How to design a logo for your VA or yourself

[Maximilian1805]

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Two weeks ago I have been asked by @Z-Tube to redesign the logo of his VA @elal-virtual. I have been using Adobe Illustrator for about 2-3 months now, even though not all the time, so I am somewhat experienced while there are most likely better designers out there ;D. Anyways, because I was asked and now finished the job, I wanted to share how I designed the logo of the virtual airline and how you could maybe design your own the next time you need to, especially all things done here can be replicated on mobile, too.

As I already said I was approached and asked to redesign the logo for El Al Virtual. At first, I was a bit unsure what to do, as I have never been asked before to do such a thing, and so I did this:

You see, whether or not you like it comes down to your own taste, but if you look at it objectively you will see that this logo doesn’t meet the criteria how a logo should look like. Normally, a logo should be

• simple
• recognizable
• scalable
• relatable

to name a few. This logo may meet the second requirement, but that’s all! I have to admit that most of the things I write here are what I have learned in the past two weeks while learning more and more about logo design on YouTube.
So before actually designing your VA logo, you should think about what the VA or the real airline, your VA is based on, stands for. Of course, there is always the possibility to just add a “virtual” anywhere in the logo of the original airline and call it a day, but in my opinion, the VA should develop its own character while keeping some attributes of the real airline. An example for the logos I described above is El Al Virtual’s old logo:

Normally you now want to make sketches in order to find a logo that you like but in my case, I went straight to working on it. I would recommend using an app that allows you to draw or create in general with so-called vector-based drawing. The difference here is, that instead of drawing pixels, your points get coordinates, making them scalable without getting blurry. This is important, as you might want to use your logo in different sizes throughout your website or IFC-appearance.
After learning the hard way that those super detailed logos make absolutely no sense, and the wish of @Z-Tube to make it more based on the real airline, I took a closer look at the airline’s logo.

In my opinion at least, making something original out of this was not possible because of the dominant font usage. I then looked at their livery and noticed the star of David.

This symbol is very key not only for the airline but also for Israel as a whole, with it being displayed even in their flag.
It’s logical that I had to change something about it to make the logo stand out from the other stars of Davids. In order to use that to simplify the airline’s logo, I increased the negative space in the logo. Negative Space is basically space where there is nothing. I did that by taking out parallels of the different legs of the two triangles, the Star of David consists out of.

Here is only one example. I basically repeated that step a few times in order to get the final result.
But here comes another important point when it comes to designing a logo: The color choice. The color choice can really mess things up and you can add meaning to your logo. In my case, the VA already had their colors which they got from the real El Al. With your colors, you can express what your VA stands for, especially when it is not orientated on a real airline. Canva has a page where you can look up what the colors have as a meaning. In my case, it was Navy Blue (trustworthy, professional, modern, and experienced) as well as Tan (security and stability). Also, the trends nowadays go towards having a rounded logo and sharp edges. I decided to not incorporate the first, as I wanted to stick with the original and rounding of edges wouldn’t have looked so nice. Additionally keep in mind, that only doing small changes is often better than big changes, especially if you are redesigning!
In the end, you can play around with the way you color your logo for example (here are a few variants I sent to El Al Virtual):

Tip: Make sure you set the size of your canvas to something that can be used in profile pics (e.g. 800x800px or 600x600px) and have a transparent background so you can export it as a PNG!

Also make sure to play around with the colors once you found the logo you want to make! Here is my example, even though I played around the most with the first canvas and can’t show you the different variants anymore…

Thanks for reading and I hope this helped!

Your

[Z-Tube]

This is fantastic! The logos came out amazing, and it is really cool to see the work that went into this!

Thank you for working with me, Maximilian! Keep at it!

[Tommy]

those came out great, nice job @Maximilian1805

[Maximilian1805]

Thanks a lot!

[tjb0709]

Nicely written topic! Enjoyed reading it👌

[Maximilian1805]

Thanks mate! Glad you liked it!

[Maximilian1805]

Here is a little update with the final version (most likely). Do keep it clean, negative space was utilized again, but the old logo was incorporated to go a little more back to the routes:

[Maximilian1805]

Logo redesign #2: Finnair Virtual

Good day everyone,
I am glad to be able to present to you the next logo redesign. After publishing the new logo of El Al Virtual, I was approached by @GBKarp to make a unique logo for @FinnairVA. In the following, I want to show you how I went to design the logo for Finnair Virtual.

Because I didn’t get too many restrictions on how the logo should look, I decided to “freestyle” a logo for this one and came up with two ideas. (Which turned out to be good but also bad in a way)

The first one was inspired by the crane. The crane is a bird that is typical for Finland, and I tried to incorporate the “F” for “Finnair” as wings.

