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

1. Graphic Design for Lunch cutout text effect: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, create cutout text effects in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teaches a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and working in applications such as Illustrator, Procreate and Photoshop. Today we're looking at cutout text effects. We'll start by cutting texts from a bitmap photo in such a way that the text itself remains fully editable. Then we'll create a second effect which cuts text out from a shape in the places where the shape and the text overlap. We're going to do this also in a way that ensures that the text is fully editable. We'll look at a couple of ways that you could use this effect in your own designs. Now, as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying this class, give it a thumbs up. Recommendations like this help me get my classes in front of more people, people just like you who want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. If you're ready, let's now get started on cutout text effects in Illustrator. 2. Cutout Text Effects - Part 1: It's possible to cut text out of a photo in Illustrator and we are going to do that now. I'm going to start with a new document, by choosing "File" and then "New". The document is going to be 1,000 pixels by 750 pixels and its RGB color mode. I'll click "Okay". The image that I'm going to use is from unsplash.com. Here it is. Unsplash.com is a site where you can find images that you're able to use for commercial and personal purposes. I went to unsplash.com and looked up the keyword London and found this image. I like the contrast in it, so this is what we're going to use. On unsplash.com, when you see an image that you like, click on it and it'll open up in a new browser window and you can click to download it. I've already done that, so let's go and get the image. Inside illustrator, I'll choose "File" and then "Place". Here's the image here. I'll click on it. I want to make sure that link is deselected because I want to embed this image in my document and I'll click "Place". Now I need to just drag out an area for the image. I'm just going to drag out a spot in my document for it then click away. Next, I made my text, so I'm going to click here on the Text tool and I'm going to type some text. I'm going to type the word work. I'll select it, click in the font size box here and press shift up arrow to increase the size of my type. I'm going to move it into a position over my image and just test out to see how it looks. It's little difficult to say, so I'm just going to color it a totally different color; orange will be fine. I think I could choose a better font; a thicker font would work better here. Myriad Pro has a number of different varieties with it. One of those might help me out. I've opened up the font list here, so I'm going to click on Myriad Pro and then just go down and look at the options that I have available. The thickest one that I have is bold semi extended. I'm going to select that. I can say it's a nice thick font, perhaps a little bit too large for our projects. I'm just going to decrease its font size. I can also move the letters closer together by clicking the Character panel here and going to this tracking option.I'm actually going to decrease the space between characters so I can get a bit more of my photo into the texts that I have here. The method we're going to use to fill this text with the image is to create a clipping mask. I'll choose the Selection tool to select over the type and the photo. I'll right-click and choose make clipping mask. Now, we have [inaudible] that it's filled with our photo. Let's have a look at the last panel and see what we have. We have layer one. Inside that is a clipping group and inside the clipping group is our text and our photo, all of which are still editable. If I click on my text and go to the Type tool, I can just click on this text and I can type something completely different. If I click away, the text is still filled with the image. It's just that the text itself has changed. It's also possible to select the image within the clipping mask and then move it. As we move the image, a different portion of it will appear inside our text. I like the bottoms of the chairs there. I might actually select that and click away. If you'd like to type effect, but you'd like a little bit of a strike on these letters that's able to be done too. We'll go back to the last pallet. This time we're going to click on the clipping mask itself, so we need to select the clipping mask. Over here is it's stroke and that's the front, so we can just go and select, for example, a black stroke. That's given the image a very fine black stroke. If you want it to be thinner still go to Window and then stroke. At the moment we have a weight of one point, but we could type that down to say half a point and then we get just a very fine line around our text. There's a simple way to cut text out of a photo in Illustrator. Of course this photo will remain a bitmap image. If we scale it to a really large size, we're going to suffer from some pixelization in the image itself. 