BlueLaguna Logo

Adobe Photoshop

I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS2 to design this logo. Many swear by illustrator, but I believe for the purposes of making a tutorial, it'd be best to use photoshop as it will cater to a wider audience. More people have used photoshop than Illustrator. Besides, I've created 95% of all my logos in Photoshop, so take what you will.

Let's Start : The Project

A buddy of mine runs a gaming website, bluelaguna.net, and he has wanted a new logo for some time, so I agreed to do it for this tutorial. So let's take a look at the current logo:

(Note: The image above isn't a logo, it's an entire header. The actual name bluelaguna.net along with the slogan is the actual logo. I thought it would be a good idea to show the entire header though to see how it reacts with the overall design.)

One of the most important things this logo lacks is readability. When a user visits a web site, or visits any medium in which a logo is displayed, the first thing that hits them should be the logo. And for some reason or another, the first place us humans look is the upper left hand corner of a site. The current logo is placed in the middle of the header and the small font and the dark blue in "BLUE" is hard to read.

There's also nothing exciting with this logo. For a logo to be effective, it has to "brand" an image, it needs to stick in your head. All this logo is is times new roman on caps lock.

Now that we've gone over why their current logo is not suitable, let's begin with the actual tutorial.

Gathering Information

It's important to always know the specifics of what you or the client is looking for before you start. Generally for most projects, I only need to ask the client 5 questions:

	1. Name of the service/product:	BlueLaguna.Net
	2. Any slogans to use?:	"Your #1 Source for RPG Media"
	3. Any specific color schemes in mind?:	Match the current design
	4. What are you trying to convey through the logo?:	Serious game-related site.
	5. Any other specifics:	You don't have to use the current header design. Get crackin'

Pretty straight forward, now we know what we have to work with.

1. Setting up your Document in Photoshop

• Once you have photoshop open, go to File -> New. Then specify the name of the logo, and a width of 600 and a height of 500.
• Then click "OK" (Refer to the screenshot below).

After you click "OK" Your setup should look like this: (I'm on a 1600x1200 resolution.) For the menus on the left, I have the layers view, and the Characters in view.)

2. Experiment with Font Selections

As a starting point, I always experiment with a font that I think will work well with the logo. You have to develop an eye for what font will or will not work, with the specifics of the project in mind. Since for bluelaguna we're trying to focus on a serious yet gamer'ish feel, a serious font selection might be the best bet. Having yourself an arsenal of fonts is very important. I have several thousand myself.

Select the Text Tool on the left menu: (As shown on the image to the right) Adjust the settings on the Text Properties at the top to match these settings: In the character window to the right, set AV to -60 as shown below: (This simply shortens the space between each separate character, I like starting out with this setting, I don't know why :) Type "BLUE LAGUNA" in the document space (First, be sure that the background is white, you can use the fill tool for this. And I've decided to go with all caps to start out with, since all caps is generally deemed more serious). With the type tool selected, and layer 1 selected, select the font list menu (where it says Arial): You can do this next section in either three ways. - Hit the "Down" arrow to change the font view of "BLUE LAGUNA". - Hit the Down Arrow of the Font List to see the list of available fonts with a tiny preview of the font. - Download a font viewing program. I personally just use the first method, although I sometimes use a font viewing program. Our goal here is to find fonts that might work with the logo. Once you come across a font that looks like it could work, you should Duplicate the layer in the Layers Window to the right, and then hide the previous layer (The layer you right clicked and selected "Duplicate" from. This way, you've saved that font selection (the hidden layer), and you have a new layer to find more fonts from):

3. Good and Bad Font Selections

Since our goal with this particular logo is to be serious, we need serious looking fonts. It simply takes time to develop an eye for what is serious and what isn't.

Here are a few examples of bad font selections for this project: The first logo (the top), has a very laid back, fun / unprofessional tone to it. The second logo is simply "goofy" looking, and it's generally always bad to select a logo that has an inherent shadow. The third logo is way too "ragged" with its frills all over the place, definitely a no go. Calligraphy logos are generally outdated, especially ones with weird "drops" coming from them. The last logo you can hardly even read. Remember, a logo should be easily readable.

Here are a few examples of good font selections for this project: All of these logos with the exception of 4 and 6 are pretty much similar. #1, 2, 3 & 5 are all very simplistic and serious in appearance. Logo 4 still appears "serious" even though it is significantly different from the rest. I chose this just in case I want to experiment with piecing together fonts for the word "Blue" and "Laguna". Logo 6 is a very bold / italicized logo that says nothing but serious.

