 Hi everyone, I'm Rob from Project Sandbox, a University of Lethbridge Library Initiative. In this video, we're going to look at how to create a logo with Adobe Illustrator. So before we start actually getting into how to make a logo, it's important to know what a logo is. From a simple Google search, we can see that logos use fairly simple color palettes, or opt out for just using black and white a lot of the time. Logos sometimes have text in them, sometimes they are just text, and sometimes they're more abstract or representational shapes. The important thing to know about logos is your logo doesn't inherently say anything about what your content is. A logo is more thought of as like an empty vessel that you can put meaning into. The important thing to know when you are creating a logo is no matter what you create, sometimes simple is best. Simple allows people to immediately recognize whatever your logo represents. When it starts becoming more intricate or representing reality a little clearer, it starts to take away some of that immediate understanding of what it is. So whenever you're creating a logo, just remember that simple is sometimes definitely the better way to go in terms of color palettes or even in terms of how complicated your thing is. Alright, so that's all I have for you in terms of talking about a little theory about what a logo is. Now what we're going to do is we're actually going to start creating the logo. So to create a logo, you want to start with Adobe Illustrator. We're using Adobe Illustrator because it creates something called vector graphics. Vector graphics can be scaled to as large as you want it to be or shrunk down to as small as you want it to be and it never loses quality. Unlike a raster graphic, which is created from a whole bunch of little pixels, which means if you scale it up, it'll look like a giant Lego picture versus your nice smooth logo, whatever it might be. So that's why we're using Adobe Illustrator to create this. So I'm just going to hit create new and a dialog box will pop up. In this dialog box, this is like a template menu. So you can choose mobile based templates, web, print, film, whatever you want really. Since we're creating a logo and we don't actually know what it's going to be used for, we're not going to worry about clicking on any of these things. And since logos can be scaled up as large or shrunk down to as small as we want them to be, worrying about the size isn't that important. Generally the only thing I do try to do when I create a logo is just make sure that the box is square. Going from a square basis is fairly helpful when you create a logo because most logos take up that type of area. If you want to do a rectangle or whatever, though, feel free to definitely like double the width or whatever. I just generally like to start from a square, especially if I'm not sure what I'm creating. And then the only thing I'll mention to you is under color mode, I would change it to CMYK, because CMYK is generally a little more finicky to get things to look proper than RGB. But if you're only going to use this for screens, there's no reason you can't just stick with RGB. And since it doesn't really matter for this purpose, I'm going to actually stick with RGB. All right. So we got our width and height sets. Don't worry about bleed. We got our color mode. Raster effects is not important. OK, so we can hit create. All right. So this is the layout for Adobe Illustrator. If you want to zoom out or zoom in, you can hit CTRL minus or CTRL plus. I'll be constantly doing that throughout this whole thing. So I just wanted to get that out of the way first. So just looking at Adobe Illustrator, if you're familiar with Photoshop at all, you can see that there are very similar programs. So on the left-hand side, you have all of the tools that you can use. On your right-hand side, you have things like your layer menu, properties of shapes and whatever you're creating, however many art boards you're creating. This is an art board just to give you a little bit of an example of what an art board is. And if you end up wanting to change the size of this, if you click in art boards and click on this guy, this is where you can change like the width and height and stuff like that. Just in case you weren't happy with what you did to begin with. And then up top here, you'll have a menu that will change depending upon the item that you have clicked. So I changed it to gradient. You can see this has changed. Lots of these actually, you can see that this is for text. Brushes looks this way. So just keep in mind that this menu may change depending on what you select. One of the differences between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop is how the colors work down here. So this is generally considered your fill color, whereas this is the color of your stroke versus Photoshop, where these are both kind of just interchangeable, depending on what you're creating. That's roughly the layout of how this thing works. So why don't we start creating our logo? So I'm not going to do anything too intricate today, but we'll just start creating a basic shape and see where that goes. So I want to go into the shape menu. And if you want to bring up the sub menus, all you have to do is click and hold on an option. So we're going to just put a circle on the sheet. If you notice when I just click and drag it, it distorts quite a bit. If you hold down shift, though, it will make a perfect circle for you. I want it to be roughly that big. Then as you can see, actually, you probably can't see. Let's make this a little bigger. So you can see that the stroke around the circle is black, whereas the interior is white. If you wanted to change that, this is the menu that you would go into. So I actually want my interior to be nothing. And