A logo that blends text and graphics -02

      In the previous article, we talked about the creativity of a logo and why it is necessary to use text and graphics to express a logo. Today we will talk specifically about the method of integrating text and graphics into a logo. In logo design, integrating a type of logo is the most difficult one, far more difficult than drawing a single complex concrete element. It is not the skill of painting that makes it difficult, but whether you can discover the fusion point between two elements and skillfully and naturally integrate completely different elements into a whole. Element fusion logos can be divided into text and text fusion, text and graphics fusion, and graphics and graphics fusion due to different fusion objects. Today, we will mainly talk about text and graphics fusion. Before discussing specific fusion methods, I will first introduce the creative process of element fusion logos. Let's get started!

    一、The creative process of element fusion logos

This section was written before the "Logo Method for Integrating Graphics and Text" because these creative processes have been a method that I have been adhering to for many years, not an industry standard, but a summary of my experience. I hope to be useful to everyone. This part of the process is divided into four steps, and the relationship between the front and back is not rigorous. In practical operation, it often jumps back and forth. Today, I will give a brief introduction, and in future tutorials, I will introduce it in detail in stages.

   1-Selection of design form

  What is the formal sense of logo design, which is the appearance of your logo, perhaps

   You'll have questions, how the hell do I know what the logo is going to look like? I need to know what the logo I am about to create will look like. Do you still need to read your article? Hey! I said, little brother and sister, don't worry, and listen to me slowly. I just mentioned that the appearance of a logo is not about refining to all the details of the final presentation, but rather about the basic form of your logo. For example, if you create a logo for an automotive company that mainly produces SUVs and is called "zhennengpao" in English, then choosing the full English logo format of "Land Rover, Jeep, Hummer, Haval" is not a problem. Just change the font and it depends on your industry and industry segmentation style. As a car company, if your customer's name is ZNB (I will register another day), then you can be conservative and draw a circle outside of ZNB. This depends on the number of words in your company's brand name (too many words are not easy to circle, see Land Rover's tail label divided into two lines) because BYD, Kia, and Ford all do this. This is the sense of form. The sense of form is not like stewed beef with potatoes, it's too concrete. The sense of form is a story of a vegetarian dish and a type of meat happening together. These two elements can be changed, and the processing method can also be changed, just like Honda and Hyundai, where a square sets H, a circle sets N, FAW sets an ellipse set 1, and Mercedes Benz sets a regular circle with a three pronged star. In the second part of today's article, the main focus is on the form of "integrating graphics and text into a logo", which is to give everyone the form Classify and let everyone create ideas in a certain form.

Design form of SUV industry logo

Land Rover, Jeep, Hummer, Haval zhennengpao

 

 

Letter based automotive brand logo format

BYD, Kia, Ford, znb

Design form of automotive brand logo with geometric graphics and enterprise elements

Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes Benz0

2- Element extraction

Element refining is the second part. There is a saying that a skillful wife can't make bricks without straw (why can't a skillful daughter-in-law get along with a Pita bread soaked in Lamb Soup?). No matter how tough it is, you need to use elements in your logo, and the choice of elements is to ask Smida. First of all, you need to know which elements can be applied as enterprise identification elements, and how to mine elements for some relatively abstract projects, because in the future, we will expand our lectures separately, and today we won't have many spoilers.

3 Elements Visual Presentation Extension

The extension of visual representation of elements refers to the excavation of a visual representation that is different from the project related elements that we have identified. This mining process involves searching for information and drawing your own sketches. When making extensions, we may not necessarily have a purpose in mind. Often, which element ultimately becomes the target is not premeditated, but rather due to coincidence. The probability of this coincidence occurring is largely due to your visual presentation and extension of the elements. If you lose an extension method, you may lose a wonderful element fusion relationship, such as a simple a, How to extend the visual presentation of element a? Everyone can take a look at my simple demonstration below. 

(1)Writing method of a: aA

(2)Different fonts for a:

(3)A is the logo of the element:

When we have such a comprehensive understanding of a 'a' and list various visual representations together through collection, it is easy to discover which 'a' should be fused with another element in our logo.

 4- Comparison of Element Modeling Line Relationships

    After completing steps 2 and 3, we need to make a real design attempt, which is to compare the line relationships between elements. Because elements are all composed of basic lines, in order to skillfully blend the two elements together, it is necessary to discover the line relationships between elements, such as parallel, nearly parallel, asymptotic, or overlapping. Taking the "a" element above as an example, if we are a manufacturer of light bulbs, Which "a" would you choose to blend with the light bulb?

