Creating Your Own Logo Suzy Ultman Audio Transcript Hi this is Suzy Ultman and I m here today to do a tutorial on creating your own logo. I want to start by showing you one of my favourite little pieces that hangs on my bolts- on board. It s a quote by Karl Jung and it says that creative minds are rarely tidy. And the reason I want to start here is because working on a logo is the opposite of tidiness. It is taking all of those thoughts you have running round in here and bringing them into a beautiful simplified little image. And I m hoping what I can do today in this tutorial is make that an easy process for you. Before we begin that process I want to give you a little bit of background to logos. Some of you might know where they began and might have an idea of what a logo mark is. Some of you might not have any idea so I ll just give you a quick background and get us all on the same page. Logos began in the 1900 s when trademarking began in the US with the industrialization of products and then in the 1950 s they began to look like what we know today. And that was under the modern graphic design movement and with heavy hitters like Solbas and Paul Rand and Push Pin Studios and they really brought to life the idea of the modern logo in its simple form and the big message. So I am going to start with Solbas and all of the logos you are going to see now and what I think is really interesting when I look through this work is how we take these logos for granted. We see them all the time, we have grown up with them and we actually forget that they are logos. That they are identities that tell us that this is information, this is an old telephone or TNT and they help us move through our environment. And these designers created a lot of logos that still exist in the same form today with companies as long as those companies hasn t gone under of course. This is one of my favourites probably because it is one of the most illustrative??? He has many logos which have stood the test of time. The final one I want to show which is his Solbas and the reason I wanted to show you his Solbas logo is because it is very different to his corporate work and potentially what you might be thinking about for your own logo. It shows more of his personality than his name but that is a good counterpoint to what he is doing in the corporate work. It still uses the same ideas as the??? logo work.?? And just want to take a brief look at Paul Rand s work who was a contemporary of Solbas. Paul Rand you might know as they have been reprinting a lot of his children s books hopefully you might have some of these in your collection. He did the UPS logo, APC logo, Western House and??? and was so influential in bringing the logo mark to what it is today. So that takes us to talking about the qualities of a logo. The first quality is you want to create something which is really simple. And all of those logos contain that. It is probably a pretty easy 1 P age
concept to understand. You want it to be clean and flexible so that you can use it across all mediums. That is something we will talk about later but something that is really simple. You want it to be really versatile, again so that you can use different mediums across different contexts. You want it to be distinctive and memorable. I want mine to stand out against the crowd as you want yours to stand out against the crowd. If you are going to advertise on a webpage with other illustrators you don t want yours to look like everyone else s. And finally the fourth quality of a logo is that you want it to be timeless. This is kind of a tricky one. Those modernist designers of the 1950 s whose ideas about logos are still used today by graphic designers would say you want your logo to last 10 or 20 years. And while I think this is very important to understand and can still hold true, I think in this day and age with visual ideas and people moving and changing so quickly, our market moves very quickly with the internet and visual ideas move very quickly. Your logo as illustrators might last more like five years then you might want to evolve it. This would not mean changing your logo completely. I wouldn t suggest making huge jumps because your audience will get used to the logo and you won t want to make an extreme jump but you are going to want to evolve your logo. That is surely something that people are starting to do. So we are talking about timelessness so you connect with an audience and they become connected to who you are as an illustrator but I don t think you need to think it will need to last for 10 to 20 years. The next step is going to be creating your logo and to help you with the process I am going to do the process in front of you. So the first step is researching the market. What I m going to ask you to do is to look at logos in the field. Get curious, go look at exi??? banners, check out little instagrams icons, look at business cards, see what catches your eye. You want to see what trends are going on in the illustration field. Do the logos that you re looking at meet the criteria we talked about? Are they simple, are they versatile, are they distinctive? Are there things which feel memorable to you and stick out in the crowd? Other things that are timeless, you know clean that nice sweet spot where they may be timeless but still trendy enough. You know