From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating a positive negative design - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

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Creating a positive negative design

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(logo whooshing) (gear clicking) - [Von] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. When approaching graphic marks specifically those being used for brand identity projects that are limited to only one color you have to work out the details of a motif so it's compelling and works well in one simple color. So usage of both positive and negative space can help accomplish this. So, in this movie, I'm going to show you how I did this on a real world branding project for a gaming business. Now my friend Mark is a fellow graphic designer based out of Portland, Oregon and he did a Kickstarter campaign for a game he came up with called Epoch. This shows the box design. Really beautiful work and he's put together a team of creative people to work out all the fantasy artwork used in this card game that he's developing and he asked me if I would create the brand mark for his gaming business that's behind this game and the name of that business is called Orange Nebula. Really cool name and I was honored to be asked to create the graphic for his company. So that's what I want to walk you through right now. It all starts where most of my projects start, in analog, utilizing the core skill of drawing. Now the reason why I reinforce this all the time is because before you attempt to build anything you need to know what you're going to create before you create it and that's how drawing benefits digital. It make digital better because you're not shooting into the dark, as it were, you're actually basing it on something you've given a lot of thought to and you've worked out the form and shape before you ever start to build it. So that's key. This shows you a crude, rough, essentially it's a sketch but it's done with a pen. Sometimes I use pen, sometimes pencil, usually (chuckling) whatever's sitting on my desk when an idea hits and Mark wanted this rocket to be kind of retro feel so that was what I was working on here. I put tracing paper on top of it, worked out the form, worked out the shape, and here's a key part of drawing. I try to draw it the way I'm going to build it meaning I'm thinking about building it in vector before I even touch a computer but I'm working out those shapes so it will act as a roadmap for vector building if you will. So this is one idea. I work with my daughter, Savannah, so I had her do a sheet of thumbnail sketches and here are some of her thumbnail sketches. I like this idea where it would be flipped but it would be the letter N being formed by the exhaust of a rocket. That's kind of a cool direction. I also like this one in the top left and that's the one I'm going to focus on because I think this has a lot of potential. I like the styling she did on the rocket and this is what I want to play up with and so I took her idea and I art directed it. Art directed, people misinterpret what art direction is. It's not about me trying to make it my design. It's about art directing. It's about taking artwork, the essence of an idea if you will in this case, and making it better. And that's what I'm doing here. I'm going to take a pen and on another sheet on top of that I work out a form and shape of a motif that I think's going to work really well. And I have that idea in mind of positive and negative space. There will be areas that are solid, areas that are knocked out to white, or the background if you will, and that's what I'm sketching out here. I'm keeping in mind the O shape for orange and Orange Nebula also and I think that's going to work really well but this is the positioning I want to move forward with and develop now and that's what we're going to walk through. So it all starts with the refined sketch. This is tightening up that drawing with another drawing to work out that form, work out that shape, and to guide my vector building now as I move to the computer. So I'll select this shape, set it for 20 percent, we'll lock that layer. Now the way I use guides is I like to manage 'em, a lot of times, on their own layer because guides will show up through all the other layers of an Illustrator file and they can kind of get in the way. And they're selectable like any other vector shape so this helps me manage 'em easier by putting 'em on their own layer. And it's going to make building a whole lot faster as well on a design like this because a lot of it is going to be symmetric in terms of the rocket itself. So let's go and zoom in a little bit so you can see this better and I've used just simply the elliptical tool here to create these circle shapes. One for the planet of sorts that the rocket is being composed with. The other one, this larger circle, to begin making the rocket shape itself. So I'll select this. I'll go Command + C, Command + F. I have a F key setup, F3, and if you want to know more about that check out the previous DVG Lab where I go over all the F keys that I have custom programmed to do cloning like this. It runs two commands Command + C, Command + F and it gives me access to making a duplicate of that shape. I can go to the Reflect tool, find a central anchor point such as the top of the rocket, reflect it, get both of these shapes, select it, and go Intersect on the Pathfinder to create the rocket based shape. And this is how I work. Usually I'm not even thinking it I'm just doing it and on something like this the top part of the rocket is pretty much