Transcript:
Hey, guys, what’s going on? Its mule, Parson. And welcome back to new video today. I’m going to be showing you how to use the box method to professionally. Vectorize your logo type design. This video is brought to you by a logo design net so here. We have a logo in the middle of our screen. This is something that I did for some hand lettering. Maybe a typeface design. Now you can see. This looks pretty professionally. Done, it’s very clean and it’s very vectored. You can see that if I go through the direct selection tool, I’ve got some anchor points on there And a lot of these anchor points are placed in certain ways you can tell that with this. It’s all horizontal and vertical aside from these little points in the left and right, you can see how all the anchor points are pretty symmetrical and in unison. Which makes you think well? How do they do that? How do they know where to put these anchor points well? I’m gonna be showing you how to do that today. Very easily, so what? I’m going to do is really choose any document over here. I’ve got my new document panel and I’m going for a four doesn’t really matter where you go, but I like a four as a starting point. I want to take my image that I’ve imported into this one and bring it over here now. This image, all I’ve done is drop the opacity down. You can see it’s a drawn image that I did in procreate, so it makes it a bit easier to scan it in, but don’t worry. If you don’t have a scanner, just take a picture off your drawing or your type. Make sure it’s pretty clean that you can tell. The outlines of it generally. And you’ve got some guides on there. That’ll helped you. You want the better? The drawing the better? The outcome of this small were first going to do is. We’re gonna have this in the center of our screen, so just highlight your image, You know, go ahead and align it, and then we want to go to a layer function over here. I’m just gonna bring it in now. This layer here. I want it to be called template so double click on that and just type in template. And we’ve got that there, but then I’m going to create another layer just here, and it’s basically a group of layers. Really, I’m gonna cause a vector now with this lit here. Selected, change this to about 10% opacity. We don’t want it to be like showing too much. We want to see where we’re putting our dots and our lines. Then all you have to do is unlock this template layer and forget about it completely. Now before we get into actually showing you how to do it. I want to show you the theory behind the box method. So if you don’t know the theory behind the pencil and very to artwork is that you’ve got basically paths. These paths called Bezier paths and you can see here if I just highlight them, We’ve got these weird anchor points that I manipulated, and you can manipulate them all the way down. You can mess them around like this. You can do whatever you need to do here if I was to pull this down. You can see where the curve is going to go there. If I move this up, you can see if this is going to come up and act all strange. And if I move this, it’s gonna act strange, very go to outline mode you can see. I’ve got this circle around here. If I draw a square. It’s the same thing we’ve got anchor points, but we don’t have any sort of that handles like we do over here. The basis of vector form is that these handles and anchor points are basically the borders around the shape and this is how it can mathematically scale up and down because these are the paths that you create. Now as you can see when I drew a circle, illustrator went ahead and basically made a shape for me with anchor points and the handles and it’s done it perfectly. You can see. We’ve got one two three four anchor points at the top bottom left and right, and if I was to draw a box around this as you can see here. There is a box, a bounding box wherever the box hits the circle. That is the most extreme part of the line going around, so that means that that’s where an anchor point is going to be. You can also see that these handles here. If I zoom in these handles are uniform all the way around, they look kind of similar all the way around because it’s creating the same. Bend all the way around now. The goal of Anchor Point Placement and Pen tooling. If you were to call it, Pen Tooling is to have correct anchor point placement using this method because this is the way that it’s designed to be to create shapes with this square. Here you can see, there’s no handles because all we have to do is use our pen tool and just drag like this and it would create lines, But if I go ahead and I basically make this into a circle, you’ll see. I’ve got two handles here that come out and it makes it into a curved line so you might be thinking. Well, what’s going on why you showing as this? Well, it’s a good reason for it, so we wanted to go ahead and design this or to vectorize this here. We got to use a circle if we wanted to. We could just go ahead and use circle and manipulate it like this for the case of this video. I’m going to show you. All you really need to do is create a guide, so go ahead and change your filter a stroke and then we’re going to create a guide or box around this and it’s going to create a box then. I’m gonna reduce the stroke size to about 0.25 points. And all we want to do is just manipulate this, so we draw a box around the shape like this so soon as it hits the shape. You stop like this like that so now. We know that these going to be anchor points outside of here. We know exactly where they’re going to be place. They’re going to be placed there there there and there, but what are the inside? Well, we just repeat the process so all. I do is go ahead, highlight this square command, C or Control C and then command F and now pace. It we’re just going to go inside. You can see there where it’s hitting at the bottom here hits that shape. Let go, it hits that shape. Let go hits this. Let’s go and then it’s there. We have there all the anchor points that we need eight anchor points in total. So right now! What we’ll do is highlight both of these and you can press come on five, and this will create guides that you can switch on or off like so so all we need to do now really is place the anchor points and pull the handles in a uniform way, and it sounds really simple, but it’s hard to master, but you have to practice this over and over again. I used something called inqscribe. Instead of the pen tool reason being scribes easier, it’s a plug-in from astute graphics that makes it easier to use the pen tool, but it’s exactly the same. So if you have the pencil, you can just use that so all we’re going to do is. I’m going to go ahead to my pen tool. You can see it here. I’m going to turn on Smart Guides, Command U or going up to view and smart guides. And then I’m gonna go to the top of the shape here, and I’m just gonna create an