4. Finalizing a Font Selection

Once you have some possible font selections, each in their own layer, you further analyze them and see which works. With logos that have more than one word, most of the time it is good to separate the appearance of the words from each other. Since this particular project has two words, "Blue" and "Laguna", we're going to want to separate them by possibly choosing two different fonts. You can also separate words from each other by keeping the same font, but changing the color. So I'm going to experiment with the 6 good font selections above.

This is what I've come up with: Although I didn't use one of the 6 fonts I selected initially for the word "blue", I simply used an unboldened version of "LAGUNA", which keeps a consistent feel but also allows for separation of the two words.

5. Adding in a symbol

Sometimes logos work well with only the use of fonts, but most times adding in a relevant symbol of some sort will really make a logo stand out. When I say "symbol", I mean any part of the logo which isn't actual text. So let's start with the first font selection from above:

Now here is where having an eye for design and experience is a really big help. We need to begin contemplating ideas of what exactly we can add to this logo to make it awesome. So, the first thing I do is just sit there and stare at the font selection and think of what exactly the product/service/site is all about. Well, BlueLaguna.Net is about gaming, more specifically speaking, it's a site that offers RPG media (Role Playing Game) media. Therefore, we have two things to work with: RPG and Media. What exactly can we associate with both RPG and Media? Well, we don't necessarily have to convey both RPG and Media through the logo (if you try to get too complex, the logo will become cluttered). We can choose one or the other if we want. I think it'd be most logical to focus on the whole RPG aspect, as you can find media all over the place and it isn't an entirely unique concept.

So let's do some research on Role Playing Games. We need to figure out a symbol which can really represent RPG. The current BlueLaguna.Net features a 3d female, perhaps that has something to do with RPG? Well, let me do a search on images.google.com for "RPG". The results turn back a few different female characters, Hmm! The first few results, keeping in mind the 3d female character on the current header of bluelaguna.net, seem to suggest that depicting a female in the logo might be the best bet. It also seems that weaponry / mystical environments are associated with RPG as well.

Now that I know what I can associate with RPG, I can come up with some possible ideas for a symbol. I think maybe featuring a face of one of these RPG'ish females with maybe a hint of mysticism.

The Pen Tool is your Friend

The most important tool when it comes to logo design is the pen tool. If there is one tool to thoroughly understand, it should be the pen tool. The pen tool allows you to create any shape(s) you want, and maintain vector format (which is very important if you ever want to size your logo up n' down (for professional print or whatever.)

It's always good to draw your logo by hand without copying over a picture (vector tracing), but if you aren't very talented and don't have much experience, it might be your only option. So for the sake of making the biggest impact on this tutorial, I will teach you all an awesome technique for creating great looking symbols for you logos.

Finding a suitable picture

If you're going to trace, I always suggest using a site like istockphoto.com to find the image and pay for it. This way you won't be using copyrighted images to trace over. Or taking your own picture to trace over. Unfortunately though, istockphoto has nothing with RPG or "anime". So I just went on images.google.com and found a picture which I think is suitable, here it is:

When I came across this picture, I got the idea that I can vector trace over her face and hair to create what I want, and then integrate it along with the font selection in some unique way. So once you've found the picture you want to trace (if not the same one), save it to your hard drive, open it up in photoshop, CTRL-A, CTRL-C to select it and copy it, and go back to your main logo document and CTRL-V. Now you've imported this picture into your logo document. Once you've imported it, with her layer selected, you can cut off the bottom half of her body. (Select the first tool in the upper left corner of the tools menu, Rectangular Marquee Tool), select the bottom half of her body and hit the delete key. Your screen should look something like this by now (You can hide the text layers behind it).

Vector Tracing

Now select the magnifying glass in the tools menu and select around the girl, it will look like this zoomed up to about 400%:

Now select the pen tool in the tools menu:

Make sure that the foreground color (the black square at the bottom of the pic to the upper right ---^) is the same dark blue color of the text we specified.

In the layers window to the right, select the little round circular > icon on the upper right corner of the window, and click on "Create New Layer" in the window that comes up. Hit "OK" and then in the layers window, with the new layer selected, change the Opacity to 0%. We do this because once we start tracing over the image, we don't want the dark blue color hiding the picture of the girl below.

