Transcripts
1. Introduction: What if you could do a Skillshare class where you actually held the guitar and you played, and at the end of some nice little strumming patterns say something really poignant. Better buckle up because these tight tips, we're going to take you for a ride. Hi everybody, my name is Aaron James Draplin, you know me from a couple other Skillshare classes. We made a family crest and we worked with circles. There is a third one and we're going to get a little weird with type. What we're going to talk about today are quick and dirty little type tricks that get you away from default. Default is a dangerous, dangerous thing. The idea that you click it and just type it up and that's just what you have, I don't know, that is just the beginning. My favorite thing about graphic design isn't necessarily working for a client and successfully completing a big logo project or something. It's more, how can you make design close to you, put it on things around you and then see it live in the world. Look at that Carhartt sign. That's really the thing here, is just putting the power into your hands not only wit type but how that type gets applied to cool stuff around you. That's the whole magic of this thing and that's in everyone of us. All right, so I'm going to try to do a little overview of some of the techniques. If you were to start at the bottom of this thing and say, "All right, just type on the PC type and there's opportunities if I could just simply track and comb and just love these little relationships just a little bit more than the default." That's the first level of the stuff. Number two, when you take that typeface and you convert those things to outlines, suddenly that typeface is now just a bunch of shapes and then you take those shapes and push them around, you can see little opportunities simply by bringing something down, bringing something up, getting some paper out, looking at the typeface and getting to know it. You can find a lot of little opportunities really quick of how you can kind of fudge things and make things totally new and totally custom. Then, we'll show you a couple of ways past that to make it clean, make it dirty, make it rounded, there's lots of little tricks you can do quick. Here I am in injecting hot lava molten graphic design knowledge right deep inside of each one of you people. A lot of the work I do is not overly complex and yet, that's the stuff that people will come and talk to me about and I might serve them beers. That's what we're talking about today because with these small moves, you can take type, customize it to your liking and then apply it to the things all around you. I've never been more raided to design something in my whole life.
2. Junkin' for References: Now, you're put my jacket on, so we can go out into the world and find some cool stuff. Hard to zip this thing up around, all this mass. All right, here we go. All right. We're at this place called Hello from Portland. These are friends of mine. They carry all kinds of cool stuff. They have a tiny little DC merch section. So, we're at the point where we get to go see my merch living in the world. So right, come on in. All right. You want to walk and take a look at some T-shirt. You can see some T-shirts with the Mount Hood and got the Oregon, and then of course, a cool little Portland sunny day, and of course, a Portland rainy day. Then, a little Oregon stack like I wear all the time, and then some hats that I make here. So, this is cool, front and center looking incredible. Come over here, you can see some patches and some decals. I've got my little pins up here going. So, this is where you get to see this stuff live and breathe and work with all these other cool little goodies. Go back what, five years, we don't have a store like this that just carry cool stuff from the Pacific Northwest and now, we've a store that does, and that can happen in your town or definitely Portland, Oregon. So, let's get busy. We just went to Hello from Portland. Now, we're taking my favorite little vintage shop in town, a place called Upstairs Basement, my buddy, Mark, watches over, runs, and owns. Hey, what's up? Just doing our part to ruin the city. All right. So, here we are at a place called Upstairs Basement. My buddy, Mark Philips, over here, the proprietor of this joint. Is he getting them? All right. Here he is, and look at that Carhartt sign. Holy shit. So,i right here. Look at that G. Look at that I. Look at that cool B-E combo. In fact, this just pisses me off that he even has it in here. I'm going to be stealing that when we leave. Look at this killer little S-C-O-U-T little C-O combo. Right. Now, look at this. Look at this little R combo where they kept the period inside there. That's great. Place is great man. I love it. I love it. I'll come back and we'll bring some tacos this week. Put all the shit I stole back in there. Good stuff in there. You get to come back once a week because he's lost that new stuff flying in and out of there all the time. He's got such a great eye from the stuff. All right, you guys ready? Let's do it. We're here at my buddy Dale's little space here at Red Fox Vintage here in Woodstock, Portland. It's over here and this is cool. It's coming here and look at cool little W. Unless you're working with how that W works over that E, you wouldn't even know. You wouldn't even know. I love coming to this kind of stuff just to sort of be reminded of what's possible. Look at this little. Pretty cool. So, here's just a cool little piece of tape right here. This weird little rounded edge. That's not something I really recognize right off the bat, but little bit of work, we can go recreate that thing. This is endless for me because it's even about the forms as much as it could just be the color of something that's exciting to me. But, it will go days and days doing this shit, one after the next. Starts to laugh it, you start to see things in the last one that you recognize one before, but I don't know, it's just the sort of like this thrill of the heart.
3. Kerning and Tracking: All right, you guys. So, now what we're going to talk about is this idea of things being default versus owning every single little ligature type face shape. Because, yes, when you click the type piece, when you spell your name, and today we'll do Portland, Oregon, you spell, Portland, and then Oregon and then USA. You're at the mercy of what this program will spit out for you. That's default. Right? Now, for a youngster, this should be groundbreaking, because this should show you, like the way that we're going to teach you here, is that default is a dangerous, dangerous thing. The idea that you click it, you just type it out, and that's just what you have, I don't know, that is just the beginning. You're just getting the stuff on the page just ready to play, like you're just putting the stuff in the mixing bowl, you haven't started to mix it yet. Right? Once you get past that default, you can start getting into these weird little relationship things of how things can overlap, or extend, or come up short, and it's infinite how you can sort of customize type. All right. Let's just start by just simply taking, clicking on this thing when you grab some Helvetica bold, and we're just going to type out what I need to work with today. Right? We're making this Portland, Oregon, USA. Now, let's just take a look at this thing. Let's just study this for a second. I mean the first thing is this is default. You've got zero Kerning, zero tracking, on any letters written on. If you just take a look, of course, we do a quick analysis, there's a big whole gap here, there's a big whole gap here. Then you can see it's really tight here, that has to do with how the program tells it to deal with the R in the T. This is dangerous. Now, now that you've seen this, and understand that once you go past this thing, you'll look at the world and typography in a different way. You're going to look at things and you'll be able to spot the default. You'll be able to spot it from a mile away, and it's heartbreaking. Because, those are things that as graphic design that everyone gets to see it and enjoy, and yt it didn't have the love that we're going to show right now. First things first, we're just going to pull this thing over. Now, there's ways to tune these things, and by saying option, back arrow, you can just quickly go through here, and just give this saying just, well, this is just called Kerning. We're just giving this thing the right amount of air in between the letters, so this thing starts to feel better. Okay, so I gently kern this thing in, track this thing whatever you want to call it. I'm going to bring an arrow in here for my little symbol's pout. Because what I want this to be is a reminder of the before and the after. Okay. Just take a look at this. Now, you can take a look at this and say all right, that right there is already starting to feel a little bit better just optically, away from the default. That's the amount of energy you had to put in this thing to get this thing to feel just a little bit more considered. Let's just say let's just do it again, and you'll see how this thing starts to work. Now, when we go and we just mess with the leading here. Okay, now, you're going to see some stuff start to pinch, and that's just the default. Now, this is a problematic zone right here, and there's a couple of ways you can solve that. You could just simply go in there and say, all right, let's bring this size down a little bit, and bring it down enough to where it just feels like it's a nice little add-on or something. Now I'll go on and take a look and say, Okay, the air is different there than right here. Let's bring this thing up. See now what we're doing here is, we're just starting to see how these things fit together. Because what I want to push you guys to do, is to own every piece. Let's just say we go over here and we do a Shift Command O, that brings it to outlines. Now, these are just shapes. Then do a Shift Command G, so you ungroup it. Now, these are just little pieces. Now what you can do here is, you can take this thing and say all right, I want to center this thing up. Group the Oregon, group the USA, group the Portland, bring these three pieces, and align them because they can see that, okay, now that there's something happening where that little Oregon could work with. It's touching that little o, or now we could take this little USA. Now at this point, these things are just sort of you can at any time you're hitting Shift, and then bring the size down so it doesn't mess with, it just scales it appropriately. But as you jump back, you can start to say, all right, let's just take a look here, like what else could we do here? What if this thing sucks up against here? And we're starting to see this cool little shape come out of that little 8-shape right there. All right. Now remember, there's a lot of little things you can do. Here's one thing you going to do real quick as there's no reason why that thing has to overlap like that and be confusing. You can do something the way we do this. Going here, to your O, ungroup that, the Oregon, go to the O, go Shift option Command