Logos are a key element to anyone’s business whether you like it or not. The voice and visuals of a brand determines how their audience will feel when they are face to face with a product or service and that plays a major factor in the client's decision to purchase something or use a service. Bottom line is, logo design is important.
Now, how can you get started designing of such an important piece of your business? Adobe Illustrator is a great tool for logo design and many other aspects of marketing. If you don’t know where to get started, check out these 5 tools in Illustrator. They are great tools to use when playing around with the design of you logo.
The Image Trace Tool
The trace tool is a little bit magical. I could easily create a separate full article or video on this tool alone but I will try to keep it brief and logo design oriented.
This powerful tool can create a vector graphic from a raster image. ALL LOGOS SHOULD BE VECTOR so this handy tool helps you to create imagery without having to fully hand draw it. Be careful with this tool, however. Because of its nature, you could easily copy something that is under copyright if you just pull images from google and trace them. Use this only as a base and be sure to always edit images to be your own or pull from you own personal stock.
Using the trace tool is simple. First you need to select the image you would like to trace (make sure this image is embedded). Then, at the top of your screen you will see a dropdown menu title “Image Trace”. CLick this and you will see all the image tracing options such as “High Fidelity Photo, 3 Colors, or Shades of Gray”. If you don’t see it, click your windows tab at the top of your screen and toggle “Control” on.
My favorite way to use this tool when creating logos is using the “Silhouette” option. This will create a black vector trace of your image with no white background. After you have traced your image, you are able to edit the tracing results with the “Image Trace” window. It should be somewhere on your right sidebar but if it’s not, all you need to do is click the widow tab at the top of your screen and toggle the “Image Trace” option. You should see it then. Play around a little with this until you are satisfied with your image.
IMPORTANT! After you get the images to a place where you link it, You must EXPAND your Image Trace. If you forget this step your image will not finish rendering and you won’t be able to edit individual points after tracing. See this video below where I visually walk through all these steps.
Path Finder
The “Pathfinder” tool is essential for combining, masking and outlining vector graphics. This tool is also very powerful and can do a lot of different this but I will focus on the shape modes of the “Pathfinder” tab. There are 4 options you can use while designing logos. I broke them down below:
Unite: This tool merges all selected shapes into 1 shape.
Minus Front: When 2 or more shapes are selected, this tool clips all front most shapes out of the shape that is furthest back in the layers.
Intersect: This tool only works when exactly 2 shapes are selected and the shapes are overlapping. It clips the shape at the intersection.
Exclude:This tool clips out of anything that it’s overlapping.
See the video below if you want a visual of these actions.
Pen tool and Curvature Tool
The “Pen Tool” and “Curvature Tool” are more very complex tools in Illustrator so I'll try to summarize it as much as I can. These tools create custom vector lines or vector shapes. Here’s my simple process of using illustrator’s “Pen Tool” and “Curvature Tool”.
I use the “Pen tool” to create straight lines. I only click once and then move on to the next point, never clicking and dragging to make curves with the “Pen tool”. Click the first point you created if you wish to close off your shape. If you want a curved shape that’s where the curvature tool comes in. edit your line with the curvature tool by clicking any point on the line and dragging it to where you’d like. Watch this short demonstration below to get a better feel of this method.
The reason I use this method is because it gives me more control when I am editing my lines. There are a number of ways to use the “Pen Tool” function and this is just the way that works best for me. Feel free to experiment with these tools to find your favorite method.
Outline stroke/text
For a logo, it’s best to have your text and outlined objects converted to vector shapes. This helps when resizing a logo for various reasons. Vector shapes will always resize correctly white text and outlines do not.
Outlining strokes - To outline strokes all you need to do is select the lined object(s) you’d like to outline and go to the dropdown menus at the top of your page. Go to object and then down to path. Path will have an arrow on the right to show you more options. In the menu to the right of path, select outline strokes and that’s it!
Outlining text - outlining text is similar. Select the text you’d like to outline the go to the dropdown menu at the top of your page and select “Type”. The scroll down to” Create Outlines” and your done.
Refer to the video below if you need a visual.
Character tool
The character tool is simple but very effective for logo designing. You have the option to set the font family, style, size, leading, kerning, and tracking to create stylized text. See the definitions below:
Font Family - Defines the type of font you are using. A great website for finding awesome royalty free fonts is Google Font.
Font Style - Defines the thickness or style of the font such as bold, italic or underlined.
Size - Defines how big or small your font is.
Leading - Defines the spacing between the lines of text.
Kerning - Defines the spacing between the individual characters. You can fix spacing between characters by selecting them (I don’t use this one much).
Tracking - Defines how much space is between the characters horizontally.
Using all of these tools you can create unique looking text for your logo. Also, another tip is that if you outline your text you can edit the individual points of your text creating an even more customized look.
If you need help identifying any of these tools while your using Illustrator, mouse over the tool you’d like to know more about and wait a few seconds, a tool tip will appear giving you the title of this tool and sometimes a short description. If that’s not enough, head over to the trusty google and start researching. The Key to learning Illustrator or any Adobe product is basic understanding. Once you have that, you can look up any method of using the program or even create your own. If you want more tips on using these specific functions of Adobe Illustrator or any other functions you may have a question about, please leave a comment below.
FINAL CHALLENGE: Create a logo using your name and post it in the comments.
Post Also Posted to my Medium account. Check it out!
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