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Quick Tip: How to Create a Retro Style Textured Logo
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Quick Tip: How to Create a Retro Style Textured Logo

on May 2nd 2011 with 46 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Program: Illustrator CS4
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Length: 15:39 min

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Learn how to create a retro vector seal logo in Adobe Illustrator with Ryan Quintal. We’ll be using simple shapes, effects, transparency masks, and a free grunge texture pack from PSD TutsPlus to create the final effect.

Resources: Freebie Pack – 4 Free High Resolution Grunge Textures

 
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Edgy. Daring. Sometimes a little kooky. Graphic designers of all backgrounds turn to Ryan's QuintalDesigns.com for industry articles, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials, and a host of other fun information. A blend of strong experience, innovative design, and geeky background. Ryan's current gig is as a Designer in Massachusetts, while at the same time, attending college, where he is honing his skills for his design career.  

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  • Greg

    Is a premium member video? I cant seem to get any of the videos to work

  • http://eskimirza.com Eski Mirza

    Great tutorial & nice usage of the colour guide. Never thought of using that.

    • http://www.quintaldesigns.com Ryan Quintal
      Author

      The color guide is neat, Kuler from Adobe is awesome too… When it works.

  • http://itcutives.com Jatin

    Retro is back. I really like the colors in logo, secondly, thanks for resources.

  • mrxempz

    video is unavailable

  • http://www.AlenkaDesign.com Alenka

    Hi!

    Liked your tutorial, learned a few things! Thanks. Here’s my question; since you’ve put in an image (texture), how is this going to effect the logo when you make it really big? Let say you put it on a jumbo poster, is that going to distort the texture in the logo?

    Thanks,
    AlenkaDesign

    • http://bucketothought.com/loungekat/blog/ LoungeKat

      Billboards are printed at 72 dpi (as far as I know). No matter the size, if you make the texture to the size of the output then there shouldn’t be a problem.

      • http://www.quintaldesigns.com Ryan Quintal
        Author

        I second that motion.

        Also, I second that EMOTION. LoungeKat, this one goes out to you: http://ryqu.in/maJqCD

  • Jim K.

    Nice work Ryan. Thanks for taking the time to do this. I especially liked your using keyboard shortcuts – Somewhat rare as far as tuts go.

  • http://seraphipod.tumblr.com/ SeraphiPod

    What font did he use for the “Est. 1932″? I can’t hear it clearly.

  • http://wildcanon.com Dustin

    I got through this tutorial fairly easily, but one question remained in my head. It looks like yours ended up brighter than mine at the end of the video, and I was wondering if you had done anything to achieve that effect because mine looks a little to faded.

    • http://www.quintaldesigns.com Ryan Quintal
      Author

      Hard to say Dustin,

      Sometimes that’s the color space used at the beginning, colors probably can’t translate exactly though the screen recording software, and after blipTV’s encoding, I’m not sure what may be the case.

      Either way, once you’ve got the technique down, you can change the colors as you like.

  • Pierre

    I’m stuck and I don’t understand what i’m doing wrong. After you pasted a copy in front of the original, you expand the appearance and then use the divide tool. But when i use the divide tool i lose the original image. In other words, there are no two images on top of each other anymore but only one. What am I doing wrong ?

    • http://www.quintaldesigns.com Ryan Quintal
      Author

      You may be selecting too many things before you hit the divide command.

      You can always make another copy, by using cmd+C then cmd+F for insurance before you use the divide command.

  • http://francoandrade.com/ Franco

    Good tutorial! But I’m stuck on the same part of Pierre.
    I think that you miss or did something different, because we can see that the recording was stopped and released again on 11:49. Doing the same thing on the video gave me a different result.

    Anyway, thank you for sharing!

  • http://www.designerist.ch Designerist

    Thanks a lot for this great tutorial. Your explanations are clear, and the whole thing is created entertaining! I look forward for more to come :-)

  • Nathan Simpson

    Amazing tut, i have Cs3 not Cs5 but it was fun to watch and i got some great tricks, ideas and inspiration from this, great job Ryan!

