One type of jumpstart for your design work is the logo or graphic building block. You may have seen clip art selections that are nothing more than circles, squares, lines, swooshes, and other shapes. You may find a stand-alone use for this clip art, but another way to use them is similar to using templates for your brochure or newsletter — use them as the basis for your logo designs or illustrations for your publications. Take them apart, recolor them, mix them with other shapes, text, or clip art.
Build a Logo or Illustration
To get you started, try this collection of 24 designs that you can use for inspiration or as the starting element in your own designs. Best of all, it's free. The designs are available in three formats: .ttf (Window TrueType font), .cdr (CorelDRAW), and .ai (Adobe Illustrator). The logos/graphics shown in the sidebar were created using three different designs from this Circular Building Blocks collection.Sure, you could recreate these or similar designs in your own illustration program (these were done in CorelDRAW) but you could also create all your other publications from scratch without using a template. These are simply another tool at your disposal. Explore your desktop publishing and graphics software to discover other basic shapes that you can use to jumpstart your next logo design.
More Ways to Create a Logo
- Logo Design With Basic Shapes "The basis of many a logo design and graphic image are simple geometric shapes -- lines, circles, squares, and triangles."
- What's the Best Software for Logo Design? "The best logo design software is graphics software, and that doesn't necessarily mean Photoshop."
