Time spent: 3.5 hours
PROGRAMS USED: ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
A Sad Story...
A couple months ago I had a brand new hard drive crash on me. As a creator, photographer, and overall organized person, this is my worst nightmare. The good news is that I only had a couple months of work on there and most photos were still on my memory cards. The bad news: the original logo file I had created was gone. I had the PNG's and screenshots but the original file was no longer in existence.
I knew I was going to need to re-create it at some point so when this project came around I figured this was the perfect opportunity to do so. Luckily my logo is extremely simple but I actually have a couple of versions I like as well as I had to completely re-learn Adobe Illustrator since my old logo was created on photoshop.
Below is a how-to guide of how I re-created my logo!
To Start...
Although I like to think I'm pretty Adobe savvy, there is a lot I don't know when it comes to illustrator and my original logo was designed and created on Photoshop since I know Photoshop a lot better and then I know illustrator. So having to re-create my logo this was a perfect opportunity to do it on illustrator and make it more professional. Here is a snippet of my old logo which is still on my Instagram as of right now.

So lets get into it....
1. Text
First things first, you want to start by choosing a font and typing your logo using the text tool. It's usually easiest when you can just throw it out on the screen as resizing will come later.
2. Ungroup
Next, you can see that I resized the text a little bit to be more in frame and then I select a group in this case it was the word "Collectiv", right click and select "ungroup".
*Note: All type is automatically grouped so, if you are going to be working with the font or making any sort of adjustments you always want to ungroup before you try to adjust.*
3. Isolate
Once your Selection is ungrouped, you can re-select the group and right click on "Isolate Selected Compound Path".
This is going to make it so that every specific letter can be altered individually of each other. In Photoshop, this would compare to having different layers although you also have layers in illustrator.
4. Ta-Da
As you can see from the photo, the letter C is now selected and has isolation points throughout the letter. In theory, If I were to grab any one of those points and move it, this would alter the way the letter C looks. This is exactly what we want as I will later re-size and adjust the spacing of the letters.
Since I hadn't worked on illustrator in a while this simple project took me so long as I had to relearn a lot of the tools.
A little bit of color...
Since my logo is in white I couldn't STAND seeing it in black with a white background so I changed it for the rest of this process.
Shapes...
Next, I know I wanted my logo in a circle or at least on a circle background. This is where the challenge came in. As simple as I thought it was to create a circle....I was apparently wrong so this is where most of the time consuming puzzle-solving came in.
Also to note this is when I created a new art board which is really easy to do by selecting the "properties" tab near the "layers" tab and creating a new artboard.
Logo...
Here you see the outline of a circle. Because it's on a colored background, it looks as though it is a colored circle with a stroke around as the border, BUT what you are actually seeing is just a stroke border and the logo on a colored square.
This was not the circle that I had wanted with a colorful because when I ended up doing that my logo disappeared and I could not figure out why for the life of me even though I'm pretty good when it comes to solving Adobe issues.
ANYWHO...I decided to keep this but to also keep going and figure out this damn circle issue.
A little pizazz...
I should also note that this is where I added a stroke around my logo that is the orange border around the words that you see. I do this to add pops of color and make it more 3-D instead of flat. It will also look good when I add the sparkle shape that I create.
This damn circle...
What you are seeing was my exact issue. I would create a circle using the eclipse total and color in with the fill tool AND place that layer behind my logo yet somehow my logo still is not showing up even though it was on a completely different layer. I also did not have the color code so I had to adjust the color to something kind of different.

Finally!
I finally figured out the stupid circle by using a couple of copy and paste tricks. So in theory the old logo is still technically behind that circle but I copy and pasted the logo from the middle again onto the circle and that is how we got to where we are now.
Is by no means done yet as I still need to create and add my little stars sparkles that I have around the logo in the circle with a background fill. Although, this does look like a pretty great start.
On To The ✨Sparkle✨
Forming the Star
As you can see on the right is a star/sparkle. I created another artboard on the left to walk us through the process of creating a sparkle.
Circles....again🙄
On the menu, I start by clicking the eclipse tool then dragging the tool on my artboard to create yet again another damn circle. (luckily this time the circle works out)
Forming the Star
Up in the top menu by selecting
Effect → Distort & Transform → Pucker & Bloat
This brings up a menu option to transform the circle to the star shape by using a slider.
At this point, your circle will have a star looking shape depending on which way you toggled the slider.
Now, we'll want to click on
Object → Expand Appearance to have the points on the circle become the points on the star.
Which ends up looking like this →
Notice the points on the tips of the star. These will be used to transform the star point thickness later on.
Transform
Here is where I modified the star point thickness and pointi-ness. By using the transform tools I simply adjusted the hight & width until I liked it.
Color
Next, I made to sure adjust the fill and take off the stroke (I may add a colorful stroke later on but for now, I like the star plain).
Ta-Da!
Finally we a star! Here is a side-by-side of my different colored stars which I will copy & paste on to my logo.
Copy, Paste, Transform
Finally I paste my star on to my other artboards and start to resize which eventually turns into this →
Logo
I place the stars accordingly and resize until I have a small, medium, large cluster of 3 on the top and bottom. Scroll to see the finished product!

Logo Creation Timeline
Here is a logo creation timeline with all the variations of logos I intend to use. I think having multiple logo variations is super important for a brand so they can be used in different branding scenarios.

Final Product
AND I LOVE IT!