How to Design a Professional Custom Logo For Your Business

This is the best way I know of to design a logo or to just generate ideas to hand over to your designer.

Decide if you want a text logo or an illustrative logo, or a combination mark.

Get out a pen and a pad of paper and brainstorm. Think about what your company does, how you want to be perceived. What are a couple of phrases of what you want people to think of when they look at your logo? Possibly take the business name, divide it up and see what types of images come to mind for each word. Take those images and put them together to see if you have something that you can use.

Google those image words and see what comes up. Search for your type of business and compare your ideas to theirs. This is still part of the brainstorming.

Take your best ideas and draw them up roughly on your pad of paper.

Either show your client your ideas, of if this is for yourself, pick the one you like the best and possibly add or subtract images and ideas from the logo, still on your paper.

Once you have the idea, scan it and drop it into illustrator or any other vector drawing software. Trace the image in illustrator and start adding color and texture with different brushes and swatches. If there are many changes, make sure you save a copy each step of the way, so if you change your mind, you can go back to the original.

Pick the right font for your logo, if it is not already incorporated into the design. I have a free program called "free and easy font viewer" so I can scroll through all the fonts on my computer and see what pops. If I don't like any of them, I sometimes resort to finding new ones on the internet.

Keep working at your logo until it looks the way you want it. Easy huh?

Other designers may use a slightly different technique but I know what works best for me. If you plan on working with a designer, skip the last three steps and just use this technique to brainstorm.

Professionally Designed Custom Logos

Third Eye Studio is a graphic/web/art studio located in Lake Worth, South Florida. We specialize in creative and unique custom print and web design.

Design services include custom websites, website video editing, search engine optimization, email newsletter templates, logos, postcards, brochures...and more... Third Eye Studio gets you noticed!

My work can be viewed at http://www.studiothirdeye.com

Workshop: Custom Character Jam 2

Vectortuts+ loves Illustration and discovering new talent, so today we are proud to be launching a new community project that combines both, the Vectortuts+ Custom Character Jam 2. The best thing is, you can be a part of it! Find out how to get involved, at the jump.

I’m excited to announce that after the amazing success of the first character jam, today we’re launching the Vectortuts+ Custom Character Jam 2! This project aims to spark your imagination and showcase the work of our extremely talented community. Fire up your imagination and let’s get started!

All you need to do for this project is download the design template and customize the Vectortuts+ Character in any style and theme that takes your fancy. Add your work to the Vectortuts+ Facebook Group and show us what you think a custom Vectortuts+ character would look like. We will showcase a selection of the entries on our blog.

We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Would you like to participate in the Vectortuts+ Custom Character Project 2? It’s easy, all you need to do is Download the Template, join the Vectortuts+ Facebook Group and get creative!

Download the Design TemplateDraw your image onto the template, you can be as creative as you like, feel free to alter any or all of the illustration. We want to see creative and fun projects so go crazy!Upload your design to the Vectortuts+ Facebook Group with a short description of the design and what kind of character it is.Artwork can be any style or theme as long as it’s vector and 100% your own work. You don’t have to spend hours and hours on your piece, the project’s aim is to be fun, fast and individual.You may submit more than one designWhen you publish your work on Facebook, please include one or two paragraphs about yourself and/or your work and a link to your website / online portfolio.Have Fun!

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Custom Brushes and Symbols Save Time and Unleash Creativity in Adobe Illustrator

The fundamental divide between illustration programs that are vector driven (like Illustrator) and raster driven (like Photoshop) is one of control over elements. In Illustrator, everything you draw is defined by Postscript attributes, where lines have a stroke, a color, and an enclosure of lines has a fill. In a raster program, a shape is defined as an X-Y coordinate with a mix of colors in a color model.

What's a vendor to do when it's defined this divide? Try to remove it. This is why Photoshop now has some limited vector drawing tools, and why Illustrator now has custom brushes and symbol painters. However, the way that Illustrator handles brushes (and the fact that they're named brushes at all) is, in many ways, disingenuous. When you tell a graphic artist "You'll be drawing with a brush", you give a set of expectations about behavior - how the bristles will splay, how the ink will run...and that set of expectations is completely inadequate for Illustrator brushes.

Illustrator brushes decorate a path (the basic line segment that everything in Illustrator is built to manipulate) with other effects. What this means is that while it's *possible* to paint with a brush tool in Illustrator, in most cases, you'll be using the brush tool to apply a special effect to a line segment or path. This can be confusing at first, but is much more flexible.

The basic brush effects in Illustrator start with two that are analogs to how Photoshop brushes work - they're the basic art brush and calligraphic brush effects. What's nice about them is that you can draw your basic structure into place with line segments and the experiment with different brush effects. You can then save the presets on those brush effects to use later.

This separation between the drawing stage and the application of brush effects allows for things that are much more flexible than mere 'painting effects'. Rather than have brushes that define the smearing of colors along fake bristle patterns and pressure patterns, you can change brushes to display sprays and spreads of symbols and other pieces of vector artwork, like painting patterns along the line of a path, or a brush that paints perfectly replicated arrows or flowers or ladybugs along a vector path.

When you adjust the path, the attributes of the symbols and brush strokes flow along with the changes, and scale automatically. What this means is that by learning these tools (and they're not always easy to wrap your head around) you can speed up the creation of very intricate artwork with repetitive elements. The best way to learn about this is to experiment with it; Illustrator comes with an amazing library of pre-sets to play with, and then you can tweak them as you experiment. As you go along, you'll discover that many things you were doing with cut and paste and the pathfinder tools can be automated (and be made much more flexible) through use of the brush and symbol tools.

Your designs can be award winning creative masterpieces that don't have to take forever to create when you know HOW to use the right tools effectively from an expert professional user. Learn more about the Adobe Illustrator through our Adobe Illustrator CS4 Classes.