Designing a logo for Sammy's Cafe in Illustrator

Today I’m going to show you how (along with my thought process) to design a logo for a food retail operation. Sammy’s Cafe is a retail operation contracted out to a man that resides within the Student Center at Rice University. The owner/operator asked me to design a logo for them (along with a ton of other things) to update the look of their space. (Previously, they had no identity.) This is what I came up with.

Step 1

I knew what I wanted, which always helps with the direction of a logo. I was envisioning the words “Sammy’s Cafe” in a bowl with steam coming out of the top. So the first thing I needed was a good look for the words of the operation. So let’s get started!

Open up Illustrator. (I’m using CS3.) Create a new document that’s 5″ by 5″. Click on your text tool in the palette and type out the words “Sammy’s Cafe”. I thought that the words would be too long for a common looking bowl, so I made a hard return after “Sammy’s” and centered the text. I also scrolled through my fonts until I found a font I liked.

Currently, the text is not converted to outlines. This is a process which takes the type and essentially converts it into shapes. I don’t like to do this until later in the process just in case I need to change words or letters. We will revisit this later.

Step 2

Now that we have a solid base, let’s draw in the steam. Grab the pen tool (hit ‘P’ on your keyboard) and start by placing your bezier points. I’m going to start at the top and work my way down.

To close the path, just click on the very first point you placed.

Now that our points are placed, you can see we have a problem. The bottom point is a little out of whack and we need to fix it. To do so, keep with the pen tool, but hold down the Alt key. (The cursor will change to what looks like an angle.) We’re going to select the directional handle of the bottom bezier point, and while still holding the Alt key, drag it around to face it upwards.

Already looks a lot better, much more like steam. After a few edits to the other bezier points, we’ll get a good piece of steam. Note: To move points around, use the direct selection tool (the white arrow, not the black one).

Step 3

Using the same techniques mentioned in Step 2, I’m going to draw some more steam until I’m satisfied with how it looks.

There we go. Now we have a good starting point.

Step 4

Now we have to make the bowl. This is a little bit more difficult. I kept trying to figure out how to make this work, because if the bowl goes below the “Cafe” word, it might be too low. I’ve decided to go ahead and put the “Sammy’s” in the bowl, and try to make the “Cafe” go on the bowl. Let’s get started with that.

First, we need to grab the elliptical tool and draw what will eventually be the “opening” of the bowl.

Notice the placement of the oval. Because I want the “Cafe” to be on the bowl, I needed the opening to terminate above the word. This actually worked out pretty well because it left part of the ‘y’ in “Sammy’s” hanging “into” the bowl which will be good for depth later.

Step 5

I’m going to fill that oval with black for the time being; I want to be able to see it when I’m working with it and we’ll need it for later. Let’s now copy that same oval (Ctrl+C) and then do what’s called “Paste in Place”—this will not only paste the oval, but will paste it exactly on top of where it was copied from. This will be important for positioning later. To paste in place, immediately after you hit the copy command, hit “Ctrl+F”. It will probably look like nothing has happened, but trust me on this one.

Step 6

Now that we have two copies, we’re going to extend one lower so that we have a “bowl” shape. Select the oval with the direct selection tool. (Remember, that’s the white arrow, not the black one.) When you’ve done this, click only on the lower middle bezier point. It should then be filled in. All the others should be filled with white.

When you have it selected, while holding shift, drag it down until you have a bowl shape.

Step 7

To me, that looks a little awkward. I don’t like how steep the sides are, so let’s extend the width of that curve to flatten out the bowl. Using your direct selection tool, select the ball at the end of the directional handle on the bezier point. While holding shift, move the directional handel to the left. Repeat this process again on the right until you have a bowl that looks a lot better. (A note: Holding shift prevents the line from turning up or down as you drag.)

Step 8

Good! Looks more bowl like. Now we need to make the top half of the bowl disappear so as to make the opening in the bowl. We want our bowl to be black, so we’ll position the first oval we drew (not the one we just edited) at the top and then use it to remove the black we don’t want.

First, we need to send the now-bowl-shaped oval to the back of the layer so we can select the initial oval. Click on the bowl with the selection tool (the black arrow) and hit Ctrl+Shift+[. That should send the bowl to the very back, though it won't look like it did anything. Then, using the same selection tool, click in the upper part of the bowl and your first oval should now be selected. (A note here: If we did not fill the oval in way back then with black, it would not have selected it. If an object is not filled in, you must physically click it's path to select it.)

Since I want a little bit of the bowl to show around the back, I'm going to need to shrink the currently selected bowl by just a tad. With it selected, head to Object > Transform > Scale. Select Make sure "Uniform" is selected and put in 98% and hit OK. Now it's ready to be cut out!

Step 9

Make sure both bowls are selected (but nothing else!) and in your "Pathfinder" palette, while holding down the "Alt" key, click on subtract from shape area (it's highlighted in the picture below).

Perfect! now it's starting to look like a bowl.