I want my stroke to be a lot larger. So just by holding that up arrow, we're going to make it a really thick circle. And I might need to scale down a little bit. OK, then I want to make sure it's center in my art board. So you can just click on these buttons up here for horizontal alignment and vertical alignment. Oh, that's almost perfect. But I want to make sure nothing gets cut off. OK, so I just grabbed one of these corners after clicking on this. Make sure that this isn't the tool that you've selected. You want to select this tool. This tool helps you scale things really easily. And they are both arrows, so this may be confusing. I'll show you what this other tool does. So if you clicked on the Direct Selection tool versus the Selection tool, the Direct Selection tool messes with anchor points. So say I wanted to distort this circle a little bit. And why don't I? We'll see what we can do with it. So as opposed to affecting the whole circle and roughly keeping the shape of it, we can really futz around with how the circle works. So I could lower that part of the circle, grab these two. And if you hold Shift when you click on things, that will allow you to select them at the same time. Let's move this out. I have no clue what I'm doing with this, just to let you know if you're thinking, wow, Rob, you're making a really weird shape. I know I am. I don't really know what this shape is going to be. Let's move this up. These are called handles. They're attached to anchor points. This is how you can change curves, make them really distorted, make them a little smoother. I have an idea. I know what I'm going to make. OK, I just needed to fiddle a little bit now. OK, so I'm going to make that a little smoother. For all of you guitar players, you might know what I'm trying to make. OK, so I have my rough shape figured out. So I'm trying to make a guitar pick. So I'm going to click on this because you can see it's a little bit now. Grab a handle, holding Shift to keep the proper size, to shrink it down a little. If you want to select this, you can click here. If that's kind of not working for you like it wasn't for me, you can also click right here. So this square pops up, and then this shape will be selected. Then we're just going to center it again. And since I'm creating a guitar pick, it's not perfect. I'm not going to make it perfect, though. I actually want it to be a solid. All right, so that's my rough pick. If you want to do other things, I totally encourage you to do that. If, say, you wanted to make a shape though it was a little more complex, so you want to add more anchor points, you can just click the Pen tool. And if you click and hold on it, you can go to the Add Anchor Point menu. This is where you could add additional anchor points throughout your image. And then with, once again, the Direct Selection Tool, not the Selection Tool selected, you have the ability to pretty much make whatever shape you want it to. The more anchor points on here, the more control, and the more complex your shape will start becoming. If you find out that things start just looking too weird, though, you might have too many anchor points, and it's a good idea to remove them. And you can do that with just the Delete Anchor Point tool. And then it'll go back to whatever you had. But using anchor points and the Direct Selection Tool really helps you create whatever you have in your mind, really. You can make literally any shape from just adding things, moving them around, and seeing how it works. Just remember how to really just start experimenting with how handles work, and with how all of the anchor points work. Okay, anyway, I digress. So here's my pick. What I wanna do is I actually do want to make the middle so you can see through it again. But what I wanna do is I wanna add another shape and place that on top of here. And this time, I don't want the outside, I just want the inside. Because if you noticed when I put the outside, it totally just gummed everything up. I apologize too, this isn't gonna be the prettiest looking logo. Once again, I don't wanna spend a ton of time doing this because this is something you can spend days doing if you really wanted to. Okay, so we can see under layer one that both of these are on here. What I want to do though is, and this is generally helpful to do, is you wanna create text layers that are a little bit separate. Cause sometimes you wanna move things around, stuff like that. It just keeps things more organized. So I'm gonna click on the type tool and I have layer two selected. Now what we can do is drag out a text box and you can write some text. I'm aware you can't see this. So I'm gonna center this and turn up the size and guitar doesn't need a capital U. And one more thing I wanna do is I wanna make that white because I want people to see it. And actually I'm going to also make this bold so it sticks out a little bit more. Okay, so if you noticed when I clicked on this and click centered, that rectangle moves. I want that rectangle to stay exactly where it is. So what we can do is by clicking on both of those. So with the pathfinder menu, it has these shape modes that you can click on. This one will unite shapes. This one's will minus the front. This will do the intersection and this one will exclude them. What I want to do is I want to merge the rectangle shape with the guitar pick shape. So we might need a futz around with this to get it to work a little bit, but hopefully I can just click unite. Yeah, see, it doesn't always work perfectly. We need to figure out a way for this outline color to become the whole shape. So right now we can see this line right here. This shows that it's just the outline that's being colored as we can see that the inside doesn't have anything. But when we go to object and expand