How To Customize Fonts For Logo Design

What it actually covers

The course opens with a short set of definitions (sans serif versus serif, tracking versus kerning) before moving into its real center of gravity: a long run of logo teardowns. Netflix, Red Bull, Discovery, Visa, Gillette, Amazon, Wrangler, and Facebook each get picked apart to identify what a professional studio likely changed from the stock typeface: an arced baseline, a stencil cutout, a missing dot over a lowercase i, a sheared italic angle. Jon Brommet then applies a handful of these moves to his own class-cover lettering and, in the closing lesson, to a custom "SPEED" wordmark for a future course, rebuilding an S from scratch out of rectangles and Pathfinder operations rather than fighting with the original curve.

The mechanical vocabulary taught is narrow but real. Outlining type, nudging anchor points with the Direct Selection tool, using Smart Guides to snap edges, and combining shapes with Minus Front and Unite are the load-bearing skills here, and they recur in nearly every case study. Shear gets a dedicated explainer for adjusting italic angles independent of a font's built-in slant. A short lesson on basic dos and don'ts, don't stretch text horizontally or vertically, don't fake a bold with a stroke, covers ground that any working designer already knows but that's genuinely useful for someone newer to type.

Where it falls short

The case studies are the bulk of the runtime, and they are reverse-engineered guesses rather than confirmed process. Brommet is upfront that he's approximating what a studio "probably" did, and the value is in the technique demonstrated, not historical accuracy. That's a fair trade if the viewer wants a grab bag of Illustrator moves, but it means the course teaches pattern recognition more than typographic theory. Anyone expecting to learn why a rounded terminal reads as friendlier, or how weight and optical correction actually work, will find only surface-level commentary.

Structurally, the class is padded. A "Quarantine" lesson is a few minutes of pandemic-era reflection with no design content, and the outro doubles down with a promotional "Message From Future Jon" that exists purely to point at other classes and shops. Strip those and the useful runtime shrinks further from an already short 55 minutes.

The S consistently gets flagged as the hardest letter to customize, and rather than resolving it, the course repeatedly punts, "I'm not going to show that," "avoid that S." For a class explicitly about hand-editing letterforms, ducking the hardest recurring problem is a real gap.

Bottom line

This works best as a lookbook of specific Illustrator tricks for someone who already knows their way around the pen tool and just wants ideas for logo-style customization. It is not a typography course in any deep sense, and it assumes intermediate software fluency the Skillshare blurb undersells. Viewers who already understand outlining, Pathfinder, and Shear will pick up a few clever reference points quickly; viewers hoping for a structured path from novice to confident font customizer will hit the course's limits fast.

What you will learn

• ·How to identify and use tracking versus kerning in Illustrator's Character panel
• ·How to outline a font (Command/Control Shift O) so individual points become editable
• ·How to use Warp effects like Arc Lower to bend baselines the way Netflix's logo does
• ·How to combine shapes with Pathfinder (Minus Front, Unite) to cut notches and stencil effects into letterforms
• ·How to use Shear to adjust italic angles and rebuild rounded or squared-off terminals
• ·Basic commercial font licensing checkpoints to check before customizing a purchased typeface