A logo page is a kind of page in Illustrate mode: a square artboard, 1024 x 1024 pixels, to design a logo on. You build it from ordinary elements (shapes, icons, text, paths and strokes), with a few tools made for logos on top.
Adding a Logo Page
- Press the + after the last page and choose Logo, or choose Logo when a new tab's first page asks What Is This Page For?
- A logo page is always the artboard: it has no other size and no portrait or landscape. It takes a Background like any page, but no pattern.
- Its margin is its safe area, 10% in from each edge: keep the mark inside it so it never touches the edge of an icon or an avatar.
- New to logo pages? Open the page's cog and press Show Me at the top of its panel for a short tour of the layouts, guides, mirror and combining shapes, on your own page.
Drawing Your Mark
While your tab has a logo page, the palette has a Logo category, first on the strip. It holds the tools a mark is drawn with: the Pen (click for corners, drag for curves), the Freehand Pencil, Text, a Square, Circle and Diamond, and your three markers from Draw mode. Pick a tool and drag on the artboard to draw; it puts itself down afterwards.
Beside the page's cog sit Mirror and Guides, plus Tidy (the wand, just left of the padlock and cog) when you have a drawing selected. Each works on that page only.
To start from nothing rather than a layout, press Start From Scratch at the foot of the layout card. The card won't come back on that page; its layouts are still in the page's cog panel, on Layouts.
Drew something a bit wobbly? Select it and press Tidy: hand-drawn lines become straight segments, nearly level or upright lines become exactly so, corners and straight runs near a guide or grid line line up with it, and a loop whose ends meet closes into a shape. One Undo brings the drawing back.
A good way to start: draw a few overlapping shapes, select them, and Combine them into one mark. Then add the name with Text and set its Wordmark type.
Starting From a Layout
An empty logo page offers its layouts inside itself (and Start From a Layout in its title bar), and the cog's Layouts tab offers the same: twenty-five logo layouts in four categories, each a complete mark to make your own.
- Lockups: an icon with the name, above, beside, below or inside a pill.
- Wordmarks: the name is the mark: large, in two lines, in spaced capitals, a monogram, or with an accent.
- Emblems: the name inside or round a shape: a badge, a seal, a stamp, a hexagon, a diamond.
- Marks: a symbol alone, several of them made of shapes ready to combine.
The placeholders read Brand and Your tagline here (a few use Studio or the initials BR): double-click to type your own.
Construction Guides
Guides sit over the artwork to build a balanced mark on: centre lines, diagonals, the safe area, a keyline circle and an inner circle, a keyline square, and an 8 x 8 grid. Moving or resizing an element snaps to the inner circle and the keyline square as well as the page's edges, centre and safe area. While guides show, a Pen click and the start and end of a pencil or marker stroke land on a guide near them, preferring where guides cross.
- Press Guides beside the page's cog: Show Guides at the top turns them on or off for that page (each page remembers its own), the tiles under it choose which guides show, and Strength sets them Faint, Medium or Strong.
- Logo Guides in Settings sets whether a page you haven't chosen for shows them.
- The parts and strength are also in Settings, under Editor, then Illustrate. They are yours: collaborators see their own.
- Guides never export, and they hide in Zen mode and while presenting.
Mirror
- Press Mirror beside the page's cog and switch on Mirror While Drawing. While it is on, what you draw on that page (a stroke, a path, a shape) is repeated as you draw. One Undo removes the lot.
- Pick an Axis: Vertical reflects left to right, Horizontal top to bottom, Both four ways, and Radial turns your drawing round the page centre, with 3, 4, 5, 6 or 8 Copies (handy for emblems, stars and petals).
- With Merge Into One on, a drawing and its copies become one element when you let go; switch it off to keep each copy separate.
- The axes show as solid lines over the guides. Each page keeps its own settings while the tab is open.
- Mirror Copy (in the element menu or the command palette) reflects what you have selected, text and images included.
- Twins are ordinary elements: editing one leaves the other as it is.
Wordmark Type
Select a text on a logo page, right-click, and open Text, then Wordmark:
- Tracking: the space between letters, tighter or looser.
- Weight: Regular, Medium or Bold.
- Case: As Typed, Capitals or Lower Case; what you typed is kept.
- Arc: bends the text along a circle, up or down, all the way round at 360. Flat straightens it. Arched text is one line.
Hovering a choice previews it; sliders preview as they move and are one Undo when you let go.
Combining Shapes
Select two or more shapes, paths or strokes on the same logo page and press Combine in the selection toolbar (also in the selection menu and the command palette):
- Unite: everything any of them covers.
- Subtract: the bottom shape, less the ones above it.
- Intersect: only where they all overlap.
- Exclude: everything except where they overlap.
The result is one path in the bottom shape's place and colours, holes and all. If nothing is left (shapes that don't overlap, say), nothing changes and a message says so. A combined shape moves, resizes and restyles as one; its points are not edited one by one.
Exporting
- A logo page on plain paper exports see-through as a PNG or SVG, so it sits over anything. Its PDF page stays white, and a background you chose is kept.
- Logo Kit downloads everything in one .zip:
logo.svg, PNGs from 16 to 1024 pixels, andfavicon.ico. Find it in Export: the Logo Kit card shows while the tab has a logo page, and asks which one when there are several.
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