Logo Creation

Our fictitious PC game would normally be created by a games studio. In order to ensure that our DVD inlay and labels are consistent with the industry, they will need to feature the developer's branding. To achieve this we will create a logo, this will be done within Illustrator™ since it is always good practice to have a logo fully resizable and vector imaging produces exactly that.

To begin with we need to create an artboard, this process was covered extensively in DVD Label  Part 2 : The Foundations so will will not dwell on it further, beyond mentioning that we have created this at 200mm square, although any square size would be suitable since we intend to make a fully resizable vector image.

Once presented with the blank image, it would be helpful to have rulers and guides to help us judge proportions. View > Rulers > Show Rulers will display the rulers. And View > Show Grid and View > Snap to Grid will provide a set of even divisions across the workspace, that your cursor and selections will snap to as you approach it them. The grid may not be to your liking initially, the width and height of the divisions can be set in the options, which are found under Edit > Preferences > Guides & Grid. We have decided to change it from the default 1 inch(25.4mm) to 10mm and 2 subdivisions, this will produce a snap point every 5mm. This can be changed at any time, if not suitable for particular parts of the design, or even disabled in the View menu for working on intricate sections.

However before actually proceeding with design, we require a name, since the logo will both feature said name, and contain a graphical part based upon it. The name needs to be memorable, and also something that can be turned into an aesthetically pleasing graphic design. Animal names are always a safe bet since everyone knows them and they are easily identifiable from their pictures. But we want to go much further than a simple animal, so we will combine two of them into a hybrid creature that would not be out of place in mythology. But which creatures? Well actually they are chosen mostly at random for the purposes of this project, simply randomly generating two until we obtain something that sounds decent, of course one could spend a lot of time and money on research to obtain the absolute best. The two we ended up with were spider and leopard, giving the name of Spider Leopard.
Now that we have this name we also know that the graphical part of the design needs to represent this hybrid creature, and wince everyone automatically associates 8 legs with spiders, we will take that feature and obtain and 8 legged leopard type creature.

Now that we have a practical workspace, we can begin on the logo design. The main part of the picture of the logo is done using the Pen Tool. this tool allows to simply draw personalized shapes by clicking point to point, until the multi-point line, or polygon, is complete. Dragging any point instead of clicking allows for curvature instead if straight lines. After some work you can make reasonably complex images, just using this one tool. Soon enough we end up with the following : 
 

Pen Drawn Leopard Outline

Of course this tool can be combined with other tools, such as basic shapes. Also by varying both the base stroke and setting a variable width profile, we can obtain the following :

Pen Drawn Spider Outline

Building on this we can start to enhance the stick-picture, firstly by selecting any enclose area, we can set it's inside colour, or fill. Another option is to set it to a gradient. In the next incremental picture we have used a 3 point radial gradient for the eyes, this is done on the gradient properties screen.Clicking next to a colour slider on the gradient will spawn another one, allowing for the 3rd colour. Opening the Swatch menu we can then drag colours onto these sliders. Then it is a simple case of sliding them until one is happy with the result. To obtain an ovoid shape, the aspect ratio can be changed in this same properties panel. In this example we have chosen 50%. Furthermore it is also possible to select a pattern, many are available in the Swatch Libraries menu, under Swatches. From this panel one can also edit the pattern, in this example we have changed all the coloring on Jaguar pattern to black and white, and thined it out so it's less overwhelming. We obtain something like the following :

Spider-Leopard Hybrid

Now we can concentrate on text, and we will start with simple text spelling out 'SPIDER' in basic Arial. Right-Clicking on it will offer the option to Create Outlines. Thus allowing to edit it directly as if it were drawn with the pen tool. Within the pen tool we can select the sub tools to add anchor point and convert them, to bulge out and curve the ends of the letters. Before long we obtain a personalized font that begins to resemble spider legs, looking organic, with prominent joints.

Bulged Ended Text

On the second word, we want this to also evoke the animal it spells out, and a s such will try to incorporate leopard skin into the font. It is also possible to apply a coloured outline and a pattern to text, something we have done on the next word 'Leopard'. We have also increased the Leading to +200, this increases the spacing between the characters, helping to fill the space between the spider's legs.
The final step is to create a square that cover's the entire artboard, making sure to move it behind all the other items, using the context menu > Arrange > Send to Back. This will be out background for the logo. In this example we have selected a linear gradient from red to blue. Using similar methods to earlier, we then convert the anchor point on the corners of the square, using the Convert Anchor Point under Pen Tool. this results in a bespoke curved edged square.
The end result is the following logo for Spider-Leopard :

Final Logo