Hello, good designers, today I wanted to give you a complete overview of the Logo Package Express extension and show you how to use it. If you've just installed Logo Package Express and you don't see the extension window open on your screen yet, you'll need to go up to window extensions and then choose the newest version of Logo Package Express from the dropdown window.
If you're opening Logo Package Express for the first time, you're going to be asked to enter the email you used to make your purchase and then the license key that came with your download afterwards, you should have complete access to Logo Package Express. The first thing you need to do after you've opened the extension is to open a logo file that contains your final logo artwork.
Then you'll simply make a selection of the artwork, go over to the panel and click set logo.
When you click set logo, a new document is made that brings in your artwork at the exact same size it was in your original artwork file and maintains the colors that you had in your original file.
You can see we have swatches down in the swatches panel.
The other important thing to notice is that we have maintained the document color mode. You will see that the document color mode in the original was quick and our new working file is also in quick document color mode. The next step is to set all of the individual components that make up your logo inside the logo builder window of Logo Package Express. You'll see that we ask for a Logo mark, Logotype and a Tagline. You don't need to include all of these components if your logo doesn't have them.
But please set the components that are included in your logo. In this example, we have a Logo mark, which it could be a symbol or an icon, but it's usually the graphic element of your logo.
Then we have a Logotype, which is simply the name of the company or organization.
So I'll click set Logotype in the Logotype area and then I will select the eco power component and set that as Tagline. OK, so I've made a mistake when I select the eco power and I forgot to include the R. That's all right. I can go up to the trash icon in the upper right corner of the thumbnail, press it and now I can go back and reset this entire component. If for some reason you have a really light colored component, you can also come up to the upper left corner and press the invert button.
And this is going to switch the background to a dark color so that you can better preview your lighter artwork.
Before I move on with making logos, I'm going to give you a brief overview of the settings.
So if you come to the upper right corner, there is a gear icon that is your settings page. When you click it, you'll be presented with a number of different tabs. The formats tab allows you to select which logo file formats you want to export. Your logo package with under the print file formats and JPEG are unchecked by default because they are less common file types for printer files. All of the web file formats are checked.
In order to change this, all you need to do is come in and select whatever file formats you want to include or exclude. The naming tab is where you can control the file and folder names for your Logo Package Express.
In this section we have all of the options you could ever want to totally customize your logo, package, file and folder names. You can even export your logo packages in an entirely different language, if that's what you'd like to do in the scale tab. We have the ability to choose custom widths for our JPEG and PMG exports. Under the padding tab, you have the ability to add padding around your logo. And lastly is the color tab where you can control Pantone conversion and your inversion settings for logo options that are partially in color and partially white.
You can now make your logos from the settings window, but I'd like to go back to the logo builder screen just so I can get a preview of everything that's about to happen. Since the original artwork was set in the CMYK document color mode, we recommend that you make print logos first.
If your logo had been created in the RGB document color mode, then we would recommend that you make web logos first. So I'm going to go ahead and press the make print logos button and you will see that it automatically generates a whole suite of logos for us in the blink of an eye.
The logo variations are arranged in columns which contain the individual components and component combinations and also into rows which contain the different color schemes. So we have the full logo with the Tagline, the Logotype, with the Tagline, just the Tagline, the Logo mark with the Logotype, just the Logotype and the Logo mark. And then for color variations, we have a one color option which is all black, a reverse option, which is all white grayscale, which is black and white.
And then this is the inverted option, which I was talking about in the settings. This option has some elements in color and some elements in white, and then we have our Pantone colors. The following two rows are the Pantone coated and Pantone uncoated variations of our inverted logo, and then lastly, the Pantone coated and uncoated versions of our full color logo.
It's very easy to control which logos get exported into your logo package. If you don't want a variation in your logo package, all you need to do is delete the artwork from its artboard. So let's say, for example, that we did not want the Tagline to be exported at all. All I would need to do is select all of those logos and press delete.
You may also want to delete redundant logos so you can see that in our inverted versions we have an all white Logotype and we already have an all white logo.
Type in the reverse section, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete all of these redundant variations as well, and then I won't have logos that are the same in different folders.
Any changes that you make to Artboards will get preserved and exported when you export your logos from Logo Package Express, for example, let's say on the grayscale that I would rather have a little bit lighter of an icon so I can select the icon and I can adjust the color.
Let's say I wanted this to be 25 percent black. OK, so now I've changed the color on all of these artboards and they will be exported with the changes included. Exporting your logos is very simple.
Press the export print logos, button on the extension and a dialog box will open up asking you for your client's name, which is either your client's full name or the prefix that you use, and then asking you to browse for the folder you would like to export your logo packages to.
I've got Leaf for my client name and I'm exporting to a folder on my desktop. So now I will click create logo package and as the package starts exporting, you will see all of the files and folders getting populated on the fly.
This process can take a little bit of time, but once it's completed, you're ready to move on to the next step.
Now that the print logos are done exporting, we can go back to the panel and make our Web logos, click the Make Web Logos button and watch the web versions of your logos be generated.
There are less variations for the Web versions because we're not dealing with Pantone colors which are only for printing. I'm going to once again delete the redundant versions of my logos and now I'm ready to export the Web files as well. So I will click export web logos on the panel and all of the settings that I put into this window before are still there and they should still work.
So I will just click create logo package.
Now your web export is complete and you have both a digital and a print folder inside of every one of your logo variations and that's it.
You've used Logo Package Express to export a complete logo package in just a few minutes.
Logo Package Express 2.0 is the latest version of our Adobe Illustrator extension that automatically generates and exports logo packages with blazing speed.