And with the pen tool selected, click a point somewhere on the outline of the hair (at the top), and then click to make another point somewhere on the hairline where the line will begin to form. You can hold down and "direction" the angle of the line to create a certain type of curve. It takes awhile to get the hang of, but it's very easy once you get the hang of it. After plotting points of an entire section of hair, yours should look similar to this: (Note: I've lightened the opacity of the girl to illustrate what your lines should look like so far)

(opacity 100%)

It's not perfect, but for now it's a good start.

Now I'm simply going to continue creating more shapes, like the facial features. After 15-20 minutes or so of creating the different facial features and the face itself, here is what I have come up with:

As you can see, I specified a different color for the face (light blue). And by now I have around 15 different layers. There's a separate layer for the top portion of each eye, the bottom portion of each eye, the middle, and the small glare. There's also a layer for the face background, and the ear. So let us continue and add some shading...

After about 20 more minutes of shading, this is what I've come up with: There are a total of 3 different layers for the hair. It's somewhat of a tedious process to do hair shading simply because there's a lot of strands of hair! But you have to just condense them and get the general idea of the shading and it will work out well. Then I did some light shading work on the face and the neck. Now I consider the actual draft of the symbol complete. Let's make our initial text layer visible and see what we can do to integrate the symbol with the text.

First, you will want to select the very last to the very first vector layer that you created (you'll have a couple dozen or more), hold down the shift so you can select them all. Then in the layers window click the little circular round button and select "New Group From Layers". This will put all of the layers of the girl, into one easily manageable layer group. This way, you can move around the one group and it will keep all of their positions together so it won't break up her face.

Now this actually doesn't look too bad, in and of itself. But the proportion of the anime head is too big, in relation to BLUELAGUNA. So we will want to scale down the head. Let's try moving it over to the left, and adding the slogan + the ".net" text. This is what it looks like:

Now it looks pretty damn good eh? The only other thing I did, was with the pen tool, I added a white shape over the "B" in "BLUE" so that the face doesn't collide with the B.

Unfortunately I messed up and didn't design this over the dark blue'ish background that the bluelaguna.net has. So I'm going to change the colors of the logo to fit a background of an appropriate header for the site.

As you can see, simply changing colors around can really change the look and feel of a logo. I'd consider this logo a winner.

6. Conclusion

I can pretty much guarantee you that if you're a first time user of the pen tool or photoshop for that matter, it won't turn out so pretty like mine did. It takes some time and patience to really get the hang of it. It's all about getting a little creative and working at it for awhile.

Digital Painting Tutorial

Digital Painting Tutorial

Here's a Step by Step Process of how I work on a painting:

Phase I - Concept + Research [Preparation]
[0.0. Concept:] Before I start doing any actual drawing or painting I brainstorm ideas for what the subject matter and message of the piece is about. This is the concept and for me is the most important part of the entire process. Starting with a strong concept is the foundation for everything that follows. I aim to define the concept with a few sentences. This is determined by the brief, or project goal, or story. In this piece the initial concept was "Futuristic sci-fi scene featuring a vehicle inspired by a classic automobile."
[0.1. Concept Refinement:] Starting with the initial concept i define the specifics of the story. For "Futuristic sci fi scene " I decide to choose a sunset on a bridge, and the vehicle will be inspired by Paulo Martin's 1970 Ferrari Modulo.
[0.2. Concept Research:] Once the concept specifics are defined I research the elements included in the piece. For this specific painting I gathered photo ref of bridges, sunset lighting, and the original 1970 vehicle.
[0.3. Thumbnail sketches:] I do thumbnail design sketches for all the main elements in the painting: the scene comp, the design of the elements, and the main vehicle. The design of the individual elements also communicate the story of a futuristic scene, so each element is designed to appear as something that could exist but doesn't yet for the year 2040.

