Creating a Logo Inspired by Alan Fletcher’s V&A Design: A Step-by-Step Guide

Today we’re going to be looking at the iconic logo designed by Alan Fletcher, from Pentagram, in 1989 for the Victoria and Albert Museum. Known as the V&A, this logo, features a variation of Bodoni type and the letters V and A and an ampersand. Let’s take a look. There’s an article that I recommend reading in Creative Review, and I will highlight a few quotes from that in this video. This is the designer speaking and he says, “So we spent a week or two weeks cutting and trying to fit and organize the letters in a beautiful way. It seems obvious now the way that the logo is done, but I can’t remember how many versions I did, where we were rescaling them and changing the weights and redrawing the ampersand.” So I love this because a final design solution, it often feels so perfect you couldn’t move one item to the left, to the right, up or down without it feeling wrong. You know you have it so tightly composed and designed, yet how much effort and time it takes to get you to a place where it is that tightly designed? So knowing even the greats did iterations and iterations and iterations. Another great quote is talking about being inspired by Bodoni, and it says, “The Italian publisher FMA had recently published a facsimile edition of the original Bodoni typefaces, and Fletcher settled on using this for the project. Quote. ”I had to redraw that font for the banners.” So the reason why this use of the V of the ampersand and the A looks a little bit different than any of the Bodoni versions that we have available to us stock from Adobe Fonts or anywhere else is because this was actually traced and hand-drawn from the original Bodoni. And so to keep that in mind that so many times our logo types or monograms, they actually have a hand-drawn element, even if their basis or their starting point is a known font. All right. And a few other things that I wanted to quickly show you. Let’s see. So in AGI you can see the font and you can see it applied in a carpet on a rug, on a uniform. And this is the article I was reading to you from. Another part I love is the solution for the final logo eventually came to Fletcher the morning of the day they were presenting the ideas to the museum. So I love that sometimes our brain just puts together everything we need when we have the pressure of a deadline. And the quote here is he literally did run in fresh from the shower at home and said, “I suddenly realized the way we should do it,” says Newark, “and simply removed that leg of the A The moment we did it, we could see that bit of the ampersand really forms the crossbar of the A and it’s all very tight and tidy.” So again, I love when inspiration strikes and sometimes it is, well, most often it is definitely when we are not sitting in front of a screen. It is when we are kind of putting together all of the thoughts, and connections in our head to that might be taking a break, going on a walk, taking a shower, cooking a meal, all the things that just let our brain process in the back. All right. And this monogram, as I said, it was created in 1989, and the museum has had other branding since then, and this logo has stayed intact. So if we look here, this is the most recent redesign, by Pentagram. And again, the original logo is still intact and it is really about other treatments, that are part of this refresh. And there’s also a marketing PDF that’s on the museum’s website, and it talks about the 2002 refresh. And again, this mark stayed intact. All right. So let’s get started. How could you create a mark like this? This is the copycat part. All right. So I am an illustrator and I have the image as a layer in the background that was taken from the AGI website. So you can also grab that image as a starting point. If you’re on a mac, you just grab the image and drag it to your desktop or right into illustrator. And it will open a file for you. As we look at this iconic logo, we notice its simplicity. It’s a variation, a hand-drawn variation of the Bodoni font, which is serif, which means feet in French. So we have a serif on the left and right of the V here and here, here, here, here and here. What we are missing and what makes this a brilliant logo is we have removed parts of the A. So let’s go ahead and look at the original V, in a similar Bodoni, and A, thinking about how these letters could combine. The idea was that the crossbar here and the A and the left stem of the if removed, would allow for the ampersand to replace and be substituted for that space. Beautiful idea. Right? All right. So how is this done? Let’s get started. You’ll begin by using the Type tool. When you click once that gives you a line of text. We are going to be using Bodoni 72 ITC Pro Bold. You can get that in Creative Cloud by using Adobe fonts. So you’ll go to find more. Go ahead and search for Bodoni. Scroll down until you find that. You’ll move your mouse to the right and you will say add by creative cloud. I’ve already added it, so my option is to remove. Then that will be loaded into your fonts and you can then select your font and type into it from character what you’re looking for. So mine is the Pro Bold using my type tool. I double click or triple click to select everything. Lorem ipsum is just the default filler text. So I’m typing capital V, an ampersand, and then a. Now I like to Command + C, Command + V make a copy of my original typography that is actually editable text. Before I do anything else, turning it into a shape. So now I have two versions. This is my shape. I go to type Create outlines and what this does is now it is a shape so it’s no longer type. I can’t change this V to any other letter. It is really just a shape with all of these points. Then I’m going to say Object > Ungroup. And that’s going to allow me to move, one by one., my letters kind of similar to how the logo is set up. All right. So that’s what I have going on below. And I did a bright color. So I’m going to take my v, say type > create outlines. My ampersand type create outlines and a. So, the most important thing about making monograms or logo types with your letters is you have to turn them into shapes first. So create outlines. All right. And I’m going to shift click maybe in my ampersand I can see they’re highlighted over here in my layers because they have this blue box. I’m going to turn off their visibility. And we’re going to start with our A. So I’m going to zoom in. Basically what we want to do is cut off this left part. And how we do that is we use a line. I’m going to click off of everything. I’m going to go back to my default, make my fill none and grab my line tool. And I am going to draw a line as close as I can…lined up. So if you’re using a font which when you draw a line it doesn’t perfectly align. Then what you need to do is use more than one line for your divide. So in this case I’m going to be dividing down here. And then I’ll also be dividing up here. And I duplicated that line by holding down option on my computer and dragging. All right. And what’s important is if you zoom in and you see that your line is overlapping at all, it will take out that chunk. So you do want to kind of zoom in enough that you can draw it pretty clearly and not have it overlap. So I will go like this. Okay. So once you have that done you’re going to select your lines and your shape and say Pathfinder > Divide. What this should allow you to do is then use your white arrow, your direct select and grab the shape. Pretty good. I deleted with my keyboard. Now I can come in and where I have any hooks Something like this, I can delete these kind of unneeded shapes here. Okay, so I don’t need that, or that, or that, or that. And you might have counter form shapes that are still hanging out and you can delete those too. So I’m deleting. All right. That looks pretty good. You can see if there’s other shapes hanging out by doing outline. Got it. View preview. Right. Beautiful. So that part works out pretty well. We have just the part of the A. So what you’ll find next is that our version of Bodoni doesn’t really fit and align with the rest of the logo, which really speaks to the customization that was created. However, I’m going to block the background and show you how you could then size and place your V and ampersand or whatever letters you were using. If you’re just using this technique outside of this copycat kind of idea of how you would replace and substitute the portions of a letter with another letter or symbol. All right. So I hope this is helpful and just another tool in your toolbox of how you can create really engaging logo or logotypes. Happy designing. Thanks for watching this copycat video. I’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment about what you liked, what I can improve, or what topics you’d like me to cover next. Or if you’d rather take a moment to reflect and share the simple thought: What brought you joy today? Until next time, have a great day and happy designing!