5 Cool Text Effects in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 5 Cool Text Effects Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class on creating cool text effects in Adobe Illustrator. Today we're going to look at creating five cool text effects in Illustrator and every one of them is very different. We're going to create some see through texts where we can see an image through some text. We're going to create 3D text with a mapped pattern on it. We're going to create a really fun in front and behind layered text effect. We're going to add perspective text over a photo. I'm going to show you a really interesting way of getting shadowed text in Illustrator. Now, as you're watching these videos, you are going to see a prompt which will ask you if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoy and learn from this class. These recommendations are really helpful for other students because it helps them say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started creating these five cool text effects in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 See through text effect: For this next text effect we're going to create the effect of seeing an image through a piece of text. I'm going to create a new document, I'm just going for a regular screen size document, 1920 by 1080. You can make yours whatever size you like. I'm going to bring in a photograph that I have downloaded from unsplashed.com. I'm going to give you the download link for that photo if you want to use it. I'll choose file and then place. I have the image here, and what I want to make sure is that I'm not linking it I want to embed it. I'm going to disable the checkbox for link so that means that it will be embedded and then I'll click "Place." I'll drag out the image into my document. Now the image is not the same proportions as my art board, so I'm going to make it as large as it needs to be. New in illustrator CC is the crop image option. I'm going to go ahead and crop this image. I'm going to click "Crop image." I'm just going to bring in the edge here, and then just click "Apply", and those additional pixels are then removed from the image. That's new in illustrators CC and it's a nice handy feature for cropping excess pixels of an image. I'm going to allow palette, going to open up the layers here. I'm just going to lock this image layer down because I don't want to it to move. For my text, I'm going to place a rectangle over the top of the image, I'm just going to size out a nice largish size rectangle and I'm going to fill it with a color select. Let's just go ahead and scramble a gray blue color to use for now. Next up, I'm going to place my text. I'm going to the text tool, I'm going to click once where I want to start the text, I'm going to size it up. I think something like 250 points will be good, I'm going to choose a nice bold font, and let's just type London in all caps. Now the text is a little on the small size, so I'm going to make it quite a bit larger. It fills this rectangle that I have. I'm just going to position it roughly where I wanted. I can adjust its size here, or I can grab the corner handles here to size it in proportion, or not in proportion as I desire. I'm just placing it where I want it to be now. In a minute, we're actually going to see through this text to the image underneath. We have text on the top, then rectangle, and then our lockdown image. I'm going to select my text and I'm going to copy it to the clipboard. Actually, I'm going to cut it to the clipboard, so I'll choose edit and then cut. The text is now gone but it's on the Windows or the Mac clipboard. We're going to target this rectangle, and the feature we're going to use is an opacity mask, and we can do this either through the appearance panel or the transparency panel. I'm going to do it through transparency panel just because this panel stays open for a little bit easier to use than the appearance panel, which is window and then transparency. I'm going to make a mask, so I'm going to click here on make mask and I'm going to target the mask. This means that we're now working on the mask and not the image itself. We can invert the mask and we can turn off the clipping and that gives us a view of the rectangle that we're going to be working within. I'm going to go and get my types, so I'll choose edit, paste, and place. Now the word London goes back to exactly where it was. You should be able to see through the word London to whatever is behind here, but we're not seeing through right now. The reason is we've got invert mask selected, let's deselect that and then we'll see the result. Sometimes you'll need to work with invert mask to get the result that you're looking for, but one or other is going to sort it for you. Before you leave this transparency dialogue, you need to be really careful about clicking here to go back to working in your document, because right now you're working on the opacity mask, and the last panel is telling you that it says layer's opacity mass. We can't see our image, we can't see anything, we're just seeing the opacity mask. To get it out of here, we must click back on this icon here, which takes us back to the image. You see the last pallet has come back to what it should be and we can just close things down. This effect is fully editable. If you need to edit it, you're going to go back to this rectangle and you're going back to your transparency dialogue or transparency panel. You're going back to your mask and at this point you can adjust the mask up and down. You can re-size it, and because it's a text object and because it's live text, you can also change the text. I'm going back to the type tool. I'm going to make this Thames instead of London, because that's the river that we're looking at here. You are seeing here, one of the problems with illustrators, illustrator really hasn't caught up with me right now. It thinks I just type the letter tape, in actual fact it's showing me Thames, don't worry about this because it's all going to be fine when we get out of this dialogue. I'm going to click back here on the main image. I'm seeing the image here, exactly as it should be, closed down a transparency panel and we've got a live result. Here we've got a rectangle, we've got some text being used as an opacity mask so that we can see through the rectangle where the text is to the image below. Of course, the rectangle itself can be moved, so we can very easily just select it and move it around. The type goes with the rectangle because it's a mask associated with the rectangle. 