How to Design an Effective Lettermark Logo

Key Takeaways

hello [Music] Gary Simon of design course comm and today fourteen ready to go and today we're going to look at designing a letter mark and it's going to be for a fictional company called paperclip now basically a letter mark is a unique treatment on either a single letter or multiple letters which are usually just initials of a business name and they're designed in some type of unique I in relevant way so you'll see what I mean when we get started so again this is an adobe illustrator CC and as always visit design course comm put in your email and also the project files are available for free as always in the description below this video alright let's get started let's go to file new and my width is 800 by 600 I'm gonna hit OK hit ctrl one to get to a hundred percent and let's go to view show grid and then view snap to grid okay so basically the idea here is to take a company that's called paperclip which will just say is a web-based file management storage system whatever I and make a letter mark out of the P so we'll say for example you know the clients requested you know they want a paperclip as part of it so it's quite literal so the letter mark will need to take AP and combine it into a paperclip so the idea I came up with was to take you know the right portion of the paperclip that would be the portion that is a P I so let's go ahead and just get started you'll see how this will all come together I'm gonna zoom up here so around the middle somewhere right around there and I'm gonna use the ellipse tool so I'm just gonna hold right down here in the center the middle of one of these square grids I hold shift and then alt and actually I may make this I'm gonna go right here in the center and we'll make it that big all right so I want to get rid of the foreground color and then I want to make the stroke right around there we'll say seven points then I'm going to use the direct selection tool to select just this left point and hit delete okay so this will serve as kind of like the pport in and also the right side of the paper clip now what I want to do is take our move tool and with this selected we will duplicate that ctrl C and ctrl F right click transform reflect and then just hit OK so now we'll hold shift and just drag over and I'll say it's right around here so we have three in the middle here three squares and now what I want to do is just take this and I'm gonna scale it up by three points right there and then we'll take this and scale this in by one all right and then I want to hit control C control F will right click transform reflect vertical again and we're gonna going to just drag that over by holding shift and I'll say right around there and then I'm gonna take this and drag it in three times or drag it down rather three times as well so one two three and drag this in once alright so this looks crazy I know I at this point let's go ahead and connect all these so with the pen tool selected we'll we'll connect that to there and I'll select that back here to deselect that and then we'll take this one connect that over there and then we'll do this again we'll take this one we'll end it right around here and then finally take this over here we'll come right around I'd say here's good and then hold shift and down alright so everything's really thin right now so let's go ahead and take everything and it's all by the way is on the same path and we're going to increase the stroke size and I think 17 is pretty good and when we were duplicating these these weren't exactly snapping to the grid points so if we just select this one and just slightly move it it'll give us a perfectly horizontal path like you can see right here it's not perfect so just take this and move it slightly and that way everything is actually straight actually this still there we go alright so it sometimes it's just a matter playing with it so if we hit control 1 we go back here to view will hide the grid and we will turn off snap to grid take our move tool move this over at this point if you want to make any adjustments you can use the direct selection tool to go ahead and move these around I think this is pretty decent but if you want it to be a little bit more condensed you could do so like that and once you're happy with the actual shape we can select everything go to object path and then outline stroke so now it's no longer a stroke everything's outlined as it needs to be and there we go so as you can see the letter mark here is taking this P right here and then it's also combining it into the shape of a paperclip so that is basically all we need to do now if you wanted to color this or whatever that's fine but since this is strictly a video about you know creating the shape or the form of a letter mark then I'm just gonna end it right here though we could real quick if I wanted to just to show like what this would look like alongside an actual word mark to create what's called a combination mark which is taking a symbol along with the actual type I'll just real quickly type in paperclip let me just scale out here and I'm gonna use a font this is one I purchased called trade gothic and you could present the logo like this I'm gonna take everything copped or duplicate it rather or you can have it at the top and there you go you have yourself an effective logo this here would again this is a combination mark and then we just have our letter mark up here I and there we go so hope you enjoyed it if you have any questions let me know and as always visit design course calm and if you need access to the project files they are below in the description all right I will see you tomorrow