Create Stunning Long Shadow Quotes in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Introduction to Long Shadow Daily Quotes in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Skillshare class on creating stylish long shadow quotes in Adobe Illustrator. In this class, you'll learn to make two long shadow effects to enhance a simple text quote. This technique harnesses the power of the appearance panel to ensure that your effect is fully editable so you can easily change the font, font size, quote text, and the colors. I'll teach both of these effects step by step so that you can follow along. And your class project is to create a quote using one of these and post it in the class project section. I'm looking forward to reading your beautifully illustrated words of wisdom. 2. Before we start: Sourcing fonts and phrases: In preparing for this class, there are a couple of things that I needed, and I'm just going to show you where you're going to find them. What I needed was some really thick bold fonts. So I went to 1001 fonts, and I'm going to give you this link. What I looked for was heavy sand sera fonts. Sand sera, they don't have little feet, they're very plain font, but I want something that's really, really heavy. I also wanted something that was free for commercial use so that if you create something that you want to sell or give away commercially, then you'll be able to do that. And so I just went through these fonts and downloaded the ones I wanted to use. This is the one I've used throughout the class. I really like UNISAs heavy caps. I think it's just a really nice font. So once you download it, you're just going to open the download file, double click on either the OTF or the TTF file to install it on your computer, whether it be a MAC or a PC. The other thing I needed was some four word quotes. So this is the website. Again, I'm going to give you a link to it. This is the positivity blog. And they had 94 word quotes. And so you can go through and find short quotes that are going to work for this kind of effect. You don't want a quote that's really, really long. These are a perfect set of quotes to use. So I'm going to give you that link so that you can go and find some nice words, nice phrases to use for your designs. 3. Pt 1: Basic Long Shadow: Let's start with a quote that has the basic long shadow effect on it. I'm going to click on New File and create a document that's just 1,000 by 1,000 pixels in size. I'll click Create. I'm going to the Type tool, I'm going to click in the document, make sure that I'm working in capital letters, and I'm going to type my quote. It's going to be one word per line. So I'm just pressing Enter between each word. I'm going to select over my type and find a font to use. As I mentioned earlier, I'm using the font UniSNs Heavy Caps. One of the benefits of this font is that it's free and it's also free for commercial use. It's a nice, blocky font, so it's going to work really well for this purpose. So I'm going to re select over my text, and up here in the paragraph area, I'm going to align everything to the center and then move everything across for our text effect, we're going to select the text, and we need to get access to the appearance panel. So I'm going to choose Window and then appearance. It's really critical that you use the appearance panel for this process. We're going into characters, so you're going to double click on characters, make sure that you have your text selected before you do this. And what we're going to do is turn off the stroke and turn off the fill. So from these little boxes, you're going to select the no stroke and no fill. So if I click away from the text here, you'll see that it's a nothing. You can't even see it. But we're going to select back over it because it's really important that we have it selected before we do the next step. So having removed both the fill and the stroke from our font, we're going up here and I'm going to click on Type, and then I'm going to click here on Add New Stroke. When I add New stroke, this is a different stroke to the one that we had previously, and this is a different fill to the one we had previously. So I'm going to select the fill color at this stage. I can change it later on if I don't like it. So I'm just going to check this one and for my stroke, I'm going to select a stroke color. Again, this is going to be changeable later on. I'm going to select a sort of dark brown that I have sitting here. The way we're going to get this long shadow effect is we're going to create multiple copies of this stroke. But if we do that right now, it's going to start going over the top of the fill. So here I'm going to just drag the stroke underneath the fill. So now I have the fill on top and the stroke underneath. You can see that the stroke has sort of half disappeared. That's fine. So now I'm going to select on the stroke because what I'm doing next, I only want to effect the stroke, not the fill. With the stroke selected, I'm going to effect and then distort and transform and transform. This is a really, really handy tool. It allows us to create multiples of a thing and move them as we create them. So I'm going to make 100 copies of this. I'm just going to type 100 and what I want to do is I want to move them horizontally in a negative direction and vertically in a positive direction. So vertical, positive is moving down the page, negative is moving up. In terms of horizontal, negative is moving to the left. Positive is to the right. So I'm going to go in a negative direction for the horizontal and a positive direction for the vertical. And that just gives me my long shadow. If I don't have enough copies, you can just increase it at this point. Let's increase it to 150. I'll click Okay. Now, in this dialogue, you'll see that the stroke and the fill are editable, so we can turn off the fill. We can turn off that stroke. We can also change the transformation by double clicking on this transform entry, and we could change the direction, for example, or the number of copies. Any of that can be altered. If we were to have a look into this effect, you might see that the edges here are quite pixelated. So what we're going to do next is to smooth them out. Always make sure that before you do this, you have your text selected. It's actually really easy to try and do something but not have the text selected, so just be warned about that. So again, with the stroke selected here, we're going to apply an effect to the stroke. We're going up here to effect and then path and then offset path. What we're going to do is offset it just one pixel and we're going to make the joins round so if you set this to one pixel and round and click Okay, you'll find that this edge here is much, much smoother. It's not so pixelated. Now, if you want to make some alterations to your type, you can do so. For example, I'm going to select on the type, and I'm going to squeeze my lines up a little bit. So I'm going to the character panel here, so I'm just going to click on character. And I'm going to start decreasing the space between the lines. I think it's just a bit too far away. You can also select on your type and change the color. So let me just make sure I have my type selected, and we could change the