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Logos for the Design Challenged, Part XVI

A Breath of Fresh Airia

I had the pleasure of meeting many of you readers, earlier in the month, at the CorelWORLD Conference in Orlando. I hope you weren't too disappointed when you met me. You were probably expecting some young, tall, handsome pup! Well, now you know! I'm almost as old as Peter! It was a fun and productive conference and a taste of things to come. At the bottom of this post you'll find some exciting Boot Camp news. Yes, it's really going to happen!

I received a lot of positive feedback on last month's step-by-step logo article. Well OK, so the feedback was from Foster. It was his logo after all! So, I've decided to do another real-world logo this month. I presented this logo in Florida but did not do a very good job recreating it. So I've reworked the step-by-step portion entirely. Please remember this is somebody's logo and don't copy it, OK?

AIRIA is air coming and going. That's what my client said when he told me about this new company, a division of Flanders Filters, he wanted me to create a logo for. AIRIA makes sophisticated air filtration products. I'll show you some of the runner up logo designs and then do a step-by-step on the final logo.

The Candidates

As you've probably heard a me say thousand times, I like to start with an exploration of type faces and type treatments. It's a good way to begin and it feels as though I'm working even if my brain has not kicked into gear. I wanted to visually communicate the air filtration process, and tried to do this on most of the designs. For this design, I used several weights of ITC Eras, starting with Eras Ultra Bold and ending with Eras Light.

Handel Gothic is a font that lends itself particularly well to customizing. I'm sure the font's designer would be appalled to see the liberties I have taken. I converted the text to curves (Ctrl Q), and then broke the text apart (Ctrl K). I selected the a and combined (Ctrl L) the letter's outline and the counter (the open part of the letter that becomes a separate object when text is broken apart). I repeated this step for the R and the other a. This made the a's and the R look like letters again. From this point on, I had my way with the letters adding pointy things to the a's and R. I reduced the R to the height of the lowercase letters. I shortened the i's and replaced the dots with triangles. While this logotype was very flashy, it seemed a bit dated in its appearance.

Not much to talk about here. I set airia in Humanist 521 Ultra Bold, converted the text to curves, broke the text apart, re-combined the a's, and changed the fill color on the dots. Simple, but punchy! I tried a bunch of other text treatments but these first three were the only designs I presented in the end.

This next logo began as a path in the shape of a lower case a that I created from a couple of rectangles with rounded corners. I converted the rectangles to curves, and used the Shape Tool to break the rectangles into the sections that I needed for the a, and deleted the rest. I combined the two elements (Ctrl L) and at this point the process gets a little fuzzy. In Orlando, I made the line weight very heavy, rounded the line corners in the Outline Pen Dialog, and then used DRAW 9's groovy new Convert Outline to Object (Arrange menu). I couldn't have done this on the original logo because I think it was done in DRAW 7 or 8 and I'm sure the process was a lot more involved and took much more time. I made a duplicate of the line (before I converted it to an object), and created a blend of two circles. I fit the blend to the path and used the Accelerate Blend Objects feature (on the Property Bar with blend selected) to optically space out the circles. I still had to do a little final tweaking. I separated the blend (Arrange > Separate), ungrouped all the elements, regrouped them, selected the circles and the a shape and used the Trim button on the Property Bar to trim the circles out of the a shape. I deleted the circles used for the trimming process. I added a drop shadow.

I always knew I'd find a use for the Spiral Tool (Polygon Tool flyout)! I created a three rotation spiral. Trimmed off part of the top left end. Added a small line to the bottom right and combined the line and the spiral. I increased the line weight, rounded the ends in the Outline Pen Dialog, and added a drop shadow. This was one of my favorite designs.

