grail of tools and it's one you'll be working with time and time again whilst designing a logo. First we start by introducng its basic function of creating lines which can be used to create a wealth of various shapes.

The pen tools "piece de resistance" is its ability to draw bezier curves which we can use to develop literally any shape in vector format. Here we tackle a snake to replicate its curves as an exercise of using the pen tool and bezier curves which will eventually form the very foundation of your logo design repertoire.

Master the pen tool in the Bezier Game!

Don't be too quick to consider a logo design as finished. Before we save our logo and send it to the client, there are a few handy tricks we can apply which very often can take a logo design to the next level. We take a look at all the warp options and discuss the results and effect of each.

Discover the new Pencil Tool capabilities in Illustrator CC!

See how we can use the new pencil tool to create beautiful curves as we develop a leaf symbol.

Learn how we use the new Pencil Tool to develop both lines and curves in the making of the Jigsaw Piece Symbol.

Exploring the New Pencil Tool options in Adobe Illustrator CC

Exploring the Path Segment Reshaping Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC

Introducing the Smooth Tool in Adobe Illustrator CC

How competent are you in Illustrator?

A small talk on what you can expect in the section.

All fonts are't made the same! There is a vast plethora of fonts available to us which we can use in the logo design process. Here we discuss the primary font types and their derivatives which form the basis of our search terms and the categories we explore on font websites to locate suitable type.

There's a boat load of free fonts out there on a wide range of websites. We focus on two of the best font websites and how we can use them to locate various types of fonts suitable for our projects.

Get the fonts on your system and into Illustrator quickly and easily. These are simple instructions to load fonts into the correct location on either PC or Mac ready to use to compliment your logo design graphics.

Owning a large archive of fonts is useless unless you can access them quickly and easily without having to remember fonts names or scrolling down endless lists. Here I reveal how I put together what I've labelled a "font pool" to arrange my favourite and frequently used fonts for easy access.

Text isn't complete when you finish typing out a word. Professional logo design involves a process known as kerning which sees each character separated and evenly spaced by means of manual alteration, judged by eye. See how one of the most overlooked skills in logo design is acomplished.

If we want to output a professional logo design, we also need to pay fine attention to the size of character height. All fonts aren't made perfect and we sometimes need to compensate for optical illusions which occur as a rsult of using or pairing certain characters together. Here we explore vertical adjustment using a well known logo as a case study.

Taglines are quite often easy to place and pair with company names. At other times however, the company name might have character stems pertruding past the baseline which makes it difficult to find position for text beneath. We can combat this problem by various means which I reveal within.

How much have you learn about fonts and type treatment?

Introduction to the development of our symbols.

Gain an insight into the symbol design process as we begin work on the Surf Star design for First Point Surfing following the client brief.

The life of the one wave logo begins here with an insight into the first stage of desgining the symbol.

Watch the Surf Board logo take form as we design the surf board symbol.

The water flame flickers to life as we put pen to artboard to begin designing in Illustrator using our sketch as reference.

We sit back and take a proud look at the black and white symbols we've created so far fo First Point Surfing.

A friendly request!

What have you learned about developing symbols in Illustrator?

A intro to the process of paring text with symbols.