Adobe Illustrator is used commonly by designers to create logos. It is a powerful tool that provides a plethora of features to design creative logos. However, to use Illustrator, you need to first understand how every feature works. If you start designing the logo without understanding the functionality of the given features, you’ll ultimately fail. It is undoubtedly a great designing tool that works best for those who are equipped with complete functional knowledge of the platform.
Besides Illustrator, there are other logo designing tools also available in the market, but they are not as advanced as the Illustrator is. That is why the priority of designers usually lies with this tool, as they love to work on it to design different types of brand logos. Not only that, but Illustrator is also preferred to design other branding materials such as digital artwork, website graphics, icons, and more others.
If you also want to know how to use Illustrator to create brand logos, read this blog in detail. It will define the complete step by step process to design a logo in Illustrator, allowing beginners to understand how it is done right from the scratch. Let’s first take a quick look why Illustrator is used widely in the design industry, and what makes it a popular tool among designers.
Adobe Illustrator has proved to be a valuable tool for designers around the world. It allows them to work on intricate graphics with precision and ease. There are a lot of tools offered on the platform that give designers a free hand to create and edit shapes, paths, anchor points and other things to design their preferred aesthetic. This is not only useful to design logos, but every other artwork that is used for digital branding like infographics, post banners and more others.
By using Illustrator, designers can scale vector graphics without compromising anything in the quality. This is one of the key features of Illustrator that makes it suitable to create designs for both digital and print mediums. Besides that, Illustrator can be also integrated with other designing tools like Photoshop and InDesign to provide a more cohesive workflow to the designers. This advantage of interoperability allows designers to work on raster and vector graphic elements effortlessly.
They can further elaborate their logo design ideas by using an extensive library of brushes, patterns, and effects given in the Illustrator’s tools section. This empowers them to create anything that comes into their vision without facing any technical difficulty.
Creating a logo in Illustrator is not that difficult if you’ve got the knowledge of platform’s functionality. Unfortunately, many beginners do not even know about the tools given in the Illustrator. That is what makes difficult for them to get started and design logos perfectly.
If you are also facing similar type of issues while using Illustrator as a beginner, follow the step by step process defined below. It will let you know how to design a logo by using different tools in a sequential manner. Let’s take a look at the steps below.
First of all, you need to open Adobe Illustrator on your computer and create a new file for the logo project. To begin, go to the top menu and select “Files”. Then, click on “New” to create a new file. Now, provide a name for your file such as “Logo Project” in the box given below. After that, click “OK” to confirm.
Next up, you will need to activate the Rulers in the project window. It is a handy feature that allows you to align every element on the artboard. To enable the Ruler, go to the menu bar at the top of the window and choose “View.” Then, select “Rulers” from the drop-down list. Lastly, click on “Show Rulers” to make them visible on your workspace.
Many designers prefer to create logos using premade shapes like rectangles, circles, triangles and more others. You can find them in the tools section given on the left. Click on it and choose your favorite shape that would be used for the logo.
You can use different types of shapes to create a brand logo. Here, we are using rectangle as our primary shape to create a logo. It depends on you to decide how to place it on the board that suits your vision to design the logo.
Now, add another rectangular box above the previous rectangle as shown here. You can decide its trajectory as per your own choice, however, just try to not bend it too much towards the right.
Next up, you need to resize the shape of the last rectangular box. You can do that easily by just scaling it down through the highlighted borders.
Create a new rectangular box just in front of the last added. The size of this new shape will be the same like the one we used before.
Add a new rectangular box on top of the last shape created. The size of this new box will be bigger than the last one, as overall, we are looking to build a home-like shape for a real estate logo.
Next, you need to unify all the shapes using the pathfinder tool. It is a very handy tool that helps to combine different shapes into one unit.
After uniting all the shapes through pathfinder tool, you will need to add colors to the logo. But, before that, you will need to select the complete logo element in which the color would be applied.
To add colors to the logo, you will need to click on the swatches menu given on the left side of the workspace. There, you will see various colored squares showing under the swatches section. Choose anyone of them that fits into your styling vision.
Now, create a new background for the above created logo. You can use two rectangular shapes here with different colors. This will help to distinguish one logo version from another.
Next, divide the two rectangular backgrounds into four parts. You can do that by using the line tool given in the left section.
The logo design work is almost completed. Now, place the above created logo in the four divided sections appropriately. It is a standard way to showcase different versions of the logo to its respective client.
Once all the work is completed, save and export the logo file. You can do that by going to the File menu and selecting the export option given below.
That takes us to the end of this blog in which we have discussed how to create a logo in Illustrator right from the scratch. A lot of beginners do not understand how to use the tools given in the Illustrator to create a brand logo. This blog is therefore written to let them understand how various tools can be used in the Illustrator to design any type of logo. It is quite simple to use Illustrator and design anything you want, provided all the basics are cleared.
Author Bio: Hailey Savona is an avid content marketer at a leading graphic design agency: Logo Poppin. She loves to talk and write about everything tech including the latest trends. When Hailey isn’t blogging, she likes to take her dogs to the park for a little game of catch.
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