Beginners Advice for Making Icons and Logos in Adobe Illustrator
My first acquaintance with Illustrator was in a college class called Digital Composition 1. I had just switched majors and decided that I wanted to study Web Development. At least that was before I took this class.
The purpose of the Digital Comp class was to teach us the ins and outs of digital design — specifically Web design. The work load for this class was shocking to say the least. We spent a TON of time in Illustrator. We had pages and pages containing dozens of designs that were due each week and I am sure that up to that point, I had never spent more time doing homework for one class. I honestly did not think I could get myself to work that hard for a class. I defiantly didn’t spend that much time in my math or English classes.
As tedious as that class was it did teach me one thing - I really enjoy making things! I’ve never been the most creative or artistic person but I do feel that I’ve always had a pretty good eye for design. The great thing about Illustrator is that you really don’t have to be very artistic to make good designs. All you need is knowledge of good design principles and some practice.
If you are want want to get good at designing logos and icons you should do these things:
Iterate your ideas on paper before you touch Illustrator
As great as Illustrator is, it’s not really the best for hashing out ideas. I’ve noticed that once I start designing something in Illustrator it is easy to get set on one design, even if it’s not a very good one. Picking an idea before going to Illustrator can save you a lot of time and headaches. A great concept we used a lot in that class was called Sketchnotes. Coined by Mike Rohde, Sketchnotes are pretty much exactly what they sound like — a way to take notes using sketches along with words.
As you can see in my example to the left, Sketchnotes are not supposed to be pretty. They are not art, they are for hashing out ideas in a way that will be memorable. In class, we always did Sketchnotes of our designs before we ever did anything in Illustrator. I learned that this was a great way to get ideas flowing even if they are not design related ones. You could make Sketchnotes for anything from business ideas to website structures.
For designing icons and logos, we always made a grid before we started so we had something to fill up with many iterations of ideas. This brings me to my next point.
Design Icons and Logos in a Table
In my class, we always designed logos and icons in a table structure. The image below shows a set of icons I designed pretty early on in my Illustrator days. I know they could use some work but I included this example to show how designing in a grid can be useful.
Now I could have easily designed these icons in there own files but the real advantage of putting them in a grid like system is for constancy and for convenience.
I don’t claim to be an expert in icon design but one thing I have learned is that logos and especially icons should be consistent in their designs. In the example to the left, I tried to make those icons look consistent by making the lines the same thickness, adding the same amount of radius to the corners and making them roughly the same size. Having them all in a grid made it easy to compare the designs side-by-side to ensure they belonged together.
It also makes things easy as far as storing your designs goes because you can have a full set of icons all in one file.
Be on the lookout for Inspiration
The last thing I learned in that class that was very helpful was that It’s impossible to always come up with ideas from scratch. I think every designer runs into dry spells where they really just have nothing. I know it feels like cheating when you look at other designs for inspiration but that is something you have to get over pretty quickly as a designer. All the best designers are always looking for things that they can mimic and adapt. As the great Pablo Picaso famously said, “good artists copy; great artists steal.”
Landon Hatch is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to the (DGM 270R Digital Comp 1 Course) and representative of the skills learned.