3. Pt 2 3D text with mapped pattern: For this text effect, we're going to create some 3D text, and we're going to map a pattern onto it. I'm going to click "Create New". I'm going to create just a document the size of my screen. I'm working in RGB color mode, I'll click "Create". Now again, I'm going to be working with a very thick font here. I'm just going to settle for Myriad Pro bold because that's a nice bold font, and I'm going to make mine about probably 250 points tall. I'm just going to type the word pink here in uppercase letters. Now, I want this to be a bit spread apart. I'll go to my character dialogue here, and I'm just going to increase the spacing a little bit. Probably something like 50. I think my text is not quite large enough, so let's just hold the Shift key, as I drag on a corner just to make it a bit larger. Now, I'm going to fill this with pink, so I'm going to the Swatches palette, and I'm just going to make my text pink, and it's not going to have any stroke at all. We're going to create a 3D object from this. But because I want to map a pattern to the front of my 3D shape, I have to actually make my pattern first. I'm going to the rectangle tool, just going to drag out a large square holding the "Shift" key as I do. It's constrained to be a square. Then I'm going to fill this with a pattern. I'm just using a pattern that's shipped with Illustrator. This one here. It's got some transparency in it. The pink underlying in the 3D shape is going to come through this. But you can use any pattern you like, and you can get access to more patterns in Illustrator by opening the flyout menu in the Swatches palette, choose Open Swatch Library and go to patterns, and then choose nature. There are some animal skins and foliage here. In the decorative collection are decorative legacy and vonster patterns. You can select any one of these and there are whole lot of patterns that you can use. Once you've got one of these dialogues open, you can just click to moves through the others here using these navigation tools here. You can get access to patterns with the shapes selected. You can just try out these patterns and choose one that you want to use. While I'm going back to the one I had planned to use in the first place. Now I have my rectangle filled with my pattern, I need to make this a symbol. I'm opening my symbols panel, I have my shapes selected, so I'm just going to click here on new symbol, and just click "Okay". That's all I need to do is to make this filled shape a symbol. Now I no longer need my shapes, so I can just delete it. Let's go back to our text and now we're going to make some 3D text from it. With that selected, I'll choose "Effect" and then "3D" and I'm going to choose Extrude and Bevel. You'll want to turn preview on so that you can see the effect, and at this point you can then choose from the rotations here. This is a front rotation, not very interesting. Back, left, top, right, they're going to be less interesting still, off-axis front is quite a good one to choose. You might choose off-axis left or isometric left, so there are lots that you can choose from. I'm going to choose off-axis front, so that I've got this look to my text. I want the extrusion depth, the depth of this pane here to be a bit larger. I'm just going to increase my extrusion depth here. Probably not quite that much. I think this is a good amount. I'm going to click more options, because that's going to give me access to my light sources. I have a single light source here right now, but I can add more light should I wish, by clicking "New Light". By adding light sources and moving them around, you can get different lighting effects on your shape. If you don't want a particular light source just target it, so it's got this marker around it, and then hit the delete light option. This is new light, and this is delete light, so you can just play around with the lighting of your object. But what we want to do while we're here, is map that pattern onto this shapes. I'm going to choose map art. Now in the map art dialogue here, we've got 50 surfaces. There are a lot of surfaces around these shapes. But when you've got a surface selected, you should see a colored area around, highlight around it, and this front panel of this letter P is highlighted. That tells me that that's most likely this panel here. I do want to add a pattern to it, so I'm going to the symbol drop-down list here, and the very last symbol is the pattern that I just made. I'm just going to click it, to add it to that panel there. The front of my letter P now has my pattern on it, and you can see that as promised, parts of that pattern we're transparent. We're seeing the pink underneath, it's just a nice little effect. I'm going to go ahead now, and I'm looking for this I. I'm looking for something that is an I shape, and I'm looking for this to potentially