exactly the way I want it but on the bottom it gets a little fatter and that's what I want to kind of capture here. So what I'm going to do is just select this bottom anchor point and drag it down just so it goes down a little deeper. And this is pretty close to what I want but, to improve the form, I'm going to pull this anchor up right here just to get a nice thickness. It's a little too thick so let's pull this one up and I think that form is good now. It's kind of fat on the top, thinning down the bottom, but it's not symmetric now on each side and that's okay. Sometimes, as I build, I kind of discover that along the way and that's where it's easy enough to fix. I'll just take another shape. This will end up being a throwaway shape and I'll just lop off one side, trim it like that. I'll clone this again, Command + C, Command + F, go back to the Reflect tool, find the central anchor point, and reflect it, select both of these, unite it with the Pathfinder to get the shape I want. So that's literally how I go about building content like this. Now all of these exhaust shapes that are cutting in and out of this planetary shape those would all too be created using the Ellipse tool. I'll just start building one like this. I go ahead and rotate it until I kind of get it into the exact form and then it's all about finessing the shape just by simply scaling it and dragging it to get those. I might clone this shape to get the interior aspect of this and, once again, I would just begin aligning it, rotating it, if needed scaling it, and distorting it to start forming those shapes to get what I want. You can see right here this isn't acting the way I want and this is where I go in and just grab this anchor point, come down here, probably right around there, and then I'd adjust the bezier curve just to get what I want. So that's how I'd approach those areas and build 'em out in order to get those kind of shapes. It would all start with the simple elliptical shape and then I customize it, distort it, position it, and orient it correctly to get exactly what I want. When it's all said and done I have base vector shapes like this, let's zoom in again, and you can see how I've created all these shapes down here using those elliptical shapes. Here's our original shape here that we created and I've created this offset of that shape. Now, to create an offset, you just select the shape you want to offset. Go to Object, Path, Offset Path, and then here I believe it was 7.5 points to create that offset shape. So that's all I do to create a shape like that and that's going to play a part in building the final art here. So let's go ahead and kind of edit the shape that we have here and the first one I want to do is I've created this circular shape. And this is just here because I'm going to edit our rocket. If I turn this off you can see in our drawing it kind of comes to this area down here where it's almost flat and that's what I want to build here. So this bottom of this circle is going to be the curve on the bottom of our rocket here and this is where I go to like the Rectangle tool. I just create a throwaway shape like this on this circle and make sure it's on top and then I'd select this square and then I'd trim that off to get the shape I needed and making sure this shape is on top. And you can always do that by go Arrange, Bring to Front, select the rocket shape, and trim the bottom of that to get what we want. And then I'll just continue making other determinations along the same path regarding this and one of those is going to be I want to go ahead and take this shape which is the whole length of this rocket and I'm going to trim off half of this rocket 'cause I only need half of the shape like this. And then these other elements like this this is going to actually cut into this shape here. So we're just punching it out like this. Let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit. It's a little hard to see what's going on up there. That's a little better and I'll take this little notch shape here and, once again, make sure this is on top, select this shape, and we're just going to notch it out to create this. So all we're doing is creating a shape that looks like that and now we'll create a few more details. I'll go ahead and, let's see, we'll take this artwork and, actually let's do this first, let's go ahead and zoom in 'cause this is where we're going to create another throwaway shape here. And all I mean by throwaway shape is I don't need it. I only need it to make an edit temporarily so I'm going to do that with this. Select this big circle, lop that off. I'll select this shape that we've been editing and I'm going to fuse that with it like this. Let's go ahead and zoom out so you can see this a little better. So you can see how I've edited that. Then I'll take this circle. Once again make sure it's on Front on top of everything. Select the bigger shape and then trim that out. So this is the shape I'm going for here. We're going to go ahead and continue to make some other edits here and the first one is on, let's see. Let's go ahead and we're going to take this shape here, and this one, and we'll go and Intersect it. Then we'll take this background shape, we'll fuse these two together like this. And we can go ahead and take the top here and fuse those in together so we're making one cohesive shape as you see here. Actually I need to back out (chuckling) 'cause I forgot to do something. And I do this, why, (chuckling) this is the real world 'cause (chuckling) what you saw me do right there is I do this all the time in the real world too. I forget to do something and that is I need