that thing we talked about for us as illustrators where we want them to feel like they are of the time but they are going to last more than a couple of years and hopefully about five years. How are illustrators using time, how are they using image, how are they using time and image? Do the images look professional, do they look handmade? That is something I want you to be very conscious of. As illustrators it s nice for something to look hand done but you want to make sure it looks professional. The next piece is that you are going to research yourself. You are the client. If you are doing a logo for somebody else they would be the client and you would be asking them these questions or some form of these questions but you are the client so take a look in the mirror and figure out what makes you you. So I will be answering these questions as I am going to be doing the logo. And you are going to get to know a little bit about me. First of all, what is your personality? And I would say that my personality is that I am very organised. I approach my illustration in a very organised way, I like to keep things simple. I am nostalgic so there is definitely a throwback look to my work but I am also very modern and contemporary. I probably dress that way and I react that way in my parenting and with my friends and in my social life. What are my quirks? 2 P age
I like to wake up early and have coffee before I do anything else. I don t know if that s quirky or not but it definitely gets me started. I have a hard time if I don t have coffee. I like to have a soft boiled egg too before I do any work. I need my protein. I don t know how that will affect my logo but you might have quirks that might come in play with your logo, so that is a very good question! I like to have my own coloured pencils and doll, that s quirky with me, I can t have them too sharp or it makes me crazy. And there are certain pens I have to have or I go crazy. What is your creative routine? I do my best work between 9 and noon in the morning. If I have some really hard creative work that I know will really stretch my brain limits I have to do it in the morning and I try and do my easier work in the afternoon. My other creative routines pieces? I like to do any sort of painting work on the weekends or when it is really sunny outside. What mediums do you work in? I work in pen and ink, I work in watercolour, I work in vector, meaning on the computer and that has been coming later for me. This is important for you too to know not just what medium you work in but what your clients are going to be looking for from you as that might dictate what your logo looks like. What sets you apart from the pack? I think it would be my characters. My clients mainly come to me for my characters. I think they know me for that. I also think it s the fact that my stuff looks modern but also has that nostalgic throwback. What colours do you love? I love a really good grey, I love a really mustardy yellow and I do really like pink which is embarrassing for me to say sometimes but there is pink in almost everything I do. I have to be straightforward about that and let the cat out of the bag! What images are you known for? I am known for my girls, I am known for my birds, probably for my sunshines. It doesn t mean everyone comes to me for that but that is what I am known for so I think that is what people look for. When they see Suzi Ultman up here that is what they think of. Who are your clients now? My clients are now are folks that usually are looking for work for girls in the age ranges I d say 12 to 16. That is my sweet spot and where I get most of my work. And who would you like your clients to be? I love that work and it definitely feeds my soul but I ve recently been doing more work for clients like Flow Magazine and its really fun to do work for the more dot clientele. That is where the medium comes into play because I think my logo should be in vector but it would be really fun for me to play with the watercolour and the hand drawn line with my logo but that might have to be for a different 3 P age
clientele. I do think that most of my clients come to me for that really straightforward, clean, geometric, modern, recognised vector work. So the next phase of the project is working on your sketches. And before you start sketching I want to talk to you about the three different types of logos you can work on. The first type of logo would be the strictly font logo. And here we have some examples of font logos. Now in the past way, way back everything was hand lettered because there were no computers. An option would be to typeset it with computer fonts but these are all lovely examples of hand lettering. And this is where I wanted to talk to you about things looking handmade versus professional. These all look extremely professional hand lettered and that is the level at which you want your logo to be if you are going to do something hand lettered. You want to make sure that this is what it is going to look like. We talk about our criteria. They are all simple, they are clean and flexible, they are versatile in terms of working across all medium, they can be big, they can be small. Something we talk about in the final art is that they can work obviously in colour but they need to work in black and white as well. Because your logo is not only