How’d They Do That? Half in, Half Out Logo

I’m one of those folks who looks at signs not only for the information on them, but to check out the fonts and graphics. This past weekend I was in an airport and saw a sign with the logo for Colorado Mountain College. It looks like this:

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The design of the logo intrigued me and I thought about how I could create a similar design in Silhouette Studio. In particular, I want to show you how to create the eagle. It’s also a good introduction to some of the drawing tools for standard shapes and some easy Modify options.

Step 1: Analyze the logo

The first step is to look and the logo and figure out the components. In this logo, we see:

• A sun
• Mountains
• An eagle

The mountains in front of the sun create the look of a sunset. To me the most interesting part is the eagle. The majority of the bird is inside the sun with just the outlines of his wings outside. I’m going to show you how to create the same type of thing so that you can do it with virtually any design.

One more thing to make note of is that the pieces are all single, solid shapes. I’ve kept that in mind in creating my elements and choosing designs.

Step 2: Create the sun

Well, yep, this one is pretty easy. I just need to draw a circle with the drawing tool.

Here’s the big tip: if you hold down your SHIFT key as you draw, then you’ll get an exact circle.

I’m going to be using the Modify tools. I always recommend working with filled shapes on any design, but it’s especially critical when working with any of the Modify tools. It helps you see the outcome before you modify and tells you if you are working with groupings or compound paths.

Step 3: Create the mountains

If you already have a design of mountains you want to use, then feel free to use that. But it’s actually pretty simple to create a set like the ones in the logo. (Most logos today have elements that are pretty basic and easy to recreate).

I’m going to use the Draw a Regular Polygon tool. You access that with the same icon as for drawing a circle. It’s the one at the very end of that menu (it looks like a pentagon).

With that tool, you can draw a shape with sides of equal length, angles of equal amount and as many sides at you choose. So I’m going to use the triangle.

After I click on the icon, I move my cursor to the drawing area. You’ll see that the cursor now looks like crosshairs. Those crosshairs show the mid point of the shape you’ll draw. But since you can move the shape anywhere you want, you don’t really have to pay attention to that.

I want the bottom of my triangle to be an exact horizontal. I hold the ALT key as I draw my shape to do that. It will look like this:

Changeable attributes of Regular Polygons

Regular polygons have special attributes you can alter:

• The slider in the middle and the number 5 indicate the number of sides. I can move that down to 3, which makes an equilateral triangle.

• The red dots at the left and middle of the bottom side are Control Points. We can control 2 different things with them:
  • The angle of rotation. I can click that instead of the normal green dot at the top to rotate the triangle freely. What’s different about it is that the triangle rotates within the bounding box, rather than the box itself rotating. It’s not going to make a difference for us on this project, but it could in a different one so I mention that for your general information. If I hold the SHIFT key as I do it, the triangle rotates only in specific increments. The middle and end point dots rotate slightly differently:
    • If I use the one on the side, the triangle rotates only in 90° jumps. That outer red dot is always at the corner of the bounding box.

• • • If I use the one on the end, the triangle rotates automatically 45°, then in 90° jumps. What that does is put that control point at the middle of the side of the bounding box instead of at the corner.

• • The lengths of the sides. I can drag a control point down on my screen to make the shape larger, up to make it smaller. And again, holding down the ALT key keeps you even with the horizon. It’s pretty much the same as using the corner white square of the bounding box.

At this point, I’m going to fill my triangle with color. I’m going to choose white, and I’ll show you why in a bit.

Alter the angle

Now I said that we have an equilateral triangle. What that means is that the sides and angles are all equal. So the angles are all 60°. (ARGHH — I know, back to high school Geometry).

But if I look at my logo, I can see that the peak of the mountain has a wider angle than that. I can change mine by resizing the triangle disproportionately. In other words, I’m going to make it shorter without changing the width. I use the bottom middle white square of the bounding box to do that. You could also use the one on the top.

And now that I look at it, I’m going to make the overall size bigger. That takes care of the middle mountain.

Align and duplicate

I select both my triangle and my sun and use the alignment tools to align the along their centers.

I make a copy to the left and to the right using the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD+left/right arrow. Then move them down just a bit and in toward center the same amount.

Visualizing

Now here’s the part where the fact that I filled my mountains with white comes into play. If you look at the original logo, you’ll see that it looks like the sun is behind some mountains. Technically, there aren’t really any mountains on the graphic — just a mountain-shaped hole in the sun. I made my mountains the same color as my drawing area so that I could visualize the outcome (for more tips on that, see this post). I’m going to leave my mountains right where they are, but simply change the line colors to clear. Now I see this:

Looks pretty good! Now if I were looking at the pic of the logo I have, you’ll see the background is actually blue. So instead of white, I could have made the mountains blue and put a blue rectangle behind everything. It’s just up to you. At this point I’m going to change the line colors back to red so I can see my shapes more clearly for the moment.

Modify

I’m going to use 2 different Modify options. There’s a shortcut for Weld in the Quick Access Toolbar, but since I’m using another one as well I go ahead and open the panel. The icon for that looks like this:

First, I weld the mountains together. Welding combines the 3 shapes into a single one and eliminates any lines that are in the overlapping area.

Remember how I said that what our eyes see as mountains on the logo is really just a hole in the sun? That means we want to use the mountains to cut a hole in the sun and then have them go away. That’s the definition of Subtract. So I select both the sun and the welded mountains and in my Modify panel choose Subtract.

Step 4: Create the rest

I don’t want to be guilty of trademark infringement. For that reason, I’m going to choose a different element for the last part of my design. Since I live in the mountains, I’m going with a deer. It’s Deer Head by Kolette Hall.

I’m going to let his antlers stick outside the sun. I used a white fill for the same reason I did on the mountains — to help visualize the outcome before I modify.

You may have gotten to this point pretty easily. But now what? What we need is to make a deer-shaped hole in the sun and not lose the part of the antlers that fall outside the sun. But not all of that — just an outline. It sounds tricky, but is actually easier than you might think. I’m going to use 2 different versions of the deer shape.

Use an offset

The first thing to do is create an offset. Here I’ve created an offset and given it a different fill color (green) so it’s easier to see.

Okay, we’re getting there, but not quite finished yet.

I’m going to use Weld again with the sun and the offset (the green). Here’s what I’ve got now:

You can leave it like that, select both and make it a compound path, or use Subtract again. All of those would cut the same way. If you leave it, then just make sure to group them together. The design is complete!