in this tutorial I'll be using Affinity designer to demonstrate how you can create a logo that depicts any three letters you'd like within a shield shape and before we get started if you'd like to learn more about Affinity designer be sure to check out my Affinity designer master class it's a collection of over 60 videos where we go over all of the tools and features an affinity designer and I explain what they are and demonstrate how they work we even have a private Community where you can ask questions and get help from me anytime you want I'll have some information about that down below if you want to check that out so to get us started the first thing I'm going to do is grab this squares and rectangles tool and I'm going to click and drag while holding my shift key to draw a square now I'm going to zoom in on this I'm going to turn on snapping by clicking this magnet icon and now I'm going to grab my pen tool and I'm going to press the Escape key to make sure I don't have the object selected and I'm going to snap to the corner click to add a point and then snap to the corner over here and click to add another point and then press the Escape key to close the path then I'll come over here and do the same thing on this side I'll click over here and then click over here to create a line going the other way and again press the Escape key to close the path now I'm going to grab the selection tool select both objects and I will go into my shape Builder tool over here in the toolbar and I want to choose the addition option and I just want to click on each of these segments right here to make them into separate shapes and once you do that you can come over here to your selection tool and you can see these are now separate shapes which is the effect we're going for so let me press command Z to put those back in place and undo that and what I will do now is I'll select all of these four objects and I will group them together by going to layer and selecting group now I'm going to scale this down and now I'm going to create duplicate copies and stack them next to each other so to create a duplicate of this object I'm going to hold my option key or that would be the ALT key if you're on Windows and click and drag and then while holding the click still let go of the ALT key or the option key and then snap this right to the edge like that and once you release the click before doing anything else press contrl J or command J to repeat that and now you will have another box and the idea is we want 17 of these boxes going across so right now we have three so I'm going to keep going until I have 17 okay now I'll do the same thing with this entire row so I'll select the entire row and I will hold my option key or alt of on Windows click and drag let go of the key and then snap it right to the edges like that and now I'm going to repeat this 17 times or I'm going to repeat it until I have 17 rows so right now we have two rows so I need 15 more now that that's done let's select all of these boxes and group them together by going to layer and selecting group and I'm just going to move these off of the screen from now and move them out of the way if you can't see them when you move them off the canvas you could just press the vertical Bar Key and it'll make them visible and again pressing that again will make them invisible so that's how you can toggle the visibility of that off and on if it's off of your canvas and now I'm going to create a shield shape to place on top of those box we just created so to do that I'm going to grab my circle tool and I'm going to click and drag to draw a circle I'm going to hold my shift key to make it perfectly round and then I will make this red just so I can see it better and I'm going to take the opacity of this and bring this down to 25% and then I'm going to make a duplicate copy of this oops let me undo that I'm going to make a duplicate copy of this circle let me come over here to my selection tool and I will hold the option key and click and drag while holding shift and move this over about that far and if you're on Windows that would be the ALT key and then I'll let go right about there I'm looking at the intersecting area between these two circles that's what we're going to make our Shield out of and to do that we're going to have to create a third circle so let me hold my option key again click and drag this object and bring it down here and the intersecting area between these three circles is going to make up the shape of this Shield right here so try to use that as a reference for where this ought to be placed and this is something that you can just eyeball it doesn't have to be a precise measurement I like how mine looks right about there I want to make sure that all three of these are spaced out evenly so I'm going to select all three of them I'll come up here to my alignment menu and I'm going to choose this option over here to the right that says space horizontally and now I can select all of them and I'm going to press the intersection uh Boolean operation up here in the tool settings menu okay so we have the shield now let me move this off of the canvas and let me move this back into the center of the canvas in fact I'm going to place this directly in the center and I'm going to take this shield and place it on top of this object right here and I want to resize it so that it fits this box perfectly so I'm going to take the top left handle of the object and snap it to the top left corner of the grouped boxes and then I'll come down here and do the same thing I take this object or take this handle and snap it down to this bottom right corner like that and what happens now is that the shield fits perfectly within those boxes so let me rightclick the shield layer and go to duplicate and I'm going to grab the Contour tool which is over here and I'm going to zoom in on this and I'm going to scale this down about that much we want to make a smaller Shield inside of the larger shield and make sure that your Corners are squared and not rounded if your Corners are coming out rounded just click on this button over here that says square and once it's set once it's about that offset by about that much you can click the bake appearance button and now I'm going to select