Creating Long Shadows in Logoist 2
It’s 2015, and flat design has taken the UI community by storm. With simplistic curves and soft palettes of color, flat design is not only recognizable, it’s inescapable. Among the most popular trends in this blossoming era of UI is the long shadow. In case you are not aware of the name, long shadows are the perfectly straight, perfectly sharp shadows used in flat design that make logos appear, well, flat. Take for example this Facebook logo:
Like it? Good. This is what we’re going to be creating today. Our tool of choice? This surprisingly professional program called Logoist 2. Sorry Windows folks, this tool is for Macs only, but the conventions outlined here can be adapted to Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, if that’s your thing. I choose Logoist for this particular tutorial because it is far cheaper than Illustrator ($30 bucks on the Mac App Store) and is a terrific entry point for beginners. Opening up Logoist, you’ll be greeted with a screen that looks like this:
To begin, we’ll want to add the background of our logo. In the top toolbar, select Shape, then choose Add Rect. Drag the generated rectangle to cover the majority of your screen. Next, under Style in the right-side panel, add a gradient fill. Clicking Edit Gradient, the following window will pop up:
For this tutorial, we’ll be using the official Facebook color as our base color (the leftmost step). This color happens to be rgb(44, 67, 136). Our secondary color (the rightmost step) will be slightly lighter, at rgb(66, 101, 206). Once you have set the gradient, set it to have an angle of 45 degrees. This creates the illusion of light being cast onto the background.
Next, navigate to Text / Add Text and add two text objects onto the logo. Stretch them to their maximum width and set their text to be identical (I used a lowercase F, but you don’t have to).
Select the upper text object and set it to have a solid white fill. Apply an extrude effect to the lower text by first selecting it then applying Effects / Extrude / Color Extrude. Set the highlight and shadow colors to black. Slide the X Offset all the way to the right and slide the Y Offset all the way to the left.
Duplicate the base rectangle and bring it to the top of the layer stack. Make sure it is resized properly and fits perfectly over the existing rectangle. Logoist 2 enables canvas snapping by default.
Holding down Shift, select all of the layers. Right click and select Group. The layers will be grouped together, and you’ll notice that big plus symbols appear next to all but the base layer. This is the mask settings tool. Click the topmost button (the one next to the duplicate rectangle) and select Intersect. This creates a mask from the top rectangle so the long shadow doesn’t run outside of the image boundaries. Once these steps are completed, your icon should look something like this:
Next, add a new rectangle to the group. Group it with the extrude (3rd) layer so your icon, with the rectangle as the base layer. Change the mask setting of the extrude layer to Intersect.
Stretch the new rectangle to cover the remaining area in which the long shadow is to appear.
Add a gradient fill to this rectangle, with black being the rightmost step and a transparency being the leftmost step. Set the angle to be 45 degrees.
IMPORTANT: Despite the fact that the leftmost step is transparent, in order for the gradient to appear natural the leftmost step must first be set to the base color mentioned earlier, then have its alpha channel turned down to zero. Setting the color to white (or any other color) with an alpha value of zero will appear ugly and unnatural (try it, you’ll see what I mean).
Finally, your long shadow will start to take place.
You can further adjust your logo by decreasing the opacity of the long shadow group (I set mine to around 40), and by adding a slight gradient fill to your text (I did from light gray to white). You can adjust opacity in the Properties panel of the sidebar. The final result will look something like this:
There you have it! You made a long shadow! You can now go forth and be part of the flat revolution. Congratulations.