offset, do three points, and make a white shape. We're just going to lay that over that R. Now, as you jump back out, you're saying, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of cool. That little piece there," Because that allows you an opportunity to say, "All right, maybe one little chunk of this U does the same. Let's ungroup the USA. Let's do that again. Shift option Command O, offset. Let's do three points. Make it white. Now you can see how that's like messing with that G a little bit in a cool way, or something. You could scale that thing down to where it just touches. What you're doing here is, you're just start, it's still readable, still you could bring this O to where it's just touching just a little bit, it's scented with the rest of that. I don't know what the term is for that stuff. But, what I'm getting at is you're just, you're owning every little piece here. Maybe it isn't so successful, so bring it back down a little bit. But now, if you were to take this guy yet again, so let's get our little arrows going here. You're just checking yourself as you're going along. Let's do it again. Let's do it again, so let's say here if we were to go and really get a little bit more, I mean, extreme is such a shitty word these days, but, go in there and attack this thing with the Kerning. Just watch out how it's going to feel different. Ungroup that Portland, and now you can just use your arrow keys and go in there and make all these little pieces touch. Now, this is- I'll show you a couple relationships where it's not going to work. But the round around works just fine. Right? As you bring this thing in here, what you want to look for is you want to look for this point in the same as this point over here. Right now we're just trying to do just a quick visual thing. There is something about it being round around because there's all this nice negative space that you get to work with here. You have to be careful because if there's something that's a little weird about the A to the L. This is all about feel, check it out, you can't put this N against this A, because it gets a little weird, but maybe you could make this cool character. Remember, you have all of this at your fingertips, so watch this little trick. You can go up and grab everything that you don't want to get rid of, Command X, go delete the stuff. Command F, put that piece back in there, and put that A against N, and that's kind of a new little character. Now, that's just worth trying. I don't know. It might not. Some type designer might be look at this and completely cringing. But, this is about customizing. Yes, that's a little bit weird, but I tend to stick with the characters and just get them just to where they're sort of uncomfortably too close, and still comfortably readable. I guess I'll say there's a balance to strike there. Now that we're messing with this thing, and you could say, okay, yet another version might be to get that little, the regon of Oregon a little bit tighter. You bring this O down, you bring this thing up against this stuff, and say, "all right, this is getting a little weird, but that's still is tight. It's the relationship, there's a tension there." But here's what I want you guys to understand is, that quick from there to there. If you take that default piece and you bring this thing back over here, this is a little embarrassing. See this is the lesson. If that thing is starting to feel a little bit better, and has this nice tension, and has this nice composition, well that's what it takes. It's just little arrow keys, and movements and stuff, and that's just called, Kerning and tracking, and it surprises you some times. At 43 years old and a lot of experience making shit over the years, it's just magical to me that it can sneak up on you. But the only way it's going to sneak up on you, that's what's important here is. When you're in the nitty gritty, you're owning every character, you're pushing things around, you're constantly, I mean, what's that? 20 minutes we've been talking and we've tried all these different ones here. These are quick, quick, quick studies. This is just the first version of just Kerning. What happens when you go and start looking how, we were talking about shapes, and we're going to talk about how things go long, or come up short. Well, let's move into that now.
4. Playing with Shapes: All. So, now, what I want you guys to do is I want you to, instead of thinking about the word being P-O-R-T-L-A-N-D, but you think of it like shapes. So, let's just try this for a second. All right. So, here we are. We're going to play with this purple black and just quickly. First thing we're going to do is we're just going to take a look at this piece of type and we're just going to say, all right, that's what the default says, that's what the default says. It's at auto and zero, auto for the occurring now and zero for the tracking. Let's just quickly, quickly get an arrow, and go bring this thing over to the side, you're dragging. I think what you're doing is you're doing shift option command and drag. Let's go quickly turn that thing in. So, this is okay. These things can't really touch, they would get a little weird if they touch. Let's leave just a little bit of air between those three pieces because what we can show you what it looks like when you actually touch these things. Check it out you're going to see it just gets a little bit like turns into an 'M' or some sort of portlamb or something. So, you need to have a little restraint as you're going through this. That's just another sort of like maybe that's just an opportunity to say, "I tried it, it didn't quite work. But we know we tried it." Because now, you take this thing and make the little arrow, you pull the sky over here and we say all right, let's convert to outlands, let's jump in there and let's think of this like shapes. Let's think of it like shapes because if you were to think and go well what could you do here you could go and say, well, port becomes its own little shape and land becomes its own little shape. Let's just go and see what happens when you start stacking these things because you can see little relationships just hard to come out here like that. Pretty lucky, like right away that's kind of cool. This is really fast stuff. Let's go put a little hyphen on there. All I want to do is I want to get like the same width as one of these pieces right here to play with. So, here's your little that's that up that's off the top of the 'T' it's bringing in a little bit because right there you've already got this weird customized little piece of type going on here. That's just simply by stacking things or damaging. Still read that, it says Portland. I want this 'D' to go a little longer out into this little space over here and now we'll just go extend that little 'L' because what we're doing here is we're taking a look at that and say, all right, that's looking pretty cool. Let's do it yet again. Let's look for some opportunities where things could get a little bit weird. The next thing we're doing is going to be talking about going long and going short, but I'm just going to jump into that now because we have an opportunity to do it, but check it out. The idea of like how characters can go a little long or a little short. But, check this out, here's this 'A', it's got this weird little bar, I don't know what you call that thing, middle bar waistband, middleville. I don't even know what the hell that thing is. Whatever that little bar is a little 'A' piece that thing, you can get weird with that thing and there's a couple ways you can do it, you just lay a box over this the rest of the 'A', color it white and then go lift this little piece off of here because now you keep all this stuff live. So, he grabbed those two little points command-C, command-F. Now, you've got this pieced and you can stretch this thing over this thing and start to tune this thing, it's all right. The way that little middle bar connects, it still says land, but that just instantly customized even this typeface a little bit more because it's what's happening right here. The relationship of little space here is the same as a space here. Let's look for an opportunity now. There's an opportunity for this this art to come extending down into this. See this little guy here and still work, but we're going to have to go fudge things to bring it back. So, we'll go, we'll leave that R where it's at, or bring these little pieces just over to where you want that thing the line up right to about there. Now, you're start to see how that thing is like starting to connect and get weird and then you can, there's other opportunities where you could say, all right, maybe there's something about this R getting a little more dynamic where like, see, you can start to see that maybe it is all that successful from there. But, the thing is is it all these little pieces and stuff are touching. You're owning each little piece and that's now suddenly is its own cool little sort of T-shirt here we're like I would like to do one more quick one. We just got a little let's see if this even. So, watch this. That R, there's an opportunity at the bottom of that 'R'. Touch that 'T' and still be readable. Now, if you were to go back and say all right well there's some cool stuff happening let's take get back to that original we were messing with. That just in that quick, quick little study, you have complete control over this thing, and now you've got this, you can look for little opportunities where you can say, all right, this little guy, I will bring him back up, but that is a pretty cool little piece of type. Let's just go test it. Let's get your T-shirt, and just go test it on it real fast. Now, make another version because remember when you lay that over that you see that little white bars. Let's take that white bar and let's knock it out of that piece. Now, you can go and say, all right, this thing's colorable. We can go make it some cool yellow or green color and lay it on your shirt. Just go test it. Now, I love to do this whole stacks and stuff, but just to test it and see what a cool shirt that might be. Now, watch you stack this thing a couple of times. It's pretty cool looking little shirt, or let's get a little weird with it. We stacked a little different way and say get rid of these ones below. Give this thing a little angle and do it again, it's a cool shirt and maybe it's not the right color. But, as we start, let's get a little bit of re-cease on this shit. Makes me hungry for a snack. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. The idea is this, as you jump back and you're like, you just looked at that thing, you took the default, you brought it in, you gave it a little extra love, start playing with shapes and getting weird. But, those are quick moves and this idea of looking at things instead of looking at like a piece by piece, or character by character you looking at simple shapes or opportunities to get weird with things, to stack them or to twist them. That's all within your hands, in your arm now to look at type a little bit differently. So, it's up to you to start making these things and getting weird with this stuff. Go.
