Creating business card & logos from scratch with Illustrator's Pen Tool

​Logos are an interesting choice of work for graphic designers or any content creators. There are so many different ways to create logos, not to mention size varieties of font, and canvas or display area as well. Logos also come in all sorts of shapes and patterns.

Some logos may just include text and a minimalist background of a gradient or even a single color. Many business cards offer such logos on the front. Other logos, however, include graphics and objects along with the text. This is why as designers we need to plan the logo ahead of time and make it fit for what its theme is meant to convey.

If the company we are creating the logo for, whether it is our own company or a client’s, is a tech company, we should make it reflect technology. Maybe add some computer screens or keyboards to its layout. If it is a flower company selling flower products, we should add a bouquet of sorts or at least a flower here and there onto its design. These are just some examples.

The actual text on the logo, however, may be its most important part. Many programs, such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, offer a wide range of fonts to choose from for text. However, there is also the option to make the logo truly stand out and offer a unique print design and that is creating the text from scratch.

One way to do this is using various inks or pen and pencil tools and writing the text. However, another way that I recently used was using Illustrator’s pen tool. It is no easy feat as the pen tool takes some fiddling to really get good curves and angles — particularly on the S. However, it offers a pretty unique way to make the logo stand out because it also allows us to create various fills and gradients to go along with the design of the text.
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I recently started doing side jobs doing native speaking or conversational english here in Europe along with my content creation online. Or at the least, I have a one-time-per-week client right now and am trying to see if I can develop this into a side business of sorts. However, my main focus is still freelance multimedia and content creation.

Thus, here is a design I started working on for a logo based on being a native speaker and it will go on a business card I plan on forming out of this logo. I may even use it for a website’s header image or other purposes. However, it really was a learning process and a process of finesse using the pen tool. That was the main goal of this project along with getting more familiar with the various gradients and fills I can use to create unique logos in the future. Here is what the final design turned out to look like after trial and error getting the letters to lign up:

So there you have it. A bit of my work using Illustrator to create Vector logos that can be scaled and printed any size without loss as long as the file is the pdf version. This particular logo was done for me personally, but I can do other such work for your brand or company if you are interested in working with me. I can also combine various other ideas, shapes, gradients backgrounds (or color fills) and more. This was just one idea.