Transcripts
1. Introduction: Would you like to create a stunning retro text effect? We will walk you through the basics of illustrator, show you the type tool. Then we will teach you how to layer multiple colors together and add some stripes through your text. Then we will top it off by adding a texture. The best thing is, we do this in a non-destructive way, which means once you have created the text, you can change the type, fonts and colors easily without having to recreate the full effect again. You click and done.
2. Creating your first document: All right, welcome to the course we're going to jumping to illustrate I fix you. Had been he Creative Cloud desktop. Make sure you have illustrator installed. And we're just going to open it. Also might have an update. I'm on 20 4.2.1, updated ten days ago. Not very long ago, but they give in performance updates and all sorts of really cool update. So if you can update it to the latest version when jumping and open illustrator, I have it open here. And it's a few things you might want to know is some basic presets that we can just click on. If we want to create a document quickly. We've got recent projects. These are for an animation project I'm doing. We've got a retro takes effect down here, but we're going to create it from scratch. So we're gonna start by creating a new document. Now my favorite document size is 1920 by 1080, probably because I've got a background in animation and videography. But for this effect doesn't really matter. We're going for more a landscape rather than portrait. But again, it doesn't matter. So I'm gonna go in 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels over here in the width and height. And I'm going to rename it to return text effect. Alright, once we've done that, we can set it to either orientation. We're going to just have one onboard. We don't need any bleed unless we're going to print which bleed is the stuff that gets cut off after it's printed. So the printer prints a bit wider than the actual page, and then it gets cut down to the right size so that your print goes right to the edge of the page after it's been cut. And if it's going to print will wanna insane y k, But it's not going to print. So we're gonna go RGB. And also if it, if you're going to print this, you will also. I want to go to invent options and make short 300 API. I'm not printing, as I said. So on a 150 PPI or DPI or pixels per inch is fine. And we're gonna create that document right now that the document has been created. Few things. This is where we work in. We might want to reset the layer. Let's go essentials. This will be what it looks like. Also coming here, reset essentials. And you can also do it over here. And workspace, reset essential. So we're gonna work on essentials. I prefer essentials classic because I've used the illustrator for six years, I think. So I prefer the classic version, but we're going to use a central. Alright, and no thing over here is a toolbar. We will want to use the selection tool, which selects shapes. It selects shapes in their entirety. And these direct selection tool selects just a point of a shape, but we won't need this. So we will need this tow here and also the type tool. And that's what we're going to be using. Also a Gradient tool will name and we'll use the swatches here for the fill and the stroke. Over here we have our Properties panel. And we will also need to bring up a couple of other panels. So what I'm going to bring up on the window is the appearance panel here. And I'm going to drag it up here, drag it to the side like that. I know. Clipping, then I can just close it and it'll be like so. And I'm also I don't need it because I can use it elsewhere, but I'm going to grab the gradient panel and stick it there as well. We may also want things like the swatches panel. We check could grab. We'll just add a few things that might make a job easier. Swatches, confine it, and we'll stick it in there as well. Alright, now we're ready to get started.
3. Using the Type Tool: All right, now it is time to add our text. So we're gonna use the type tool to do this. And it's down here. You can press T on the keyboard. Shortcuts. What I will say is short-cuts speedup your workflow massively. So I use shortcuts when I'm working, is short cuts a lot pen. It speeds up the workflow. That way I'm not drawing a shape and then going and clicking the tool. So you can just use shortcuts and you can also use shortcuts for things in these top panels. But we're going to draw or type a word. Let's call it retro. Retro. And we're going to pick a font. I'm gonna go back to my selection tool and holding shift. We're just going gonna go into a little corner here to change that little icon and make it really big. Thing I might do now is change my paragraph sittings Eigen properties to align center. And that way I can come down to my Align panel and align it makes sure this one selected aligned to our board. And we're going to align it to the dead center. Like so. Now we're gonna pick a font. So arena Character panel. I've already picked one. It's called Trevor. Trevor. But we can find more Font over hint, find more whole. If we open up our Creative Cloud desktop, we can come here and we can click on this font and then browse more fonts. And if you've got, I think it's secrete a cloud subscription that gives you all these apps. You have access to Adobe fonts. So Trevor is part of Adobe font. One thing we're gonna do here with my Trevor F1 is change the spacing. So in here, we're just going to pull the text a bit closer together. So the everything sort of just touching the center spacing I think is alright. Maybe the spacing between these two. Nice condemn. You just stick your cursor right in the center. And this will come down to personal preference on set negative ten and negative ten. So it looks like, I feel like the gap here. Or this gap could be smaller. Alright. We can also, I can also drag this up. If I hold shift, it's going to snap to certain points. So this is snapping to the center. One day now is drag it back down again and click and drag it back down. Make sure you got your selection tool for this. And you can hold shift to drag us straight down and then honed. And that's going to duplicate it. And I'm just going to see test what it looks like in lowercase. Which in this case I'm lacking lowercase more than all uppercase. So going to delete that and will realign this over here. And I Align panel, make sure it's on our board and realign it. Another thing you might want to know in Illustrator is zooming in and out. So we can grab a zoom tool. We can go plus and holding Alt and click and go out. I can also drag into an area. So if only going here, click and drag, like sir. And I think it's called Animated zoom. So not a var1 will have it depends on the speed of your computer. And it is under-performance. Animated zoom. So GPU performance. Otherwise, if you've gotta off, you gotta select the area to zoom in. And you do that on slow computers because a con, zooming in real-time, nothing done. He is real-time drawing bottom. Not going to explain that. All right. The last thing you might want to know is panning. So you just hold the space bar down. Click and drag, rather than going to find the hand tool and then clicking and dragging. And you're going to go back Copy J selection. So if you just hold your spacebar down, click and drag to zoom is just hold. And use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out while holding Alt. Alright, next lesson, we're going to pick some colors.