5. Chopping and Extending Letterforms Pt. 1: Okay. So now, what I want you guys to think about is this idea of going long or coming up short. If you take a look at the typeface, if you think of an R, an R comes around like this, and it does that sort of thing there's a little leg or something, whatever these proper type terms are. That little leg or whatever can go a little bit longer, it can extend all the way out or it doesn't even have to touch that back bar. It can come around, come up short, and then go long and you have this new dynamic R. That's what we're going to talk about here is, when you take a look at a piece of type, be it Portland or Oregon or whatever piece you're going to mess with, maybe your name or something, you're just looking for opportunities. You're looking at these typefaces as these weird little directional pieces and then what will come out of that. Later on, when I go and I really customize a piece of Portland or Oregon type, you'll see it. I might take it too far because you can go little too far with this stuff like pretty quick when you're in this head space. But the idea is you're just looking for opportunities. Because as part of your quiver, these are quick decisions you can make to quickly, drastically change the mood of that typeface and that's a great thing to have on the tip of your tongue when you're designing and going so. All right. Let's give it a shot. I'll type out the word Portland some nice big geometric type, there's that Blippo Bold from before. Now, I'm going to go jump into some Futura Black, really going to get the extra bold Futura. Sometimes, I'm at odds with the typeface. So, if you just look at how this thing just comes out, it's auto kerned or whatever and then there's no tracking yet. But I have issue sometimes with the typeface and these are classic little, I think they're called an ink trap or something, where when the way that thing would print they would optically adjust the things. So, I don't know what the proper terminology is. I just know that I don't like the way they look when they spin out from my version of the typeface. So, quickly what we're going to do is we're going to do this. We're going to convert this to an outline, so Shift+Command+O. Now, it's an outline. I'm just going to go make this thing to my liking. Now, I don't know if this is blasphemy, I don't know, but the idea is, I just wanted to be nice clean, crisp edges. So, if you're going through and you're looking at these things like take that N and say, all right, drag that straight piece down, drag that straight piece up. I'm going to go make it into a path finder. I'm going to grab my arrow plus, just grab that edge, get rid of those inner points. I know that can be blasphemy, but no, I want them to be straight. You can just take a quick look and then you can go do the math and it's a little better. But now, that thing is straight, that thing is straight, it's ready to go. It's rare to be playable. So, let's just start playing with it real quick. Now, let's just quickly go over here and just kern these guys in, track these guys in and we just look. See there's something happening with that R. There something that can happen with the way that A connects to the L. There's something happening with the way that little D comes swinging around, you can do some stuff with that. I'll show you a couple. Now, I'm just looking for opportunities. That L could extend, this R could go down. So, I'm getting into where it feels a little bit better and now we'll do it yet again. This is where we start to get just a little bit weird. So, let's go take a look at what this thing could be. So, let's extend this R down. But here's the deal, there is no way to maintain that angle. I'm just eyeballing stuff. Remember, this is all editable later on, but as I just go and grab this piece. I use my little white arrow, I grab the edge, I drag it down. I'm just trying to keep, you can see where you just keep it straight. You can go to adjust it later, but you're just getting it down there towards your eyeball, let's just say. That might be a little dangerous, but that's all I'm doing. So now, you have this other piece here, and all this is just a nice bar to work with. That's the same width as the bottom of that L. We're going to close off that shape, you can see that shape is closed off now. Now, we're just going to go and extend it over to here and see what you can do. You can take that little R and bring it back up it using your Command+U. At all times, I want you guys to have your smart guides on, so that Command+U. Right now you should see the command symbol, and then U. Those are smart guides because smart guides look like this. It'll tell you when you're up against something. Let's turn it off. It's not going to tell you when you're there, you see that's not snapping do those things, it's not snapping. So, let's go back, let's turn it back on, Command+U, and watch. It'll snap to that little edge. That's nice. You want that. It's just keeping things lined up. So now, as we step back a little bit, it's all right. Cool. We've got this R extending out here and this T could come over. That's cool. This L could go into the A a little bit. That's cool. Or we just say, I want this thing to come in and have this relationship here as with the same angle as this L. So, how you do that really quick is just take the A, lay it over that L, use your little path divide. Get the piece you want that little L and get rid of that and then just bring this thing over towards getting close. Now, you've got that thing working with that thing a little better. There's a weird little space right here. There's a weird little space. Let's get this A, which was that bottom of that L piece right there. Let's go and suck it to the top of that A. So, we land it at the top of the A. It's all right. That's cool. That's fills in that space a little bit better. Then, there's a way to connect that D. So, let's look and say maybe that thing does this. So, bring your little piece over here that connects that D, but we want the same little space. Here's a little trick you guys, watch. You go in here in your Command+Y mode, you grab your piece here, you find that relationship. It snaps there using your smart guides. Take this little piece now, make it white, drag it up here, snap to the bottom of that thing and I'll just drag this over. You have to clean that thing up at some point. How you would do that is like this. You're going here, you'd use your arrow plus, and now just bring this thing down to the top of that bar. So, you're using your smart guides. All right. See. Now, you're getting this dynamic extra little swash here, this little thing. So, once again, if we want this thing to line up with this guy right here, here's a cool trick of how to do this. Extend, I want that line to come do the same relationship down here. Now, I can try to eyeball it. That's not the best way to do it. Here's how I would do it. I would go in, I would extend this little swash over, I would click it with your arrow key. I just want that line, Command C, Command F. Now, that little line right now is just that little line. Color it to something you can see, which will color it orange. Get into your little scale tool here and bring it all the way out. See that now? Bringing up to the front of it. Now, that is the perfect line coming off of that little guy. Now just grab these two, divide it, get rid of that thing you don't want, and that thing is coming off that thing perfectly. So now, if we step back and say, "Ooh that's a cool piece of type." This thing went a little long. This thing came up a little bit short. These are tiny little opportunities that you should be watching for at all times, if you're in that headspace to go customize. That's what we're trying to get you guys in today is just to say, this stuff there's no rules.
