Negative Space Logo Design Tutorial in Illustrator CC

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello Gary Simon of designc course.com today we're going to look at negative space logo design and how you can kind of practice to create your own so negative space of course is the area around a shape or design that has no fill to it but you can create interesting ideas in images and illustrations out of this and it's particularly effective when conveying ideas and especially through logo design so I came up with a way to quickly basically gain practice and experience by designing uh a negative space logo so I'm going to use a site called random letter generator.com and I'm going to pick two different random letters and then immediately after the letters picked I'm going to come up with the first noun that I think of that begins with that letter and then I'll take that letter into Adobe Illustrator and try to use that letter to convey through negative space the noun that I chose randomly all right so I encourage you to follow along and maybe do your own um there's no project files for this so you don't have to worry about that I'll be using Adobe Illustrator to do this and as always check out designc course.com if you haven't yet subscribe here on YouTube let's get started all right so Random letter generator.com here I am and to create our first letter I can just uh click this and then I'll come up with the first noun that comes to mind using that letter a uh Apple oh God this is going to be stupid all right so let's go to file new 860 by 600 control one to get us to 100% I'm going to do a capital and lowercase a shift all right so I kind of have immediate idea that could possibly work I think so the goal here again is to use the negative space to come up with both in apple while still maintaining the shape of an A so I think right away I'm going to get rid of this Capital right here that's my wife out there being loud and so I'm just going to duplicate that control C and control F and you can experiment with different fonts to give you different shapes and possibly different ideas all right so let's see here these are some ridiculous fonts why don't have these all right if I use this and just block this out real quick all right and zoom up and try to quickly create an apple here that they usually have this little butt looking thing here hold on let me see keep on going we can fix this up this is obviously a rough draft all right create a stem maybe well I mean I think that's the best I can come up with I'm right on the spot I mean we could take the the negative space from the circle here and just make it into an Apple so that's one way that you could possibly [Music] approach let's try this again though let's try this process another time all right so I'm G to move this down just a tad bit all right so not too bad for you know just being on a spot I'm going to try this again G Garden I'm making this hard on myself let's see here so all right G and G all right so I'm going to keep this font here here contrl C and contrl F and maybe just use try to come up with something else that might work that's already kind of a cool idea I think I'll just leave this here for now and keep going up so you know when you think of a garden you think of plants obious obviously what are doing with this food concept here oh well um garden garden using the negative space's see here I'm just going through these hoping to spark an idea I think I'm just going to end right there let's see let's take this so the idea of a garden let's let's see here to help you come up with ideas you can go to images. gooogle and just type in Garden okay so nothing really helped me there um let's see see it's worth trying to look outside of the letters and what type of shapes are created from that so we have like this little look like a mountain type thing here and so the challenge is of course coming up with something that is relevant using the letter form you know what I came up with another idea with this actually let me think here maybe if I pen tool yeah let's see come up over here come on think think put myself on a spot look ridiculous here no I think that's good right there connect that and of course this is just a rough draft so not not everything's going to be exactly perfect now what I want to do is take a white come on over here now is this necessarily using the negative space I'm not sure yet I mean the the leaf right here in and of itself may not be I'm going to keep on doing this working with this though actually what I can do is take this copy that that move this down get rid of these points real quick okay that way we can see the full Leaf a little bit better and let's see what else can I do you know what can be construed here in the middle h okay so right here I don't know why it reminds me uh possibly of like a a seed this Leaf possibly coming out of it so I'm going to go here and type [Music] in um plant growing or something yeah this is kind of what I was looking at or thinking of around well that's tiny that's a basic idea though let me see if I can possibly illustrate that into this Leaf idea um okay so this is going to have to change a little bit so what I'm going to do is come through here all right and then come through there come back like this I think and come back up here of course this is just a rough draft so you definitely want to play around with making this these lines smooth and then take this over here now I need to look at the ref image a little bit more just to kind of see what these things look like when they're coming out the plant LEF kind of just comes out of the side of this yeah so I think I could still illustrate that idea just kind of going into this blindly uh all right so I'm going to take first let me take this add a Anchor Point right here all right and oops okay and then take the black here and let's kind of just continue on this line or this stem maybe right around there and for now yeah let's go out like that up and around like that does that look like a seed I don't know let me see here let's make this bigger yeah kind of garden all right so one thing I'll do is take this type out Garden here okay I had to pause my family was being loud as always control shift and O uh yeah you know we could enter it just right here um I see some possible improvements that can be made but I think we get the idea I can't help myself though I kind of want to slightly adjust this possibly yeah because usually when it comes to these um seeds take this and delete that actually usually it could it probably look better if I wrap wrapped it around like this but you know what I'm going to leave it like that we get the point I mean so basically a negative space logo it's basically using the space around in in around the form of it could be a letter or not in our case we're using letters um to to create something that is relevant to the actual company or business or idea uh so yeah that is it uh so basically check out designc course.com if you haven't yet and subscribe here on YouTube I'll see you tomorrow [Music]