Typographic logo design ｜ Adobe Illustrator tutorial

In this course, you're going to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator to customize type and we're going to recreate some interesting logo designs. Hi, my name is Daniel White, also known as Danski and I'm a designer and teacher of all things creative and in this first section, we're going to take a look at the anatomy of type. Okay, so on screen you can see a diagram. We have the anatomy of type and we've got the word typography and lots of labels. These are all different parts of the letters. Now, you don't need to know all of these but there are definitely some that are worth remembering or unless you want to pursue a career specifically in typography, you probably should know them all but they're going to come in handy when it comes to creating our own letters as well or if you're just talking about type in general. So what we're going to do is we'll start on the right actually. Let's zoom in nice and close. So first of all, we have the cap line or the cap height. That is typically the height of capital letters and anything that is an ascender. We'll come back to that in a minute. You can see these peak a bit above a bit cheeky there but these are like the highest parts of the text. The X height is typically the top of any lowercase letters. Now, you'll see the A and the P extend beyond the X height and we'll come back to that in a minute as to why that is. We've got the baseline which is where all of the lowercase letters and many uppercase letters, they sit on the baseline and then we've got the beard line which is where all the descenders and other parts of letters that kind of droop down, they kind of rest on the beard line. So you can see the P and the bottom of the Y there. So those are pretty important to remember. So then we have other parts of the letters. So we have the bar here. That's this horizontal part on the T. We've got the beak here as well. I guess here you can see that that could be a beak of sorts, a bird's beak. We've got the stem which is this tall vertical part. The tail which is this flick on the Y and serif. Now, you've probably heard this before. You have serif typefaces and they are typefaces that have these kind of little... Oh, I've got a double up there. These little kind of feet, I guess you could think of them as. We have them on both sides of the letters and then you've got typefaces that are sans serif which means without the serifs. So you can see a serif here. We've got a serif here and then at the top of the P and on the Y we have serifs as well. So that is a serif. The counter, that is that negative space in the middle of the O. The ear, we'll come back to this in a minute because we'll be customizing a font. So that's the ear which kind of looks like a Shrek ear if you ask me but that's just me. We've got the link which is this part here and then this connects to the loop on the G. Now, not every style of G is going to have a loop like this but this one does so it's worth knowing. Right, now we have the bracket. Now, this is kind of part of a serif because if I move this out the way... Oh, there's a couple of them here. So if I change the color actually, let's do that. There we go. So this now is what's known as a slab serif. So it kind of makes sense. These serifs and all the feet, they're just like these big slabs and then these are your regular serifs. So that bit there, again kind of makes sense, is called the bracket. Okay, now a few others. I do forget some of these ones if I'm honest. We've got the terminal which is this kind of droopy part on the A. The bowl which is the rounded part. The spur which kind of makes me think of like a cowboy's boot. A spur, it does make sense. On the bottom of the A and you'll see that on other letters. Perhaps like a U as well, that little flick in the bottom corner. We've got the descender. Now, this is on letters where they will have an area that descends below the baseline. So you might have this on a lowercase p, a lowercase q and then the opposite of that is the ascender. So this extends above the x height. So this might be your lowercase b, d, in this case h. So ascender and descender, they're worth remembering for sure. And we've got the shoulder which, I mean, I guess I could sort of see how that is the shape of a shoulder, I guess. And then we have the stroke. So this is kind of that vertical part but a little bit more angled this time. And you can find this on the letter y. Now, do you need to remember all of this? No, absolutely not. But the ones that I outlined, specifically the ones on the right, cap line x height, baseline, beard line, ascenders, descenders, those are the ones that at least I personally reference and use quite a lot when I'm talking about type serifs as well. And it wouldn't be a bad idea to keep this design handy just so you can refer to it if you ever need a quick refresher. This video is brought to you by Envato, unlimited creative assets and the broadest range of categories all in one place. Right, next up, we're going to take a look at choosing and pairing fonts. So here you can see I have the Airbnb logo and a quick logo for a fictional brand that I've just made up. This is a jewellery brand, elegancia, very fancy Dan, quality and timelessness. Now, in this section, I just want to kind of go over choosing fonts and font pairings. But I also want to show you what happens when you pick the wrong fonts, because this is something that I see