Step 10

Now we need to work on the "Cafe" and getting it on the bowl. Remember earlier when we didn't convert the text to outlines? Because I'm pretty satisfied with the way this is going—and because we need to do it for the next part—let's go ahead and do this. All you need to do is right-click on the text and select "Create Outlines". Bam. No longer text, we can now manipulate the text like it was drawn with the pen tool.

Step 11

By default, this text is grouped. However, since we want to work with just the "Cafe" part, we need it ungrouped. So with it still selected, hit Ctrl+Shift+G and the letters will then be ungrouped. That being said, EVERY letter is now ungrouped. Let's go back and select the individual letters.

Now they're all selected, hit Ctrl+G to group then. Perfect! (By the way, if you're having trouble seeing the letters to click them, you can do one of two things. Drag select the lower half of the bowl thereby selecting the letters and the bowl, and then while holding shift, select the bowl. You can do that, or hit Ctrl+Y to view it in outlines, select the letters, and then hit Ctrl+Y to turn the view mode back to normal.)

Step 12

With the letters still selected, we're going to turn them white and bring them to the front so that we can start to work with them. In the Swatches palette, click on white.

You'll notice you can't see it right now. That's because it's behind the black bowl. So with them still selected, hit Ctrl+Shift+] and that will bring it to the front. Bam. White “Cafe”.

Step 13

Already we’ve got a pretty good logo going, but a couple things strike me here. First, I think the bowl is a little big, so I’m going to shrink it a tad, and then bring it back to center.

Now, in order to center everything, we need to make sure all elements we want lined up are grouped. We are about to use the Align tools, and if things are NOT grouped, all pieces (not the whole element) will align. That being said, using the same method to group “Cafe” mentioned above, let’s group “Sammy’s”. Once you’ve done that, select all your steam elements and group them as well. Then, select “Sammy’s”, “Cafe”, the steam, and the bowl (all of our elements), and click on the center align in the align palette.

Step 14

Now there are two obvious things here. The black “Sammy’s” is now buried in the bowl, and “Cafe” is buried in the background. Let’s correct those. All we’re going to do is resize them and reposition them like in the picture below.

Step 15

I want to put a white outline around “Sammy’s” now so that it stands apart from the black bowl behind it. You could select the text and literally give it a stroke color and size, but I don’t like doing it for one very important reason: When you resize this logo (which is the whole point of vector logos to begin with), the stroke size will REMAIN THE SAME. So if you have a 1px stroke and it looks good on a 5″x5″ logo, imagine how poorly a 1px stroke will look on a 100″x100″ version of it, or even a 1″x1″ version.

In order to accomplish this, we need to select the “Sammy’s” text (it should still be grouped), and go to Object > Path > Offset Path.

In the next dialog box, input .025 in for the size and hit OK. We should now have a crazy looking “Sammy’s” on our hands.

Step 16

You now have two versions of the word “Sammy’s”. One in front (the original), and one behind it (the one that’s now a .025 inches bigger). We want to turn the larger one white to give the main “Sammy’s” some depth against the black bowl. Using your direct selection tool, carefully select each letter of the word and then cut it (Ctrl+X) and paste it back down in the same place (Ctrl+F).

Step 17

You’ll notice that parts of this selection overlap. Well, it’d be much easier to work with if it was one big block, so while the text is still selected, holding Alt click on “Add to Shape Area” in your Pathfinder palette.

This text is, however, still above the text we want shown, e.g. if we made it white now, it would cover up the original, smaller, black “Sammy’s”. So while it’s still selected, using the selection tool, hold shift and also select the bowl. Then, hit Ctrl+Shift+[ to send all this to the back. That means there is now the bowl at the bottom, the larger “Sammy’s” text, and then the smaller “Sammy’s” text on top.

Deselect the bowl by holding shift and clicking on it. You should now just have the larger “Sammy’s” text selected. In your Swatches palette, click on the white box to make the text white.

Perfect! Looks good now. This could serve as a perfectly good logo. I’m all from the school of clean, easy to read, functional marks for your company. But I still want to mess around with the “Cafe” a little bit.

Step 18

This is going to be subtle, but I think it will make the logo look better, a little more realistic. I want to bloat the “Cafe” so it looks more like it’s on the bowl. We’re going to do this using an envelope warp. With “Cafe” selected, head up to Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Mesh.

Select 4 rows and 4 columns and hit OK. You should then see this:

Step 19

Here’s the fun part. Using the direct selection tool, you can then select any of those points on the grid, move them around, and it will alter the look of the word! Play around with the grid; it’s pretty fun. When you’re ready to get down to business, I’m going to use this grid to bloat out the sides of the word so it looks like it’s wrapped on the bowl. Here it is just getting started:

Don’t forget to use the directional handles when you have a bezier point clicked to smooth out the curve! And don’t forget to change the directional handles of the points in the corners.

Step 20

There really is no Step 20 because now you’re done! Here’s our final logo:

This is a pretty simple logo, but it’s a good start to getting used to some of the major techniques you need to make Illustrator your friend and not your enemy. Practice with the pen tool and modifying the bezier points and directional handles a lot—you will use them a ton when you’re mastering Illustrator.