I looks like you are getting the hang of it. Good work!

A few observations.

1. It looks like you used a combination of caps and small caps letters on the top or something else is going on. It is making each word look as though it is squished at one end. It is best to keep to all caps. Also increase your tracking to keep the letters from running together.

2. On the Bicep Beer line you need to shift your baseline a few points so the lettering is centered better between the two light blue rings.

3. I think it would look better if the banner at the bottom had a similar styling applied to its border as the circle above does. As it is now, it appears just stuck on, rather than blending with the rest of the design.

4. This one is minor, but the arm should probably be a tad smaller on the yellow circle, so that there is more negative yellow space around it. The elbow should definitly not be touching the outer edge like it is. I feel like it actually is distracting and will cause the viewers eyes to look right there where they meet.

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Welcome.

Where did you get the arm? It's jaggy. It also possibly looks live traced with an offset path applied (the peak on the thumb is a sometimes telling artifact), but you say you are just starting...

Thank-you very much for the elaborate evaluation! I will have a look and try out the things you mentioned.

Thanks!

I imported it into photoshop and used a threshold and a lot of lines were missing when I got the look I wanted so I drew them myself - probably where I went wrong...I used an image trace in illustrator but I guess it didn't fix it completely.

You can't rely on push button options in either program. Getting it right requires a little more practice.

BTW, If you traced someone else's artwork, you open the owner of the logo to a lawsuit, if this were a real client.

Not that it matters, of course, since it's just a practice thing, but it really reminds me of the Arm & Hammer logo.



Not at all bad for a first try. It's a whole lot better than the first Illustrator thing I attempted way back when.

Illustrator's a difficult tool for lots of people to get the hang of. It's not that it's especially complicated — it's just that it's different from most anything else and the drawing tools get some getting used to.

That Arm & Hammer logo looks like somebody's first try aswell.

Agreed. How would they engrave it?

You'll never embroider THAT

etc

Why did they start running the lettering together in their newer renditions of the logo. Compare the quality of the new with these old ones.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/illumin...hy/4231680931/
http://www.creativefeed.co.uk/wp-con...mer-crate.jpeg

I think the old ones are so much better.

You could most definitely embroider the A&H logo. It's flat and 3 color. How much detail you get in the hammer is up to the size it's embroidered.

And it is also easily engraved. Especially today. I could sandblast it or laser etch it. If I had a good vector of it, I could also have it acid etched into anything from zinc to Stainless then filled with color and it would look sweet.

One of my favorite things to make when I worked in a sign shop was sandblasted wood signs. The sandblast resist could be a pain at times to weed out (not as hard as ruby film though), but I think the sandblasted signs have such a nice look over signs made on router systems.

Did you ever try a grain frame on signfoam. Now that was irksome.
I outsource sandblasted wood signage. Definitely can be nicer than router cut stuff, and some of the 'historic' downtown areas around here require stores to have engraved wood or sandblasted wood signage to keep the antique feel of downtowns. We can do the engraved stuff all day, though if we have to, and we have the time, our CNC artisan has come up with a method to fake randomized wood grain in sign foam...

Hahaha...