This logo was another of my favorites because it took on the appearance of a filter grid. I created an 11 x 11 square grid using the Graph Paper Tool (Polygon Tool flyout, next to the Spiral Tool), holding down the Ctrl key while dragging to constrain the grid rectangles to squares. I created a circle the exact size of one of the grid squares, made a duplicate circle 50% size, and positioned them at opposite ends of the two row of squares. I created a 9-step Blend. I separated and ungrouped the blend and then regrouped the 11 circles. I dragged and dropped a duplicate at the bottom of the grid and created another 9-step blend of the two groups. I separated the blend (Arrange > Separate), and then selected Ungroup All from the Property Bar. I colored the circles as shown creating a stylized lowercase a. I deleted the grid.

This is the logo the client bought, although I had different text under the logo.

The client liked the first type treatment I had done but also liked this logo and so we combined the two elements into a logotype. And now, if you'll walk this way, I'll step you through the process I used (as best as I can remember) to create the logo.

I created two same-sized rectangles. At the time I originally created the logo, I didn't have DRAW 9's nifty individual Corner Roundness feature to only round the lower left corner of the right rectangle. But since I'm recreating the logo in DRAW 9, I can use this feature and make my life easier! I clicked the small lock symbol (to toggle unlocked mode) and rounded the one corner 100%.

I clicked twice on the first rectangle to toggle into Rotate Skew mode. Holding down the Ctrl key, I dragged the top center skew handle to the right. I repeated this on the right hand rectangle but skewed toward the center.

I selected both skewed (or is it skewered) rectangles and pressed the Weld button on the Property Bar to create one united path. I created two circles, a small circle (green outline) and a larger circles (red outline). Both circles were tangent to the inverted V shape as you can see in the magnified illustration.

I converted the red circle to curves and modified the bottom. I also modified the top of the inverted V shape so that it was tangent to the guideline.

The modified red circle and the inverted V shape were combined into one shape using the Weld function. The inside corner of the new inverted V shape was squared off by adding two nodes on either side of the tangency created by the small green circle. The green circle was then used to Trim the center out of the inverted V shape.

I wanted to make a swooshing kind of crossbar for the A. My favorite method of doing this is to create a closed path (the last node is placed on top of the first) using the Freehand Tool and a series of connected straight line segments. Double click after each line segment to connect the next segment to the previous one. Or, you can also use the Bezier Tool (the next tool in the Freehand Tool flyout) in which case you only need to click once, and the next line segment is automatically attached.

Marquee selecting the entire shape with the Shape Tool (drag a box around the shape with the Shape Tool), the lines were converted to curves. The Convert Line to Curves icon (shown) appears on the DRAW 9 Property Bar. In previous versions this might appear on the Property Bar as a button reading To Curve, or it might be a symbol that pops up in some menu or other. To be honest, the fine folks at Corel have changed this so many times that it would take an entire paragraph just to track its migration and transformation! But I digress. Now that the line segments have been changed to curves, I drag on the lines with the Shape Tool and pull them gently into shape.

Once the shape of the swoosh was the way I wanted it, I created a duplicate (the + key), clicked twice to toggle Rotate Skew mode, dragged the rotation bulls eye to the base of the inverted V shape, and rotated the duplicate swoosh shape down as shown. I clicked again to return to Scale mode and extended the shape a small amount to the left using the left, center control handle.

A 1-step Blend was used to create an intermediate shape. The blend was separated. You might need to ungroup the blend, though in DRAW 9 this step is now unnecessary. The three swoosh shapes were welded by pressing the Weld button on the Property Bar.

And finally, the inverted V shape was given a solid fill while the swoosh shapes were given a fountain fill that started blue and ended with the same fill color as the inverted V shape, thus creating the impressing of both elements being one. And that's all there was too it!

That wraps up this edition of Logos for the Design Challenged. If any (or all of this) makes no sense at all, contact me in the Graphics Unleashed Forums and I'll attempt to clarify as best I can.

Tutorials by Gary Priester

Read more articles by Gary Priester along with a short bio.

_{Last Updated November 21, 1999.}

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Logos for the Design Challenged, Part XVI

A Breath of Fresh Airia

The Candidates

Tutorials by Gary Priester

Logos for the Design Challenged Series

Vector Studio Series

Son of Makeover Maven Series