In our last post, we provided an overview of the basic steps needed to design a custom drum head. Those steps included adding text, shapes, and artwork to your design, as well as configuring portholes and other design elements unique to drum heads. All of these steps were done using our free online designer app here at Vintage Logos.

Today we will look at the more advanced features of the designer app, as well as provide you with some design tips. This will help ensure that the design of your custom drum head looks just the way you want it: absolutely stunning!

The Vintage Logos Designer App: Advanced Features & Design Tips

To begin, go ahead and launch the designer app as before. You’ll initially have to select the desired drum head size and brand. Then, if you have a saved design that you’d like to improve or finish, you can open that. Otherwise, create a new design!

Show/Hide the Grid

When designing, symmetry is very important — you want everything to look balanced and even. An easy way to achieve that is to line up everything to a grid. This feature can be easily enabled by clicking the “SHOW GRID” button at the bottom of the designer app. Once clicked, a grid will appear over the drum head. Keep in mind that each square in the grid represents 2 square inches in real life.

If at any point you’d like to turn off the grid again, simply click “HIDE GRID.”

Align Your Graphics and Text

In a similar way as the grid above, aligning allows your design to look as balanced and symmetrical as possible. Maybe you want to move all of the elements in your design into the very center or perhaps you want to align your text to one side or another. Whatever the case, here’s how you can do that:

Take a look at the left side of the designer app. Each element you add to your design (text, shapes, clip art, etc) is organized in a menu there. When you click on a specific element in that menu (or even the element in the design itself) you’re given a sub-menu of various editing options. One of those options is “align.” When you click on that, you’re given a menu with various alignment options, including a link to “align all items at one time.” Simply click the desired option and go from there!

Move Layers Up or Down

When adding and manipulating elements in your design, you may find that you need multiple elements stacked on top of each other. For example, you may have a piece of text that you’d like in front of a background image. This can be achieved by using the Layer Up and Layer Down feature.

This feature is available in the same sub-menu as the alignment option above. Once you’ve selected an element of your design, simply click the buttons “to front” or “to back” in the available sub-menu. This causes the element to move towards the foreground or background in the design. In addition, the element is reordered in its position in the menu on the left side of the app.

Design Effects

Most of the elements in your design have effects that you can add to them as well. These can be accessed via the sub-menu for each design element on the left side of the app. Here’s an overview of the effects you can choose from:

• Distort causes the element to bend or stretch from its original shape
• Outline (available for text and shapes only) adds a stroke outlining each letter of the text or a stroke outlining the entire shape
• Rotate
• Blur + and Blur – cause the element to appear more or less blurry and out of focus
• Opacity + and Opacity – cause the element to be more or less transparent, allowing visibility of the element(s) and background underneath
• Shadow adds a drop shadow to the element
• Flip and Mirror

Need More Info?

If you’d like to continue reading about how to design your custom drum head, including best practices for professional design results, we recommend our Design Tips & Issues page. This covers such issues as bleed margin, color differences between computer screens and printed products, and much more.

Have you been wanting to design your own logo for a custom drum head but are intimidated by the process? Maybe you have an idea of what you want it to look like, but you’re not sure where or how to start?

Well today we have a post just for you! We’re going to walk you through, step-by-step, in designing your own custom drum head logo. Here at Vintage Logos we offer an online designer app that is free and easy to use. This app allows you to create anything from simple to sophisticated designs. What’s more, you can save your designs online to return to at a later time! Let’s take a look…

The Vintage Logos Designer App: A Tutorial On Making A Custom Drum Head

Step 1: Go to the online designer app

Step 2: Select your drum head

Before you can begin designing, you have to select the desired brand and size of drum head. This is important because the size of the drum head will affect how much available space you will have in your design. Once you have selected your drum head, click on “CREATE NEW DESIGN.”

Step 3: Start designing!

Below are some of the basic features of using our designer app. For more advanced features, stay tuned for part two of this post!

• Set the background color: this is available in a scrolling menu on the lefthand side of the app. There are over 50 background colors to choose from!
• Add text: this is done by clicking the “TEXT” link in the top-left corner of the app. There are lots of options to customize your text but we’ll just look at the two simplest for now: color and fonts. Color allows you to select from over 50 colors for your text and fonts gives you hundreds of font choices to choose from. You can also sample additional colors from files you upload.
• Add shapes: this option is available via the “SHAPE” link at the top-left of the app. You have the choice of a square, circle, star, arrow, and more. (More on this in part two of this post!)
• Add clip art, stock photos, and more: built directly into our app you have access to thousands of background images, clip art, and manufacturer logos, all free of charge! This can be done by clicking the “CLIPART” link at the top-left of the app. In addition, you have access to the millions of stock photos available on Fotolia.com, offered to you at a nominal fee.
• Upload your own artwork: perhaps you have a pre-existing image you want to use in the design, or maybe you previously designed your full logo in a different app. Either way, these images can be added by clicking the “UPLOAD” link at the top of the app. You have the option to upload images from your computer or from Facebook or Instagram. You can also use this feature to create a QR code.
• Add mic holes to your drum head: as you may know, adding a mic/port hole to your drum head gives your kick drum more versatility as well as improving its sound. It allows you to insert a microphone for live performance or recording and it also gives your kick drum more projection and attack. (Learn more about port holes at this page). You can easily add this feature by clicking the “MIC HOLES” link at the top-left of the app.

Step 4: Order (or save) your design

When you’re happy with the design of your drum head, simply click “ADD TO CART” in the top-right of the app to calculate the price. Then begin ordering your own custom drum head.

If you’d like to save the design and come back to it at a later time, you can click on “MY DESIGNS” at the top of the app. This gives you the option to “SAVE CURRENT DESIGN,” which you can then access in the future to continue working with.

Part 2 Coming Soon!

In the upcoming part two of this post, we will look at the more advanced features of the designer app. In addition, we will offer some design tips to make sure your logo looks as good as possible!