anchor point and what I’m going to do is make sure that that line that I’m drawing and with a hold shift and you can see here where I handles are going. I’m gonna hold shift because if I don’t hold shift, this solve can go anywhere and we want it to go this way. A horizontal. We don’t want it to go vertical. We don’t want it to go over to the right of the 90-degree angle. Why don’t you horizontal and exactly horizontal? So we’re gonna create that? Let go you can see here. We’ve got this rubber band going on. We just do the same. We’re gonna go all the way around, depending on which way you went and go here. I’m gonna do this. Let go same over here. Do this let go over here? Do this let go and then over here now? You can see that it’s not the shape that we want. It looks kind of like a weird egg. So what we need to do is go ahead and basically mess around with these handles. Keep them uniform until it fits the shape. There’s a really good system of making sure that you keep your handles great as well and the way that I do, it is by making sure that this handle here does not intersect this line here at the top, and this one doesn’t incite this line here, so all you need to do is basically hold shift, We’re going to drag and make sure that these two handles are coming out relatively the same amount. We don’t want one to hold more of the other, so we’re just going to do that. We’re gonna work our way over here to this line here, and you can see that leads to your handles in this section Here are creating this curve. We want it to use both our handles, and we want it to be as far from the anchor point as the other one that looks pretty good to me, and we can test this by just going ahead and going to outline mode. Turn off guides and we can see there. We’ve got a pretty good circle going on there and it’s only done with four anchor points now. With the next one, we can go ahead and just do the same thing. I’m just going to do a really quick. I’m just going to plot where the anchor points are going to go like. So this is a very strange way of doing it, but it is possible, and you see that it doesn’t really work, so we need to go straight in. We need to go in and mess with these handles one by one. So I want this one and this one. I’m only focusing on this curve right now. Using these steel handles, there should be a horizontal vertical one. Then I’m gonna result to this one here and see what we get giving and taking and giving and taking that looks pretty good to me. You can see up here. We’ve got an issue, we can see that one of the handles here have come too far outwards and it’s intersected. So we bring this out and back this up a bit. Rubens, out a bit. You can see here. This one’s come out too far. You can go right in and get into a good detail here and the same thing has happened down here. Move this back in this back out now. We’ve got a pretty good anchor point placement now with circles and stuff. And if you want them to be real, and if you want them to actually work perfectly, you don’t have to do that. All you really have to do is go ahead and create a circle and manipulate it around, so we just have to basically to go ahead and manipulate it like, so let’s create the outline and turn our smart guides, and they won’t be perfectly something. Use a pen tool or it might be too perfect. What we need to do is we should do this. Rotate this next. One make it smaller and then. I’m just going to go ahead and mess around with it until we get it perfectly in line and it takes a bit of practice, but this is the probably the easiest letter to do to show you, and as you see, even though we’ve done it with just the shapes, it uses the same math as we did last time, it uses the same points and I knew exactly where they’re going to go because of the box method, so we do now is basically just highlight this. There’s both these shapes, go ahead and press shift in X, and you’ll see that this hasn’t been cut out, so we need to cut out by pressing shift and M cut this out with the shape builder tool like so, and they you got your perfect sort of. Oh, right there now. The next step is basically to carry on this process all the way through and refine it later. So I’ve one even better way of doing this. The most, which is very quick. I’m just going to do the box method here. Go ahead and put this down 2.25 I’m gonna boxes around, So I know exactly what I’m gonna go with. The lines do it again. I’m just going to copy it down, and sometimes you won’t know exactly where the lines are, but you can use common sense to work it out there, then go around the shape and it doesn’t really matter about the handles. Just get there Anchor points placed where they’re supposed to be if you get that, correct? [MUSIC] You’ll be okay and see here. This is where it gets a bit hard, so I’m just going ahead up here and moving this over there and we’ve got a place here, so I’m going to go for a long one here. Now that we’ve got the anchor point spaced. We can go ahead and move the handles where we need to be. So this is to come down further and this needs to come over here. Now as you can see. We’ve got a bit of an issue. This isn’t follow the exact line. You can leave that or you can go ahead and make it even better up here. We’ve got a bit of an issue as well. Just gonna go ahead and take this move it and you can move these lines pretty quickly and easily all the way through your document. You don’t have to worry too much about them. We want to make sure we’re going to even spread and that nothing looks too strange and having the anchor point placement is great and it great starting basis because it makes your text so much more editable during the whole process. So that is a quick rundown using the pen tool all across illustrator for your logo type design. This video was brought to you by at logo design dotnet now. I’ve teamed up with logo design dotnet to bring you. Some amazing tutorials, and as part of those tutorials have actually written up a blog post about each tutorial that I have created so you can get even more in-depth insight and education from these logo design. I have so many resources for graphic designers and especially logo designers or aspiring logo designers, so if you’d like to see this tutorial in a written format with a few more hidden tips and tricks, then click the link down below in the description and make sure you share it with your friends. If you guys like this video, please press that red subscribe button and press the little bell next to it, which turns on all post notifications. So that whenever I upload a video like this, you can get it straight to your inbox or to your phone and it will notify you. Thank you so much for watching. It means the world to me. If you did enjoy it, press that like button. If you did enjoy it. Press the dislike button twice and Ill. Catch you guys in the next video soon. Goodbye [Music]!