6. Chopping and Extending Letterforms Pt. 2: Okay. So now, we've landed on this like quickly customize a little piece of tape and if we get a little bit weirder with it, let's bring another arrow over here. Let's bring this thing down below, because there's something I'm picking up here where you say, "All right, I like how this arrow is landing down here, but I wanted it to be this baseline, line thing or something." Where is an opportunity to do that? Well, there's the opportunity with this D, but we're going to have to rebuild it, which gets a little tricky. But what you have to think of is think of it like, this is just a line. So, if we don't make use a circle, find the middle point using your smart guides, the middle point of that top bar here, and this pop bar here, that's going to be the width of our circle. We just found it. We just found it, there it is, right there. So, now, take a look at this thing. Let's color it something just different, bring up your points to just trying to get to that width, that feel. Because I want that D to come off of this end and come swinging around back to here. So, I'm going to extend this thing I'll make my own little weird little D here. Okay, that's close. That's pretty close. Now, you can go back and make that thing black, and lay this thing over, and then go experiment and make that D feel like it's right. Like, it's meant to be there or something. So, we just need to go find a nice vertical bar here. So, grab the width to see the spirit of consistency, grab that guy and bring it over here, and just watch. Watch the relationship of this space, and this space, and this space, and this space, and that little space right there should be that space. So, you have to bring your D to bring it over a little bit more, that certainly feel pretty good. Now, bring that top bar to where it just touches that edge, okay, okay. Now remember, we want this thing, we want to keep this thing alive because I don't want to go mess. I want to be able to go and go up or go down or whatever I need to do. Right now, we are at 24.5 points. So, there's a quick way to do it. So, just grab this little guy here. I want that to be a white shape. Put that behind everything. Put this big D swash behind everything and now that thing's lining up. So, you can go and say before we go and use that line took off the A, we're just testing right now. This D can extend below that white piece, and give you that feel, that little opportunity. So now, if we step back and say, "All right, where else can we get weird with this thing?" Maybe there's this P comes down to the bottom of that, and we go grab, going to get on these bars. Now, we want that thing to be the same as this. So now, you can either try to eyeball it. That's close enough for now, or bring that thing, and quickly, quickly, quickly, we've got this dynamic little shape. This dynamic little piece. There's this cool off thing, because then you know my mind goes to the opportunities are like this. Here's a little tip. This is something I'll do. I'll make a note and stuff and say this is where I wanted to see how it stacks. Because as you keep the lineage of this stuff going, sometimes, I'll forget why I wanted to see something do what it was going to do. There's just a quick little way to go and make a note, let it stay there with that little orange piece, and now, we know and say, "Oh okay. Okay. Let's go stack this thing." So, you can do the quick one like this, and that one, is pretty cool but let's try it again. So, what I want to do is I'm going to go try this one more time with just a little bit different stack. Grab your arrow, we're going to try this real quick. Now, watch this little warning here. So, I don't want to say I want just dupe the whole piece. I just want that cool line and something happening with that cool line. So let's just grab this piece right here, Command C, Command F. Bring it to the front, shift Command bracket, bring it to the front. Now, just bring this little guy down to where it feels about right. Do it again. Now, extend these things, just grab one, grab the piece, add an end to it. Now, what you're getting is you're getting this cool leg. You know this thing could come all the way to this edge, that's cool, or keeping in the spirit of what's happening up there, grab your arrow, all we're doing here is we're just trying a little ways to get this tight to feel weird, and make this dynamic little shape. But you could grab a little arrow piece right here and how you could do that is just simply grab this piece right here. Go and make a little chunk of it. Lay it over the whole thing, let's color orange just so we could see what we're working with. Now, I'll just quickly eyeball. Here's how you would do this. You would just scale this thing up, and then just drag these things in so you just cut these pieces to play with. Because now, if we take that thing, we overlay that thing, and we put that there, you can start to see like there's opportunity to say, "Oh that's cool. That's cool. Okay. Let's get a little bit weird with it. Let's go and take it yet again." You must take this little piece down, one step down, down, down, down. All right. You're getting this, I don't know. I don't know. I mean there's it's infinite, it's infinite. You have the control like this is a little hard to read right here. So, I'm going to show you another trick now. Let's go up above. It's a little hard to read right here. Okay. All I want is I want that outline right here to go up over these four bottom pieces. So, I'm going to go command C, command F. I'm going to make one. I'm going to color it something weird like orange. I'm going to lift it up above everything. I'm going to go a little bit bigger. I'm going to send it to the back yet again, and then I'm going to the cover that thing white. I'm going send these four bars to the back, and see you got that little cool overlap that's easier to read that piece stuff? If you get to that white one, then you can go adjust. You can go and adjust the tolerance that you like, see? Now, that thing is working off that little angle at the same space as there, as there, as there, as there. Yeah, and I'm just going to stop there because what I want to see is I want to see you guys take something like your name or the town you're from, and mess with it, and try these things. It doesn't have to look like mine. Let it go and that's where it should get weird. There's a couple of little tricks you can do that we're going to show as we get into this crazier customizing stuff right now, where you can own every single little piece. Then even after that, have these quick fun little moves to go and like make it like, keep it clean, get screezy, or have rounded edges, or triple lines, or whatever you want. So, all right. See you in a second.
7. Custom Type Sketching: All right. So, we went junking, find a bunch of cool stuff, and then we sat down the computer, and we started just to see what the words even look like and start to [inaudible] these things, or just take a look at the shapes, or how they stack, or little opportunities of how these things can fit together. But that's all on the machine, that's on the machine. There's a limit there because you're working with the typeface, and how you can get where with it, you can go an infinite number of ways. But there's something about jumping onto paper, where things just get weird, and that's what we're doing here. Now I just want you to free yourself of the confines of Illustrator, or a machine, or sitting down to create something. Now, we're standing up, we're out, we're using our hands, and using pencils, and paper, and we're looking at things. We're going analog for a second here. But there's a lot of gold to be found here. This is dangerous, and exciting, because this is where you can go all the way custom, where you own every single letter form. This is a little coin purse here, we're going to make another little Portland, Oregon coin purse. But we're taking that shape. You're actually going to learn and live inside that shape here. When this little graphic we're going to work with here gets scaled on later on, goes on this thing, you're living and sketching inside that shape now. That's what we're going to do now, we're just going to see if we can't slam and make a weird little Portland, Oregon right inside this. Let's just try that now. There's a couple of ways of doing this now. Just to go and just write the word Portland, Oregon, and take a look at all the characters. You have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You've got eight characters there. One, two, three, four, five, six in the Oregon. The idea is you've got these eight things to work with stacked over six. The math there is pretty nice. So that said, even just by taking Portland and then Oregon, the idea is you can have these big hyphens, you're just seeing how things stack, you're just learning what the characters you have to work with look like and feel like and how they're going to work together, the relationships you can get from them. SJust quickly saying, all right, if this thing's going to be a coin purse, and here is this coin purse, you can start by just making, I'm just going to get weird here. We're going take a P and you're looking at how that thing fills that space. See, it's already happening. You're just using this little space and you're getting weird here. What does that little space do right there? I don't know, maybe that T comes down. You're already starting to jump in here. Now, let's leave a little space for a cool little mountain vista or something. I can just quickly sketch some little neat thing here because here we are in the city, you can see the mountains, and we do this little Oregon right here, and we're looking for opportunities. That might just even be enough right there. So, we did this one quick sketch, real fast. The thing is that's just so fast, that's the first thing I did. There's a million ways you can do this stuff. But what you can do is go grab, I know it's weird, but you grab tracing paper, and jump over this thing and quickly, just go over it again, see what you can't find there. You can start looking at how these relationships quickly change. Or yet again, take this thing, and say,"All right!", just flip this over this one right here, and see where you can fudge things in cool ways. You could say," Well, the P can do this, the O can do something cool like this, the R can go a little bit longer, and connect, and be a little bed for that T. The L can come underneath this thing here." All we're doing here is we're just finding cool ways to make that Portland thing. Right? The idea is if I take a quick iPhone snapshot of this thing, drag it into my Illustrator, you're going to start seeing stuff come together when you start to recreate this stuff. This was just that quick. This dropped O right here is a little weird, so we'll try it another little way. Now, I like what's happening over here. This is a custom piece of type just that quick, what's happening over there. Well, what if we take this thing, we lay this thing over this thing, and we say, all right, this is a little weird how this thing connects nice but we can go quickly make a change by saying, all right, here is that cool D. So, it's own D, this thing hooks back around, off of that T, you got that cool R. We're going to nestle the O inside this thing. We're going to bring this P. You can see here, you're starting to get some weird little characters and little relations, you're discovering things just that quick. Here's what I want to say, once you start getting to a point where, this is just a quick sketch, but once you start getting this thing, and this is just with quick tracing paper, just by this, that was a real fast thing. But if I just for one little second now, slow myself down and say, " All right, there's some cool stuff happening here. Let's just get these shapes in here." You start to see where that thing is becoming it's own little piece. This is something I was digging in around here. Tulsa's stereo country. What's great about it is look at that little K95, where it's a little K with this bigger 95. It's just that little tiny thing where it's going along there makes that dynamic. It could have all been big, big K95 and a little FM, and still work, but there's just that little tiny thing that makes that 95 jump out that much more. Here, saying, okay, we want the same thing happening here with our Portland. It's seeing this thing and saying, all right, the P should be a little bit larger, just be a little bit larger. Then you work your way and say, all right. Now, there's no reason it has to go all the way to that piece, I could just come down here and do some weird little stacking thing or something. Right? Now, when you look at this, you go,"Damn, that little N is pretty cool like this." N doesn't have to do this, and N can do this. That little error right there, I'm going to harness that thing and say, all right, that N, we're using that N somewhere in this thing. That's a pretty cool little N. Right? Because then it allows you to go, "Okay, look at the A that can come off of that thing." That little N now becomes here's this cool little A that can become this other little piece over here that just mimics that. You can see here is that A, and that N, and as you start to work your way back, that little L. Something's happening here. Right? Something cool's happening here. Now we can say, all right, before we go, we're running out of space here, let's go work on that little D. Now, that land is starting to look pretty sweet. So, it's infinite. By laying this thing over this thing, just this quick and saying, all right. There's a pretty cool little land right there, just that quick. This is going to be faster here than it ever would be in the computer. Okay, let's mess with these little Ns again. We've just did a little bit of sketching here for what? 20 minutes or something, 15 minutes. Instantly, you're starting to see these little things, this is just a sketch, so something isn't quite working in there, just a fast sketch. But the thing is your hand is that much more free on paper. Okay, here's a crucial part. If it's one thing to make the sketch, how do you get that thing into your document? Well, here, I'm going to take a quick little snap here. And now, air drop, or e-mail, those over to my machine, and I can bring those things, do a quick screen grab, bring those things into my Illustrator document, put them on a different layer, and start building these things over the original sketch. That's how I use my phone as a tool to get it from sketch into the Illustrator. Go.
