What you’re going to read in the following pages is probably what some designers do not want you to know, because designing for some designers today is more of knowing what to do than having the innate qualities of a designer.
Here’s what you are going to learn:
If we look at the well-known online brands, we can observe two categories of logos: those that are made with a special font and those that are made with a special font and a shape in front of them.
The shape can be used for many purposes and one of them is to make the name, the service, or the website content more expressive.
Here are some examples:
The question that needs to be answered now is how would you like your logo to look? Do you want it to be with or without a shape?
For illustration purposes, let’s make a logo for a virtual website called “Smarthousefuture“.
The goal of the website is to sell devices that turn an ordinary house into a smart house.
Also, let’s make a logo with a name and a shape that has meaning.
Something like a gable on top of it.
Here is a list of the tools needed:
To make use of custom shapes, they must be installed into Photoshop as follows:
1. Open Photoshop. On the left side, click with your right mouse on the square shape and select Custom Shape Tool.
2. On the top, next to Shape, open the Custom Shape Picker.
3. Click on the wheel, then Load Shapes.
4. Search where you downloaded the file, select it, and click Load.
Custom shapes have been successfully installed.
Using the newly installed custom shapes, let’s draw a house, then edit it so to keep the roof only.
1. Open Photoshop
2. On the top left, click File and then New.
3. In the new window, set the width to 700 and the height to 350, then click OK.
4. On the left side, click Custom Shape Tool, then on the top open the Custom Shape Picker, and find a shape that represents a house, and select it.
5. In the top, next to Fill, choose any color other than white.
6. To draw the shape, just click on shift + left button of your mouse, the more you drag the mouse, the more the shape gets bigger. Here’s the result.
7. Now it’s time to delete everything except the roof. To do this, be sure that the layer of the created shape is selected.
8. On the left side, with the right button of your mouse, click on Lasso Tool and select Polygonal Lasso Tool.
9. With Polygonal Lasso Tool select the house, except the roof just like in the picture below:
10. On your keyboard, Click Del to delete the selected part.
We have successfully edited the custom shape, the next step is to write the name of the website and adjust it under the roof.
1. On the left side, click on Horizontal Type Tool, then on the top, select the font and its size.
2. Click on the white space under the roof and then type the name of the website.
3. You can also adjust the website name or the roof by clicking on them and displacing them with your mouse.
With gradient, colors will look great, here is how to do it in Photoshop.
On the right side, double-click the layer of the roof.
2. A new window will appear, activate Gradient Overlay, and click on the color next to Gradient. A new window will appear, select the third Preset and pick two varieties of the same color. The varieties should be very close to each other. See the following picture.
As you can see, I’ve chosen the Blue Ocean.
The color on the left side looks a little bit darker than that in the right side.
In this tutorial, I decided to use only one color for both the shape and the font.
Here’s the final result:
One of the characteristics of a professional logo is that it can fit any website’s background,
i.e. if the website’s background is gray, the logo’s background will be gray, if it is black, the logo’s background will be black, etc.
To do this, you should delete your logo’s background and save the file as a .png extension.
1. On the right side, with the right button of your mouse, click on the layer of the background, then with the left button, click on Delete Layer.
2. Click on File then Save.
3. Next to File Name type the name of your logo, in the drop-down next to Format, select PNG and click Save.
The logo is now ready to be used!
You can now save many copies for many purposes with different sizes: for your website, Facebook profile, Twitter profile, etc.
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