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So at this point we've created a really cool flower icon to use as a logo for our company.
But now we need to add the name of the company, Hansel & Petal, to complete our logo.
Now I want the text to actually appear on the right side of this icon.
So I am going to hold down the Spacebar to activate my Hand tool.
And I am simply going to click and drag while holding down the Spacebar just to
reposition this over to the side. Next, I am going to go ahead now and choose
my Type tool here. And I am going to be creating a point text
object now. So I am simply going to click once and release
the mouse so that I get a blinking cursor. I could type in the name of the company. In
this case here it's Hansel & Petal. So I'll type in Hansel.
Now because of the design that I am going to using, I am actually not going to
put a space in between these characters here. I want it to read as one long word.
So I am going to hit an ampersand here, and then type in Petal for Hansel&Petal.
And now I want to style this text. So I am going to switch now for a moment here
to my Selection tool. And then right here from Control panel, I
am going to switch the font. And I'll maybe use something, like maybe Chaparral
Pro is a nice typeface to use. I'll leave it set right now to the Regular
style. And I'll change the point size here to 72
point. It's pretty big and it kind of runs off the
screen now, but don't worry about that for now.
I can actually press Command+Minus or Ctrl+Minus, to zoom out just a little bit
so I could see more of this and kind of reposition this on my screen.
But I'd like to make some adjustments to how the text actually appears.
You'll notice that the spaces between each of the characters are not
necessarily even or the same. Many times when creating a logo, a designer
needs to go in and adjust the kerning, or the amount of space that appears
between each of the characters, to get a better look.
I want to get a head start here with a setting that appears inside of the
Character panel inside of Illustrator. A quick way to access to Character panel is
to simply click on the word Character right here inside of the Control
panel. The kerning is actually controlled by this
setting right here where it says AV. And I am going to click on this little pop
up here and choose Optical. This is basically an automatic setting where
Illustrator will go in and automatically distribute all the spaces between
the characters so that they are somewhat similar from an
optical perspective. However, I still may want to make small adjustments.
For example right here the P and the e have a little bit of an extra
space between them. And I might want to adjust that manually.
So to do that I am going to switch now back to my Type tool.
And I am going to click so that my cursor now appears blinking right in between
the letters P and e. I am going to press and hold down the Option key on my
keyboard or Alt on Windows. And at the same time, I am also going to tap
the left arrow. And notice that when I do that, it moved the
e, t, a and l or basically anything after that cursor, kind of nudged
it to the left. So now, I have less space that appears between
the P and the e, and I am much happier with that result.
Even though I wanted the Hansel&Petal to kind of read as one whole word, I do
want add just a little bit more space around the ampersand.
Now I didn't want full spaces. But what I could do is use kerning to just
add a little bit extra space here. So I am going to move my cursor right here
between these two characters. Hold down my Option key but now hit the right
arrow once or maybe even twice. Then I move my cursor right about over here,
click, and then Option+Right Arrow about once right there.
And now I have the extra space that I need on either side of that ampersand.
Getting the kerning right is really important when setting text for logos.
The main reason why is because you want logos to be easily recognizable and readable.
So you want to make sure that just at a quick glance you can easily read and
understand what that word is. Now to make this logo fit just a little bit
more nicely together with this flower, let's change the color of the text.
I'll switch to my regular Selection tool. Notice that right now the text object is automatically
selected. And since I am using the theme here of green
colors, I am going to use just little bit of a darker green for this text.
For that added touch I am also going to use a lighter color just for
the ampersand itself. I could switch back to the Type tool to just
select that one character. But here is a great shortcut.
Since I have my Selection tool currently active and I know that I want to go
ahead and make a text selection inside of that text object,
I can just double click on the text object and Illustrator will automatically
switch me from the Selection tool to the Type tool.
I can now click and drag to highlight just the ampersand itself and change its
color by choosing a different color in the Swatches panel.
So at this point I could switch back now to the regular Selection tool, deselect this,
and I'll zoom out just a little bit here and reposition my artboard a little
bit so I can assemble and position the final logo.
I am going to press Command+A or Ctrl+A just to select everything and position
them so they all fit now inside the page itself. I'll click on a blank area to deselect.
And we haven't learned about groups yet. But since I want to make it easy to go ahead
now and select these different elements at any one time,
I'm going to click and drag to marquee select all of the elements now inside
of the flower itself. I am going to go to the Object menu
and I am going to choose Group. This now gets treated as if it were one object
whenever I select it, which makes it easier to move it around.
Since the text is really one text object, it kind of acts as a group anyway.
And I'm simply going to reposition this text now.
Just about right over here where I want it to fall right about where the flower is.
I'll then press Command+A to select all the elements right here, basically the
group and the text object. And I want to group these two together as
well. I am going to press Command+G or Ctrl+G to
basically create a group using the keyboard shortcut, instead of the menu command.
And now I have completed my logo. I now have a single group that is made of
a beautiful flower and some text. Remember to create that flower we started
off by just creating some simple circles. We used the Shape Builder tool to both simultaneously
color and combine those elements together in a way that we wanted
to and then we simply added some text, put it in to position, and we are left
with a beautiful logo that we can now use for artwork.
We are almost done here we just want to go ahead now and save this logo, so that
we can easily use it. To do so, let's go to the File menu here.
Let's choose Save. I am going to choose to place this on my desktop
over here. And I am going to make sure that where it
says Format I have my file saved as the Adobe Illustrator or native file format.
I'm going to give it a name. I am going to call it Hansel_petal_logo.
And I am going to click on the Save button, which brings up the
Illustrator Options dialog box. We are going to go through these options later
on in our title. But for now I just want to make sure that
I am saving this as a native Illustrator CS5 version, which it says right
here. And I am going to click OK using the Default
settings. At this point my logo was ready to be used
just about anywhere. I could take this logo and I'll place it into
InDesign into a layout. I could bring it to Photoshop.
I could send it to Flash if I want to use it for a web design.
And I can even bring it into Premiere Pro or After Effects if I'm working on a video
project. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why
many people choose to create their logos here inside of Illustrator.
Because once you create it here you can use that logo virtually anywhere else.