8. Digitizing Sketches Pt. 1: So now, the fun part. Now, we're going to jump in Illustrator, and we're going to take these little sketches that we did on our tracing paper or inside your field notes or whatever, and take these sketches now. What I did was I took photos of these things with my iPhone, email this to me. Though I have this on my desktop ready to be sort of inserted into the illustrator file, I'mbasically go and kind of rebuild using these sort of general templates underneath. Let's start with that. Okay. So, I'm going to start with a new Illustrator document. We'll call this thing the Portland coin purse. When you bring these things in, plug them in and get them to a sort of a reasonable size to work with. So, what you want to do is you want to go make another layer. When you put these two on the bottom layer, and we'll call those the sketches. Then, you're going to lock that layer. There's a lot of cool things here, you can go dim that thing, you can dim it to like 50 percent. So, you can barely kind of see it. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to lock those things or up above that have a layer up above. I want to go start to redraw this thing and just kind of get the general form down. So that the quickest way to do is I want us to use the simplest of math, the simplest of shapes. As you're doing it, I want you to really remember that all of this stuff is live, and you want to keep these things so we can move them around and play with them later. It's still loose right now. But you're just kind of trying to get the basic shapes. What's the quickest way for me to rebuild this thing? Well, there's a big O in there, and just go hit yourself a circle going. One with at least for now to get these things going, and remember, all this stuff can change. So you just want to go quick and stay kind of loose in the spirit of being able to tune these things, later on, to make these little pieces right here. Remember, all of this stuff can change later on. We're just kind of using our little corner tools to make these things because in now, just go and quickly dupe all these pieces. These pieces are already here. Basically, what we're doing is we're building piece by piece this entire piece of type. But I don't want that to be any sort of intimidating. I want that to be more like an opportunity to own every little piece, and as I walk through here, I mean, I can show you kind of how I attack that. If you're take a look at this cool P right here, you're anticipating what this thing might look like. As you go through, and you say, well, that P needs a little circular chunk there. Now, here is your little chunk. You can go and start to work with here. You can see here, even just starting right there, you can see here, when you turn off that layer, you're starting to get some cool little stuff happening. All right. So, let's just keep moving here and let's not overthink this too much. All of these are sort of like-minded shapes. Remember, all this stuff can be tinkered with later on, and adjusted, and tuned up, and messed with. Right now, we're just trying to get the basics of the pieces in there. But what you can start to see pretty quickly, you can go turn your stuff off that's getting you confusing back there is like say, Okay. Some stuff is starting to kind of happen where we can sort of like adjust and mess with stuff, and I'll show you how you can do that. You can bring this little guy over. You can snap these pieces to the top here. I want you to go make that D and want to suck underneath that little chunk of the N here. So, go and just grab one of these cool pieces right here, you can see all of this stuff watch. If you grab this piece right here and scale it up and it's going to be obviously way too thick. Just go and use your little eyedropper tool and bring it back down to that certain width. All we're doing, these are just piece by piece by piece. We can go and refine this thing and just a little bit here. But you're getting down to like, we don't even have room for an A. Well, this is going to be sort of problematic because you have to have an A in there, obviously. So maybe you bring this, as you're discovering along the way here, that's going too far over. You bring this guy, this D to the other side of this N. You bring this guy. I mean, these are just shapes that you're messing with right now. We've got to make rooms for an A. There's a lot of ways to do that. But watch. So, to use some of the math here that you've already been using, grab this little piece and that can be just a little A right there. Use your aligned tools, grab those little endpoints, bring those things down, and then bring this thing up and go plop it in there and see how it feels. Here's an A that's starting to work out of this thing. At any point, if that's not fitting there, well, go take a look at where you can scootch things back, or whatever. We'll do that right by grabbing all those pieces and just quickly kind of move some stuff back. See, what's cool about this is all of this stuff now is completely yours. It's not a typeface. It's not a pattern. It's yours to play with. It's going to take some adjusting, but it's yours. But at this point, you're just trying to get this cool little shape going. So, let's just keep on moving here. If you hit command Y, let this be a reminder. These are just the simplest of little just shapes at this point. If this was too thick, you can take everything globally and bring it down a little bit to see how that felt, or whatever you're working on. So, for now, let's just keep chugging here. Now, there's something about consistency. As you go through and you start to mess with these things and say, "All right, I want all these spaces to sort of be the same spaces." Now, that's the mark of someone who understands like how the optical quality of this stuff works. You don't want there to be a big old gap over here when the other ones are all different. You want them all to feel like they came from the same sort of family or the same sort of value. So, we're getting this little Portland piece here. We're getting a little A piece go in here. Then down below, go back to your sketch, when you take a look at that Oregon. Okay. So once again now. So, at any point here that you want to go, we need an O down there. Let's just dupe that thing so you can go command C, command V, and grab on that way, or you can grab this thing, hold on your option key and drag it to wherever you want and lift up, then I'll just sort of dupe that thing pretty quick. But what's important here is you want to use some of the geometry down here that you're using up here. So, if we go over here and we grab an N, there's an N. Here's a little piece of G we can use. We're just grabbing these pieces quick to say, hey, that still works. That still works. Then, just mimic this little piece here like here is your little, I don't even know, you'd even call it a G. I don't even know what that is. I'm sure there's some nice typographic term. Everyone who's a typographer is pissed off at me now because I don't know what the term is but I don't know. You can get busy learning vocabularies or you can get busy making shit. It's your choice. I don't know. So, you can grab the piece off this R. So, that's kind of a cool thing with that thing rests over the top. I wasn't really planning for that. It just kind of happened. Okay. So now, let's just go and turn off that bottom layer and take a look at where we're at here. Now, this is just going really, really quick. But you can see like some thing's definitely are way too tight and some things are way too loose and that's okay because all of this stuff is adjustable. At any point, you get it up to here and say, "All right, let's bring this guy up to where it's-" Okay. That's cool. Let's go. Use your little eyedropper tool at any point to make this all the same width and then as you're going through, you're going to see opportunities to say, "All right." Well, this is starting to happen here." It'd be nice if this angle right here was the exact same angle as you're using down below. Because you just want these things to be as fiercely consistent as possible. I have to say, it is just exhausting to think of what you're saying while you're working. Here I am injecting hot lava molten graphic design knowledge right deep inside of each one of you people. Right now, I'm injecting it deep up inside of you, and I hope you enjoy this, but man, I hope I'm not screwing anyone up along the way. So, you can start to see here like, make all these little lines a line to the bottom of this L, or to the bottom of this R. You can start to see here like there's an opportunity to make all these things align so they're on the same sort of little, see? Okay. Now, those are all in that same little axis, we can go tune this thing up later. You can grab these two little pointer here and suck these things in. But you're seeing where you have these opportunities to make things get consistent quick. Let's keep it hammering here.