the original shield underneath that and I'm going to duplicate that again so let me right click that and go to duplicate and let me select the shield underneath it I want to select the one layered all the way on the bottom and I'm going to grab the Contour tool and I'm going to pull this one instead of bringing it in I'm going to bring it out like that and again make sure you have sharp corners on there so I'm going to press the sharp Corners button and I want to remove the fill from this so I'm going to click on this red slash over here to remove the fill color and I want to apply a stroke so let me come over here here to the stroke Tab and increase the size of the stroke like that until we have a nice border going around the shield and again I want to make this sharp Corners as well just to keep the consistency now this is going to be part of the design at the end if you notice here there's this Shield shape going around the outside of the letters that's what this part represents right here so we're going to edit this further at the end for now I'm just going to make this invisible so I'm going to tick this button right here that toggles the visibility and we're going to ignore that for now so now let's grab the ction tool I'm going to press the Escape key to deselect everything and I want to select all of these objects right here and with those objects selected I'm going to go into the shape Builder tool and now you can use the shape Builder tool to draw letters inside of this shield now the way that we set this up this Shield fits three letters and the way it could be designed is one letter could represent five boxes and then one box afterwards is the blank space between the letters and then you can use another five box es so there's 15 boxes for the letters and then two in between them for the spacing so if I come out here 1 2 3 4 5 the first letter will go this far and then the empty space will be right there so I'm going to start drawing line through here to combine these all together to make this into a single shape because what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw the letters let me go back to my thumbnail design let me come over here if you notice I have the letters g x and J I just picked those letters because I thought they look nice in this design but the way way that I set this up we have vertical and diagonal boxes as well so it shouldn't be too difficult to draw the letters that you need so let me go through here and draw my letters and you'll have to be a little careful of these little Corners in here they sometimes stick out and it's very easy to miss them if you're not coun if you're not careful okay so like I mentioned the first letter occupies five boxes so the letter ends right here and I want to make sure it doesn't go past this area over here down here on the bottom as well so I'm going to come down here and just fill this all in as well and I'm going to let this be where the letter ends and then I'm going to draw the arm of this letter G up to about here and then in about one box so let me draw that okay so now that we have the letter G drawn I'm going to draw the X now if you notice I have a letter X in here it makes use of those diagonal lines in there for the middle part so I will go in there and estimate how that ought to look and then finally I'll draw the letter J which sort of looks like the G only mirrored so let me go in there and draw that as well okay so at this point I am finished drawing the letters within the logo so let me grab my selection tool and I'm going to take these letters or you know what I'm going to select everything here except for these letters I'm going to select everything and now I'm going to deselect the letters by holding shift and clicking on each of them to deselect them and then I'm going to press the delete key to delete to delete everything that was there except for those letters and what I could do now is turn the visibility of this outline layer back on and now we have that there that we can work with so let me take this object here bring me opacity up to 100% And then I'll take these letters in here and I'll bring their opacity up to 100% and I will give them a fill color of black and if you want you can unify them together as well by selecting this add button and the benefit of doing that is that you can make these letters thicker now if you want to so if you're not happy with the thickness of these letters to me they look kind of thin you can increase their size by adding a stroke to them so let me come over here to the stroke button and or the stroke Tab and increase that a little bit and get the stroke width that I want and I want to have sharp Corners here so I'm going to click the sharp Corners button to make sure I have sharp corners and if you're noticing down here that your Corners are getting cut off you may have to increase the miter value so come over here where it says miter the default should be 1.5 I'm going to try four and see how that looks that worked a lot better okay whoops let me put that back and the shield here if you notice after I made the letters thicker The Shield the padding between the shield and the letters is kind of small so I want to increase that let me come back over here to the Contour tool and I'll increase that a little bit and I will while I'm in here I'll even make the stroke a little bigger as well just to match the letters better and let me bring that down actually and once you're happy with how that looks you can click the bake appearance button and there we go at that point we are finished so you can now take your logo and color it in and use it however you'd like if you found this lesson useful then consider checking out my a designer master class it's a collection of over 60 videos where I go over all of the tools and features an affinity designer and I explain what they are and demonstrate how they work kind of like how I did in this video we even have a private Community where you can ask questions and get help from me anytime you want and best of all there's no monthly membership fees you just pay $17 one time and you're in for Life I'll have some information about that down below if you want to check that out as always thanks for watching [Music] damn