The second one was a normal F but with parts of circles subtracted to create more negative space, something I am known for praising xD. It also created those neat curves that made the logo look very sleek.

But I may or may not unintentionally copied someone. In general, when designing logos, you can’t be blamed for being close to someone else’s logo, as designing is something that has been existing for quite some time now, and by now, basically every idea you can think of has been created in some form already. This is mostly not too important, but in my case, it was pretty unlucky. As I already said, having similarities in logos isn’t automatically dramatic, but it should be avoided if a company close to what you are doing has something comparable. In my case I unintentionally came close to Frontier’s logo:

After getting notified about this issue I felt like a copycat despite not doing that on purpose - another reason not even to consider copying someone!
After this, I immediately got back to work and played a little with shapes. Again, it’s important to try out many different things before deciding on something, as you never know if you might come up with something better later on.

After some time, I got the idea to approach things differently this time. I always had the idea in mind to make the logo consist out of triangles, but I never found the right way. But I did, after deciding to make one body out of many triangles instead of trying to position just a few triangles to an “F”.

That’s how I came up with those two variations (the first one illustrates the use of triangles). In the first picture, you can also see the color palette of the official Finnair Brand colors I collected. This is also an important step in order to keep some of the identity of the IRL airline while also building the own brand:

I had the feeling already, that the top leg would stick out too far, but I still proposed it as a second idea, because of the “F” exactly filling out half of the square.

To simplify and to make the logo more edgy and refined, I also took out some triangles, to give the logo an overall modern feel.

The color utilizes in the logos is the same as the one Finnair uses in their logo.

The next step as always for me is to add some font. This was not too hard this time, as I resorted to the official font that Finnair uses. It is called “Amplitude”:

Most fonts come with different weights. Amplitude has the weights shown above. In order to keep the logo simple, I would recommend using only 1-3 fonts at once, with the optimal case being to only utilize one font, but with different weights in order to create hierarchy, and to guide the person’s eye.

In my case, I utilized Amplitude in different weights in order to achieve a sense of hierarchy.

I also made a profile picture version with swapped colors to create better contrast:

Another neat thing is banners, which can be used starting from banners all the way to the website. On a banner you usually have more space to work with, so that’s also the place where you would add more information and give an overview. Here, I also made use of the different colors in the color palette to differentiate between the words.

After that, the job was done originally, but I then played around with the idea and created a logo animation, which in the end turned out to get the new gif banner for their thread.

So… That’s all for this time I think. I hope you like the new design, and I hope you could learn something new about logo design!

[Maximilian1805]

Here is also the version of the animation they use in their thread now:

[GBKarp]

Thanks for doing the logo/profile picture and banner for us, they look amazing :)

@tunamkol @Hardlanding_Hussain @That_Guy14 @Finnishboy @ECOFRIENDLY_TIME @airbus7447skyhawk @Pilot_Aaltonen @Dmitry_Gal

[Maximilian1805]

It was a pleasure working with you! :D

[Errigal]

Very interesting! I’m personally looking to redesign one for my own VA too!

[Maximilian1805]

I wish you the best of luck!

[Maximilian1805]

Here is my first attempt at a personal logo:

Until now, my logo was

I am a fan of modern-looking logos that are often simple and have sharp edges. The logo was ok, but I made it right when I started to use vector-based software, in the beginning, Affinity Designer on the iPad. I didn’t know how to properly use the software at the time, so it is easy to spot alignment errors for example.
At the moment I am working with Adobe Illustrator, and while I would still call myself a beginner, I am not the worst anymore, and I now at least know how the software I am working with works. This is something that is often underrated. I know some people who never touched designing software in their life before, but suddenly want to design a logo. This mostly leads to results like my old logo. After knowing both states, I can only emphasize how important it is to know your tools!

Anyways, a few days back I wanted to create a new logo for myself, and this time, I started from the very beginning. This means I took myself a clean sheet of paper and started sketching my ideas for a logo. Its natural that you don’t know exactly what you are aiming for, so just try to let your ideas flow on the paper. Remember, that sketches don’t need to be perfect, so don’t spend too much time on each of them! I used different ideas to draw out the two letters “M” and “A” which is the abbreviation for “Mobile Aviation”, the name of my YouTube channel. This is how one of the pages I sketched on looked like after I was done (pls. ignore some of the random things I drew on them when I was bored xD):

After that, I imported the sketch into Illustrator and started recreating it with vectors. It’s also important to keep your logo structured and also proportional, so I would recommend using lines to assist you when making your logo in software like Illustrator:

The rest of the process is the same as the one I described in my other two posts, so look there if you’re interested. Anyways, this is how my logo looks for now, but I am constantly adapting so this may not be the final version: