Step 3 Draw Details
14. Look at the lines inside this shape. Perhaps you can see that these lines create another, smaller square. It is simple enough to sketch but can be quite tricky when you try to replicate it inside of Illustrator or any other program. So, let’s start by creating another square right at the top of it. But instead of a Stroke, we’re going to make it a Fill so as not to wreck the stroking area.
You can resize the square by holding Shift and then dragging.
15. Now go ahead and press Shift+X again to turn it into a Stroke. The difference between this stroke and the stroke that makes our main shape is that they are of differing weights but that’s okay. We only need it to give us our baseline of where all the lines need to be.
16. Now, let’s start creating the lines. We’ll use our Line tool. But first, we need to choose the stroke weights for the lines, and for that, we’ll use the stroke weight of our main logo shape. So, go ahead, and select it.
17. Use the Line tool and while holding Shift, draw a line over the topmost line in the sketch. What holding Shift will do is bring this line at the perfect 45 degrees snapped angle at which we need it.
18. Next, go ahead and scale it up to get all the lines in perfect shape.
19. Now, press Shift+Option (Shift+alt for PC) to copy this line at the 45-degree angle and start dragging it to drop over the next line in the sketch. Now press Command+D (Ctrl+D in PC) twice so our line-repetition is perfectly spaced out and equidistant from each other.
20. So, it looks good but I want it to look even better so I’m going to work on the lines a little bit more. I’m going to make them thinner and increase the number of lines.
Make sure that the endpoints of the topmost and bottommost lines are closely parallel to each other.
21. Now, highlight everything else, de-select the outside shape, press Shift+M and then hold Option (Alt for PC) for the Shape Builder tool to get rid of the outside parts of the lines that we don’t need.
Start with the big thick lines first and then go to smaller parts. This is how it’ll look.
22. Now our final logo design shape is somewhat coming together. The lines inside are thinner than the boundary line of the main shape but that’s perfectly alright. It is giving the shape its balance.
23. Now duplicate this shape by pressing Shift+Option (Shift+Alt for PC) and dragging. Bring it to your left. Duplication will allow you to save your progress so far and give you something to go back to if something goes wrong. It also gives you a reference point to guide you forward.
24. Let’s now polish up our design. Right now, the lines look a bit jagged so let’s round out their corners. The easiest way for me to do this is to select all these lines, go to the Stroke option on your top menu bar, and press it. From the dropdown menu select ‘Cap’ which will turn the line corners into rounded caps.
25. The line corners are done, let’s do something about the top two corners of the main shape too. They are contrasting quite harshly with the soft rounds of the lines and we want to blunt them down ever so slightly. Highlight the area with the Direct Selection tool, click the blue circles and drag them down till you’re happy with the curve of the top corners.
26. This is our final logo design shape. And we don’t want to mess around with it too much. Group this shape now by pressing Command+G (Ctrl+G for PC) and selecting all of it and duplicating it to a new art board very quickly.
27. Now, I don’t want this shape to change every time I try to scale it so there are a few ways you can go about securing this shape. One of those ways is to press Command+K (Ctrl+K for PC) and press Scale, Strokes & Effects. But we don’t want to do that because we want to keep things consistent when we scale. So, instead, we are going to highlight it, go to the Object option from the menu bar, go down to Path, and then select Outline Stroke. You can see that immediately all of these have turned into real shapes.
Now we can scale it any way we want without worrying about the line weight.