going to be used potentially on its own but it could be on a presentation board where you have a big pattern and this is not going to be the main image, it s going to be a secondary image or a tertiary image. If that s the case it s going to be teeny in the corner as black and white or brown and white or, like in Elisa s case, red and white and if that s the case it just needs to be one colour and small so you make sure your logo can read as one colour and very small. So again these would be just font logos. Then the next example would be an illustration logo and here are some examples. These companies have also added in some type which you can do for an illustration logo. So we want to print out?? s logo which I asked her how old the logo was for this project because I thought it was very interesting. I think her logo still looks very contemporary and she said her logo is 15 to 18 years old, she wasn t exactly sure how old it is. Which I think is really incredible because when I look at it today I still think it holds its own. So I just want you to take a good look at those. I think they are all really beautiful examples of illustrations logos. The egg press which is the really simple egg and the nice?? sits in there and the???? too. You know, they look like really simple ideas but it is hard to boil down who you are to one simple image. The final type of logo is an abstract logo and these are kind of the hardest and I don t know if you will necessarily go in this direction. Probably one of the most well known abstract logo would be the Nike??? and I don t even have to hold that up, you can see it in your hand. Now we ve talked about the three types of logo it s time to have some fun and start sketching. What you are looking at is my current logo what I would say in quotes logo. I wouldn t consider it an official logo as it doesn t have all the qualities we discussed. It s not flexible, when you shook it down it doesn t look great, it doesn t work well in black and white. So what I d like to do is evolve it and simplify it. People do identity this as my logo so I don t want to just throw it away completely. So I m going to put this aside and get cracking here. One of the reasons this works so well as my logo is because it s simple, it s very modern looking and organised and I ll start with the girl s face. I talked about earlier about how I m a nostalgic girl and I would say there is a bit of nostalgic in my characters. And something which is really important is that I am well known for my girls. I discussed that before so it s very appropriate that my logo would have one of my girls. So I m breaking down the face into its simplest forms instead of using the whole girl. Let s see what 4 P age
happens when I just break her down and then my initials in her eyeballs. That works well and you can see how this could start to work as a logo. We talked about how your quirks can maybe fit into your logo and I talked about how I was an early bird. If I was doing a different logo I am known for my birds so perhaps I would create a logo that had a bird in it. So for this second sketch, what I am doing is creating a different line with the hairline which makes the logo look a little bit different. It actually simplifies things one step further so again we re playing with the geometry. If you watched my other video about how to create a sunshine that is something I do talk about which is just playing with your geometry to simplify shapes. And instead of giving her the full eyeball shape I m just going to use my initials for the eyeballs. Let s see what it looks like which is quite sweet. So in my mind I must have a logo right there. Very nice, very simple, I can see once it is done in vector that would be quite a good logo. You know we talked about what sets you apart from the pack. For me it s definitely my girls. One of my first projects coming out of the Gate was??? people still see me for those girls. I ve evolved my characters and I still create a lot of other types of projects but people still come back to me for those girls and see me as those girls so this is definitely something which identifies us. So this one is a combination of these two characters. We talked about colours we love, I talked about pink, I definitely can t see these as black and white sketches but for finals there would definitely be some pink in here. Now this one is going way off but I just want to see what it s like if I just do the eyeballs. Because believe it or not that is something I m known for too, the eyeballs as being straightforward. People have asked me about that and it s probably something psychological and how I look at the world in a straightforward way. And that isn t about logo either but I think for me going more along these lines since I am known for the girl characters and potentially maybe two of them depending on this maybe for something that is more of a board and maybe this for something more whimsical, and this for something more for a client maybe I would add my name at the bottom. And then the next step would be the vector piece, seeing how it looks in colour, big and small. And that is how you create a logo. I cannot wait to see yours all over the mats, pages, on your boards. I hope you learned a lot. It s been a pleasure and an honour teaching you guys. So long [End of recording] 5 P age