Illustrator: Recreating Logos

Today we continued to work with illustrator. Since we were looking at logos, we practiced tracing/recreating well known logos.  

The first logo we recreated was the Google logo. This started with circles like the Ziggy Stardust cover art, using the "Pathfinder" tools to create an "O" shape. Next, guidelines (from the rulers) were used to find the middle of the logo. Along the vertical line, I created a rectangle the same width as the "O" by lining it up with where the guide went through vertically. I then moved the rectangle to the middle and made sure that on the right side it overlapped the "O". After moving the guides away, I selected everything else and used "Divide" (from the "Pathfinder" tools) this made divisions where the shapes overlapped. I could then remove the part of the rectangle that was outside the "O". I then rotated the guidelines using the "Rotate" tool and used "Divide" again. After removing the piece above the rectangle I was left with the "G" shape, I could then fill in the colours. 

The Google logo is very recognisable, which is a feature that makes a good logo. Also, by making the logo using a vector programme like illustrator, it can be scaled up and down without compromising quality. 

(Recreation of Google Logo, Google Logo )

After recreating the Google logo we then went on to recreate the Nike logo. This logo some unique shapes so required different techniques. For the tick, the process was just tracing the shape with the pen tool. For the text all the letters are slanted, one way you could do this is by tracing with the pen tool and then copy and pasting the slanted rectangle shape; but when I tried doing this the shapes were a bit uneven. Therefore, instead I created a rectangle and changed the slant in properties, I then copy and pasted this shape and created the other shapes that were needed. I was then left with the black logo in the image below. After this, I experimented with the logo creating two alternate compositions, by changing colours and opacity.

(Recreation of Nike Logo, Nike Logo )