9. Digitizing Sketches Pt. 2: See that those are just getting a little too plain and weird so just go delete that thing and go make your own new kind of N. Remember that one N I was drawing. It felt pretty good. Now this is all quick. This study is about going quick. Once you get these pieces all built and starting to feel good, you can get into the nitty-gritty. I mean we'll do that. There's just ways of like scaling things. For instance, here's a little quick way to scale this thing to make sure you understand that you don't want to scale it like there isn't a right and a wrong way, maybe, right? So you grab your little scale tool, want to grab this little point right here, we're going to bring it down using that and now we're going to use your eyedropper tool to get that little width. That thing sort of scale that thing appropriately, right? Like we weren't damaging the integrity of the line or the spatial quality of where you had that thing sitting. That thing feels pretty good. This N could get a little wider and a little weirder. But all of those things are starting to line up. If you go take a look with a command Y, these things are starting to line up along here, right? At any point, you can go align those things so they're like painfully working together which is a great thing. That's where you're getting this consistency throughout. Okay, let's take a look. Looks like this thing could scooch over when you step back and take a look. Now remember at all times you guys, one of the great benefits of working on a computer right now we're like in the weeds. We're like way down on the grass level. You step back now you're at the top of the tree looking down going, well, certain things could work, certain things couldn't work. It's a little busy, it's a little weird. This piece can suck over here a little bit more and this T piece can go back this way a little bit more. And this piece can come maybe a little bit over here. But we're just starting to get it to this point where like this is becoming a dynamical piece a type, like pretty quick, right? And that's just really all we're trying to go for is just to get it to a point where it's just kind of loose. Now if you look at my regular sketch, there's a little mountain and some, I don't know, trees or something up here, maybe a little cityscape down here but we can just quickly take a look at this thing and Sarah let's go quickly draw a little mountain. I want to scale a little triangle going here. Remember, don't go and chip out of this stuff, just overlay shapes. Just make these shapes just things that you can still move. So I want a little mountain scene overlooking the city. All right, cool we got some mountains. These are going to be a little fun little trees. Because as quick as that is, all those parts you own, all these little pieces now, now you can bring this little guy down here, flip it around real quick. You're looking at this space here and you're looking at this space here, just to be consistent, right? I mean this, remember all this can be moved. But here it cools like like all right, there's an opportunity to drop this little N down here. Let's do that. Let's bring this guy over here. Cool. Let's bring another piece. Command C, command F off of that line then bring that little piece over there. Now this is bothering me because that's a little bit different than that. I like the relationship that O, so let's just bring this guy up just a little bit. So it's kind of feeling like what's happening over there, right? You see what's going on here because when we suck that thing over to kind of mimic what's happening there, then we can go do that with the rest of these pieces here to mimic what's happening down below. Now here we can say, well, we could put a little cityscape here or we could just go put some cool or USA, just turn that thing white so we'll get a cool typeface which would be some Eurostile. I don't know, is that how you even say it? I don't know. Maybe the points are a little too much. Okay, now real quick. Now let's just jump back up. Now we just took really fast. We took this little sketch. We built into this little vector here. By now means ready to go. It's the idea we took a sketch and we brought to life with the simplest of shapes [inaudible]. We'll take a look at all those lines. It's all one, just one width. Now what's funny here is like I've got this prepared to where we can say, "Okay, let's just quickly bring this thing over here and let's chop this thing out to start using it real quick", right? So for instance little on the top here, we'll go subtract those little guys using your pathfinder just to make that shape. We'll drop those little trees out of there. Reminiscing those pieces. Down here we're going to cover all the outlines. We're going to take those two bottom triangles. We're going to knock those things out of the bottom. We're going to knock this little USA out of there. That's just a shape. Now you see that's just a shape command Y. Okay, so now we've got these lines but we want them to be shapes. So, I have it as option command O, okay? Now those they're just the shape now, right? You've got your one over here live. Remember this is super crucial that the original is live at any time. But now this piece, we could start coloring this thing and we can go give it any color we want. Something's starting to happen. But here's where it gets really fun. So I prepared this thing I want to make a coin purse, right? So you can drop in this little coin purse here and let's start just taking this thing and saying, "All right, maybe that thing's white." And just plop down there and see how this thing feels. Because when you look at that like it's really busy. When you see it in this context, it's pretty cool. But it's busy and it's a little thick. I mean because that's the thing, remember. You have this like we bring up to here, it's kind of okay. You're like, "All right, all right." There's a couple little tricks you could do. Real quick you could do this where you go and you grab this whole piece. You make it all one shape using your Pathfinder Unite. Go shift option command O, Offset path. Do it half a point. There's command exit, right? Command F and that just lighten that things up just to a little bit. See, just getting that thing so it's a little bit optically it feels a little better on there. What's important is we're trying to arm you with these quick tips because even though I'm not necessarily sold on this thing completely right now. And as I sit here, it takes all my strength not to want to continue to adjust and play and tweak because now that we're here, I have complete control. There's just no excuse. That's a really exciting thing, because no one's going to tell me I can't make this thing either perfect or worse or whatever. I need a little bit of like I guess it's a personal time with this like to go and see if it's actually going to be viable. Because remember, there was another one here. So, tonight what I'm going to do is I'm going to go home after we turn all the cameras off and stuff. I'll go knock this thing out and then I'll show up tomorrow with something that feels like maybe that could happen to be on my coin purse and that's another sketch, and another study. What I don't want you guys to think is just because you're listening to me or you're learning with these things that like if you don't hit it in the first try that you're frustrated because you didn't hit in the first try, that's just not the way your life works and that's not the way this stuff should work. It should take a little bit of elbow grease and a little bit of accidents and things and stuff to kind of like stumble into something cool there. Okay, I'm going to go home now. I'm going to tune this thing up. I'll see you guys tomorrow and show you what this thing could look like. All right.