quite a lot. And there'll be a great logo design, but the font choice will just not pair well and ruin the whole thing. So we're going to try and avoid that. But first of all, I'm going to start by selecting and copying the Airbnb logo. And then I'm going to delete the text with the direct selection tool. Press T for the type tool. I'm going to type Airbnb and let's scale that up, holding shift. And with the eyedropper tool, I'm going to sample that same colour. Now, this well, this here isn't the the worst font choice, but we're going to try a few others. And you can see how the Airbnb font is just so suited to its target audience because it's clean, very modern. It's a little bit playful as well, so not too serious, which is kind of perfect for the Airbnb brand, specifically being more inclusive and targeting people who are interested in travel. So first of all, we're going to type Times. Good old Times New Roman. As you can see here, this does clash with the very modern and clean mark, but also it's just it's too formal. It's very authoritative. Maybe this would be good for like a school or something a bit more academic. But here it's just not a good match. And this is something that you'd probably see more in related to a newspaper or a publication rather than a travel brand. So now let's try another one. We'll go with Impact. As you can see, this is very bold, very in your face, very aggressive as well. And again, it just doesn't pair well with that logo mark from an aesthetic point of view. Even though it is relatively clean, it's just way too bold and too strong. Right, let's try another one now. Papyrus, kind of reminding me of the Avatar logo. This is kind of a bit of a meme in the design community at this point. Papyrus and Comic Sans. And this font choice is just it can look quite unprofessional and it just doesn't really fit with this at all. You know, you can see the style of the lettering. You've got this subtle distressed effect around the edge. It's just a total mismatch. And then if we were to go and try something like Roboto. So we've got quite a few variants here. Let's go for something like Medium. You can see this is probably the best pick out of the bunch. And you could go ahead and use this. But even this font, it just doesn't have that same playfulness with some of the curves in the current Airbnb logo. The font being used there, by the way, is called Serial. And it's just a little bit more fun and playful. And Roboto is also quite generic. And you might find a good use case for that, particularly in UI design. But here it's just generic and arguably forgettable. And whilst it does pair better than the other examples with that logo mark, the version over here on the left, you can see we've just got clean lines, we've got curves, and then we've got a few subtle curves in the current Airbnb logo as well. So it's a bit more curvy, a bit more playful, not too serious and corporate, but it's still very clean and modern. I think we'll actually, we'll just try one more not so great example. I've got this one here, Marker Felt. So it's kind of like a marker pen. And as you can see, it's got a very specific style and I would arguably say even more artistic. So this would be great if you were working on a brand to do with arts and craft or a design project where you wanted to have some handwritten annotations, this would be perfect. But when it comes to a brand like Airbnb, you can see here it's just a total mismatch with that logo mark and it just doesn't have that same clean and modern style that the current logo has. And generally good font pairings, they match in tone, in weight and in personality. And you want to avoid fonts that are too formal, too aggressive, decorative or even generic. And a brand's font should reflect its values, its voice and its audience. And this is where custom fonts like Airbnb's work well because they've been designed specifically to reflect the brand's human and more friendly nature. So font choice is incredibly important. Like I wouldn't go with this one, for example. So what we're going to do is we're just going to grab this one here and I'll show you a quick demonstration and we'll pick a different font. So what have I got at the minute? Odin Rounded. Very nice, but not really that suitable because I think, you know, this is a jewelry store. I want this to be a bit more premium, elegant perhaps. We've got a nice clean symbol here for the mark. And so something that I might pick is, well, there's a few actually. We could go with something sans serif like this. Very clean, very elegant, very modern. But we might also go with Playfair. Yeah, we've got a few different weights here. So I might go with Playfair Display. This is a nice serif font. Let's just zoom in a bit and we could scale that down. And to me, this just kind of now exudes that sort of quality, expensive premium. And there's a lot we could do with this actually. In fact, I would often encourage people to, instead of just picking random fonts, I would start with the basic fonts and play around with things like kerning, tracking, leading and just play around with that a bit more. If I just copy this a second, and what was it? Quality and timelessness. I'll just show you what I mean. And this is a relatively simple font. You could do this with Times New Roman. It would still look okay. So you could do something like this. But for the name as well, what we could do is we could change this to all caps. We could then increase