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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!
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