How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion
To give the impression of a bulge in the centre of the shape, two curved lines will be added, to create these select the Star tool.
While clicking and dragging press the down arrow key to reduce the number of points until you have a triangle.
This triangle has some unnecessary points so remove them as before with the Pen tool. Then select the upper most point and drag vertically while holding shift to constrain the axis.
To bend this triangle go to Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Warp…
Select the Arc style and enter 50% on the Vertical axis.
Make this new shape editable by going to Object > Expand, and select just the Object box.
Scale, reflect and rotate this shape as necessary to fit within the outer shape as shown. Duplicate and repeat on the opposite side. Then fill these shapes in the same colour as the outer shape.
Select the inner shape and press CTRL-C to copy, then select just the outer and inner lemon shapes and press use the Subtract From Shape Area tool from the Pathfinder window and expand. This has now removed the centre of the outer shape. Press CTRL-F to replace the inner shape.
This will now allow us to merge the curved lines with the outer shape by using the Add to Shape Area from the Pathfinder window, press CTRL-SHIFT-] to bring this shape to the top.
Zoom in and check for any unnecessary points that can be removed.
Next the lemon can be given it’s corporate colours, in this example I have used a dark purple of 70C, 80M, 0Y, 0K and a lighter purple of 45C, 70M, 0Y, 0K.
Rotate the lemon to roughly 45degrees to give it a little dynamism.
Despite adding the curved lines to give the appearance of a bulge the shape still looks rather flat, a reflection may help give more of a three dimensional impression..
Draw a circle whilst holding Shift, then drag a guide along the vertical centre of the shape.
Use this guide along with the pen tool and create a triangle as shown in the screenshot.
Use the Add to Shape Area tool from the Pathfinder to merge these shapes.
Give the shape a bend by using the Envelope Distort tool again (Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Warp), using the same options of Arc, 50%, Vertical.
Object > Expand > Object to make the shape editable.
Rotate, reflect and scale and bring into position on the lemon graphic, give it a light shade of purple such as 35C, 45M, 0Y, 0K.
This leaves our lemon icon/graphic complete, now onto the typographic element…
Type out the words ‘purple’ and ‘lemon’ and set in your desired font. In this case I have used a free font from www.dafont.com called Eurofurence. It’s rounded appearance is similar to the popular VAG Rundschrift typeface used in many ‘Web 2.0’ logos and gives a friendly, modern, trendy image.
At first I used the bold weight for the word ‘purple’, but it looked too overweight so I set them both to regular, and used a stroke to give a slightly stronger appearance to ‘purple’.
Convert the text to outlines (CTRL-SHIFT-O) and align the two words to the baseline, zoom right in and use guides or a temporary square shape to adjust the kerning of the characters by eye. Also adjust the word spacing as desired.
Select the word ‘purple’ and go to Object > Path > Outline Stroke, draw a selection across each letter individually and Add to Shape Area from the Pathfinder window. This removes the duplicate paths from the stroke we added earlier and creates a nice simple letter outline.
Use guides again to balance the lemon graphic with the text, scaling the lemon to fit within the Ascender and Descender lines.
Finally add the corporate colours to the text to link the design together. Then variations can be produced such as a single colour version, flat colour version and full blown glossy reflected super trendy Web 2.0 version!
This logo now sets the theme for the whole corporate identity, where the colours, lemon graphic and typeface will be implemented into the design of the stationery, brochures, advertisements and website.
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April 21st, 2007 at 4:57 am
Great tutorial!
April 25th, 2007 at 5:55 am
thans for this great lesson!
May 7th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
it ’s great !thanks a lot
May 9th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
This is a very good tutorial.. Excellent quality & very informative.. Thanks a lot.
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:40 am
[...] How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion»» [...]
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:02 pm
[...] How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion»» [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:49 am
the tutorials in here are handsOn and effective…much respect
May 25th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Thanks for the lesson! Very well written and easy to follow.
June 5th, 2007 at 2:49 am
Can you please explain how to do this part?
To create a smoother, lemon-style shape, draw a curved line with the Pen tool that follows the form of the graphic, and complete the path to form a shape.
I can’t figure it out.
thx
June 5th, 2007 at 9:02 am
DJTrex,
Hopefully this will clear things up.. take a look at this screen shot:
http://www.spoongraphics.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/4.jpg
Where the smaller circles on each side of the large oval were combined, it left sharp angles. Basically you’re using the pen tool to create the triangle shape to follow the contour of the large oval and smooth out the angles. Do this on all four corners then Add to Shape Area with the Pathfinder then you are left with a curvaceous overall shape.
June 10th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
[...] How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion»» [...]
June 18th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! mbjswfcwyafsvf
June 25th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
[...] To start, open up your vector logo design in Adobe Illustrator, this tutorial makes use of the Purple Lemon logo from a previous tutorial. [...]
July 21st, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Good tutorial for a beginner like me, very straightforward!
July 26th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
[...] How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion [...]
August 6th, 2007 at 5:42 am
[...] How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion [...]
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:03 am
Great tutorial! Here is a link some more useful tutorials to design logo.
http://www.logoblog.org/wordpress/category/logo-tutorial/
August 30th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
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September 18th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
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October 9th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
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[...] How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion [...]
October 24th, 2007 at 9:19 am
[...] SpoonGraphics: Designing a Logo: From Concept Sketches to Completion [...]
October 27th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
This is a really cool tutorial, can’t believe i’v only just found it!!!
November 3rd, 2007 at 7:08 pm
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November 7th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
respect, great tutorials, great site
December 6th, 2007 at 8:41 am
nice guide
thx very much
really helped me
December 11th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
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Wo kann ich filme downloaden?…
January 20th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
You help me a lot
thank you very much
January 29th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
[...] How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion»» [...]
January 30th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
This is the same process I’ve always used
You gotta start out with sketches, it helps tremendously. Otherwise sometimes you get lost if you go straight into illustrator. Excellent TooT!
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February 10th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
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March 11th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Awesome tutorial man.
This will give me some good inspiration in the future!
March 12th, 2008 at 1:48 am
it seems like e very good web site but my Chinese is not good. It would be great if it might be availible in English too. Thanks.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I stumbled across your website while building my own portfolio. You help me A LOT!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your site looks fantastic and tutorials AWESOME. Many thanks x x x
March 28th, 2008 at 1:42 am
Good job.
PS I added this site into memori.ru
April 17th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Hey, like your website and respect your work! Very informative articles and a joy to read.
April 27th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Great site. Question: If I want to design a logotype for my business that I will eventually register as a trademark, are there potential copyright infringement issues with using existing typefaces in my design?
April 28th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
[...] http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-design-a-logotype-from-conception-to-completion [...]
May 6th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Thanx 4 sharing a great tutorial!