Phase II - Painting Rough Block In
[1.1. Initial Comp:] Starting with monochromatic values I place the main elements of the painting. The general linear perspective and camera angle are also set. Dramatic lighting is also used to control the areas of contrast to set up the focal points. Using the rule of thirds, I place the front wheel and headlights at the vertex of the bottom left thirds. I set up the lighting conditions to create the highest amount of contrast of value and color in this area. Monochromatic values are used to create depth with atmospheric perspective using a limited value range in the Background [light values 2-4], Middleground [full values 0-10], and Foreground [dark 7-9]. Thinking about color theory I establish a simple foundation for a complementary color scheme of warms and cools [orange vs blue]. All of the previous thumbnail designs for the elements are also used in this step.
[1.2. - 1.3. Comp Refinement:] First I flip the entire image to get a new look at what i have so far. I start defining the shapes in the bg thinking about how they relate to the rest of the painting. I create a secondary focal point by silhouetting a future city in the opposite third relative to my focal point, then I use the large sweeping curve of the bridge to lead the viewer back into the foreground where my main focal point is. I'm also using the warm lighting of the sunset in the bg and cool shadows in the fg to separate the bg from the fg. I also squint to check the value arrangements and see if the main shapes are working.
I add a small bit of preliminary lighting effects to test my ideas of the headlights and front corner as the main focal point. I check what i have done so far and decide its time to move on to the next phase.


Phase III - BG Rendering
[2.1. BG City + Bridge:] From here on out I'll mostly be rendering. My approach to digital rendering is a hybrid of techniques from traditional oil painting process [working bg to fg, tightening up in focal areas, controlling edges and gradients to make forms read], and the techniques offered by new technology [adding details and lighting effects].

After all the rough ins I begin finalizing the bg. My goal is to indicate a future city and bridge without actually completely rendering it. The purpose of this being not to distract from the main focal point that I will fully render later. I've increased the saturation and grouped the shape silhouettes to make them more dominant as a shape. I use a small amount of color shift to create depth of the bridge coming forward away from the sunset behind the city. [2.2. - 2.3. MG Bridge Rendering:] I fix the linear perspective from the previous step to define where the corners of the road are relative to the vehicle. I change the design form language of the structural elements of the Mg bridge seen in the upper corner to something more experimental and not seen today. I also change the design to to have dominant structures with subdominant rails or beams to create more interest. I use hard edges to define the shapes and highlight the corners of the forms with the warm light of the sunset. The changes I make to the vehicle are just place holders to remind myself of where I'm going later on in the painting. With the Bg and secondary elements 90% complete I check what I've done so far and move on to the focal point, the vehicle rendering.

Phase IV - Focal Point Vehicle Rendering
[3.1. Wheels:] The wheels are created using the ellipse tool as a guide to get the series of crisp concentric ellipses. I also keep in mind the lighting direction as i render. I only create one then duplicate and transform the other. Place both according to the pre existing perspective grid lining up the minor axis of both wheels to the vanishing point outside the image.

[3.2. Main Vehicle Body:] A simple step using value changes to show the form changes as the forms turn away from the light. I use mostly a digital airbrush with 10-30% opacity to build up values. I also don't worry too much about the edges as I'll clean everything up in the next step. The goal is to just get the main form changes to read.
[3.3. Defining Forms Using Edges and Values:] Continuing from the last step I use a hard edge brush with higher opacity to increase contrast and harden the edges to create crisp form changes. I also add the warm highlight on the far side of the vehicle and a hard edged reflective highlight to indicate the glass material change. The glass highlight is placed representative of the cool light source illuminating the front corner. I then use a smaller brush to add some of the smaller highlights and details. Lastly I indicate the wheels turning with a few brush strokes. When I'm satisfied with how all the forms read I move on to the last phase.

Phase V - Detailing + Effects
[4.1. - 4.3. Paint Stripes, Lights, + Textures] I add a paint stripe with a hard brush and create a headlight pattern using a light fx brush [glow-painter/colordodge-ps]. As I do so I'm thinking about my composition and remember why I set up the image in this way. I want the front corner to be my focal point so it should have the most value change[full range 1-10], clearly defined forms, and most color contrast [adjacent complementary colors]. I add some minor textures to the various surfaces using a hardlight layer with very low opacity to add some noise and variation to surfaces and some subtle warm light near the rear of the vehicle and cool light near the front. A minor touch is a bit of motion blur in very limited areas [near the wheels, on the road]. Everything is finally coming to an end. All that preparation work was for this moment.
The Finished Painting
[Final:] I flip the image once more, add reflections on the ground by duplicating and lowering opacity of the new layer, and add some final brush strokes just for my own taste, and its finally done - a full finished painting. Of course I can always go back and make changes but for now I consider this piece done and I don't have any more time to spend on it.
Thanks for reading this far. I hope this tutorial was helpful and enjoyable!