to take this shape first and clone it, Command + C, Command + F, then I can trim this fin on the left hand side because I need to get that nice contour to mach the continuity that is with what we were creating there. So that's really important and then I think we can go ahead and now I'm all nervous like (chuckling) I'm going to make a mistake now. We'll select these, I'll fuse these together, select this like that, we'll select the background, and we'll unite those together using Pathfinder and you can see we have a few things left over. That's fine because we're going to go ahead and edit those moving forward but we can go ahead and, just so you can see what's going on, let's go ahead and do this. I'll go ahead and cut this, select all these shapes, and paste behind like that. Then we can select all these interior. Notice how these guides they kind of get in the way? That's why I put them on their own layer. That's a lot better. We can turn off the refined sketch now too. I'll select these inner shapes and you can see how this positive negative is kind of coming along. It's looking good right now actually. These will be white. These will be blue like that and like that and we'll color those white. So you can see how this design is progressing. It's looking pretty good. We're just going to do a few more details and these are like little notches. So here's another notch like this and you know what? I think, did I? No I think we're okay. I thought I screwed something up again. Okay there we go. We'll select these two shapes like that and unite 'em together, color that back to white. That's looking really cool. You needed that rim of light on the right hand side just to make it work better. We're going to do a few more notches. Let's go ahead and colorize this differently so you can see it. We'll just make it an outline like this and you can see I've taken the shapes we had previously and we'll bring this to front so it's in front of this notch shape. And we'll go ahead and go back to the Pathfinder and trim that like this. And this one we actually don't even need and now that we have this we can select the background shape and we can notch that out like this. And I'll go ahead and cut this, select everything, and paste behind. I think we're missing our content over here so let's go ahead and bring that to front like this and you can see this is looking pretty cool so this is the process I'll use to create that nice illusion of positive negative but I think there's even more we can do. Now, in simple black and white it's going to look really cool. It's going to be strong. That's what I really like about it but, on this design, one thing I want to do is I want to select everything and also, on a design like this, because I'm working in vectors, specifically on this fin, let's zoom in on it. Notice how it comes to this really obtuse point. I mean this is so sharp you can poke your eye out. This is where subtle rounding comes in. You can see I've added this subtle rounding on this fin. It just looks nice and all those kind of rounds when it comes to a point I'm rounding it off there. Even on these little star shapes I'm rounding 'em off so they don't come to these sharp points and on the exhaust itself. If we zoom in you can see the rounds there. These are easy to do. I don't use the Rounding tool in Illustrator. Everything I'm going to show you you can do it with Illustrator's own Corner Widget tool. I just don't use it because I like Astute Graphics' Dynamic Corners plugin, this one right here. This is the popup for it and the nice thing about it is once I rounded one I can hover over it, click on it, and that loads that attribute. Then I can go to another one and just simply apply it. So I'll do that on these two areas. Just to finish out the rounding we can go ahead and close that. And that's why I use that tool. It just works really, really, really well. Now on this motif I don't want it straight up and down. I want it at a 45 degree angle. Now one thing is I've noticed is I built these at the 90 degree angles so I'll just go into Isolation Mode and kind of put those back at that original angle because it just looks better having 'em like that. Now that we have that I can select these shapes, which are all black, and we're going to colorize it this brand color. Since the company is called Orange Nebula it's going to look a lot cooler coloring it the way it should be for the company itself. I think this looks beautiful. I think this is going to work great but I always like to give people a choice so we came up with three different directions. You see the one I just built on the far left and the other two were based off of some of those sketches you saw previously. Well Mark liked the one that I showcased how to build out and locked it up with type and so this was the logo for his gaming company. A lot of fun. I'll just show you a quick little usage here. He sent me a nice hat that had it on a leather patch sewn to the hat. That was kind of a cool usage of it. So it works really well for his company and this kind of mark, a positive negative mark, looks great on a light or white colored background and it works brilliantly on a dark colored background as well. It's very, very flexible. When creating a positive negative design your goal is to retain profound simplicity in order to achieve simply profound graphic results. As always the analog skill of drawing facilitates your digital building efforts and it's going to make the process easier and, with that said, thank you for watching DVG Lab. Until next time never stop drawing.

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