4. Finding Good Colour Combinations: In this lesson, we're going to pick some colors. And I found some very great color pickers. And we can actually add this one in particular, cuz the code. We can add this one into Illustrator or Photoshop InDesign, which is pretty cool. As an extension. I'm not gonna do that. We're just going to stop by generating some colours. So all you have to do is go to coolers, dot co and come down here, start generator. And it will load. And then all you gotta do is hit the space bar and cycle through the colors. And what you can do is if you find a color, you read like, I love black, lock that. And we can go through, maybe we'd like these two colors. We don't want this. Let's not go for bright color. And you can look at them. And then you might go, oh, maybe we won't do the yellow. Or if you go too far and get only adds up, go too far. And you think I'll maybe that red back there was great. Are we can just go Control Z to Undo and go back one. You can also go and explore other people. Create it. If I had been the song, explore what other people have created as swatches and they've saved him some big swatches here. And we can come in and pick one. I really like this one, and I think it will work well for our richard text. So what I'm gonna do, the little three dots, and I'm going to export the pellet as an SVG. And we can save that place. I like to go to find some colors is heavy, Hughes. And this is more for web colors. But it's very great side to see you'll colors in action, I guess. And you can come here and choose some swatches and the whole website changes to the new swatch. So it's great way to see your colors being used. You know, the thing is you've only got a limited map. You might luck some of these. But I prefer to go and have a lot more variety and see a lot more combinations. So once we got that call Apollo, drag this over here. Once we've got the color palette, if you save it as an SVG, you just drag it in from your files and it will pop up in a new document. And I'm just gonna select, click and drag and select those images. Will the shapes and control C to copy and paste them into the document. And we've got all that colors. Now what I can do is come over here to swatches panel. And you're going to open that up by window. Swatches. If you remember from the stop. When I'm do is new color group. We're going to call this retro. Okay? And we've added in a new color. And these global colors, because when we added in, it is automatically selected to global. If this doesn't happen for you, as in, doesn't have the little white triangle in the corner. It means it's not a global color. You go to go convert process to global. And that'll make it very easy for us to change colors. I'm going to leave that there. And we might add to our fest color by going to fill. And we might pick, show a slight color. Maybe. Another thing we can do is come down to transform woke. And one should rise and hate poker. And that's going to add into appearance. In the next lesson. We're going to add all colors to these Don destructively.