colors here. And I could also change the color of the stroke at this point. So all of this is fully editable. If you want to create a frame for this, let's see how we would do that. I'm going to choose the rectangle tool. I'm going to drag a rectangle over my shape here. I'm just going to alter down the opacity a little bit so I can see how everything is going to be placed. So what I want to do is basically crop the text effect to this rectangle. So to do that with the rectangle in place, I'm going to select over everything, and I'm going to right click and choose Make Clipping mask. And that creates a clipping mask that crops away the text effect. Let me just close that down for a minute and let's go and get the layers panel with window and then layers. Here we have a clipping group. That's what we just created. We have a rectangle that is controlling the cut, and this is the text underneath. If you want to add a frame, you can do so. So with the rectangle selected, you'll see it has no fill and no stroke. Well, I'm going to add a stroke to it, so I'm going to click here on the stroke, and I'm going back to my swatches. I'm going to choose the same blue as I'm using for my text. I'm going to make my stroke a lot thicker, and you can see here that this rectangle is editable. So I've got the widgets, the corner widgets here, so I can make it round. So there is our text effect. If you need to edit it, it's fully editable. For example, if I go to the Las palette, I'm seeing here that there's a little bit of white in there. So let me just select on the text, but not on the clipping mask itself. And I can just move the text over a little bit, just to fill in that white area, or I could bring it further to the right to make the white area a little bit more visible, so it didn't look quite so much like a mistake. The text colors are all editable. You're going to select on your text here. You're going back to the appearance panel with window and appearance. And you can change the fill on the type. You can change the stroke, which is causing this long shadow to appear, so that's fully editable. 4. Pt 2: Multi Colour Lines Of Type: For this next Type effect, we're going to do a multi colored one. So I'm going to click on New File and create another 1,000 by 1,000 pixel size document. I'm going back to my type tool, and this time, all of my type, every word is going to be a separate object. I'm going to click in the document, make sure I'm typing in capitals, and I'm going to type D I'm going to set this up so it's set up the way I want it to look. So I'm going back to my Nisans heavy caps. And then I'm going to drag a duplicate away, and I'm going to do this three times because my quote has four words in it. And I'm going to select each in turn with the type tool and change the words. I'm going to select over all of my type. I'm going to the align options, which are visible here, but you can get to them from Window Align. And I'm just going to align everything to the left for now. I'm also going to distribute the centers, vertical distribute centers so that they're all evenly spaced. I'm going to select over all of my type, and I'm going to set it to the exact same thing. So I don't want it to have any stroke or any fill. And I'm going to go back and locate the first of my pieces of type and go to the appearance panel. So again, I'm going to select type here. I'm going to add my fill and stroke. In this case, the fill is going to be white, so I'm just going to select my white color. I'm going to select the color for my stroke. And because this is going to be multi colored, I'm going to start with a pale green color. We're going to move the stroke beneath the fill because that's important for the effect to work and not to overwrite the color of the fill of the text. So again, selecting a stroke, we're going to do our distort and transform effect distort and transform, and then transform. I already know that I want around 150 copies. I also know that I want the horizontal to be negative and the vertical to be positive. I'll just click Okay. I also need to round the edges, so I'm going to select again on my stroke effect path, offset path. Again, we're just going to do one pixel offset and round edges. And click Okay. So in the layers palette, you'll see that we have four layers here, and they're in reverse order because that was the order that we typed them in D and then the other words. That's actually going to work to our advantage here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy the effect that I've just created because it's just going to make life so much easier. I'm going to click on this little icon here and hold the Alt or option key and drop it on this piece of text here. And I'm going to do the same thing Alt or option, drop it on every subsequent piece of text. And so all I need to do to get this multicolor effect is to select each item of text and just change the color. And now if we want to offset things, and just go to the selection tool and I'm going to hold this shift key as I just move this type across. That's going to constrain its movement to a horizontal direction. So I'm going to grab this one as well and shift drag it. And we can do the same thing as we did previously and just crop this. So I'm going to create a shape to crop it too, select the text and the shape, right click and choose M clipping mask. And now by moving the rectangle alone, I can just finesse the way that the clipping mask looks. Again, I can round the corners here, and again, with the rectangle selected, I can add a colored stroke. Well, actually, let's just go and choose a stroke from the colors that we're working with. I think I'm going to use this orange just going to increase the stroke weight. So there's our multi colored effect. In this case, we have to create it with individual lines of type so that we can get different colored, long shadows on them. 5. Pt 3: Finishing Touches: Like any other illustration in Illustrator, you can easily recolor these long shadow quotes. I'm going to select over mine. I've already put some color schemes here in my swatches panel, but you don't actually have to have them. Going to the Recolor Artwork tool, I'll click on it, go to Advanced Options. Now, this panel over here can be opened or closed. And if you have color groups in your Swatches panel, then you can access them here in this dialogue. So you can simply click on one to apply it to your art. If you like the colors but don't like their order, you can click here to rotate the colors around. You can also adjust the colors even if you didn't have swatch groups available by going to the dit panel. My colors are currently by default, linked, so dragging the color around, just even one color will drag all the others. If I unlink them by clicking here, then I can drag each color individually and just find a color look that I like. When I'm done, I'll just click Okay. You don't have to save the changes to your color group if you don't want to, so I'm just going to click No, it won't affect my art. But just do be aware that I have lost the original piece of art. The colors in the original piece of art are no longer available. So if you want to recolor, you may consider duplicating your art before you do so.