10. Preparing for Print: All right, earlier you guys saw me take where I wouldn't sketch this piece out, and we're just drawn and getting weird. Then of course, took a photo of it, brought it into my illustrator, and then actually started to rebuild that thing piece in line and chunk by piece. Here's the thing is, I land on this final piece but since last night, once the crew got out here, I went and tinkered down a little bit and you'll just see where I landed at. It's a little bit less than where I was at. But really this thing can even continue to change. The idea is this, from a quick sketch, I got down to this nice little shape here and I can go now and take this thing and start to source it. I can go find out, I want to put it on a coin purse, but now it's like I definitely want to put on a patch. I want to put on a patch and see how that turns out. I know that would be a winner from my little merch line. But how do you even find this stuff? What's important here is it's one thing to think something up, really important how you go on build it. But then, the scariest part is how does it actually get applied to a coin purse? Where do you even find a coin purse? Let's just jump out of here, I'm just going to search for custom coin purse promotional right. You'll start to see these little things come up here. Here's one let's see here, here's a Imprint Items, and you can see here well there it is, an oval, vinyl, squeeze coin holder, there it is. It's got all your little imprint areas and stuff. Here's the thing, it says right here, it says 78 cents. Let's just go take a look and see what other places go. Because here's a deal, how do you tell when a promo guys lying? You check to see if their lips are moving. That's how you know, okay. Knowing that, when we go dig around and take a look at other people usually offering the same little chassis, the same little piece, you can go and say, "Hey, this is the price I'd like you to hit, this is the price you think is fair." You can show these guys over on this website they're saying this much. So, right here these guys are saying it's the same little coin purse. They're saying it's 72, if you have to buy 2,500, but at 200, you have to buy there a buck. So over here, it's saying at 200 you have to buy them, they're a buck a piece. If we go back to that one cost of one we were at before and take a look there, how much for 200 over there? Two hundred over there was, well 500 was $0.78. So, I mean, the thing is it's like you can basically go and talk to these guys and get them on the phone and say, "Hey what's your very best price? If you look at this other website, it's this much." But even cooler than that, in town here I have my buddy Shawn McMahon. My buddy Shawn McMahon, he does a lot of breweries and makes hats and just a lot of incredible stuff, thinks up his own products and makes his own cool little beer openers. Just, this is this inventive guy and he's really a good friend of mine just in town as is. But he helps me make all my cool merch. Everything from my hats to all the little coin purses and stuff. I'm to show you quickly how I can go through and build this file to hand off to Shawn, and this is just what it looks like. So, let's just jump in here. You jump into your Illustrator. I'm going to go grab my graphic. I'm going to start a whole new document here. Let's just say this thing right along. I want to call this the Portland Oregon Patch. So, arm myself here with some existing patches just to take a look at the sizes and stuff. I've got my little, what you call it? It's a little. What the hell it's a little? schaedler little ruler thing here. The idea that I can go quickly measure and figure out what I'm trying to go for here and then have an understanding of how to recreate that for Shawn. So, if the right size, I just got a little assortment of patches here and I say, "Hey, this is the size I want this thing to be." All right, well, we got to measure it and take a look at that thing and that thing right now is at three by two, okay. So, let's bring this thing down here. So, we're going to call this three by two, so there's your patch. Now, you want that little edge to look like a patch. So, there's a couple of ways you can do that you can go jump in your dash line here, and then say one in one, there's a little patch edge now. Now, you can go around your corners. We're just trying to do a quick little mockup here, a quick little mockup of what a patch might look like. So, if I was to go through now and take a look at this thing and say, "This is called the marring right here, the marring on this little edge right." If I was to measure that little edge, it is 0.125. So, if you tell that little edge then to be 0.125 inches, that's what it's going to be. So, now we're getting there. I want it to be a turquoise patch. I'm going to call that turquoise. I'll call it inside turquoise. Then you can just go outside and do the outside a little bit darker right. So, we just want this thing to be a quick mockup. But now, you've got this little piece to work with and you take your little piece. Of course, you want to take the art, you want to make sure that that thing is just one color, and then all flattened to be this final piece of art here. You can see here now. Then plopped it on your guy and get the spacings so you know where it's feeling pretty good. All this stuff can be tuned up later. Were just trying to get this thing in a general fashion where I'm ready to send it back to Sean to say, "Hey, man, that's the patch I want. Go." Okay, we've got that thing on there now, and that's how I'd hand off to Sean. I mean, this is ready to go, but there's a couple little steps you have to go. You have to have your art ready, and you want it scaled appropriately. So, just to be as safe as possible. When you build this thing, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in this thing in over here and I'm going to say, "All right, here's a pantone chip I brought from my cymbals." That pantone chip, if that was something specific while we would go and grab it, but since it's just the white of the ink, we'll just hit white. That would be, I mean this comes down to how you want to label your file. So, if we're to call that the Ink or the Stich, go and say that up above there. What we're doing is we're just making a little mechanical right now, all right. So, this is the Stich. Later on, when after I hand this thing to Shawn, I'm sure he'll go fill it out to be precisely so he can hand it off to his vendor. Here is the color of the stuff. We'll call that right now just The Patch Backing, and we'll call this. Right now, we'll just put a little zero, zero here until we go pick our pantone color. But now, we're telling the people, "Okay, the white is a color. The patch backing is a certain color, here is the artwork." Now, here's a really crucial thing make a little note here that says something to the effect, warning or something. Because here's the problem. Oftentimes when you hand stuff off to the vendor and then they handed off to their vendor, you get the sort of game of telephone going. If someone on their end starts to tweak or adjust or stretch or compensate your type, it gets printed, you miss that, and it comes back and it's off, you're going to notice it the moment it comes back. This is a little thing that you might have to sign off on it, you have to sign the document saying let it go as it is. That happens, but this is a little warning I'll put that says, "Do not stretch, alter, compensate, or mess with the type art in any way. Just print it as it is. If the pieces fill in, then no sweat." Something to that effect, I don't know. But what this does, it draws a little line in the sand. Because it's one thing when I work with my buddy Shawn, he understands this for me, he warned me of this stuff. But it's another thing if you're like cold calling here who even went and looked on some websites, if your cold calling some guy in Florida, they're going to hand it off to their operator. That person's not going to know that you're like this nerdy typographer like we are, and they're going to go compute it just to make it print as good as they think. But you don't want them to do that. So, I always put this little warning and I just make a little graphic that explains myself right there. So, if someone is having to build this thing and grab from this file, they're going to see this. It's up to you to talk to your operator or whoever your representative is to say, "You guys." They might make you sign a little form. I have to sign them all the time. But don't worry about that. That's just like, you don't want anyone altering the stuff on your end. You go and jump in here and put a couple of other things that say, just say exactly what each piece is. Artwork is at 100 percent, do not alter or scale. That's just like I said, it's drawing that line in the sand. Over here you can say, "Patch is at 100 percent." Then just to get even a little bit nerdier, this is just, you're just like owning each piece here. Go in here and put exactly what those dimensions are. So, they understand that you want a three-inch wide patch by two-inch tall patch. Now, what we're doing is this is all just an illustrator file. You have to make sure that your typefaces. That's just a little trick everything I haven't built in tear right now. But I'm just going to go through and build it all in like a really simple default version of Helvetica. That means they can open it up on their end and they can read it and stuff. So, all we're doing here is we're just doing a quick mock up, you know what you want. Then you could say, "All right. The stitches is this. The patch backing is this color," and so on, and you're owning every little chunk of this. That's really what it takes to build these files to then hand off to either my buddy Shawn here in Portland, or to send now as a PDF off to your vendor where you found the source for that coin purse, or patch, or sticker decal, or how we're going to do it. A lot of these things offer no upload services and stuff. Then you'll see a version of it show up, mocked up on their stuff but I don't trust any of that stuff. I would always request you want to see a proper mock-up sent back to you, so you can really see how the artwork has been placed. If it's been messed with even though you put that warning, it doesn't mean that they're going to really respect that. You have to watch for that and you do not sign off on anything until you see the proper proof showing exactly where it goes and how it goes. So, hopefully that's helpful, and we're just trying to walk you through how to build that file for a.
