Vintage Logo Tutorial for Adobe Illustrator
blooomuser 0 Comments Illustrator
Hello everyone, this is Chris from Spoon Graphics back with another video tutorial. I missed an upload recently because we’ve been away on a two and a half week long road trip in Canada where we visited my wife’s Auntie, Uncle and cousins throughout a 1600 mile drive from Vancouver to Kelowna, Revelstoke, Banff, Jasper, Edmonton and Calgary. So now I’m back I thought I’d use that fresh inspiration to create something cool to show you in this new tutorial. What we’re going to build today is a vintage style badge design. Mine is going to have a Canada theme, but no doubt you’ve seen these kinds of logos and emblems scattered across inspiration galleries. With this example we’re going to use some ready-made graphics from my Wilderness Logo Survival Kit, which you can pick up for free from my website. That will allow me to focus mostly on the typographic aspect in this tutorial, where we’ll use a mix of type based tools in Adobe Illustrator to construct the layout.
So begin by opening up Illustrator and create a new document. I’m using a generic landscape A4 layout, but the document size doesn’t really matter at all with vector art because you can resize it later anyway. I like to go to View > Hide Artboards to give myself a nice large area to work with. Select the Type tool and write out the main wording of your logo, which is my case is Canada. I’m going to be using the font Smoothy in this tutorial. It is a premium typeface by my buddy Ian Barnard from Vintage Design Co, but it’s a really awesome combo of a mono weight cursive script and a simple sans serif. It’s perfect for creating logos like this so I’ll leave a link in the description if you fancy grabbing it yourself. Hold the Alt key, then drag a copy of the text and change the wording for any further text elements. I’m adding Road Trip as part of the main title, but positioned slightly smaller underneath. This Smoothy Sans font only comes in one weight. I’d prefer something a little bolder for this design, so I’m going to fake it by adding a stroke.
Usually this wouldn’t work for normal typefaces, but you can get away with it for this kind of single-weight linework. Use 2pt for this larger word, adding the round cap and round corner options. Select the other text element and add the same black stroke in the toolbar. Since this text is slightly smaller, add just a 1pt stroke to beef it up a little. Select the main word from the logo and go to Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Warp. Change the Style dropdown to Rise and adjust the bend amount to 30%. Add the same Envelope Distort effect to the other wording, then make any necessary alignment adjustments until you’re happy with the layout.
Use the Type tool to add the year 2016 to the design (or whatever the current year is if you’re watching this from the future!). Use the Sans-Serif version of the Smoothy font for this text element. Increase the tracking to 200, then scale the text roughly into place. Go to Object > Transform > Shear, then check the Vertical option. Turn on the Preview, then adjust the angle until the baseline of the text matches the rise effect of the other typography. Nudge and position the text neatly into place within the layout. Next, download and open my Wilderness Logo Survival Kit. We’re going to make use of some of the ready-made graphics to quickly decorate the design.
Select the first of the logo templates and Ungroup the pieces. Copy the mountain graphic with the light rays into the main document. Scale it up, then rotate it slightly to match the angle of the artwork. Position it to sit above the wording. Switch back to the Wilderness Logo Survival Kit and copy the bear graphic. Paste it into the logo document then scale and position it within the design. Next we’re going to take a look at another typographic technique that works perfectly for these kinds of designs. Select the Ellipse tool and draw a circle over the design, holding the Alt key to enlarge it from the centre, and the Shift key to keep it circular. Clear out any fill or stroke so it’s invisible. Click and hold the Type tool within the toolbar to access the Type on a Path option. Click anywhere on the outline of the circle to begin writing out a tagline that follows the circumference of the circle. I’m using the words “A journey through the beautiful Canadian Rocky Mountains”. I was originally going to use the words Canadian Rockies, which is what they’re usually referred to, but as you’ll see in the next step, I wanted to keep the word ‘beautiful’ central within the design.
Grab the Direct Selection tool then move the tiny markers around the circle to adjust the text layout. There’s a brackets for the start and end points, then one that moves the whole text around the path. Watch out for the red icon that tries to extend the overflow text, I always accidentally select that one! Adjust the text so it sits inside the circle. Change the tracking to 75, then change the text size so it fills the lower portion, leaving a little space before it overlaps the other text. Highlight a keyword within the tagline, which in my case is the word Beautiful. Change the font to Smoothy Cursive, then increase the size and reset the tracking. Add a 1pt stroke to beef up this section of text. Make any final alignment tweaks to the Type on a Path brackets to centralise the wording. It might be necessary to move or alter the size of the actual circle to fit all the elements together in the layout. If you need to change the size of the wording, don’t forget to go back and adjust the sizing of the keyword afterwards because it will be overwritten by the size used for the rest of the text.
Some of the other final adjustments I made to my design was to align each end of the mountain range with the invisible Type on a Path circle, then to nudge any elements to visually centre them up. Draw a selection around all the objects that make up the logo, then hold the Alt key and drag them to one save to make a copy. With the originals still selected, go to Object > Expand. Select any text elements that had a stroke applied and go to Object > Expand again, followed by a click of the Unite option from the Pathfinder panel. Those strokes don’t get expanded the first time, so this step manually converts them into shapes, them blends them into a single outline for each text element.
All vintage themed designs need some distressing to finish them off, so let’s rough up the edges and add some nice texturing. Hold the Alt and Shift keys and scale up the design a little. This makes the next step a bit easier so you don’t have to work with super tiny decimal numbers. Selecting one element at a time, go to Effect > Distort and Transform > Roughen. Change the options to Absolute and Smooth, then use the Preview to find a value to adds just a subtle amount of edge distortion. For my main text I used 0.55mm, which will differ depending on the scale of your design, and what units of measurement your document happens to be set to. It’s sometimes easier to enter a pixel value for these tiny figures.
Smaller text elements soon become illegible with too much roughening, so use a lower value for those other objects. You can go back and adjust the amount of roughening for any element by clicking the Roughen effect in the Appearance panel. To add some texturing to the design and give it the popular aged and weathered look, download a texture file, such as my free high resolution grain textures. A link to this pack is down in the description area.
Open one of the PNG textures with a nice even but heavy sprinkling of graininess into Illustrator, then go to Edit and Copy. Back in the main document, draw a selection around all the artwork and go to Object > Group. Under the Transparency panel, click the Make Mask button. Click the empty box on the right to enter into mask mode, then paste in the texture and scale it down in size. Don’t forget to click the box on the left within the Transparency panel to exit back out of mask mode. This texturing mask adds some nice effects to the artwork, but remember it isn’t vector so it won’t scale.
You can always vectorize the texture by clicking the Image Trace button. This will give you full scalability but it can bog your computer down a bit with all those fine speckles. Expanding the artwork again will permanently apply the texture and make it less CPU intensive if you’re happy with your final result and want the texturing to be an integral part of your design.\
As found on Youtube
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