FINAL FILE PREPARATION
PART 04 - HOW TO CREATE AN ORNATE LOGO DESIGN
This tutorial is a little follow up on our logo creation from Part 1-3. We've already designed a nice ornate vintage logo, but at the moment our design is a mix of strokes, shapes and clipping masks. In some cases the design may be ready to use, but for a final file that you can send to a client you need some extra work to rasterize the logo completely.
!!Please, before you start following these steps make a copy of your files, because this is going to be very hard to revert!!
So first of all we delete all things we don't need, so that we only have the logo on one layer and our background layer (if you have worked with a background color at all). When you hide the BG layer you can see that you still have some black lines within the design. You won't need these so let's remove it.
Select the whole design and go to Type –> Create Outlines (Shift+Command+O). This rasterizes our text fields. It also means that the text won't be editable anymore. This process is necessary for example if you are transmitting files to a client and the client does not have a license for the fonts used in your design.
Before you continue with the next step make sure that your design is only using the colors you prepared previously.
Now concentrate on the following, this is one of the most important steps! We select the whole logo again and choose Object –> Expand Appearance. Then, do the same again, but choose 'Expand' and press OK. Now every part of our logo is converted to paths.
Then, use the Pathfinder Tool again by clicking on 'Divide'. This action splits all shapes into pieces.
Next, select the white color in your color swatch window (top left). Choose Select –> Same –> Fill Color. This process selects all white parts of the logo. Go to Pathfinder and choose 'Unite' to connect them together.
We do the same thing with the golden color. Select –> Same –> Fill Color and then Pathfinder –> Unite.
Select the full design and right-click –> Ungroup (Shift+Command+G). Now, click on a white part of the logo, hold shift and click on a golden part. Then, cut it out by choosing Edit –> Cut (Command+X). If everything worked right you should only see remains of some parts like in the second picture.
Now, select everything (you can see there are some transparent shapes and lines as well, like in the first picture) and completely delete it. Then choose Edit –> Paste in Place (Shift+Command+V), this brings our logo back again ;)
We create two layers, one for the golden color and one for the white color. Cut it (Command+X) and Paste in Place (Shift+Command+V) the parts on the corresponding layer.
When we enable the black background again we can see that now there are only two parts of our logo left – gold and white.
Ok, but you may ask yourself 'Why is all this necessary?'. So there are two reasons:
1. We worked with strokes and contours. We had to expand these into shapes to make our logo scalable. If you scale a shape with stroke wight 10pt for example, it won't increase the stroke weight proportionally. Therefore we have to make sure our final file only contains shapes and no strokes.
2. To make the logo versatile usable it makes sense to reduce the number of paths and especially the number of colors. For example if you forward the design to a letterpress studio this can simply create two printing plates (in our case one for gold and one for white) to print our logo.
Here is another quick tip for you how to avoid gaps between contours:
When we zoom in on an area where two shapes are directly next to each other like in this case here, it is often helpful to ensure there are no tiny gaps between the lines. This could cause inaccurate results when printing. So here is a quick trick how to avoid this.
Here I switch the gold layer transparent to better show you the process here. Select the white part of your logo and give it an outline, so that it overlaps the golden shape like you can see in picture 01. In the Stroke window choose 'Round Cap' and 'Round Join'. Now, do the Expand process again (Object –> Expand –> OK). Then connect the outline and shape with the Pathfinder –> Unite.
Like you can see here the two shapes are overlapping now and you don't have to worry about any unwanted gaps when printing ;)
Finally we select both parts (gold & white) and group them together (Command+G). Now we have a solid two color logo, scalable and ready to use :)
I've uploaded another follow-up with an introduction to colors and exporting files here: Part 05.
And if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave a message below :)
Check the other parts of this tutorial here:
PART 01 - ORNATE LOGO DESIGN, GETTING STARTED
PART 02 - ORNATE LOGO DESIGN, ADDING ORNAMENTS
PART 03 - ORNATE LOGO DESIGN, FINE TUNING
PART 04 - ORNATE LOGO DESIGN, FINAL FILE PREPARATION
PART 05 - ORNATE LOGO DESIGN, COLORS AND EXPORTING FILES
1 comment
Excellent…Thank you for filling a void in the font/clipart market. Absolutely love your style and quality. Quality at a fair price and reasonable terms. As an old Sign Painter, at 73 and still going I really enjoy early advertising art and the letterforms of the past. We used to call the different styles of letters ‘alphabets’ and you had to learn how to draw them correctly before you could do a decent job of painting them, (which in itself was something that required a long learning process. Fast forward to the computer age and a new ball game. At first we…(my son and I), resisted as did many in the business. Long story short, we have fully embraced the technology and truly enjoy the best of both worlds. So keep up the good work. I’ve purchased a couple of your packages so far and intend to buy and use more. Next on my list is the Milkman pack. Sincerely, Mike Szczoczarz aka Mike Z Countryside Signs