If you’re looking for some help to guide you design your custom made metal badge using illustrator, then this tutorial post is just for you! Thankfully, my effort and time invested in writing this comprehensive post finally serve its purpose, as its aim to provide complete detail on designing custom badges.

So let’s open illustrator and start!

Designing a custom badge is all about putting relevant information in a certain shape divided into layers together, and making it appealing with any themed color.

Start with using that’s that are relevant to you such as, use your first and last name, put your occupation down, then put your dream, whatever you aim to achieve. Then put your state or country name from right in the middle, then put the year you were born in.

Let’s suppose you were born in 1991, so you’ll write it separated, 19 on left, and 91 on right, this is how you put your birthday. Let’s move to create a fresh design on the artboard.

Creating Fresh Design in Blank Art Board

You can create art within that artboard and center it around that artboard which is cool. The pattern of blank artboard goes in a reel like a slide, so you can create many next to each.

However, let’s start making a circle design. Use 600 by 600-pixel document, but why so small size document? Since it’s a vector image so you can resize to anything you want to, so there’s no point in sizing your document up to like 15 by 15 inches.

Let’s use 12 point stoke for a specific design that’s going to be consistent with the entire design. You won’t like to switch upstroke because you want to be consistent. Go for a circle, and draw it holding and shift that way. I repeat, draw a circle and drag it out, hopefully, you’ll get my point.

Okay, change that circle into a stroke, a black stroke; again you’ll go with a 12-point stroke so you can keep the consistency. Make sure everything is centered vertically and horizontally which it is.

Next what you have to do is, select it, and go up to copy and paste in front. Now there’s going to be a copy in front which you can’t see it but if you go to this right corner, you’ll see the arrows appear, if you keep holding shift and alt, then drag down; it’s going to evenly drag it down. You proportionately drag it down, then you need a copy with the same width, and try to get as close as an outer layer.

The next thing you have to do is, create ovals, so just do control V, resize it, and center it to the artboard; this is the cool thing about artboard you can easily center things to it. Okay, if you hold ALT and drag it down from the top, it’s going to create that nice oval, you can also reenter it again just to make sure, then drag this to the right and group all these. I also group things just to center them on the artboard.

Group both ovals and center it on an artboard, this looks very nice. The next thing to do is, lay down the last circle as you might be missing one inside, so you can just do paste in a place that’s already pasted. These pasting circles can save you a lot of time.

Now, add little dividers where you’ll put your dream, to add a certain style, you can add a line tool in each section. Click on each circle point and drag the line. This is called the line segment tool. Once3 your design is completed then fill your information inside.