Logo Design in Adobe Illustrator - The Intermediate Level

I just finished this graphic design course and I honestly loved it. Daniel makes logo design feel so simple and clear, which really boosted my confidence. I learned so many useful tips and finally understand which details actually make a difference in a logo. The course was thorough but easy to follow, and it genuinely inspired me to keep improving my logo design skills. I especially loved the variety of logo exercises, and the questionnaire approach was such a great idea. Having different scenarios to work with made everything feel more real and fun. I’m so glad I took this course and would absolutely recommend it to anyone who wants to grow as a logo designer.

Another great course in this series - focusing on the artistic elements more than the previous course, but keeps hammering home the technical tool elements learnt in the first course of the series.

Last course (Logo Designing Beginner's Level 1) was above my expectations. That was really great match and amazing.

[General] I'm coming from Daniel's Logo Design for Beginners course and I'm very satisfied with this Intermediate course. As I stated in my review for the previous course, this is by far the best, most comprehensive, and most detailed Logo Design series I've ever taken. It's a series worth a 5/5 rating! Now, considering specifically this Intermediate course, despite having less content than the Beginners course; it maintains all the positive aspects of the first one, and it is even more polished and high-quality compared to it. I'm planning to switch careers and become a freelancing Logo Designer exclusively through online training, and this is certainly the most important and relevant course series that would eventually make this possible. This course was greatly structured, rich in content, hands-on, and very detail-oriented. I am already enrolled in the Advanced Level course and looking forward to starting it soon. [Positive Aspects Shared with Beginners Course] * Without any doubt, the best aspect of the course is that it is a hands-on follow-along course simulating real-world projects. * A second very positive aspect of this course is that Daniel has a very clearly defined model and stages on how to approach a logo project, and he sticks to it for every single case study with only minor deviations. No other course has such a structured order about which stages to adopt, and what to do in each stage. He always goes through the Moodboard, Mind Mapping, Rough Sketching, Refinement Sketching, Symbol Tracing, Typography, and Coloring stages for almost every single project. Other courses, by contrast, are much more chaotic and rush some of these or even skip them completely; and you can certainly tell that the stage they missed would have contributed to a better final result. * The methodology is extremely consistent not only within the course but also in comparison with the Beginners Course. I consider this as a positive aspect because it allowed me to reinforce and get to practice the foundations established early in the series, instead of generating confusion with new misleading knowledge. * Yet another great aspect of the course is that every step involving the use of Illustrator was covered through the lectures, in a work-along format, rather than skimming through the process and only showing the final results. The length of the course is a positive aspect here because there's always something to learn, practice, and/or reinforce by going through every single lecture and project. [Aspects Missing in Comparison with Beginners Course] The positive aspects of the course are much more relevant and they overshadow a few aspects to improve. However, there are still some of them, that I must include here to consider this to be a fair balanced review: * The development of the logo for the three case studies (Ridez, Trutone, EyeDive) was very thorough; including the exploration of several ideas and rough concepts for each project. However, in the end, only one idea for each case study was explored in-depth, and only one final logo resulted in the end. By contrast, in the Beginners Course, for the most important case study: First Point Surfing, several ideas were considered and developed in parallel, showcasing an entire logo project workflow. It consisted of several logo concepts being progressively refined, whittled down, and combined; instead of exploring a single idea and resulting in a single logo. * There wasn't much variety of styles regarding the symbols developed for the three case studies. All the logos belong pretty much in the same category: Separate Symbol & Type. The final EyeDive logo was a Combined Logo but it still fits in the same category. On top of that, all the symbols had more or less the same style: minimalist with semi-abstract shapes. By contrast, the logos developed during the Beginners Course had much more variety both in style and category. There were medium-complexity Symbols, Typographic Logos, Vintage, and Pixel/Mosaic styles. I would have liked to explore a logo with a more intricate and detailed symbol, such as a Mascot Logo, Enclosure Logo, or a Medium-Detail Illustration Logo. [Main Positive Aspect in Comparison with Beginners Course] * The conceptual demonstrations for the first section of the Intermediate Course were great! By contrast; In the Beginners Course, there were conceptual lectures of two different kinds: 1) The ones related to the methodology (Planning, Mind Mapping, Moodboard, Sketching); which were great and built the foundations of the case-studies development; and 2) Isolated conceptual sections which were somewhat disjointed and focusing on isolated or random topics rather than having a certain continuity (Like the Color Psychology Section, Logo Design Fundamentals Section, and the Creative Questions Section). This was perfectly addressed and improved on in this Intermediate Course. During the first sections, a lot of actual questions and decisions you face as a designer are addressed with much better structure and continuity. This included font family choice, the relationship between the font-weight and symbol, legibility issues regarding font characteristics, professional kerning, vertical & horizontal balance between type and symbol, negative space, proper relative sizing, etc. [Aspects Improved in Comparison with Beginners Course] * All the lectures have been recorded in a recent