the tracking, which is a nice little cheat code to make things look way more expensive and elegant. Look at that elegancia. Yeah, and I think that fits really well. And then with this, you could keep that as it is. Or what we could do is, so you can do this, but I think sometimes when you reuse the same font and the same font style as the tag for the tagline, it can just look a bit too much. So what I would do personally is I would look at pairing this with a font style that complements it. So, you know, we've got a serif there for that main logo type, elegancia. I would probably pair that with, but we could pick the other one actually, champagne and limousines, a nice sans serif. And we could go for this, and we could even shorten the tagline down by using an ampersand. Some fonts do have a bit of a funny ampersand, but this one is okay. Bring it a bit closer. Yeah, I might change that actually. I might change it. Let's try something else. So we don't want to go too chunky and bold. I think I do want to keep it a bit lighter, but also legible. And then maybe just have it a bit smaller, just so it's not shouting louder than the actual brand name. And it's just finding a balance in size as well. Sometimes I'll see this. Everything will be just squished way too much together or it'll be way too far apart. And so that's where it kind of, it pays to just have a little bit of breathing space. Sometimes what you can do is you could kind of have double the height of certain elements. So you could reuse some of those elements you've already created to actually inform some of the spacing. So rather than just guessing, you're sort of using, you've got like a bit of a system. And I mean, already, look at the before and the after, this is where it started. And this is the difference in the impact you can have just by changing the font to something a little bit more suitable. Okay, so this next one is really gonna open up what you can create in Illustrator because we're gonna be customizing and redrawing letters. Okay, so we have the existing logo up here, Ogilvy. And I really do like this. So what I've done is find a very similar font. We've got Baskerville and we're actually going to customize this and try and get it a little bit closer to this. So first of all, I'm gonna duplicate this and go to type, create outlines, and then ungroup everything. So I've ungrouped all of the letters and we're going to go in now and customize them. Now we do have something here called a ligature. And effectively a ligature is where you combine two different characters into a single glyph. So you see the G and the I here, the ear, remember that's the part from the first section, that kind of becomes the dot on the I. And you'll see this with letters like A and E, they can be kind of paired or merged together into a single glyph. So what we're gonna do is try and get a little bit closer to that. First of all, I'm actually gonna be a bit cheeky. I'm gonna do something I very rarely do. And I might get told off for this, but I'm gonna actually stretch and distort the text a tiny bit just to make it a bit more vertical. It was a little bit squished before. So that is normally a bit of a no-no, but I'm gonna be cheeky and hopefully I get away with it. Please don't tell me off in the comments. Then what I'm gonna do here is I'm actually gonna use the direct selection tool to go in and select the dot on the I there and delete it. And I'm gonna recreate my own one. And I think I might use a circle actually. I could kind of make this more elliptical like the original, but I'm gonna go with a circle. And I'm not a big fan of this ear. And I'm gonna delete it as well. And what this does, if I go into outline mode with command or control Y, you can see it does cause a bit of a break. So what I can do is grab the pen tool with P on the keyboard and I'm just gonna connect that gap. So I'm just reconnecting it. That's just gonna help me avoid any problems that may occur further down the line. And to kind of create this big ear, what we could do as well, we could use the pen tool, we could use the pencil tool. I think what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna use the ellipse tool. I'm gonna create another circle, swap the fill and the stroke with shift X, use the direct selection tool to remove how much we're removing two of those pieces. I'm gonna rotate this 45 degrees and then thicken it up. Now I don't wanna go too thick. I want whatever I'm gonna kind of add to the letters to match the other parts of the letter forms. So I'm kind of paying attention to the other letters that are part of this word just because when we start customizing type, you gotta be careful, especially if you're new to this, because what you can do is you could edit the letter in a way that you think might look good, but it kind of breaks some typographical rules that you might not necessarily be aware of. So I would always tread with caution would be my advice. Then I'm gonna press R for the rotate tool, click on this point to set that as the point of rotation. And now I can kind of bend this around. So I might be able to pull this over a bit and then pull this down, maybe shrink it a bit. Yeah, there we go. So I want a nice smooth curve. That's not too bad. We could zoom in there and just get that lined up perfectly. Like I'm zooming in at 4,743%. So it does make lining things up considerably easier. There's a way I can smooth that out actually. And I'll show you a technique