How to BALANCE Your Logo (2 Easy Techniques)

Ever tried to pair your logo mark with your logo type and it just feels off? And no matter what you do, something's just not clicking. Well, in this video, you'll learn a simple grid trick so your logos feel balanced and client ready. When we talk about balance in logo design, we're usually talking about lock-ups.

That's just a common word for how your logo mark and your logo type sit together. There are a bunch of lock-up styles, also known as variations, such as horizontal, vertical, badge, and even partner lock-ups. But the two most common are horizontal and vertical.

So I'm going to show you two techniques that you can use to balance your horizontal and your vertical logo lock-ups. Okay, so let's start with learning a technique to balance your horizontal logo lock-ups. So we have this beautiful timeless logo here.

So let's sync these two together. So the first thing you want to do is you want to get the pen tool and you want to create a line. Let's make this line, let's just have a colour like this.

So straight to the top and right at the bottom. So we have a line at the top line at the bottom and then what we want to do is create a few more lines. It can just be anywhere because I'm going to show you another technique.

So let's say we should have three lines in between and then now you have the three lines, you want to highlight all five lines and then you want to go to align and then you want to select vertical distribute. When you select vertical distribute, you now have this simple grid system. Almost like a grid system but basically.

So I'm just going to expand that there and what I'm going to do now is take these two lines, place them on top. I'm also going to group them just to make it easier and then I'm going to do it again for the bottom and then I'm going to control, copy it and paste it in front. Then I'm going to rotate it.

I'm just going to make it slightly shorter and then I'm going to place it right at the beginning of the logo type. This is right in the beginning and the middle and I'm also going to do it right at the end. So these are like your margins, your gutter spacing.

So now we have this grid system for a horizontal logo lockup. Now I can just simply bring in the logo and boom. I should have used a new layer but let's do that and you can see how this syncs very well together.

When you have the grid, you can, depending on your logo, you can choose if you want to have the margin like that. So then your logo can be more outwards and you can just choose the scaling for the logo if you want to be bigger or smaller. I found that this just works.

So for this example, that's how you create a horizontal logo lockup. Now this is the second technique to balance your vertical logo lockups. With this one, the technique is slightly different.

It's a bit more complicated but I'm going to show you how we can do that. So let's use the same colour and what I'm going to do is create a line right at the top and also make sure your smart guides are on. I'm using Adobe Illustrator.

So go to view and then smart guides. Smart guides are the purple lines, the pink lines. Not these pink lines, these pink lines that you see over there.

So I want to create another line at the bottom and then I want to create two more lines in the centre. Doesn't matter where you place them because again we're going to do vertical distribute centre. So now we have that and now we have this system of lines here and what we're going to do is just paste this below.

Just make sure that this is on top. So now we have that. So what we've just created, we're going to duplicate it.

So copy paste it in front the same as before. Rotate it and then you have it like somewhere in the middle. That is in the middle.

And now what you want to do is let me ungroup this. Take this line that you've created and you want to create another line. So you should have two lines in between.

So now you've turned this into thirds. So again you want to do vertical distribute. So now you've turned this into thirds and now I've got this.

I can just drag that down and bring that there. You can see the smart guys help me there and then I can just do command D and it does it again. So now we have a grid system that allows us to place our logo mark up top and also our logo type below and if we have a slogan we can place it at the bottom.

So now I'm going to align this to something that works. I'm going to say this should be probably above there. Just an example so I'm not going to spend too long trying to exact where it is but on your example definitely make sure to double check everything.

And this one again so that seems about right. So now you can see if I just remove these lines you can see we have a perfect balanced vertical logo and then obviously for optical balance if you think it looks better to just use the mathematical horizontal align you can do. And yeah there you have it.

These methods work well but they take a little bit of time. So I made a script that automates this grid system for you. To use the script version for this you can simply select the logo type go to file, scripts, horizontal lockup grid and it instantly creates a grid with the proportions that we used before and then you can just simply bring in your logo mark and then you have your layers and of course you can hide your lockup grid layer.

And now the same for a vertical logo lockup we can select the logo mark and then we can go to file, scripts and select vertical lockup grid and then now you can see it duplicates the logo as reference points and then we can do the same thing as we've done before putting that there and just bringing that there and of course lastly you can hide the lockup grid. You can grab the logo grids core kit completely free. It includes a ready-to-use logo grid template and my mastering logo grids in Adobe Illustrator ebook.

Just check the link in the description to download it. Thank you for watching. Please like, share and if you want to see more videos like this hit the subscribe button below.

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