Design a Vectorized Animal Logo in Illustrator

Logos are everywhere — they serve to represent a company or brand. That’s why designing a logo is no easy task; it has to be designed thoughtfully in order to stand out from the crowd of visual competitors. A logo should depict the clients’ ideologies perfectly. It has to be simple, unique, and interesting at the same time.

In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the process of designing an animal logo for a construction company in Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator makes the whole process of getting your visual ideas into vector form quite easy for us. If you are not familiar with this great tool, you are missing out on a great design application. Let’s explore Illustrator through this tutorial.

Resources:
ChunkFive font
Final result: (To download the completed, layered file, click here.)

Step 1

Create a new document in Illustrator with a 600px width and a 400px height.

Step 2

We’ll create the logo for a fictional company named King’s Builders. While making this logo, we’ll have to focus on the brand and company that we’re designing for. Since we’re designing for King’s Builders, I thought of illustrating this concept in the form of a lion (the “King” of the jungle) and few bricks to symbolize the construction trade. Your approach could be different; I am just showing you one way to do it.

First of all, we’ll draw the sketch of the lion to complement the “King” aspect. In Illustrator, set your fill color to “none,” and set stroke of pure black color. Select a 2pt stroke weight from top properties bar. Now, select the pencil tool (“N”) and draw the ear shape shown below. If you are not satisfied with the first attempt, you can redraw it until you get the desired shape. Or, you can erase the part at any point using the eraser tool. Keep drawing the sketch using the pen tool. Make sure to draw each stroke on separate new layer.

Step 3
Now, we’ll give these strokes some character. Select one of the stroke layers by clicking the ring-shaped target on the respective layer and change its width profile. I am using width profile 2 for the following stroke paths.

Then, change the width of the following stroke to width profile 1.

Step 4

Draw the following two strokes on separate layer with a 1pt stroke weight.

Change their width profiles as shown below.

Step 5

Select black as your fill color, and set stroke to none. Now, select the pen tool and draw the following shapes. It doesn’t have to be exactly like mine. You can draw it as you like.

Step 6

Draw the following two strokes using width profile 4.

Step 7

Next, we’ll make the eye for our kingly lion. Draw the stroke using a 2pt weight and width profile 1.

Step 8

Add a few more details, as shown below. Use a small stroke (0.5-0.25pt) here.

Step 9

Make a few strokes for the hair using a 2pt stroke weight, and change their width profiles as shown below.

Step 10

Draw the rest of the hair strokes using the same techniques.

Step 11

We are done with the lion’s sketch. Now, we’ll move ahead to create the other half of our logo. We’ll create few bricks for that. Collect all of the lion layers into a new layer. Create a new layer and draw a rectangle using the rectangle tool. Use a black fill color for your initial brick.

Step 12

Draw a smaller white rectangle over the black one to make a highlight. Reduce the opacity of the highlighting rectangle to 50%-60%. Collect both rectangles into a new layer and label it as “brick”.

Step 13

Duplicate the “brick” layer few times and arrange these copies over each other randomly to get the effect shown below.

Step 14

Now, you can add the text. Select the type tool and type in the text just below the logo. I am using the “ChunkFive Roman” font here.

We are done with the logo. You can give it any color, texture, or treatment that you want. Since it’s a construction company, I chose wood below.

I hope you guys enjoyed the process. Do share your thoughts!

Frequently Asked Questions about Designing a Vectorized Animal Logo in Illustrator