Exploring Illustrator

For this, I wanted to learn something completely new that I haven’t attempted before as I had experience with using illustrator for the film poster project and the pictogram project as well as some other things. I chose the creating a letter logo task because I felt this would be a good opportunity to enhance my typography skills whilst also improving my knowledge and illustrator.

Design ideas and design process

I started by drawing out a lot of sketches and rough drawings to help me brainstorm. I also played around with different ways of arranging the letters, before settling on the main idea.

Initially I was really interested in a monogram inspired logo design and I tried this out in illustrator. I wanted a traditional logo and for that I used a serif typeface to achieve the look I wanted. I originally used the font Bressay Devanagari. I tried a solid version with this font, but it felt too cluttered. I changed the font to Superclarendon and recreated the design thought this was successful but when I showed this design to others, the ‘G’ wasn’t easily identifiable to them. Because of this I tried a completely different design.

I felt the hexagon was somewhat successful, but I kept working on it as I didn’t feel having the ‘A’ facing the wrong way was any good, but I couldn’t work out how to turn the ‘A’ around and have it still look legible, so I changed to a circle. I followed a tutorial on setting letters within a shape and also learnt how to use the shape builder tool in illustrator. I made some sketches as well to work out how my particular letters would look within the shape. I chose to do a hexagon shape to better follow the tutorial.

The circle was very successful but I felt the hexagon looked better so I experimented with the guidelines from the video so that the ‘A’ would fit in better.

Process Images

Software tutorials

I was somewhat new to using illustrator for text related designs, so I used tutorials to help me understand how to warp and edit letters, add multiple strokes to letters. for this task I learn how to shape letters into an actual shape and how to use the shape builder tool with guidelines. I followed a YouTube tutorial as well as many articles. The YouTube tutorial was very helpful as a visual guide helped me to understand exactly what I had to do to create the logo that I needed. Due to a visual guide, I was then able to adapt the skill I had learned to fit my own logo and create different shapes as well as different styles of letters which allowed me to have a variety of options that I could choose from as my final design.

Another tutorial that was very helpful for me was on how to reshape a path using the direct selection tool. This tutorial was very helpful for me the monogram letter logos I had to create smooth lines for the ‘S’ and ‘G’ and then fit the two letters together in a smooth manner.

Additional tutorial – https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/using/puppet-warp.html

Resources for research and inspiration

The additional resources that I found were the YouTube tutorial on creating Latin logo within a shape and the Adobe articles on using the direct selection tool as well as on puppet warp. these tutorials help me develop my design ideas as they allowed me to bring my design ideas to life as I originally wasn’t sure how to fit letters smoothly within a shape as well as how to fit letters within each other and not make them look like they’ve just been placed on but instead drawn as one.

I would still like to improve on my use of the shape builder tool because I’ve only used it in one way instead of experimenting with different ideas. Although, I was able to create a successful and legible design, I wish that I took the time to experiment and explore with the shape builder tool more as I feel it would have allowed me to create a more creative and unique design.

Additional tutorial

• https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/using/puppet-warp.html
• https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/using/tool-techniques/direct-selection-tool.html
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDNZURvGs9E

Learning across the module

The software skills and design skills I’ve learned across the module in Photoshop are how to transform images by using layers, the adjustment panel, removing backgrounds in Photoshop and moving them into new/separate layers as well as learning to use the magnetic lasso tool.

The software skills and design skills I’ve learned across the module in Illustrator are how to use the pathfinder tool and warping tools, in particular, how to use the puppet warp tool as well as the direct selection tool. Furthermore, I have also learnt how to use the shape builder tool.

The software skills and design skills I’ve learned across the module in Indesign are how to use the table function and table styles and use of paragraph rules and tabs.