Sorry for the large images
Many logos for me start with scribbles like this:
The drawing is just to give an idea of where I want things to end; I don't trace sketches like these, especially not in a case like this where I know I want the finished thing to be crisp and regular and made of perfect shapes
Laying down the base shapes-- I have final colors in mind but just work in random high contrast colors so I can see what I am doing
The above image in outline mode; note that the eye-shape is a mask over a series of concentric circles right now (so that I can get it to feel right without destroying my circles)
also note that literally everything here is built from a perfect shape... I do frequently draw bezier curves and use the pentool in illustrator, but in this case there was none of that, haha
more details added; I usually work side-by-side with a reference or references (the sketch in this case) so I can see what (if anything) is going wrong
started offsetting my paths. Everything is built from the foundation shapes in the previous screenshots. Here I know I want one of the crescent shapes on the eye to be asymmetrical, so I am trying to find where I should put that gray shape
Things are starting to come together so I change the colors into something close to what they will be in the end. It's important not to do this too late in the process (I have learned this the hard way and been screwed over by color issues before). Lots of details added between this shot and the previous one, but they are all just more shape building and using illustrator's pathfinder tool
Here I thought I was finished... the last of the details are there and the logo has all the outlines I want it to have. If I was producing this logo for embroidery or printing, I would have ended here since all the colors and shapes are trapped nicely. But for the forums... it felt a little chunky to me, and I kind of liked the way it looked earlier without the extra outlines
So I cut away most of where the outlines were, making them transparent. In "the real world" this logo might be better because it could more easily become straight up black/white, but then again it would be pretty challenging to have this logo appear on a variety of colored backgrounds (because there aren't as many outlines protecting the colors)
I was also being a major scrub when making the transparent, but Nastyjungle showed me some tricks and saved the day. Thanks as always, nj :)
So obviously this wasn't a how-to, but this is probably the sort of thing you can expect when I actually do a how-to, haha
Thanks for reading :)