in a minute. In fact, we're gonna use that technique down here. I'm not a big fan of the bottom of the G here. It's a little bit jaggedy and just I'm not a fan of the shape. So what I'm gonna do is select the letter and then go and grab. No, not that. Let's go and grab the pencil tool, double click the pencil tool and then you get access to some options. And I would drag the smoothness to either here or here. So I'm gonna go here, but what it will do is smooth out any lines you draw. So that's not the nicest line there. And when I let go, it auto smooths it. Very, very cool. But something else you can do with the pencil tool, if I select the letter and press N, which is the shortcut for the pencil tool, I can actually draw over an existing path completely re-sculpt it. Now, sometimes this doesn't work. So you might just have to be patient with it and redraw it a few times. I mean, look at that. I'm using a mouse here. That was a terrible line. And look how it smooths it out. That's done a pretty decent job. And another tool that complements this perfectly that we'll be using in a second is the smooth tool. So I can just drag over these areas that aren't as smooth as I would like and it just smooths them out beautifully. Now again, typographically, we have to look at that and look at maybe other parts of the letters that are similar. So we've got the tail on the Y there. So I'd probably go in and find that a bit more. So I might kind of droop that back in a little bit and maybe make this bit. Oh, that unsteady hand. If you do get it wrong, don't worry, you can undo. So I might do that and then just smooth it again. And I've got a keyboard shortcut set up for my smooth tool. And if you do want to do that, go to edit keyboard shortcuts and you can set it there. I've got mine set to shift S and it's very useful because I use that a lot more than the symbol spread tool. So now we need to smooth this out and connect this properly. So what I'm going to do is select all of this and we have a stroke and a shape with a solid fill. So let's expand everything. So the stroke now becomes a regular shape. I can select both parts here, merge these together with the pathfinder panel. Sorry, I'm struggling to speak here. And zoom in. And all I've got to do is grab that smooth tool and just smooth out that kink. Now this can kind of affect your anchor points in your geometry in ways you can't predict. So use it carefully, but you can see there, what a quick and easy solution to just smooth that out and get that looking better. And even here actually on the G, you know, maybe I want to just kind of have this bend out a little bit more, be a bit more smoother. And I can do that there. Give it a smooth if it needs it. And so it makes it so easy to sculpt and reshape letters. And even here, if I wanted to kind of, it would have been easier to do this when it was an editable stroke, but if I wanted to afterwards taper it in a bit, you can see it doesn't always work. So you do have to have patience with it. Okay, so when it doesn't work like that, what I would do is use the direct selection tool to delete a segment, go into outline mode with command or control Y, and then use the pen tool to finish it off. So what I'm going to do is just zoom out and I'm just going to have that taper off towards the end ever so slightly. No, I think I've made that worse actually. That would have been a lot easier to do. If I go back a few steps, in fact, what I'll do, let me just copy what I've done. I'll go back and show you how to do this. So this is one of the downsides to expanding is what I could do is just very easily grab the width tool and I can bring the width in like that. And you can see it then has that kind of tapering and I could go and chunk up the other end. Whoops, like this. Now that's quite an extreme version, but you can have that tapering if you want, but it's much easier to do it when it's a stroke. So that's probably what I would do is I'd go back a few steps, tweak that, add the tapering effect, and then do everything we just did. But there we go, that's looking pretty good. I'm just going to adjust the kerning between the letters because I think they're all spaced apart a little bit inconsistently, actually. And a good way to check kerning is to zoom out. When you zoom out and look at the letters, it makes it much easier to identify any inconsistent gaps or kerning. Yeah, it's quite close together on this one. Yeah, you see the I and the L, they're actually touching. So we're going to try and bring these closer together, I think. So we're going to nudge them together, nudge these together. The only other thing I might have to do, so I might have to go and, yeah, I've got to nudge the G over, and then I have to go and reposition this to match that, which actually works out quite nicely because then it pretty much almost lines up with that part of the I. Yeah, there we go. And all the letters are a bit closer together, just a little bit tighter now. So this is where we started here with our Baskerville font. And this is where we ended up with our complete finished logo. Okay, so for this next one, we're going to look at ligatures, glyphs and stylistic alternates. And these are going to make creating a beautiful typography absolutely effortless. Okay, so this next one, I'm very excited to show you because this is a fantastic way to quickly make boring typography look much more interesting, very effortlessly as well. So you can see we've got Sunday