A logo is not a picture. It is a set of files and rules that other people will use without you in the room. This one-day workshop is about building that system in Illustrator: constructing a mark that holds together geometrically, deriving the variants a real brand needs, and delivering it so that a printer, a sign maker and a web developer can each work from the same pack.
The morning is construction. You build a primary mark on a geometric grid, then correct it optically, because a circle drawn to the same measurement as a square looks smaller, and a horizontal stroke matched to a vertical one looks heavier. You then choose and kern a wordmark by eye, outline it, and keep an editable master alongside the outlined version, which is the file most designers forget to keep and later have to rebuild.
The afternoon is where a mark either survives or does not. You produce full-colour, one-colour, reversed and mono variants, define the palette in CMYK, RGB and HEX against a client-supplied Pantone reference, and then run the stress tests: sixteen pixels as a favicon, a single-colour stamp, and signage read from three metres. Anything that fails gets simplified until it works. Clear space and minimum size are drawn as artwork rather than written as a note, because a note gets ignored.
You finish by exporting a delivery pack in AI, EPS, SVG, PDF and PNG under a naming scheme that will still make sense in a year, and by assembling a one-page brand sheet that goes out with it. The day closes with a group critique: you review someone else's mark against the same tests and receive the same in return.
Bring a logo concept or a rough sketch you want to develop. If you have nothing in progress, a written brief and a concept sketch are supplied so that you spend the day building rather than deciding.
