Personal Logo for Marking Digital Schoolwork

Watermark

A watermark is any kind of identifying logo an individual has to ensure that they are credited for their work. This is seen on postage stamps, educational documents, and even currency to help prevent counterfeit currencies. For this instance, the watermark will be used for students to properly identify any schoolwork they have done.

For this tutorial, I will go over step by step how I would create my own logo in Adobe Illustrator, and show simple shapes that could be arranged in order for the student to create their own design for a basic watermark.

This tutorial is designed for Grades 6-8 and above, simply for students to be able to have their own individual marker for projects and assignments.

By The End of the Lesson, Students Will Be Able To:

1. Open a new project in Adobe Illustrator.
2. Make use of, and manipulate shapes to convey a design.
3. Change the color of shapes
4. Duplicate and Transform elements in Illustrator
5. Create their own personal watermark logo using simple shapes
6. Export files as a .png file with a transparent background

Standards

• Standard 7: Design in Technology and Engineering Education
• Design is something that is going to be continuous throughout a STEM students education and career. This design can range from physically designing 3D models or even doing simple designs for themselves, or doing more advanced designs for information posters using other Adobe products, like InDesign or Photoshop. Students completing this activity can creatively make simple designs using simple shapes through combining them and arranging different colors.
• Standard 8: Applying, Maintaining, and Assessing Technological Products and Systems
• Students will be better prepared in the future for any sort of creative design problem they come across, ranging from needing to remove a background and make it transparent, or to creating a new image entirely. The concepts learned in Adobe Illustrator will be able to be further applied to more Adobe Products, and even in other softwares, like Autodesk products, or Solidworks.

Practices

• Technology Engineering Practice 2: Creativity
• With this Illustrator activity, students will be able to creatively express themselves to make their own watermark to represent themselves.
• Technology Engineering Practice 3: Making and Doing
• Students will be digitally creating and designing their own finished product able to be applied to their own work.
• Technology Engineering Practice 4: Critical Thinking
• This activity is primarily centered on the student thinking of their own individual design through a tutorial shown for using specific methods for another basic design.
• Technology Engineering Practice 5: Optimism
• Students are encouraged to play around and experiment with the software throughout the tutorial to learn how the different shapes look, work, and to be able to create their own individual design.
• Technology Engineering Practice 7: Communication
• This project helps the students to be able to communicate themselves as an individual through a creative medium for a watermark logo to be able to represent themselves.
• Technology Engineering Practice 8: Attention to Ethics
• The whole point of this watermark being created is so that the students can protect their individual work, preventing other students from turning in assignments that are not theirs. Individuals doing creative work need to be able to show that they can do original, individual thinking and creation.

Contexts

• Technology Engineering Context 5: Information and Communication
• Design in this manner is primarily used to communicate a message to the viewer. In this instance, this design is going to be used to communicate to the viewer that this work is indeed, original work that the student has created, because the watermark will be seen to identify that. For this activity, Illustrator is primarily the medium used to create the communication design.

1. Laptop
2. Mouse
3. Access to Adobe Illustrator
4. Optional second monitor to look at tutorial and use Illustrator simultaneously

To start off, we’re going to open Adobe Illustrator. Your home screen should look like this, but if it doesn’t it’s no big deal

From here, click on the "New File" highlighted in red from the photo in Step 1

• If home page doesn’t look like this, just hit ctrl + n on your keyboard and you can still get to the same template that I’m seeing

Go with the default post card and its settings. The dimensions don’t really matter too much for what we’re doing.

Now you’ve come up on a blank screen, and this is essentially your workspace. Since this logo that we’re making is going to be your personal watermark, you’re going to need to put it on other items. For this, we need to get rid of this blank background and give ourselves a transparent background.

We can do this by enabling the transparency grid. You can access this by going to the top left, clicking on “view” and sliding down to “Show transparency grid.”

• You can also do this by using your keyboard shortcut, “shift + ctrl + D”

I will be making a barbell using simple shapes, only rectangles and changing colors, because weightlifting is something important to me. You can feel free to make something else on your own. Feel free to play around with the different shapes you can find. The first thing I’m going to do is set up my shapes tool to be easier to access for myself. You can leave it on the default setup there if you’d like.

Once you click and hold over the rectangle tool, you’ll see this menu pop up. Click on the arrow to the far right and you’ll create a window you can use to easily select different shapes available, and able to manipulate them.

First, I’m going to make the barbell, which will be a thin, long rectangle. Don’t worry about the size/scale, we can always scale it down later as necessary. I made mine the same length as the width of the template, as that’s a good reference point to use.

Next, we need to make the barbell a certain color. My barbell is steel, but you can get cerakoted barbells with different colors, so I’ll go with a blue for mine. You can change the color by looking to the right and selecting the fill option

I’m going to add a couple smaller rectangles on each side to add to the look 

Next, we need the bumper plates. For my logo, I’ll reference 25 kg plates, which are red. These bumper plates are also not rigidly rectangular like the barbell. So I’m going to use the rounded rectangle tool.

Get a small distance from the barbell collar, center it up, and hold down "alt" and drag out until you get to the size you need compared to the barbell.

Once you get the overall rectangle size, you’ll need to adjust the radius of the rounded edges. You can click on the small nodes and drag them to adjust the size.

While it’s still selected, you’ll need to change the color of the bumper plate, feel free to choose any color you like, but I will be choosing red. Use the same fill function to the right that you used with the barbell collar from before.

While the bumper plate is selected, use “ctrl +c,” then “ctrl +v” on the bumper plate to make a second one. It should look something like this once you do.

After you’ve made the second one, you’ll need to use the selection tool in the top left in the toolbar.

Use the selection tool to drag it over right next to the other one. Just simply click and drag it over as needed.

Still using the selection tool, you’ll need to select both of the bumper plates by dragging and creating a selection box over both plates, and then group them together. Right-Click on the bumper plates and choose the “group” option. This is purely for organizational purposes, that way in the event you do accidentally click somewhere, you won’t somehow move one of the plates and cause yourself grief

From there, we need to go back to the regular rectangle shape, and finish out this side of the barbell. Don’t get ahead of yourself and add the bumper plates to the other side on your own. I’ll make the process a little easier on you after we add this, using the mirror tool.

For the barbell sleeve, I’m going to start from this little center point on the collar to ensure it’s symmetrical (see picture) and hold down alt as I drag out my intended size for this.

From there, you’re going to want to move it over to the outer part, and want it to be roughly symmetrical, and you can see the intersection lines in the picture shown to help you guide it as necessary.

Once you get the barbell sleeve where you want it, go ahead and change the color to whatever you desire.

Then, group the sleeve and the bumper plates together like you did before using the selection tool, right click > group

Now that they’re grouped, go ahead and right-click and select transform, then go to reflect.

Once you get there, make sure the option selected is “vertical” and you’re going to select “copy.”

It should look something like this.

From here, select the one that was reflected, and drag it ALL the way over to the other side

Once you get the other side set, go ahead and select the entire thing, and group it together again.

After it’s grouped, you’ll need to scale it down and fit inside the template size we selected. Just select a spot on it and scale it down. It doesn’t need to be uniformly scaled down, just make it look close enough for your logo you choose to do.

Now we’re going to select the type tool. Feel free to use any kind of type you’d like, play around with it, and make it individually yours.

Highlight your text, and change the font, change it around.

Once you’re done making your text, group the text and your final logo together.

From here, you’re going to click on file > export > export as.

Save it as a PNG file so that way you can keep it clear and have it sit on anything you’d like.