   5-Element fusion sketch, correction, and completion

After completing the above steps, we are about to embark on a crazy sketching process, just like the combination of "deer" and "fu" in my previous episode of "Fu Lu Cooking", which was completed after multiple sketches and revisions. At the end of today, you will also see a few cases of text and graphic integration, as well as my entire sketch drawing and correction process. I hope you can see it more thoroughly through dynamic videos.

   Summary: After discussing the creative process of integrating elements into a logo, I will discuss it in the future until you understand it. Let's take a look at the theme of this chapter, the method of integrating text and graphic elements.

二、 The fusion method of text and graphic elements

The previous article talked about why we need to integrate text and graphics. Let's briefly review

Why design a logo by integrating graphics and text

Because the name of a company (institution or product) is the most distinctive element between the customer entity and the same industry, and must also be exclusive, which is the core element of enterprise identification. Therefore, selecting keywords from the company name (keywords from Chinese or English names) as logo design elements can maximize the unique recognition of the logo. The same or similar elements are often used in the same industry, By using keywords in the company name as design elements, we can avoid having overly similar logos, which is also beneficial for improving the chances of successful logo registration.

  The above is why we need to integrate text and graphic elements. At the beginning of today's article, I also talked about the creative process of element fusion logos. Next, we will introduce the centralized method of integrating graphics and text.

  1- Figure group character

Design and combine multiple project related graphic elements into a single project keyword. The following cases all use this method. Firstly, you need to determine which word is your keyword, and English logos usually use the first word as the main character. For example, the logo of Unilever in Figure 1 is composed of some graphics related to the project to form "u", which is the initial letter of the English brand name of Unilever. If we use Chinese as the design element, we may not necessarily use the first character because every word in Chinese has a meaning, and the meaning of the first character may not be the best. For example, in Figure 2, Teacher Jin Daiqiang's urban logo design for Chongqing used "Qing" instead of "Chong", but the most impressive idea is that Teacher Jin used two "overlapping" people to express the concept of "Chong", which is a super clever and rare idea, I think Teacher Jin would have been particularly excited at that time. The third case is the logo of the Capital Airport, which cleverly combines an airplane and a runway to form a "first" character. In terms of graphics, it is very vivid, and in terms of text, it is no more than a few strokes, which is the highest level of integration between graphics and text. The fourth case is the "China Outdoor Education Network" I created. Did you see that the white figure as a tree trunk is a deformation of the word "outdoor"?

2-Figure Subtraction

The meaning of subtracting characters from images is that the characters are in a positive shape while the images are in a negative shape. This formal character can be in English or Chinese. The design method of integrating text and graphics can effectively integrate enterprise related graphic elements into enterprise keywords, allowing consumers to visually see the company's products, symbolic information, or cultural symbols. Of course, the most important keyword of that

enterprise is also the primary recognition element. The following case studies, Figure 1 and Figure 2, are all m, with almost the same font shape, but different negative shapes. From this case study, the form itself has no uniqueness or so-called copyright. It is just a formula that we can freely choose to apply. Many people talk about plagiarism and borrowing, but in terms of the form of borrowing in logo design, it doesn't matter how to define it, because there are so many classic forms, and it doesn't make sense for you to have to go through the wrong path. People think that Figure 1 and Figure 2 are too similar, mainly because the letters are the same. However, at this point, you can look at Figure 3 and use the same method as Figure 1 and Figure 2, but if the letters are changed, does it feel a lot "original"?

Looking at the following three cases, they all use the combination of birds and letters, namely two R's and one P's. R and P have a great similarity in themselves and are combined with birds. This is not accidental, that is to say, to some extent, the shape of the letters also determines the design form and the fusion of elements,because there is a blank space in R and P, which is perfect as a negative shape of a figure.

The first example in the following case, which everyone is familiar with 'FedEx', does not look for negative relationships in a single letter, but cleverly inserts an arrow between 'E' and 'X'. This is the result of observing the negative areas of two letters. The second case GD was designed by me, with a vivid eagle head interspersed within it. This type of design must pay attention to the fusion relationship between graphics and character lines, as it can be difficult to look at if not done naturally. The last logo is quite unique, using words to subtract images. There are not many cases of this, but it is also a wonderful way.