chill here. It's in times, it's not that interesting. Sorry times, but we're going to try and make you look a bit more creative and a bit more fun. So I'm going to switch over to Envato. Honestly, cannot recommend this platform enough. I'm always talking about them on my own channel because look, you just get everything in one subscription. And one of the things that you do get are fonts. So you can click on fonts, go to all fonts or browse by a category. I've got a tab already up here. Loads of filtering options, which makes finding the font just the easiest thing ever. And they're so creative. Look at these. Look at that. I don't think I've even got that one. So I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to save that for later because I absolutely love that. They're just so good. Look at that. Right now, rather than me just kind of gushing over Envato and spending the entire course doing that, what I'm going to do is just show you this one here because this one really stood out to me. And I could see that it had some beautiful ligatures connecting three letters together. So I was like, this is a really, really good choice. And you can usually see a few more examples here as well. Nice. Look at that. Fantastic. So these are some of your ligatures. So you can go ahead and download that once you've got a subscription and then I'm going to go and type, what was it? Cinema Sunday. There we go. And already that's the default. That's what I'm putting in and that's how it looks. But we can do even more with that. We just zoom in. We'll go to type, down to glyphs. And here what you can do is go to alternates for current selection, grab the type tool. And if you select individual characters or pairs, you can actually go and change it. So we could go and have a regular U in there. We could select the C and the H. We could select the L and you get a slightly different style of L. Or is that the same one? No, that's the same one. Yeah, so we've got a couple of different A's. There you go. Some fonts have a few, some fonts have absolutely loads. The Y, there you go. A couple of different tails on the Y there. We've got that sort of looping round one. Capitals. Let's try that and see what we've got. Oh, there we go. That's nice. Oh, that is lovely. Yeah, so we've got a few in there, but already the ones that we had by default were actually very nice as they were. So how do I get back to that? Let's go to Ligatures. Oh, there we go. We've got an F and an I. That was kind of what we did, although it was a G and an I in the previous one. Access all the alternates. There we go. That's what we want. Discretionary Ligatures. So what am I looking for? A U and an N. I mean, look, you can see there's so many pairs here. U, R and a Y, UN. So you just double click and it adds that in. And then I think we'll go for maybe a regular H here. Oh, no, it was lowercase, wasn't it? It was lowercase. So we had the C and the H and then we had the Y. But I kind of liked the original tail. So these are your Ligatures. You've got discretionary and any standard ones. You've got the stylistic alternates there. So a lot of the times when we download fonts, it's very easy to download a font and just type in your words and think, oh, it doesn't look as good as the preview. But actually, if you just sometimes, sometimes it does like this, it looks pretty good. But if you actually just go and open up the panel for the glyphs and go to stylistic alternates, Ligatures and all that stuff, you can switch out a few characters and just make it look fantastic very quickly and easily. OK, so now we're going to customise an existing font and use this to create a custom logo type design and a custom app icon design. Right, so for this one, we're going to be doing something similar to what we did before where we customised the text. But here we're going to do this in the context of a mini project. So we're actually going to turn this into a logo and customise the font as well and then add this to an app icon. So the text here is in the font Siphon and it's fine, we've got our app icon and our text. But let's see if we can make this a bit more interesting. So I'm going to select text and then first of all, go to create outlines, ungroup. So I've got the letters and I love the angle on the top of the T here. So I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and mirror that on the H as well. So first of all, I'm going to try and use a clever little technique to try and create another version of this. So I'm going to, you can see my smart guide, snap that to the top and I'm going to create a nice little coloured triangle that fills in that top piece. So when I move that over here and turn it to white, I know I've got the exact same angle. Now here I'm looking at the C and the H, they're very close actually. If I could get those to line up, it would kind of almost like a cut going through both of them. That would be a nice little touch as well. So what I'm going to do is just draw a line up here and set the colour to red, make it nice and thin and then I'm going to just move this out the way for now and just drag that up. So that kind of meets that red line and then if I snap that in place, we're almost there. There's almost like that perfect line. So that's pretty cool. So they now line up pretty much. I think I might push the letters slightly closer together as well. Just adjust the kerning a bit. I'm going to bring the T up as well. It's a little bit short at the