Designing a Powerpuff Girls Inspired Graphic in Adobe Illustrator

Plz don’t sue me Cartoon Network.

Here’s the font I mentioned: https://www.dafont.com/powerpuff-girls.font

Video Transcript:

What’s up, guys? I’m gonna do something new today, so let me know if you end up liking this, and I’ll try to do more of them, but I’m gonna do a little, like, “behind the scenes” of how I made this Powerpuff Girls inspired sticker.

This was just a fun project that I wanted to do. I just had the idea and decided to make them for fun. So I recorded my process of actually, like, vectorizing out this graphic and kind of going from step one to complete so you guys can see how that works. I’m going to stop rambling now and dive into the video…

So I’m starting with just kind of typing out the words that I want to have, and this was a font that I already found that someone else made that was, like a Powerpuff Girls font. I’ll link it in the description in case you want to try it out.

But it was, like, really, really close to the original Powerpuff Girls type. But there were a couple little things that were kind of off to me that I wanted to tweak. I ended up, like, outlining the text and kind of tweaking certain letters and rounding the letters and stuff, and also had to do this weird, unorthodox thing to fill in colors behind it because of the way that the text was formatted.

So that’s why I’m, like, I was, like, drawing behind the colors and then outlining the text and then adding, like, a stroke around the text. Just kind of experimenting with getting the letters just right, and now I’m, like, knocking them out of that background color here.

But, yeah, I kind of got inspired to make this after I sort of took a break from designing things for a while, especially designing things from scratch kind of like this versus using, you know, Canva or using, like, a pre-made template of some sort.

So for quite a while, I took a pretty good break, and I finally, I think, got over a little bit of burnout with design. And one day I just randomly had the idea to make this graphic. I don’t remember what even brought it about, I guess because I say “f*** around and find out” all the time.

I was like, what if it was that, but the Powerpuff Girls logo? And, you know, if something doesn’t exist, you just make it. So that’s what happened.

And this was one of the first projects I did when I was kind of dipping my toes back into design after taking a break from it for quite a while. And it was fun.

It was nice to do something that I just wanted to do and just for the fun of making it, instead of it being for, like, a client project or monetizing it in some way. I did end up making some cool stickers. Like, I have a shiny one and then a matte finish one. Can’t decide which one I like more, honestly. I like the shininess, but I really like how the pink came out. It’s like pastel pink on this one, but they both look pretty good.

So I made these stickers, I made some mouse pads, I made some posters, some shirts, lots of different things with this graphic on it, just for fun, and that was cool.

But anyway, back to my wildly fast designing here. This is like, I forget what it was, I think it was like 6x speed or something that I put this video on instead of my actual real time design, which probably took several hours for me to put this stuff together.

But yeah, I was really fine tuning the sizing of all this stuff too, because I wanted it to feel like the same general shape as the Powerpuff logo.

And then obviously, like, the letters being about the same size and distance apart was another big thing that I had to kind of adjust from the original font that I was using. Getting that letter spacing just right and rounding some of the corners on the letters a little bit more and then also throwing that little and in there felt kind of weird.

Like, I wasn’t sure if it should be the same size as the rest of the text, but then that kind of made it really long, so I ended up smushing it down, kind of like where the “the” is in the Powerpuff Girls logo, making it about that same size and then recreating these stars and getting the spacing just right for that.

And even like, these little corner bits where the stars poke out was like, I was getting like, really OCD about that part. I wanted them to match as closely as possible to the original logo and not look like wonky either. So I think they ended up being pretty close. Here’s the final one. But I mean, this is shit that nobody besides me is gonna notice. Or maybe another designer who’s also a little bit obsessive, like me, staring at it.

But yeah, I think this is just about the finished version. Adding some extra strokes and borders around the outside of the logo to make it match the original one. I think that that like, really brought it all together and that was just about the finishing touch, I think.

Yeah, it was fun to do something like this. Hopefully I don’t get sued for copyright issues, but I think it’s like just different enough from the logo. It’s not like an exact copy that hopefully I’ll be alright. It’s more of a…I forget what they call it. Not an iteration, but, uh. What’s the word I’m looking for? Not a copy, not an iteration.

It’s not inspiration either, but there’s some kind of art term that’s basically taking inspiration from something. Like pop art is a good example.It usually incorporates things that are popular in culture and society at the time.

So, like Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup and things like that that have, like, actual brands or logos in them. And it’s not. Since it’s art and it’s like an inspirational thing, it doesn’t count towards copyright issues, I guess. I’m not entirely sure how or why that works, but apparently it does. I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what I’m talking about.

But anyway, let me flip over and show you guys some of the finished products too. Alright, so here were a couple of like, finished products. So here’s one of the stickers on one of my friends drift cars, which is pretty cool. And she also bought, oh, flags! I totally forgot I made flags too. These came out really good. I was really excited with these. So it’s actual flag with grommets on it. So you could hang it and like fly it like a flag. Or you could just hang it on your wall or garage or something like this, which is pretty cool. That one came out really good.

And then I did like a shirt design also stickers, beanies. The beanies came out amazing too. Look at these colors. Like, perfect colors for this logo. I do wish it had like a little bit of green in there for Buttercup, but I really love how these came out.

And then the mouse pad I was talking about, these came out awesome too. I ended up vectorizing that heart shape in the background too, because I. I think that just gives it like a little bit more context into like the Powerpuff Girls world. Like, I feel like the logo like this is pretty recognizable on its own, especially if you’re a fan of Powerpuff Girls. But if not, I think the heart background definitely tells you what it is.

So I included that on some of the merch, like the flag, the posters, the mouse pads, some of this other stuff I didn’t end up actually making, but I wanted to mock it up and see what it looked like. There’s the heart background, so mine’s just a little bit different. A little bit different shape and colors.

But I think overall it came out really good and it was a fun project, which is the most important thing. It gave me a fun thing to work on. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you want to see me do more of these about design stuff or also building websites and stuff too, and talking about kind of the process, leave a comment and let me know and I’ll start trying to make more of these. Otherwise, I will see you guys in the next video. Thanks for watching. Byeee!