choosing the fill and the stroke, we can now see the blue line is around the outside because we just told it that we wanted to expand that outline color to be just the entire shape now, not just the outline, which is why the fill color now has that. We could add another outline though and start making that yellow or whatever color is selected. I don't want to do that though. There's totally zero benefit for it for me at this point. But now when we select both of those and do that shape mode, we can see that it blends appropriately. I am also going to do something else. I'm going to create a red rectangle. And the point of this is to show you what the shape currently looks like because it's a little hard to tell. I'm gonna add a new layer here. This is an important thing also to let you know is how layers work. So if you notice this red square is showing above that pick I just created, that's because it is above it in the layer menu. But when I move it down below the pick, it is now also showing below it on the canvas. If you can imagine, this is what my logo would look like. I don't want this text to show above the actual shape. I don't like the way that looks. How you can manipulate that a little bit is pretty much the exact same way that we just added this shape to just like expands to the whole thing. So what we do is we click on the text and hit expand and do object and fill and hit okay. So now we have the lines around the text. And if we wanted to, if we click the direct select tool and zoom in a little bit, you can see that you actually have the ability to, click on just one, we can move things around a little bit now. So this could also be a fun way to create different things. One thing I will warn you about though is once you do that, you no longer have the ability to edit the text at all. So what's generally a good idea is if you click on that text layer and drag it to a new layer, it will duplicate that and you can just hide the one. This is like your safety text just in case you want to change it and clicking that eyeball will hide it. But now when we change this into an object and we just figured out that we did like a spelling mistake or something like that, we now can change it again. But what I want to do is I want to remove this text from this giant shape. So if we click the text, then I click the shape and then I want to minus the front. I want you to click minus front, you'll notice that the text was removed. And just to show you that it was removed, let's move this giant red square around. So now we can see the whole shape is actually transparent. So this is roughly what you need to do to actually create a logo with Adobe Illustrator. How we can move this around completely and everything just kind of works the way it should. Please feel free to experiment with the shapes and stuff that you create. Like you could have just done just the text layer and expanded that and played around with that a little bit to create the logo or whatever. The point is to play around with the shape tool, the pen tool, text tool, anything like that. And you can create wonderful cool logos. Just remember that simple is generally better. So one of the final things I'll show you what to do with this shape is how to save it. Because this is pretty important. So if you go to File, Save As, I have my desktop selected, call it pick logo. So you always want to save it as an Adobe Illustrator file because this is what'll allow you to edit it again in the future if you want to. At the bare minimum, make sure you save it as this. Outside of that, there's a couple other ways that you can save vector graphics. You can't save it as a JPEG. If you save it as a JPEG, it'll turn it into a raster graphic and when you make it bigger or smaller, it's going to pixelate, which won't look good. But what you can do is you can save it as an Adobe PDF that will actually retain vector graphics. You can save it as an Illustrator EPS file or you can save it as an SVG file. SVG are particularly good if you want to use your logo on the internet or sometimes if you're using things like laser cutters and stuff like that, SVG files work pretty well. Illustrator EPS files, those are good if you're just doing things like print files and stuff like that. But feel free to use any of these. I'm just going to save it as an Adobe PDF just to show you what this looks like. I don't want to preserve Illustrator editing capabilities because we will have an Illustrator file we can edit it with and then hit save. It'll warn me that I didn't choose that. That's totally okay because we can always edit it with our Illustrator file. But once that's done, I'll just open up that PDF so you can see it. So now when we go in, you'll notice that this shape never pixelates. You can do that as much as you want and nothing will happen to it. I'll show you actually one more thing. Say if you wanted it as a JPEG, you just go to export for screens and then in here you could choose your JPEG. We'll just keep it one size and export. Then this is what your logo would look like as a JPEG. But now when you scroll in, you can see that your line begins to pixelate a little bit. So that's what the difference between raster graphics and vector graphics is. Thank you very much for watching this video and keep in mind that although we went over different aspects of Adobe Illustrator, it is far from everything you can do with the program. So feel free to be creative and try stuff out. Thank you very much for watching and if you would like to keep up to date with library videos, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you would like to continue your project sandbox journey, feel free to click on one of the videos on the screen right now. Once again, thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you again soon.