minute. So let's duplicate that one and drag it across and now what I can do is with the direct selection tool, I can use these top two points and hopefully that's snapped correctly. Yeah, you can see it's snapped there perfectly. So now they're both the same height. So if I wanted to adjust it any more, I can select them both and move them both together but I don't want to because I love that kind of lining up part there but I don't like how the C isn't kind of mirrored on the bottom. It's a bit weird. So what I'm going to do is use the rectangle tool and I'm going to select just the top half of the C. So I'm going to hope that is straight through the middle and then what I'm going to do is just make sure I only select the bottom half. Select everything and click minus front. That will subtract it and then if I select this and press O for the reflect tool, I'm going to click on one of the bottom most points, hold Alt or Option and click and I can reflect this as a copy horizontally and that should be in exactly the right place but we've got that sort of mirrored symmetry there, top and bottom and then I can select both halves and combine them together. Just check they're combined in outline mode. Yep, all looks good. So this is coming together nicely here. Now it's kind of exactly lining up with the edge and you can see you get that little border. To avoid any issues, I'm going to just extend this a bit beyond. You see it's not messing up the angle or anything. So I'm scaling it, holding Shift in both directions and it just gets rid of that border, that uncertainty and then we could just use the Pathfinder panel or we could use the Shape Builder tool, hold Alt or Option and drag through to subtract and you can see that gets completely cut from the design. So that's looking pretty good. Now because I've changed the shape of the sea, it looks like it's spaced too far apart so I'm going to have to bring it back in. Again, I'm going to use the technique I did before, zoom out and check everything and well, this is for a fictional app called Chat. So we're going to turn this into a little speech bubble and one way we can do that is we could use the Pen tool. I'm going to use the Arc tool here. I've got a nice little arc, there we go and then I'm going to press, what am I going to press? R for the Rotate tool, click here to rotate around that point and then I'm going to hold Alt or Option to duplicate the line, scale it up, holding Shift and then what I can do is select the endpoints here, Command or Control J to join them together and the same Command or Control J after selecting them to join them together here. There we go. So that's pretty good. Shift X to swap the stroke to a fill, Eyedropper tool to sample the white background color and then I can just use this to get it in position and I can even press A and just round off that one corner widget just to make it a little bit rounder. We don't want it to be too sharp, we want it to be a bit more playful and I can get that in position. Now you wouldn't necessarily, well no, you definitely wouldn't actually send this off to a client as a final design because if someone were to then open this logo and use it for something you can see we've got a weird white shape there so this has to be prepared properly. So you would still need to go in and either use the Shape Builder tool or the Pathfinder options to subtract that from the lettering. I would keep it editable but when you've got your final version and just make sure that you do that so it's kind of supplied to the client or someone else printers correctly and then we can just go in now and we can add we'll make sure these are in black but you could add a colour we're going to add a little three little dots make sure they're centred vertically as well I think they're looking good I'm going to zoom out and there we go we've got a little bit of a chat logo going on this could be for a social app or something but then we can also use this on the app icon as well so let's group that one together create a copy and we'll get rid of this sample that white colour and then we can just drag this in there adjust the size and then just centre this here so we want to kind of centre it it's not a perfect circle so if we centre it using the tools over here it might throw it off slightly so sometimes you do have to use your eye to centre things and I would kind of zoom out to just kind of check that everything looks balanced I might need to shift it over a bit maybe something like that and there we go very quickly and easily we've made the app icon look far more interesting we've taken an existing font and customised it as well and then we've added a few details to turn that into a finished logo design and lastly what we're going to do now is look at creating a logo by drawing all of the letters from scratch okay so what we're going to do for this one is we're going to recreate a logo for a game called Mordhau this is a real game actually I've played it it's very good this is my more modern take on their logo and I love straight lines, smooth curves, geometric shapes and you can probably tell it's in there so we're going to have a go at recreating this now what I typically like to do is just to start with when you're being creative and designing your own font or your own letters is just get some lines down just get some lines down we're going to work with strokes because we want the ability to edit the thickness so that is quite important so what I'm