Finished product
So when me and Wil were thinking about a logo for Cluelesss I came up with the idea of a 3D box with question marks on the sides of the box. So I started on the idea trying the “hard way” of doing this. That is taking 3 separate squares and trying to line them up right with the 3D tool. But thats not what were going to show you. We are going to show you a quick and easy way to doing this. So to start off create a new web document and make it 1024×768. Make sure the orientation is set to landscape. Then click okay.
Once in the document grab the rectangle tool and click on the art board. Dont click and drag just click anywhere on the art board. In the dialog box that pops up make a square with the dimensions of 500px by 500px. Make sure the dimensions are the same. For example dont have 200 by 304. That wont be a square that would be an odd rectangle. Once you have the dimensions in the dialog box click okay and the square will be on your art board. Give it a fill of a light gray and drop the stroke to 0.
Okay now that we have our square set up we can go ahead and make this thing a 3D object. Go to window > 3D > Extrude & Bevel. Once in there look for a box called Extrude depth. Click in the box and change the number to 500, or what ever dimension you decided to use. Notice if you have preview on that the square becomes a cube! Now for the most important part of this tutorial, click the more options button and look all the way to the bottom of the window where there is a check box that says ‘draw hidden faces’. Make sure you check that!! If you dont this tutorial will not work. Once that box is checked go up to the map art button. Click the drop down menu that says “symbols” next to it. Now choose any symbol that you would like, size it up by clicking and dragging the corner and holding shift. Once finished click okay on both the Map Art box and the 3D box.
Now click the cube and go to Object > Expand Appearance. You can see once you clicked it the cube was traced to all of the actual faces on the cube. Now ungroup these by selecting all and going to Object > Ungroup. This is where the “draw hidden faces” option in the 3D panel is key. Select only the top face of the cube and delete it.
Now we can start adding colors. Select the left face (picture below will help) and lets add a gradient to it. Lets go with a light brown from the swatches panel and then the last gradient stop choose a darker brown. After you have the gradient applied to that side grab the gradient tool from the tool panel on the left. Click the top right corner of the side and drag it down to the opposite corner.
Now for the side with the actual symbol on it gets a little tricky. Go to your layers panel and find the group with the symbol in it. Select everything in the group but the symbol. Give it the same gradient as the other side of the cube. Only this time with the gradient tool click and drag to opposite corner (see photo). While were here we might as well color the other two faces behind the front two. Here is how we are going to do it. Select the one that is directly behind the one with the symbol on it then use the eye dropper to grab the gradient from the face with the symbol on it. Now select the back face that is behind the face that does not have the symbol on it and eye drop that face that does not have the symbol on it. See the photo for a better explanation.
Now that we have the colors and everything done right we can pretty much say that we are done. But to really give it the finished look we have to do one more thing. Go back into your layers panel and go back to the group with the symbol in it and grab the symbol. Once you have only that symbol selected go to your transparency panel and drop the opacity down to about 40%. Now it looks like that symbol is really apart of the box. We are done!
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