Last week I announced my latest project: Your Freelance Career.

Your Freelance Career is my new blog where I’ll bring transparency to running your own freelance business. I want to share, collaborate, and help other freelancers learn the ins and outs of freelancing.

(If you’re curious why I decided to create a new home for my freelance content, you can read more about that here.)

Today, I’d like to share the process I took with creating the hand lettered logo for Your Freelance Career.

The concept & sketching

For You Freelance Career, I want the style and mood to convey a balance between happy, classy and honest – so I instantly knew the direction I desired was a clean script logo.

With that in mind I went straight to paper and started hand lettering some ideas.

Once I had the logo I desired on paper, I redrew it and inked it to get it ready for vectorizing.

From sketch to vector

The logo itself has to be vector, so before I can do that I had to get the logo onto my computer and prepped for Adobe Illustrator.

With the inked logo, I scanned it in, and opened it in Adobe Photoshop.

Inside Photoshop I cropped the page down to isolate the desired sketch, then adjusted the levels to clean it up.

Once the contrast is high, I erase any unwanted details and save it as a .jpg.

It's time to turn these pixels into a vector logo!

In Illustrator I place the adjusted .jpg of the logo on a locked layer, then start tracing it with the pen tool. I don’t outline the shape, I simply create a single path, then apply a rounded stroke.

Taking one letter at a time I trace, adjust, realign, kern, and review. Some of the letters can be reused by copying, pasting, then moved until the lines connect.

I take breaks often to keep my eyes refreshed on the design, so when I sit back down I can spot out what needs adjusting. This especially works when I revisit it the next day.

With the logo being made up of multiple paths (with a stroke), I need to combine it all into a solid object. To do this I copy and paste the logo onto it a new layer, so I can always go back and make edits to the original paths if needed. With the paths still selected, go to Object > Expand – doing this will turn the paths with strokes into objects (or shapes) that can now be combined. I then use the Pathfinder to “Unite” the shapes – turning the logo into one solid object and ready to be used.

The final result

The final vector logo is saved and can now be brought into Photoshop as a shape layer to be used anyway desired.

Overall I am very happy with the feel of this hand lettered logo. It has the clean and honest feel I was going for.

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