going to do is I'm going to work with round numbers as well so we're rounding that up to 30 and I'm going to go with like a more square kind of blocky style for the lettering and then you've got the sort of helmet shape in the letter M there so I've just created my O, my first letter and that's kind of if it's a lowercase letter I'm going to add a guide down if it's an uppercase letter I'm going to add a guide command or control R for rulers and I would start creating my guides before creating too many letters now I'm doing all of this by eye at the minute because I'm using a stroke so these guides in fact if I go to view I need to unlock them just so I can move them around the guides will snap to well they should do they're not now but they will snap to the stroke or objects will snap the stroke to the guides yeah they should do but hey illustrator doing an illustrator sometimes they don't that's just the way it goes so I'm going to zoom in nice and close and line them up so we're going to do this by eye and if you know you zoom in super close we want to get these first ones right and let's go to view guides and we'll lock them again now I've got those first ones correct and that's just the way it goes sometimes sometimes it doesn't work as intended or something stops working and you just have to figure out a workaround to get around it so we have the O and then what I'm going to do now is I've got the same stroke properties here that's 30 point I can then start drawing the other letters ah there you go so you can see my smart guides are now being useful again I've got my pen tool and what I'm going to do is start drawing the other letters now you could do this with the pen tool but because this is a monospaced design where all the characters occupy the same width I'm actually just going to duplicate this one and probably repeat that across all of these letters because what I can do now is just delete certain parts with the direct selection tool and I've already got the kind of main shape the main width created so we're going to go there I'm holding shift as well so I get a 45 degree angle so here I can go into outline mode and I'm still holding shift when I'm dragging with the direct selection tool so I kind of maintain that 45 degrees so this is quite important so I don't kind of mess the angles up and then the pen tool again holding shift and then holding shift and going down and then what I would do is select this select this and align them with the align panel you get a bit more precision and now I know that everything kind of lines up perfectly so for the d what have we got there let's delete that one we're gonna have actually no let's press c and make a cut in fact let's make a couple of cuts and just delete that middle part there and then what I can do is grab these two and then nudge them back well the angle isn't going to be the 45 degrees now so that's no good so I think what I'll do is I'll start with the top first we'll get this in the right place and then I'll go diagonally that way so I'll kind of drag that up until it meets the line here and then bring that one back so they snap together now they're slightly off there so I would zoom in and just drag them up together like this and then if you get something like that it's because you've got to join them with command or control j so just select those anchor points and join them together I'm going to bring this one a bit shorter and then I've got to bring the d out a bit further and then I can bring it down you can see it marks halfway which is fantastic and actually now just as we did before what I can do is if I make a cut with the scissor tool there on that halfway point I could probably delete that make sure there's no stray anchor points left around reflect tool which is o on the keyboard alter option and click and I'll reflect it horizontally with a copy so I would just have to get one half right and reflect it if there is symmetry in the design just make sure you join any unconnected paths together now we've got an h this one's going to be very very easy select them both alter option and drag to scale from both sides the pen tool yep marks the center and you see the way we're creating this as well in outline mode we're trying to make this as clean as possible a okay we've got an a that's very similar to the r so I would drag this over I'm holding alter option and shift when dragging to make a duplicate cut it with command or control x delete command or control v to paste in or f sorry f will paste it in front but also in the same place and then we can just delete that point and drag that up and there we go there's our a I would do this across the entire alphabet if I were designing more characters as well because this way you're just reusing elements and it's just going to make your work more consistent as well just make sure that the letters you do do are done correctly and if I want to tighten up the spacing between all of them because they're all spaced the same width apart I can select all of these letters and then hold shift and use the left and right arrow keys to just nudge them one shift and then arrow key click to the left arrow key press I should say so we do that so whatever we're doing to one we're doing to all of them so they're all tight they're all occupying the same amount of space and now we've just got to do the m now how on earth did I make that the first time well it's symmetrical so we've only got to do one half so I'm going to start