Random Letter Logo Design - "D"

Key Takeaways

all right hello everyone Gary Simon of designc course.com today I'm going to be doing another random letter logo design practice technique video and basically I haven't done one of these in a while but I decided you know what I have some time I'll go ahead and do another one of these and the idea is I'm going to click on generate another random letter right here and I'm going to think of the very first noun that begins with that letter that comes to my mind and then the task is to design in Adobe illustrator uh something that symbolizes the shape of the letter but also the idea of the noun in some unique manner so I'm going to go ahead and get started D I can't say dick come on I'm such a nasty mfer um dog all right so dog that's that's the most likely that's probably what almost everybody else said but I'm a pervert so uh let's go ahead and work with that somehow so dog all right file new here I'm going to put it 850 or 860 by I think 500 works well for this 1280 resolution I'm working on for recording these videos all right so going to get d and a lowercase D so I got a capital D and a lowercase D and the goal is to come up with something unique and effective and designed well that symbolizes some aspect of a dog okay so I'm just going to filter through some logo or some fonts here uh and the way you do this you just left click up here in the character panel and then use use your keyboard down arrow key just uh something that might spark some ideas so this is something I'm I'm completely doing this randomly I I didn't think of this beforehand uh so I'm just kind of challenging myself uh to see what I can come up with it's a good practice technique uh for coming up with Concepts quickly all right so you know the first thing I need to consider is you know do I want to work with the lowercase version or the uppercase version all right so when I think of a dog I don't know why I just think of this font right here it's just kind of silly and although I guess it depends on the type of dog we're talking about but uh sometimes you can help just to get up a uh reference images so if I go to images I mean I know what a dog look like looks like but sometimes it just helps to see dogs all right so these are all front-facing this is a good representation so OB obviously the tail will probably be the easiest thing to work with because I don't want I don't want to necessarily get into try to trying to depict specific features of a dog I mean you have the ears okay I don't want to try to get a silhouette because I would just be lame um so thinking of this uh I'm going to work with the lowercase D I believe all right get this thing nice and big all right so I'm going to try something um we'll see how this works out just with the pen tool and I may have to Tinker with it quite a bit in order for it to work so when you drag these bezier handles here you can just uh hold alt and left click all right I'm going Escape going to take this get rid of the fill give it a stroke all right and increase the size substantially could already tell it's not very smooth it's something that would need to be worked with uh let's see here we'll go ahead and change to this variable width profile where where it gets smaller one thing that might help of course I can use the add Anchor Point tool real quick wraps right around here to add an anchor point and then take this the direct selection tool and delete that one all right and we'll go back here hit control h to get rid of the outline there yeah it's going to be like 28.5 or so based on the current size of the font to get these matching up just initially here all right so let's go ahead I'm not sure if I I'm too satisfied with that but we'll see for a second um I want to smooth out this tail make it a little bit more uh just make it flow a little bit better so you just take the direct selection tool modify that just a little bit uh I'm going to go ahead and add in with the pen tool an area just right around here maybe coming up about this much and down okay and then maybe try to um add some sense of motion because when you think of a dog tell you think of it wagging all over the place so I how about I do that so I'm just creating a single very slight bezier curve here and we're going to make the stroke here black variable width profile one so it goes thin to thick to thin maybe move it in just a little bit closer uh copy that control C contr F and scale this one down maybe right around there so now it feels like a a dog tail much more just by adding these two lines U just to symbolize Motion in in a sense uh so I'm going to move this one over here and I'm also I'm going to experiment with another idea real quickly um I'll go ahead and take the pen tool real quick and just block out this area all right go ahead and I'll make it simple I know like the I'm thinking of adding like a paw print here that might be too much though uh but I just want to do it anyways just to see oh my mouse is about about to die that's nice all right so we'll go ahead and add some ovals for paw prints you know what I want to make sure I get this right dog paw print yeah they're really not a whole over like I was thinking I want to make that a little bit better make it black for now and all right so what could I do I just take this middle bottom Anchor Point well there we go that was pretty simple all right so take that back move this or rotate it w rather get a reference image there's four four right here that is my cell phone all right uh yeah not very much quality control happening over here right now my wife just texted me all right let me move this over here these ones are usually larger uh move over there I'll just take this one I I'm pretty certain that's going to be way too much I mean when you add all these shapes then you create kind of issues of of of clutter because we have this here we have this here we have this long tail this is too much I still wanted to see what it look like now let's go ahead and just remove these things well it just become too bad at that point it's certainly not as bad as uh what it was with the tail added not sure what happened there me scale that up again actually just like that that would be more ideal though not quite as unique uh so yeah I'll take this one and just scrap it we'll move this one back now let's say for example see in my opinion I I like this pretty much as is I wouldn't want to go further with this otherwise you're just going to get too complex so you remember you know when you guys are submitting for example the design challenges that we have at design course.com don't try to go too elaborate you know like I did over here because we ended up just being too much so you take you know when it comes to coming up with logo Design Concepts you take a s single idea some element or some aspect that relates to the purpose of the business or whatever it is you're trying to do uh and you integrate it into the the the letter form or the the icon or whatever you're working with uh and stick with that don't try to add too many things um so let's say for example just for the heck of it it's only been 10 minutes um you wanted to use this and maybe you wanted to get it printed or something well you can't leave your text layer here uh you need to make sure everything's flattened and the paths uh well the paths don't have to be uh converted to outlines but uh I kind of like doing that sometimes just because if another designer messes with it and they scale it the pass could become screwed up so what I do is just take everything hit control shift and O so that converted the this right here to a uh an outline with a path rather and then we want to basically take everything and com combine them so I'm going to take these Strokes right here go to object path and outline stroke and then I want to take everything with exception to this little uh the white portion where the Tail's cutting into the letter uh and go ahead to the window and Pathfinder and merge them all and I got Facebook app man this is just terrible I should have uh checked that stuff before it started and then finally take this this little white path here and hold shift and select this one and then just specify minus front oops I'm going to ungroup that first just like this minus front then you can uh take everything and combine them to a single shape like that and that is it and the reason you would want to do this is because you don't want a white path sitting there that way if you have a background or something it's going to look messed up but yeah that is it uh you know just thinking of things off the top my my head uh you it's not too bad of of of an attempt it's a little bit separated a little bit ideal be it would be a little bit more condensed but uh yeah that's my attempt so hopefully you guys took something from this if you want to see more of these videos let me know they obviously don't take very long uh but yeah so check out designc course.com subscribe here on YouTube if you haven't yet and I'll see you later goodbye [Music]