I'm FIXING your Logos

0:00what is up designer friends i have asked you over on instagram to shoot me your logo so that i can go ahead and try to fix them and teach you something along the way and i've got this logo from my friend leonard who is a photographer so let's check out this logo and see how we can improve it or how i would think about this now i would start off by saying this is not a bad logo right what we're looking for in a logo is something that is simple and memorable and that can set you apart and that is probably appropriate for your business and so he

0:31is this kind of a symbol that also looks like c all right which is kind of classic using the first letter so this is crafted media we're using a c and it looks creative i guess because it's kind of like splashy like two little dots all right it's not bad it looks okay there's two things here that i think can be improved now number one is that this little shape right here is very water droppy right it's circular it's kind of like very organic and the font that we have here working with it is very kind of modern sharp sensor fun if you look at the sea right so this one is

1:11rounded and this one is kind of pretty chopped and you know and very sharp and i think that this combination between this very organic roundy thing and this very kind of like hardcore font um is not working it's it's it kind of it creates kind of a mix that doesn't match so i think i would try to fix that and then also kind of the combination between the typography and the uh and the mark itself i like the idea of the mark i also like the font choice so let's try to see how we can make them fit together better now i so i'm going to copy this here to the side

1:46so that i can start working with it and i'm working in illustrator but you can do this on any software now this gradient when i design logos i always start with black and white just to see that the shapes work we can always add on this gradient thing which is kind of nice i like it but i don't know if we need it so i'm starting to look at this as a black i just want to look at the shapes right so let me try to recreate this shape but actually let's try to recreate it from the c that we've got here going on so i like this c i like that it's sharp

2:21and i would try to recreate the same effect that we have here but with the actual seat so that they would work together so let's see what we have we've got this round kind of like white thing so maybe let's take a circle and let's try to draw some kind of circle just to have the line that goes right here and let me just remove the feel on this and add kind of a white stroke just to mimic how this cut would be and i can check whether i want this to be very thin or thicker maybe something around 1.5 points and i can play around first of all let's

3:03delete this part of the circle because we don't need this but now we can play around and see this shape so it starts looking pretty similar but you can see this is sharper and it looks more in line with this maybe make it a tiny bit thicker maybe 1.7 um play around with move it a little bit so it's not cutting the bottom part of the c too much let's zoom in on this um let's delete here this part here so that it does not cut rc from the top and one thing is that it's not rounding out this area here you can see of the

3:46sea it's cornery we'll have to smooth this thing out but overall i think i think overall this looks good i can play around with this to see if i want and but i think i want the shapes to be balanced so right now the top is bigger than the bottom and if i change this you know like this it makes the bottom higher so now i think the shapes are kind of equal and it looks pretty good so the next step is i want to extend this line which is kind of just like an outline right now so i'm going to go object expand and now we have this actually as a white

4:27shape and now i'm going to subtract that white shape from the c so using the path finder to bam now we can see it's just one shape right i can see the outlines of how this looks now the only thing i want to fix here as i said is this i don't like how this corner i think it's a little bit too uh too sharp and i think we can smooth that let's see what's the point structure here so we've got one point over here and one point over here and also one point over here let's try to remove some some of these points and we can

5:05try to go ahead and make it smoother like this now we have to now if i want it to be super super accurate of course i can you know put a circle or something below just to see that i'm smoothing it out correctly but i think i'm just to eyeball it right now and just try to make it smoother and yeah now i think um still looks a little bit bulgy so maybe maybe i'm going to take this a little bit here um let's see okay so this feels better to me now one thing that you can see here is that the corners are rounded and here my corners are sharp

5:54now again because i i like the sharpness of this thing i think i'm going to keep it sharp so okay now we've got i think i feel like this is a better c than what we had before so these work together but as i said i also think that the composition here doesn't work very well or it can be improved so let's give it a try i'm always note how i'm working illustrator i'm always creating duplicates duplicates so i have breadcrumbs to see my thinking and my process and i can always backtrack or i can always compare multiple options right to see which one i like best

6:29so one thing i would try is let's make this c smaller so that it's aligned so now this is kind of like boxed the top is aligned with this and this this already i think this is better let's try something else maybe let's try something like a centered composition so let's make sure this is grouped and this is grouped and let's center them and maybe make this bigger maybe make these media smaller so now we've got kind of like a nicer higher key this is also not bad i don't know how these media maybe on smaller sizes maybe this media won't be super readable one more thing that i would try is i

7:15would try a composition where maybe the c is in the middle and then we have crafted but i'm not going to do crafted media in light because this is way off balance so let me try to find the font that is i'm not sure what font leonard has used but i guess avenir is pretty close so let's do media that looks pretty close so let's try to make it the same size and let's see how that looks so yeah media is still shorter than crafted so it's still off balanced so this is not really a good option now one more thing i'd try to check is

8:01what happens yeah what happens if i actually use this this c instead of the um instead of the c that we have here so let's see how we just make a word mark out of it so let's say we make this bigger and we make this a little bit smaller so that we can just use it as a c this is way sim more simplified simplified is more i guess so it is simplified a little bit i think this also works it's kind of minimal so maybe but but i actually like word marks where the it's a custom font so maybe if i would go with this maybe i

8:45would add a little bit more cuts to the other letters and then we have some custom font and then maybe really we can do something like this like crafted media like this so this is another option that we have here the last option that i want to test out is how about let's make a duplicate of this how about we box in the the symbol in kind of let's do a square um let's do a square that is aligning to this and put the c inside in white so let's put it out like this now i like this because for two reasons one it's let's just make sure that it's circle

9:41it's first of all it makes everything a little bit more blocked right because it's the top aligned to the top and the bottom aligns to the bottom but also you know this is a media company he is a photographer so here we can actually look at the rectangular as the media maybe the media is the photograph or the social media post or the video or whatever it is we have besides the sea we have the media so let's say it might be like if you're talking about this conceptually this is like the photograph and he captured this special thing in his frame or something like this and i like this conceptually i

10:16also think it makes it stronger i'm gonna make one more experiment or thing here which is let's try to make this a circle so let's try it out this way and try it out with a circle now i definitely think that the rectangular works so much better okay so looking at this and of course by the way just a real world project if i'm doing this for a client i would experiment the same thing i did here i would go tens and perhaps sometimes hundreds of different variations i'll try different font sizes i'll try to you know play around with each of these elements but for the very quick

10:58iteration that we're doing right now i think i'm looking at this versus the original that we have here um looking at these here i definitely think that this version is stronger is more more coherent in the style of the type and the symbol uh the block is stronger and it just feels both more balanced and more bold and powerful so that would be my suggestion to you leonard and if you all want to learn more about my logo process and in general the full process of branding we've got more resources for you below this video so make sure you check them out and i'll see you on the

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