by I can correct the width after so I'm going to just work with what I know part of it meets the same height as the baseline here remember we covered that earlier on and I'm going to go down up here and I'm holding shift so I'm going to snap to 45 degrees as well now unfortunately here you can see because the path doesn't end it does kind of extend a bit higher so I'm going to drag that down so it lines up there or actually no I think we'll do this so we'll leave it there with the stroke lining up to that x height swap it around so I'm working with a fill now and then we'll press command or ctrl c and then f to paste it in front sample that same white color and scale it down with alter option and shift and then using the direct selection tool I'm going to you can see it's helping me follow that 45 degree line perfect it lines it up brilliantly there so we're not losing that angle and then I can drag this all the way down and then bring that up so we've got a nice consistent width either side I'll bring it up enough so the width here and here is very very similar to here so I'm going to push it a bit higher so we have a good width all the way around and I think yeah this one was probably a bit chunkier but that's okay we've gone for a slightly slightly leaner one here or I could chunk it up actually and make it bigger like this but remember this part here has to line up with the baseline with that first letter o so it's very much about reusing different assets that I create holding shift to maintain angles and line things up with the direct selection tool and okay so that middle one needs to be thinner because if I duplicate it now you can see the middle one is going to be very very chunky so what I need to do this is a really clever trick I love this is with the direct selection tool I'm going to move this up you can see I'm following the angle try and go about halfway and then I can select this point here and press command or control d and it's going to repeat that last transform so now I've gone for about half the width so if I select this and then press o for the reflect tool hold alt or option and click and reflect a copy vertically you can see it mirrors it like that and then I can press command or control semi-colon to hide and show the guides and that looks pretty good yeah we could do a few more minor tweaks and things we could play around with it some more but that's generally how I would create that but now obviously we need to kind of finish this off because in outline mode it's looking very messy so first of all I'm going to well I can see the tops ah they're not perfectly straight they're not actually flat on top so we're going to select all these points and snap them together so they align perfectly that's quite important we'll combine all of the black together and then with the white I can use the shape border tool and just like we did before alter option and drag through to knock it out and so you should just have that one shape left and you can see I've got one fill color so that's how you know that you've done it right so it looks a little bit different to that I was think that one was a little bit wider but you can of course have a go at this and play around with it yourself and the way I like to do this is I'll just make a colored block in between the letters this is just one of those weird habits that I've always had and always stuck with there's so many other ways you could measure and you could have guides for spacing and things I just like creating random shapes and I usually make it like bright pink or something and then I can line things up and there we go all uh all spaced out and then we can get rid of that one now obviously let's get rid of that block as well now I would keep an editable version of this so you can then obviously all of these letters here they're more characters this one here is very very custom so that's a bit different but these are all editable strokes so if you wanted to make the font a bit lighter obviously you've got to make a few tweaks there but you still have that flexibility to adjust the font weight and all of the properties and things when you're really finished and you're ready to go ahead create a copy expand everything and then I would just go through and combine all of these together this is just a very like professional way to kind of finish off your work and just make sure that everything is looking really tight let's just move that out the way yeah then we'll group all the characters together and we'll add a nice solid colored background so we'll give it a very very very dark gray almost black but not quite change that to white and then just make sure it's aligned to the center of the artboard and there we go we've designed a well a custom font some custom letters and we've included it in a custom logo and we've done it all from scratch and you can get very granular with adding guides you can add more guides for your x height your baseline beard line cap line you could add angled guides if you are going to be working on an angle but as you can see for this one here and at this early stage especially when you're experimenting with ideas and some things may or may not work you know just add guides when you feel that you need them and yeah just kind of go from there and there we go that wraps up the course I really hope you enjoyed this one and again a huge thank you to Envato for having me here on the channel always a pleasure take care and I'll see you in the next one