3- Characters in the picture

The words in the picture are the words in the picture. We use the most intuitive method to take a look at our following cases. Figure 1 and Figure 2 show the most familiar examples of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Bank of China, including Figure 3. These three cases all use the same method, with the keywords of the enterprise integrated into the circle, forming a square shaped coin overall. This type of image character fusion is not just about simply placing a single character in a geometric shape, but also considering the overall balance of the lines. Figure 4 and Figure 5 are the cases I designed. Figure 4 seems to be a ornamental column. In fact, the Xiangyun part across the middle of ornamental column is the word "patriotism", which is the same way as the noodles composed of 1086 in Figure 5. These characters do not need to be highly recognizable, because such logo and "figure" identification are more important. At first glance, Figure 6 looks like a bicycle. Upon closer inspection, it is a fusion of "permanent" and bicycle, is it very clever.

Picture within words

A picture within a character is a picture within a character. Attention everyone, the "√" in Renren Loan and the "eyes" in Sina. The reason why this design is a fusion of "text" and "graphics" is because the graphics and characters are integrated, unlike the arrow in the Amazon logo, which is a pure decorative element independent of the words. The first "Pu" in the second line is the logo I made for Puhui Water Treatment Company a few years ago, with "Pu" as the element, integrating the shield representing protection and the water drop element in the industry. In Figure 4, the characters "desert mushroom" have shapes of mushrooms and mountains, which directly reflect the growth conditions and varieties of desert mushrooms.

4 word plus image

Add some features to the character to form a graph. In case I, the initial letter of the logo of "Tiktok" is a lowercase "d" plus a musical symbol, which is superimposed in different colors, in line with the characteristics of Tiktok; The logo of "Storm Video" in Figure 2 is mainly composed of the initial letter "B", with several square holes added on the left to form a film shape, which is combined with the industry's attribute of film and television; Figure 3 and Figure 4 are my works. The letter "R" in Figure 3 has been added to the shape of a dragon head, transforming it into a dragon. Adding a milk tea cup to the bottom left corner of the letter "T" in the English logo of Tianguo in Figure 4 directly reflects the industry characteristics.

Expansion exercises

Case 1: Chenzhou Bohan Eaton International Student Apartment

1. In this step, extract the key elements in the company name and express them in a concrete way.

2.What elements should be combined? Extract the outer contour of the letters B and E and combine it with the graphic elements of the eagle to take a look.

3.It's a bit interesting, as long as the creative points are determined, the combination of elements is not a difficult task.

4.Further adjust the proportion.

5.Try some other combination methods, the original one still works better, continue to optimize it.

6.Adjust the proportion relationship between positive and negative shapes, and outline details.

7 .The tail of an eagle needs to be done well, with both effectiveness and recognition, which is a small challenge

8 This effect has already been achieved, let's try adding other elements again.

9.We went from addition creation to subtraction optimization, and completed it.

10.Add English and Chinese fonts, expand VI applications, and complete the entire set of VI 

Case 2: Yixiang Pediatric Massage 

1 . Extract the key elements in the company name and visualize them to identify the formal relationships between the elements. 

2: Try to relate, because the sun is the center of a circle and the heart is also a curve, which can be replaced. However, the heart has a more loving feeling, so we will do the second plan first.

3. Starting to sketch is the most time-consuming and challenging step.

   4.Give it a try, it seems that hands and wings can be combined, it's an opportunity, give it a try.

   5.Combine ease, heart, and hand. This heart is not very like the sun, it needs to be adjusted, basically OK.

   6.Continue to concretize the graphics and adjust the balance between positive and negative shapes.

   7.Adjust the curve relationships in the graph and gradually advance.

   8.Optimize the spatial balance relationship again.

   9. Add fonts, adjust positional relationships, and complete.

      Case 3: China Outdoor Education Network

      1.In this step, extract the key elements in the name, combining the thumb, branches, and leaves with the word "outdoors".

      2. Continue to optimize and adjust the graphic structure according to the word 'outdoor'.

      3.Continue adjusting and see if there are any other possibilities.

      4.Adjust to see if there are any other possibilities in terms of form.

      5.No more possible sketches, optimize the possible drafts.

      6.Adjust the graph scale and the relationship between positive and negative shapes.

                            Summary

                Creative methods for logos

                  That's all for today

              I hope my article can be like an excellent movie

             It can leave everyone feeling unfinished

       Always wait until all the eggs are released before leaving the venue

      I will also adhere to my principles

      Let everyone read good articles