11. Bonus Lesson! Adding Texture to Type: Now, we've customized type today, and you guys are getting weird at these tight faces. When you're done and you have this final piece to work with, be it a nice simple geometric thing, or a script typeface, or something, there's a couple of cool other things you can do to it. In Photoshop, really really quick, just give it a little bit of tooth. We'll just call it, keeping it clean, going dirty, or going like a nice rounded edge. I will just show you guys how you do it. We're going to walk through that really quick. So, when you jump in the Photoshop, and you bring in a nice little piece of type, always start in the grayscale, bring in your little piece, plug it in as a smart object. Now, make sure the thing is nice and big. It's big enough to work. Now, let's say, seven inches at least. Then, about, I always go 888 or 999, just some nice larger resolution. Now, do this a little bit of option command C, which is your canvas size. Go eight-by-five, it gives it a half inch all the way around. Now, you've got this place to seem to play with a little bit. So, the first things first. You've got your vector up above your background, great. Go in and dupe that, then flatten it. Now, that is your flattened version. Now, down below, you have your original vector still to play with, but this is just in Photoshop. Do that again, and now, we can quickly do this and say, "Okay. I just want to see this thing get like scrizzy, like dirty." How we'll do that? So, I'm going to go through here, I'm going to go add some noise to this thing. So, here's some noise, and you can see, what this does, is this is just going to allow you to go in like add some little tooth effect to the edge. Now, as you go in here, you've added this noise. You're going to blur that out, blur it out a little bit. So now, when you go in here now, and you want to isolate that piece, you use your levels to bring down the whites, and bring those blacks in a little bit. See, and then we're going to end up with is this just scrizzy little shape. Once again, if you go hit that again with the blur again, and do that again, you're just getting rid of those little like, see? Now, the edge of that thing is what you're trying to get at. You want that thing to be nice and crusty. Because as you blur that again, you're just getting this thing, that edge is just going to get down. Keep on blurring it. Now, you can get into where you are going to get, that's crusty look. That's a fast way to make some crust on some stuff. Even faster than that, jump into your little, what is this here? Your filter gallery, the only one I use is that stamp thing. Now, just test this stuff. You want it to be soft, light and dark, and you can get that thing looking pretty crusty pretty quick. It'll just give it a honing feel. Now, blur it again. Now, all this blur's doing is just fudging these things. As you go through now, you say, "All right. I want that edge." Now, that thing right there quickly has a little bit of a tooth and a little bit of a weirdness. You can go add stuff, you can go damage stuff, you can do whatever you want. But up above that clean one, there's your clean one, there's your dirty one. Let's go make one more one here. We dupe that one, we lifted above the dirty one. If you want it, you can say here we'll call this original. Your second one can be called scrizz, and this one right here can be called rounded. Let's round this thing, and how I do that? It's really simple, just go through and add a little blur, Gaussian blur, and get it pretty weird. There you go. That's a 25 pixels. Now, jump into your levels and just quickly get that edge refined down. So, you can see here, that just changed. Do it again. You're just rounding everything off real nice, and that quickly changed the field from original to rounded. See how it changes that way right there? That original rounded, that's a quick way to do it. That's just another quick little trick of how to get that thing just a little bit different like this one shape, this one ligature, this one little constructed piece now. It has this really cool custom quality. Now, as you zoom out, it still say's Port-land, it's still cool and weird. But that's just a quick way to go from clean to dirty, to rounded edges. Just that quick.
12. Bonus Lesson! Rebuilding Script: The other day when we went out with the crew here, I found this at the bottom of some little kit or something. I don't know, weird day, in one of the stores, a junk store and I don't want the whole kit. I just want this one little tiny piece of type right here. This tiny little piece of type, there was something charming about that little piece right there. Now listen, like one would do, I go and I look online to see if I can find that typeface and of course, you can't find it. It's always like that. The weird part about script typeface is when you go out and start looking for those things, there's an incredible sameness to them and that's why you see the ones that are in the successful typefaces, it's the same bunch of scoundrels. They're great but it's the same bunch of stuff. Seeing this here, this means you have to rebuild it. It's not a bad thing but it's pretty advanced and I just want to show you guys something I made last night. So, I built this little Portland piece and why this is kind of fun is because I surprised myself. So let me just mess with this thing. Where it all started was it started with this little O. But even before, let's just say it started with this. If you were to go just grab this little piece here and say, "All right, this is the angle," because as I start going through this, if you were to take this thing and say, "All right, if this is the angle," I'm going to color that thing orange, I'm going extend it a little bit bigger because I want that thing to be like a little guide. If you were to go take this thing and say, "All right, this is what I drafted the whole typeface off of this axis." That becomes your little guide to how to keep you in tune along the way because in the next thing is, how did you even know where to start? Well, and we can get up close of course, you can see this thing later. But, I took a look at the O and how it connects, it was just one line. It's just one line. It's one with, one line, there is a couple little doodads and how the brush might work and stuff but can it just be one uniform line? It can be. So, I'll just show you here. Now, as you start to build this thing, I started simply by just saying, "All right, let's go make a nice looking O, like this." I took this O and I drew this O just that shape. I got to the width I want it to be and then just simply just took it and I looked at whatever that angle was and I sheered it to that angle. How I did that is, I'm looking at that top dot, this bottom dot, I'm just sheering that thing. You can go test by laying there underneath that thing and saying, "All right, where are my dots at?" Well, they're getting close. None of this stuff is perfect but the idea is now that little piece right there, I've got that thing to work with. So, that's where I had this O right here and I started just to build these pieces out. To make the A, I started with this one vertical piece let's just say, and to make that A, I would just go and well, tack it on there and then drag this piece up and then go and continue to draw that piece as it went to the next piece of the N. So, there's that piece of the N right here, you have to go draw this little piece. So, I'll just show you here. Now, all these pieces are editable. So, there's your little A to the N. I'm just saying, you just have to have to adjust and mess with these things to where it starts to feel good. But that's how you built that A and then to build the L, you would just go and simply draw that piece again. All I'm getting at is, in no time I have this little piece built and it's weird because if you go look at it there it's just the simplest of lines. Then tricking things but you're using this one axis, using this one sheared O to build these characters and frankly that's how people build the typeface. Now, this isn't necessarily right or wrong but it feels good to my eye. It's a cool little piece of type for Portland and as you look a little bit closer here, there were these great rounded little edges. So, to take this thing and say, "All right, let's go jump into photoshop real quick. Let's just come in and see this thing." I'll show you a quick little trick here. Now I think we already showed this when we were customizing, let's just do it again. We are going to paste this into a black and white gray scale image. Smart object. Give it a little extra room. Now, make sure that that DPI is something like eight eight eight, or nine nine nine, or six six six, just something really high. We just said eight eight eight. Now, your vector is up above your background ready to lift that up above again. We are going to flatten that little piece. We're going to do it again so we've got something to go against. So, we're just going to lift that piece up again, make another version of it. Now, I want you to go blur this thing, blur it. Get a good blur on that thing and then I want you to go jump out now, you're jumping your levels and I just I want to crisp those edges up, crisp those edges and get weird with it. What you're doing is you're just looking for these little tiny things. So if you look here, I want that little guy to be round but you can do this in illustrator. But this is a quick way to do it and that is a debt, that takes it even away from the hard edge of these lines. Do it again, do it again. All right. So, then you do it again, let's do it again. Then use that levels again to go in there and just get that edge nice and crisps because all we're doing is we're just testing to see what this thing feels like, that's all. It's all this is. Just to say, "Yes, that's a cool way to do it because those little rounded edges are drastically different than just that simple line going and making that piece." Now just go and select this thing, color range, grab this little guy, jump into your path. Make it a 2.0 pixel so it's nice and smooth. Command, see come back into here, put this thing in as a compound shape just below it, make it black and you're seeing that thing come to life. You are seeing that thing come to life because that's got even just a little bit different, this lived in feel, this fudged feel. This is just a new look here, that's just the line making that one uniform. What is that. It's 17 points each one. Well, over here now it's just a shape and all I'm trying to get at is, this stuff exists and sometimes, you're going to have to rebuild it and if you just step back you, take a look at the axis and the roundness, the width, you can go and rebuild anything.
13. Conclusion: All right you guys, here's where we wrap it up. I just want to say thank you for coming and checking out my third Skillshare class. I'm just hoping that you guys look at type a little bit differently, that you understand that each little character is a shape, and that you control things going long, things going short, how you kern and track, and how you know quick little Photoshop tricks to just get things to feel differently. That's all on you. This is all me showing you some of my little goofy tips and tricks, just to expand your arsenal. So, now, go make some stuff from where you're from, I've made a ton of Oregon things and I can always use more, but you guys go make things where you're from, make it in your own style. I'm excited to see how you guys attack that stuff. It should show up on a patch. I love how my patch turned out. I will never lose that sort of magical feeling of making something being excited about it, submitting it, and then having it show up a couple weeks later and being blown away how you kind of forgot, it takes on this whole new life. So, go out there, make some stickers, and patches, and t-shirts of things that you love, and apply these little type tricks to it, and I hope you dig it. Hope you had a good time, and we'll see you for the next one coming this summer or something. Thanks.
14. What's Next?: way.
Aaron Draplin, Designer and Founder, Draplin Design Company