version of Illustrator, with a dark theme and a standard interface, which allowed a better contrast and good enough legibility. In the Beginners Course, on the contrary, some lectures were recorded in Illustrator CS5, which was a very old version, with a light theme and poor contrast, resulting in poor legibility. * The lectures related to color picking got slightly better. In the Beginners Course, he frequently changed his mind and switched away very fast from the Color Panel and CMYK sliders once he picked up color. In this course, there is still a lot of room for improvement but at least it got better. He has slowed down a bit and has narrated more accurately his changes within the CMYK Color Panel. He should ideally say to the student something along the lines of: "This is my definitive color for this shape: 50% for cyan, 25% magenta, 5% yellow, and 18% black"; so that we can follow along much more easily. In fact, he did this a couple of times; but most times he just says something like: "Let's move these to the left these two sliders", which is still very unprecise and hard to follow. [Aspects to Improve Shared with Beginners Course] * The scaling of the Illustrator interface is yet too zoomed out and it's very uncomfortable to read the values in the fields. Now that I'm on a separate screen monitor of 1080p height, I can read the values in the interface as long as I switch to the Full-Screen Mode (I always watch at 1080p). Now, I must say I hate Full-Screen Mode because everything else gets hidden, such as the Windows taskbar and the address bar in the browser. It is a pain to switch to another tab in the browser, to switch to Adobe Illustrator, to Windows Explorer, or switch to any other application back and forth in Full-Screen Mode. The course should have had a much more small-screen friendly scaling, especially since the feature of up-scaling the interface was introduced already available a few years ago for Illustrator, and there's no need to change your computer's entire resolution to achieve a large scaling when recording. I usually watch in Theater Mode and get frustrated when I have to switch to Full-Screen Mode to read a value and then get out of it again, but it's tolerable. However, if I still were watching the course on a standard 14" 720p laptop, the scaling would be a very serious issue [I'm sure this has to do with the scaling interface set-up during the recording of the course because I've made more than 10 other Udemy courses, I always watch at 1080p when it's available, and I never had this issue before]. * The strategy behind the color selection is still falling short. Daniel uses two very crude strategies over and over, which are picking a random color from the color spectrum, or picking a pre-defined swatch and moving the CMYK sliders by trial and error. I believe he should dive into some color theory (not the psychology behind it, but the actual components of color such as Hue, Value, Saturation), explore the Adobe Color Themes and integrate palettes into a project, exploring the Color Guides Panel, and using purposely the harmony rules in there, editing and assigning colors in the Recolor Artwork dialog box, and exploring colors in it's Lab color wheel. * Unlike all the Illustrator-related lectures, which were hands-on; the lectures involving the planning and sketching stages were covered in a format consisting much more of a presentation than an exercise. Don't take me wrong, the Mood Boards, Mind Maps, Rough Sketches, and Refinement Sketches were very thorough, detailed, and high-quality; but there was no pedagogical strategy behind them. There was a fair amount of useful analysis when they were presented, but they still weren't proper work-along exercises. I found myself recreating his Mind Maps and sketches as a self-assignment, but he should have tried harder to come up with a strategy for training these stages. Something like creating a template of his original mind map with only half of the ideas laid out and the other half being blank spaces that we should fill with some scrambled word bank to refer to; and maybe having the doodles separate and leaving it to us to find out in which part of the mind map they fit. Maybe he should have delivered us a partially completed Mood Board with some white spaces, where they were word ideas instead of pictures, and we should find the proper pictures on our own to replace those floating words. The same applies to the training in the sketching stages: there should have been some pedagogical assignments onto them, such as digitally erasing some of his scanned pages of the rough sketching stage and describing with words what idea he tried there for us to try to draw it and then compare it. * Many times there wasn't available an exercise file to rely on and compare. This forces you to follow each case study from scratch, but there were lots of cases where I would have liked to have the actual Illustrator file and compare my result to Daniel's. This also resulted in having to do a lot of fonts identification; because frequently, during the font selection process, most of the time the name of the fonts he tried were missing. Also, I would have liked to follow along with the first Logo Design Fundamentals section, but only a few lectures had an actual Illustrator resource file. It got slightly better compared with the Beginners Course but is still far from ideal. * I found the final assignments too demanding and intimidating. This is probably because we focused too much percentage of the lectures on the Illustrator side of the projects, but as I stated previously, the training in the planning and sketching stages was far from enough. I have never been good at drawing and I now feel trapped because I can come up with good Mind Maps and Mood Boards, and I can trace existing logos from images having an Intermediate-High mastery of Illustrator, but I can't draw much and I always hit a wall when it comes to rough sketching the word ideas I have for a logo. Maybe Daniel should point us to some online drawing resources that could help students like me who can already get around Illustrator but have poor drawing skills. Finally, let me reinforce that these are still minor aspects that are vastly overshadowed by all the positive aspects mentioned above and that this is still the best Logo Design series I've ever taken. I'm already enrolled in the Advanced course and I'm looking forward to starting it soon.