Choosing a style - Illustrator Tutorial

- [Instructor] When approaching any creative project, be it a logo, an illustration, or in the context of this movie, creating a hand lettered design, you need to pick a style appropriate for the giving client or their audience. So let's take a look at how you can approach various styles in various ways to go about creating hand lettering in Adobe Illustrator. Now, all the logos that you see here on screen were all hand lettering projects. The top left was a street vibe, vinyl toy line that was produced in Hong Kong, and they wanted it because it was street oriented type of artwork. And the figurines, they wanted it to be styled like graffiti. So that's what Street Value was for. The top middle was a personal project. This was a sticker I created based off of a skull and it's just something funny. Don't be a bone ahead. The top right was an exploration for a brand identity for a Cincinnati radio station, and I did hand lettering there as well. The middle left, Meewok, was a toy product, and this was the logo type that was molded into the toy which you stood on, you kind of wobbled back and forth. I was never good at it. My daughters were. Soci Circle was a social media platform for kids, developed by a Microsoft engineer, and I created that. And then the middle right, that's for Jenna, Louisiana. They were rebranding the small town named Jenna, and that was an exploration for that identity project. The bottom left, the product at the time I worked on it, was called The 50/50 Burger. It was half plant, half protein. And I did most of the lettering in here, was hand lettering, the and 50/50, burger wasn't. The bottom middle was for a friend of mine, Lisa and her husband. They would put on these corporate treasure adventures for different teams at different companies and they would design these maps, and they'd have to go, as a team, go find the treasure. It was kind of cool. So she called her business Street Level Adventures, and this was the hand letter design I created for her logo. And the bottom right, Deluxe, is a company here in Oregon where I live. They've been a client of mine for about 10 years now. And that was a custom logo type I created to represent their business. Now when you're creating, it's obviously hand lettering. So you'll start off with a sketch of whatever it is. And when I'm in Illustrator, I'll scan it in. And once again, as I discussed in previous movie I use a flatbed scanner to scan in my drawing, and then I save it out as a TIFF image, place it in the illustrator like this. I usually go to the transparency palette and I'll adjust the transparency to about 15%. And then I'll just go ahead and lock the layer. And then on a layer above it I'm going to create my artwork in vector shapes. Now, everything I'm showing in this movie I'm going to exhaustively go over in upcoming movies to show you the principles of building these letter forms this way, as well as on the iPad Pro, because this is the way I would do it if I wanted everything to be built precisely within Adobe Illustrator using the pen tool. I'd create all my base shapes. So ultimately, the final AI built artwork would end up looking like this. And I think this would be a fun one to create like a tin sign that a designer could put up in their workshop or studio. Now that said, you've seen the tools I showcased in previous movie, and one of those tools is the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. And you might use a program like Adobe Fresco to do vector drawing on the iPad Pro that is. And that's how I did the same type of concept, artsy fartsy. But all of this was inked on the iPad Pro using Adobe Fresco. And we're going to cover that exhaustively in an upcoming movie. But you can see I purposely made all these letter forms different styles because there's a lot of different styles you can do. And as you start developing your own skills on hand lettering, you're going to actually develop your own style. You're going to find a way that you'd like to shape and form things, and that's the fun part about it. So just keep drawing, don't get frustrated. One great way to practice this and to force yourself to think differently is to focus on a letter form. So here's a letter form R. And I force myself to draw out in this case 12 different iterations of the letter R. You know, I started with one that first came to mind which is kind of like this. Then I decided to do a lower case. Then, what if I handled it more graphically and just filled shapes or cursive or hand letter or like a rope per se, or I simplify it? What can I remove and still have it read as a letter R? So force yourself to experiment. That's the best way to discover how to handle letter forms and shape 'em for whatever motif you're creating. Whether you want to do it on an iPad Pro or whether you want to keep it all in Adobe Illustrator. That's just your preference. So neither of those are better than one another. It's all about what you prefer and how you prefer to work. Now, if you look at all six of these designs, these are again, all hand lettering projects I've worked on, only one of these was drawn on the iPad Pro. Can you guess which one it is? Well, I'm going to tell you, it's the top left, Plaster Lungs. That was actually for a garage band which kind of fits the garage band name, and it was their name that inspired me to even try this. But a very globular format in terms of the lettering. And I drew that on my iPad using Adobe Fresco. Everything else I drew by hand, scanned it in, built it precisely in Illustrator. We're going to go over all of those principles in upcoming movies, but this is the type of work that you can create when you need to. And you have a project or a client that needs, let's say, a very unique logo type, then you can handle it with hand lettering. Picking a style is a decision that will drive the direction of an entire creative project. So give it serious consideration and figure out what styles would best resonate with your client, their brand, their product, their service or the audience they're trying to reach.