Inverting a logo may seem like a simple color swap, but it requires adjustment and customization to maintain clarity, balance, and impact. Different factors can affect how a logo appears when flipped from light to dark.
To ensure a visually appealing and legible logo design, we must consider the irradiation illusion and shadow distortions—these two factors can make an inverted logo look unnatural. Let’s take a look at how to invert a logo in Adobe Illustrator!
What you’ll need
For this tutorial, you’ll need access to Adobe Illustrator, and you’ll also need a logo template to work on. In my case, I used one of these badge logo templates.
What you’ll learn
- How to invert a logo
- How to turn a logo from typographical to vector shapes
- How to fix the irradiation illusion
Things to keep in mind
There are two important things to keep in mind when inverting a logo. This is to ensure the logo still looks attractive and the focal point remains intact.
Highlights and shadows
While some logos can be simply inverted from positive to negative, it often doesn’t work so well with logos that include a play of highlights and shadows. In a normal (non-inverted) logo, shadows are dark and highlights are light to create natural depth. But when inverted, the highlights are dark and the shadows become light, which can create an unnatural look.
According to color theory, it’s important to maintain a natural light source. In this case, it’s necessary to rework the logo slightly by adding an offset path, outline, or background, sometimes even simplifying strokes for clarity. If a logo relies heavily on highlights and shadows, it’s necessary to create a one-color variant to use only on dark backgrounds.
Irradiation illusion
Most logos are designed in black to go over a light background. The irradiation illusion is based on how the human eye interprets light and dark areas. When a logo is inverted, the light area can have the illusion that it is spreading out, and dark areas tend to look as if they’re shrinking. This creates a visual imbalance, which can lead to legibility issues as the small text can look either blurry or too bold.
To account for the irradiation illusion, it’s important to follow a few steps:
- Adjust the stroke weight: reduce the stroke width of light elements to maintain visual balance.
- Optical correction: manually tweak shapes and letters, making dark elements thicker and light elements thinner.
- Simplify fine details: avoid using very thin lines or intricate patterns as these may exaggerate the look.
Logo designs with a little more detail, or logotypes that are text-based, will often look bloated when you just change them to white. It has something to do with the scattering of light inside the eye, but we designers often need to account for this by offsetting our designs by a couple of pixels.
How to invert a logo in Adobe Illustrator
Bearing all of these things in mind, let’s look at an example of how to invert a logo, step by step.
Step 1
Open the logo in Adobe Illustrator.
In the Layers panel, create a new Layer. Move the layer to the background and select it.
Step 2
Using the Rectangle Tool (M), create a dark background on the layer created in the last step. Lock the layer in the Layers panel.
Step 3
Select the logo, and if it isn’t expanded, go to Object > Expand Appearance.
Change the color of the logo to white or a lighter color. I’m comparing the logos side by side on the different backgrounds.
Step 4
To invert the logo, use the Ellipse Tool (L) to create an ellipse to cover it. Select both the ellipse and the logo, and then go to the Pathfinder window and select Divide.
Step 5
Ungroup the objects by pressing Shift-Command-G. Delete the parts of the logo you don’t need.
Step 6
The irradiation illusion is affecting the logo, so it’s time to tweak the edges to make sure the typography is legible. Select the logo, and set the stroke color to the background color. Set the stroke size to 0.20 pt. This value will vary depending on the size of the logo you are working on.
Below, the logo in the center was inverted simply by changing the color. The first logo is the one I’d suggest as the correct way of inverting the logo—it looks stronger compared to the center logo.
And that’s it!
In this tutorial, you’ve learned that inverting a logo is about more than just switching colors. It requires careful adjustment to maintain legibility, clarity, balance, and visual impact. By understanding how highlights, shadows, and the irradiation illusion affect inverted logos, you can make the necessary adjustments to ensure your logo looks great on any background. With the right approach, your inverted logo will look just as polished and professional as the original.
If you’re looking for some cool logo inspiration and want to practice inverting logos, be sure to check out these logo templates.
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