be a bit red as I go through, because that seems to be the highlight color. There it is there. As soon as I work out what panel it is, I'm going to go and again, add my new symbol to it. Then I'll keep going, because I'm headed towards the end. That's not it, this is it. You will know whether you've got it right or not, because if you add the art to it and, it goes in the wrong place, it's going to be really obvious. If you do put the art on a panel that you didn't mean to put it on, just click the clear option, and that will take the art off that panel and you can go forward or backwards and try and pick up the right panel, or the right face to use. This is the correct one. I'm going to keep going to the last surface that I want, which is a K shape. It's going to be here somewhere, and it's going to be one of those two. I'm just not sure whether it's this one or not, and it is that one. I've got my pattern on the front face of my text. If I'm happy with everything now, I'll just click "Okay" and then I'll just click away from my text. There's my 3D text effect, and in this case, I've been able to map a pattern to the front surface of my text. Because each of the letters has individually had the pattern mapped to it, this text is no longer editable. 4. Pt 3 Infront and Behind layered text: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to create this sort of layered text effect. It's actually a whole lot easier than, it might seem and of course it's fully editable. I'm going to the type tool, I'm working in Myriad Pro Bold and I've got a point size about 380 points, but it really doesn't matter, what size you're working on just make it suit the document that you're working with. I'm going to work with the word dream. I'm just going to adjust my type down now, I have got an increased kerning on this font. If you have a look in the character dialogue here, I've increased the spacing between the characters to 100, so they just pushed further apart from each other to think that's going to give me some extra room, which we're going to need, with this font so that we've got room for the layering. Now with the type selected, with the selection tool here, I'm just going to go and lock down the type that we've already created so I can't select it, I can't do anything with this one. So I'm going to target my word dream here. Going to the appearance panel, I'm going to double-click on characters, I'm going to remove the current fill. So it has no fill and stroke. I'm going back to the type here, I'm going to add a fill and I'm going to make my fill in this case, I'm going to use this sort of green color, but we're going get the same effect as we had previously. I'm just using green instead of pink. Now we need a second fill, so I'm going to add a second fill. For this I need a pattern. I'm going to show you where I got my patterns from. You'll go to the swatches panel, click the "Flyer menu" here choose open swatch library, and then go to patterns, basic graphics, and basic graphics aligns. These are line patterns that are shipped with illustrator. As you click on each of them in turn, they're just going to be added to the patterns pallet here. This is the one I'm using. Its this very thick sort of strike, but you can select any pattern that you like. Don't worry, that's gone on top of the green, that's just fine right now. We need to continually make sure that we have our type selected. Let's go to the appearance panel. Relative to the pinkie, you can say that the stripe has been moved down from the pink type and it's also at the back. So what we're going to do is we're going to switch the order of this fills so that the stripes are now behind the green and we can't see them, that's fine. We are just going to target them and then move them. With this stripe fill selected, I'm going to choose effect, distort and transform and then transform, then turn preview on, and I'm going to move the striped pattern. I'm going to move it 25 pixels across and 25 pixels down. So you can see it's now behind the green shape and it's been pushed out from it. So click "Okay". Now we also want to add this black line. So I'm going to make sure again that my text is selected. I'm going to go to my stroke, I'm going to apply a black stroke, and I'm just going to increase the stroke weight to around three pixels. The strike at the moment is around the green area. If you have a look up here, we don't want it to be around our color, we actually want it to be around our pattern paste. But the stroke is in front of everything. So all we need to do is move it, the exact same distance as we moved our pattern paste. Now we can do that manually or we can just copy that transformation. The easiest thing is to copy the transformation. Let's go and re-select our text, and let's go and find the transformation which is this one here that actually did the work of moving this pattern paste. So I'm going to make a duplicate of it, I'm going to drag it onto the new icon here. So it's a double transformation. It's actually had that effect on that pattern paste, but we don't want it to, we just want to take this and put it up here on this stroke. So you take one of these transforms, they're identical and we're going to drop it on this stroke and that moves that stroke into position. Let's just close up the appearance panel. We have this layered text look that we came here to create. We've moved two elements offset from the original type, we've taken one behind the type and one in front of it and that has given us this really interesting, very, very easy to achieve once you know how to do it, layered effect. Of course this is fully editable. Let's just go and select the text, I'm going to turn dream into drama, and the effect is just being applied to these new characters. 