  • Jeremy

    Great tutorial, but it’d be nice to see one that wasn’t so Mac OS-centric. All of this Command C, Command F stuff made the tutorial a lot more complicated than necessary for us Windows users.

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2DLYABFIHUFVTZYCAKYPALPA3M Justin White

      seriously? Cmd+C (Mac) is the same as CTRL+C (Win)

  • http://brianjohnsondesign.com Brian Johnson

    It’s a pretty good tutorial and a good design, but I just couldn’t for the life of me get some of it to work… Maybe you left out some key shortcuts your were using, I’m not really sure. Like Pierre and Franco, the part where you make the new layer, then copy the logo over itself and expand and divide and delete gets messed up. It never goes for me how it does for you. I eventually got through that part while selecting all at parts where you said to only select the front copy of the logo, but that messes up future parts. What I finally ended up with was the same logo, but without the rectangle behind the text getting cut out from the rest of the logo. So its a continuous circle. Maybe one day I will figure it out…

    • ThomasShaoed

      I think I eventually figured out that by ungrouping the newly divided layer it allows you to select and remove the white part

  • Stefania

    Thank you very much for this! Super helpful!!!!

    Keep up the awesome work!

  • http://www.andreipersonals.com Andrei

    I can’t understand anything of that..I am using Windows and the shortcuts doesn’t seem to coincide with Mac

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2DLYABFIHUFVTZYCAKYPALPA3M Justin White

      CMD = CTRL

  • rendra

    thanks for the awesome tutorial!
    i am using windows also mac sometimes, keep up work.

  • Bob Taylor

    Hi Ryan,
    Thanks a lot for doing this – perfect for what I want to do. It’s well explained an presented. Very professional.
    Thanks again,
    Bob.

  • Patrick

    I’m also stuck at the divide part, it makes everything look all crazy and pixely when I do it. I’m having a hard time from deleting the blank rectangle that encases the type to the final product. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I did figure out everything from converting mac commands to windows and I’ve done everything exact but it just doesn’t want to work from the divide point on :/

  • http://blogspot.ousean.com Jordi

    Excelent Tutorial , thanks Ryan !
    Very professional ;) !

  • http://graphicriver.net/user/katemale Katemaledesigns

    A lot of my work is based around 1930′s & 40′s logo design and I love the freedom you have when it comes to type. :)

  • Anne

    You explain so well! thank you for sharing!

  • http://frinleypaul.com Paul

    Very much useful idea. Thanks :)

  • Luna

    Great tutorial thanks! Re the divide part, I had problems too but in the end I think I did it this way…: select all (I used the black arrow), ungroup, click divide in the pathfinder, select the white part with the magic wand, hit delete.

  • http://iampaulbrophy.co.uk Glitchmunki

    Great tutorial Ryan.

    Sometimes the results are different colour-wise, but if you play around with the colours a bit then you can overcome this – and that’s where the learning bit comes in.

  • Miky Reed

    Some retro sources:
    http://www.lookback.eu

  • Vermyllyon

    this tut exists no longer!

  • dougieladd

    Nice work! Very simple… One constructive crit would be to record your video at lower resolution. It looks very tiny and not very sharp. Otherwise, good tut. :)

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2DLYABFIHUFVTZYCAKYPALPA3M Justin White

    Looks and worked great! Thanks for the TUT

  • http://twitter.com/rmnoon Ryan Noon

    This is an awful tutorial, the transparency does not work at the end, whether its because im using CS6 I dunno, but I press screen and nothing happens! Waste of 2 hours of my life! Not happy :(

  • mersh

    pathfinder unite! holy cow how have i lived so long without you. thanks!

  • http://www.clippingpathindia.com/ Bijutoha

    I love your good thinking about tutorial presentation it is easy way to learn perfectly . Thanks for your kind help .

  • http://www.facebook.com/amanda.james.1044 Amanda James

    my version..

  • Jessica

    Easy to follow tutorial, but who wants an image file in their vector logo?

  • http://www.clippingpathservice360.com/ Rajesh Aggarwal

    Nice thinking.

  • http://www.image2vectorgraphicsindia.com/ Sanjay Gupta

    That’s good work and tutorial presentation. I think it is easy way to learn perfectly. Your logo is very helpful.