5. Adding and Layering Colours to your Type: In this lesson, we're going to add o of colors to a text. So we can do this within the text so it's drawn destructive, which means we can edit it laid out and it will keep all the colors on it. So what we're gonna do is with l selection tool, select the text. And we can go over here to appearance, petal or window appears. And this is where we can start adding. Fick's first effect. I'm going to add is a stroke. So I'm going to bump it up to about five. Now we're going to stroke of five. Fauna got bigger. I probably don't want it to overlap. Soil would add a fill of the same color. And I could drag it below. And you can see we start getting some joins in our text box. Personally. I'm gonna keep it above and keep it about five. About 5 because not much of my starts overlapping. And this is where we can start adding our colors. So what do we need to do is add another field that's a stroke. This one, we'll call it name is Phil. And it adds a automatically onto the top. Gonna do is pick out next color. I might go from dark to light. Would drag it over to the bottom. I'm going to select this is Phil. And we're going to add an effect, a distorting Transform, and a transform. And what we're gonna do is move it like 0.1 pixel horizontal and 0.1 pixel vertically. And then we can start bumping up the copies. Let's get ten. Preview it, 20. And we saw bumping other copies. And we can go and look a 100 copies and hit OK. Now the reason I might bump this up to 2.42 pixels. But if you have this number too high, five, like so, we could probably do five In this incident, but we go like five pixels. Now this is blending quite well. Let's drop. I want to show you a good example of identities can really start to stretch cyst off. You can see the shape, so it doesn't blend very nicely. We can probably go one in this case. And we can bump up at copays. Want ten copies, might be nice. So. The larger this pixel number, the less copies will need to do for the shape. So if I bump this up to two pixels, means it's moving it two pixels horizontally and down, and then copying it ten times and repeating that transform. So let's go to and hit OK. All right, now what I can do is duplicate is Phil click and drag it down to the new. And it's duplicated with the effect. So what I'm gonna do is the low one underneath that I've just made, change it to the next color. And I can click by telling it this down, click on the transform. And all I'm gonna do is bumped the copies up ten so-called Shift and press up arrow. That's going to change it by increments of ten when you hold shift and hit OK. Then what we can do is duplicate it again. Select the shape, change the color, and transformer another ten. And look at that we created, I guess, the pushback of colors, a shadow of colors onto shape. Now what we can do is up here in the fill, we can actually change this fill to a gradient. So select the top fill. This is F cynical. I come over here to tuba under here with upgradient. Click on OK. And I'm going to rotate this like I need agrees. So it is going vertically and then pump it up to maybe or down, down to, down to. And then we can use Gradient tool. So it was up. I wanted to tilt back. And now what we can do is start adding out colors to a gradient so it lowest color I want to be disclosed. Use the LU, our Drupal, selected the top color on thinking that blue. We have used the Gou, Heavenly, maybe the red colour, the red. And then we can start adding the close. Let's hit the plus will go this other color. And what we're gonna do is stop positioning him. So I'm thinking that we're gonna go this Shiller and that we need to duplicate this color. So let's click in here with this little icon. Press the plus, and with the eyedropper. Select that. I don't want to change the location of this with the selected. So let's go a location, select OLAP or 40. And now we're going to select this second column we create. And we're going to go like a location of 40.2, which means it's on this side to the right side of this color. But they're so close together that it creates a line. I'm going to add the second color again. And we're gonna go 4545. And then we can add a third color. Click the third color. Can double-clicking e, anger only 5.1. Now we need to add another instance of that color. So it's this process of adding him. Now we're gonna go 50. And now we need to add our loss color again, which is red. And then change it to 50.1. And end are, are there we have it, we have our gradient in L stroke. I'm thinking maybe I want the blue. So we can change that. Now. We have shaped selected. Let's change it to the blue script, the Drupal. Change it to blue. Like Sir. So we have picked a black stroke. Now what's really cool about this effect is hopefully because the colors are global, these colors are global. I can double-click on here. And I can come in and change its color, preview it. And it changes everywhere to wherever that global colors being selected. It changes it. So what we can do is good down to you, let's say hs b. We can line, line that blue. You go bright blue. But we can change the colors so easily. Now we got one last thing to put onto how texts effect, and that is some texture. So this going to be in the next lesson.
6. Adding Texture to Your Type: Alright, the last thing we're gonna do is add a grind. And all you have to do is head to Google Images, typing grainy texture. And we could probably find a high res version of it. But what I've found is, doesn't matter too much. The resolution of the grind, we're gonna try and keep it black and white. And all you're gonna do is save that as an imager. My inside the illustrator will place it in File, Place selector grainy image. I'm gonna place it over the top of everything. Now will I'm going to do is edit cup and select my spring up my guides, and select it. By text. And overseeing the appearance or Properties panel. We can go to a mosque and I'm going to select that mosque and go file. We're gonna go mega mosque, select that mosque to envy. And that's going to paste it. I had to do Command VIV twice. Mosques can be a little finicky sometimes. So what I think it may be is when we go to the mosque and make a mosque, we want to be in the mosque. So I had to eat Command V twice and open that. And I'm going to invert the smallest codes for heavy to black. And now we have added how mosque. What we need to do is get out of that month to go back to a registered text. What we're going to select this shape, the lead piece would drag them all for my Needham. And along and do is drag this, I honor, full size of the image. And then we can right-click and weak and arrange, send it back. I'm going to scale these holding Shift key proportion almost gonna hone, scatter from the central aright. And there we have it. We have completed out texture effect, retro takes effect. And that completes the course. So I hoped you enjoyed it. And there'll be certainly more courses coming. You wanted to figure that out of this course and you can now do a retro takes effect. The benefit of this is now it is, it is a double. So I will type in a new word. And it's all changed. We can change colors in global swatches. So let's go back, make sure nothing stay selected soda and change the color. Change that red. Are nice, green, looks lovely. Doesn't go back. Alright. If you enjoyed the course, make sure to leave a comment at the end and tell me what you thought of it if you enjoyed it. And he causes for the future. If you want to learn more text effects or more, bet you illustrate. Oh, let's put them in the comments. I'll put it in the video below, or maybe I'll do a neck nonetheless. And it'll have comments. Alright, bye.
Interactiv, Graphic and Motion Designer