5. Pt 4 Perspective text over a photo: This text effect is going to involve adding perspective text to an image. I'm going to click "Create new". I'm going to create a document that is in landscape orientation, that's going to be 2,000 pixels wide and the height is going to be 1,305. I've measured this out because I've got a image that I'm going to use that is in this ratio. I'll click "Create". I'm going to do a file place, I'll choose File and then Place. I'm going to my image, which is this one here. I'm just going click "Place" and now I can drag it out and it should fit exactly across my art board. I like this image because it's the blue gray color. I'm actually going to put some colored text on it, but I'm going to lock this image down first of all. I'm going to open up this layer here and just lock the image so it won't move. For our perspective text, I'm going to type the words, hit the road. I'm going through a top tool, I'm just going to choose Myriad Pro. Probably just use a bold font this time. Let's make it about 250 points tall. I'm going to click over here and type it. I'm going to type all three words separately. The reason for this is that the distortion that you get when you use one point perspective is probably a little bit more than I want. I actually want to have a bit more control over this, so I get the effect that I want rather than the one that Illustrator is going to give me. I've typed the word hit and then I'm going to go ahead now and type the and then again road. I have my text already prepared. I'm going to select the three text objects by just clicking on one shift, clicking on the other two using the selection tool and apply a color to it. I want a turquoise blue. I'm not really happy with this blue, but let's just go and make it a turquoise blue. I think that'll work well with the image. We've got our text, it's already been colored, it's been laid out and now we need to create our perspective grid. Just going to press Control or Command 0, just to zoom back out so I can see my image. The Perspective Grid tool is here, I'm going to click on it once to get the Perspective Grid. This is not a one point perspective and we need one point perspective. We're going to choose View and then Perspective Grid, and we're going down to One Point Perspective, One P Normal View, and that just changes this to a one point perspective. We've got a lot of handles around here and a lot of things happening. The two handles we're most interested in is this one here and this one here, they are filled circles. I'm just going to drag this one out. This controls this side of the grid. I can drag down on this one and it controls the plane that we're working on. We're actually more interested in this green plane than anything else. I'm going to drag it down. That's going to allow me to put my type in perspective, but this one I need to drag out. Right now my horizon is well where it should be. I'm going to take this handle here and just drag it up to bring it up to the horizon, and now I can continue working on the grid. I'm going to make sure that this side plane here runs along the edge of the road. Once I've got it there, let's just zoom out a little bit. Let's go back to the Perspective Grid tool. What I'm going to do is take this as soon as I've got it in position. I'm going to bring it all the way out across here and when I do illustrate is just drawing this base plane for me. It's this green plane here that we're most interested in because that's where we want to add text to go in our One Point Perspective. With our perspective text, we need now to put our text into this plane. We do it by first of all going to the Perspective Selection tool. I'm going to tag that and I'm going to take the first of my pieces of types that's going to read hit the road. This one's coming first. I'm going to select my type. Right now you can see that it's going in on this side plane, which is where I didn't want it to go. I'm just going to press Control or Command Z to undo that. This little selector up here allows me to select the plane that I'm going to be attaching my text to. I need to select this one, which is the green one. You can say it's got a green color. This is the one on this side. This is the one on this side here, but I want this one. It's the green color. Let's go back to our text, which we've now selected with the Perspective Selection Tool. Let's just drop it into position, and when we do you'll see that it's adjusting to this Perspective Grid. I want it to be much wider so I'm just going to widen it out and I can adjust the height should I wish to do so. I'm going to the next piece of text. I've still got this bottom plane selected, just going to drag it into position and then just enlarge it to sight. You can see that it's all bent correctly so that it looks as if it's actually painted onto the road. Then our final piece of text which is road and I'm just going to bring that into position and then just adjust it's size. There are a lot of little handles around here, but it is actually isn't that it looks to get the right one. When you're doing your selecting, of course you want to be using your Perspective Selection Tool not the the regular selection tool because it just doesn't work. You can continue to work on the type to get the exact alignment that you want. I'm just looking at these lines here and making sure that my type is pretty much running along these lines. Control or Command 0 to zoom back out. If I want to turn the Perspective Grid off because I've got the effect that I want, I can do so by just clicking here in this top corner where there's this little x and that just hides the grid. I can go back now and select my type with the regular Selection Tool Shift, click on each of these. I want to blend them into the road and little bits I'm going to the Appearance Panel, click "Opacity" then get a couple of options for blending this scene. Probably the one that's going to work best here is just reducing the opacity a little bit so that you can see the road through the type. There are other options here in the Blend Mode. You could select Color, for example. You could select Multiply or Screen and they are going to give you different effects as well. Again, seeing part of the road through here. If you like the screen effect, you can still use a Reduced Opacity to blend the text in the road. I'm pretty happy with that so I might just go with that right now and just click "Away". Here we've applied Perspective Texts around, we paint the text so that it fits along the road. This is all perfectly editable, even if we can't see the grid, the grid is still in effect. I can come here, double click on the Type, and he is the type effect. If I needed to change it, I can just go in here with the Type Tool and just adjust my text. I don't actually want to do that, I'm just going to press Escape a couple of times to go back to working with the document but his is still editable type. It's just being bent using a One Point Perspective Grid. 6. Pt 5 Shadow text: In this lesson, we're going to create a shadow effect for our text. I'm going to click Create New and create a document just screen size, but yours can be any size that you like. I'm going to target the Type Tool and I'm going to type my text. Now you can make this upper or lowercase text. It doesn't matter, and you can use any font that you like. I'm going to start with a size of font size about 250 for the type face that I'm using. You can use any typeface that you like and any font size. I think I might just change the typeface though, so we use something a little bit different. I'm going to use AvantGarde book, and it only has one style and that is regular. I am going to adjust the kerning just a little bit to spread these characters out so that there is plenty of room for my shadow effect. Let's just take this out, probably about a 100. Now with my texts created, I'm going to the appearance panel, in the characters area is this fill that we're using right now I'm going to turn that off because that is not going to work for me. I'm going to the type area here and I'm going to add a new fill and this fill is going to be orange. Now I want to create my shadow and for that I'm going to need a second fill. Click here on add new fill. I'm going to use the fill that is at the bottom here for my shadow, and that's going to be behind the orange font color here. We want to make sure that you select the bottom most one of these fills. Now we're going to change the color here to a middle gray so that we can use this as a shadow, and it's going to be appropriate for any color of type. To get our shadow effect, we need to move this fill somewhat, so we're going to target just gray filled layer and choose effect, distort and transform and then transform. You need to turn preview on and you bumped Butte number of copies for now up to about a 150. You want lots of copies here. We're going to start moving this into a horizontal and vertical direction, but one pixel horizontal and one pixel vertical is going to be way too much. Part of the problem is that we're getting this rough edge here. We want it to be a lot smoother, so instead of one pixel, I'm going to bring it down to 0.25 of a pixel. That's going to give me a smoother shadow. I've still got a 150 copies, but if we zoom in here later, we're going to say a much smoother effect, and I'll click ''Okay''. Let's just zoom in to say what the effect looks like and say it's nice and smooth. What we've done is we've started with some orange filled text and this is the fill here and then we've created a second fill behind the front one and we've displaced it using the transform option. We've displaced it half a pixel horizontally and vertically, and we've made a 150 copies so that we have a nice smooth effect. Now if the shadows to date for you, if there's too much of a shadow, just select IVR texts, go back to this transform tone preview on so you can see what you're doing and just reduce the number of copies. For example, a shadow with just 50 repetitions is much shallower than it was with a 150. I think I'll bump this up to about a 100 and click ''Okay''. So far our text has a fill color and it's got this shadow, but there's also the possibility of adding a stroke to it. I'm going to select all of the text, I'm going to add a white stroke, and I'm just going to increase that to about three pixels in weight. Let's have a look and say the difference that we get when we add this striped stroke to our text. This text is fully editable. It's enough to come back in, change any one of the letters and the effect is instantly updated. 7. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to recreate one or more of the text effects that you have seen shown here. Just recreate those that you're most interested in learning and practicing and post an image of them as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this video and that you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. As you were watching these videos, you would have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others, please if you enjoyed the class, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class, and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations really help other students to read and say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.