3. Cutout Text Effects - Part 2: To create an inverse text effect in illustrator, we're going to choose File and New and just create a brand new document. I'm using 1,000 by 750 pixels in size, RGB color mode. I'll click Okay. Now, I'm going to start with I circle, so I'm going to the Ellipse Tool. I'm going to click on it and hold Shift as I drag out a circle. I'm going to move it roughly into the middle of my image. I want to fill my circle with a solid color. I'm just going to go to my swatches palette, and I'll choose a color to use. I'm going to choose this orange color. I'm going to flip the stroke and fill colors and remove the stroke entirely. Now I'm going to add some text. I'm going to click here on the text tool and in the interests of making the text visible over the orange shape, I'm going to click away from the shape and then select black as my fill color. I'll click on the Text tool again and I'm going to type the words magic circle. Now I'm typing two lines of text. I'm just going to select over them. Click in the font size box, press shift up arrow to enlarge them to a large size. I'm going to position them over the circle and I'm going to make sure that the lines are aligned centrally. I'm going to click the center option and I'm going to move them back yet again. I found a font that I like and it's called mono alphabet. I'm just going to go and select it. Here it is, mono-alphabet regular. It's a rather interesting little font and I'm going to give you the download link for it. It is available from dafont.com and it is a free font and it is free for commercial and for private use. Now that we've got these two elements that I've typed and a circle, we're going to create our cut out text effect. I'm going to the selection tool. I'm going to select over both the text and they circle. Going to the Pathfinder palette and what I want to do is the equivalent of an Exclude option. The Exclude option will exclude overlapping shape areas. It will get rid of the areas where the text and the circle are overlapping, giving us a cutout effect. But if I just click on the Exclude option here, nothing happens. The reason why nothing happens is that my type is still typed. Now, I have two options at this point. One good one and one not so good. Let's talk about the not-so-good. The not-so-good is we would go and convert this type into outlines and then apply this effect and it would work. But it's going to limit us later on in terms of the flexibility that we would have in working with these objects. The better option is to go back to this Exclude option, which click as we might on it is not going to work and add the Alt or Option key. At this time I'm holding down Alt or Option, I'm clicking on Exclude and let see what happens. Well, something rather magical has just happened. We've been able to cut the text out of the underlying shape. We've lost the color of the shape. It's turned into the color of the text but we've got the effect that we were looking for. As a bonus, we've also got editability. Going down here to the last pallet, just going to click to open the last pallet and you'll say that we've got here a compound shape and inside that compound shape is our magic circle text and our path, both of which are editable. If I click on the magic circle text, I can move the text around and when I do, it's still going to operate this cutout text effect, but the cut-out position is going to change according to where the text is placed. Now the text is also editable. I could come in here and remove a letter. With this effect, the text remains fully editable. Now if we wanted to go back to a color other than black for our shape, we can just go back and click on the compound path and you can see that there's black here indicating that the compound path, fill color is black. Now, if we go to the text, you will also see that that is black, but changing the actual text color will have no effect on this object. We have to go to the compound path, select each, and now we can select a color. It doesn't matter what color we choose, the effect will be applied to it. You can also fill it with a pattern and I've got a couple of pattern sitting in here in the swatches panel. Some of them will work better than others. With this particular pattern, it might look better if the pattern was sized down a little bit. Let's see how we do that. With the shape still selected, we'll go to object transform and then scale. I'm going to turn preview on. I'm going to disable transform objects, because I don't want the size of this object to change. I just want the pattern size to change. I'm going to click in here, shift down arrow to make the pattern a little bit smaller. That makes the text a little bit easier to read, and I'll click Okay. It's also possible to add a thin stroke around the object. Now it's going to appear around the text as well as around the circle. We'll make sure that we select everything, go back into last palette, make sure that this compound shape is selected. We'll switch here to the stroke color, and then I can click up here and find a color stroke to use. I'm going to use a blue, somewhat similar to the blue that is in the pattern itself. If I go to the stroke dialogue with Windows stroke, we have to increase, for example, the white of the stroke. Now you can say that the strike is overlapping here. It's an effect that you may or may not want to use. Of course, it's easily removed by making sure that you have the object selected and just turn the stroke off. There's a way of cutting out text from a shape and in the next video we're going to see a practical application for this. 4. Cutout text Part 3: To see how we might use the cutout text effect in a more practical situation, I've gone to a site called Vecteezy, which is where you can find free for download vector objects. I looked up and found these coffee and teapot silhouettes. I'm going to give you the link to find and download them. When you download them, they come down as a zip file, and inside that zip file is an AI file that has all these images in it. I'm going to, first of all, open that AI file in Illustrator. Now, I've recently opened that file so it's going to be in my Recent Files list here. It is here. I'm just opening it. Let's go to the last panel, and you'll see that every one of these coffee pots is a compound path so we just need to find the one that we're interested in using. I want to use this one here, so I'll just select it and I'll choose Edit, Copy. Let's copy to the Windows or the Mac clipboard. I can just close this. I'm going to choose File and then New, and I'm going to make a document that is square. I'll make it 750 pixels high and wide, RGB color mode, and click "Okay" and I'll just choose Edit, Paste to paste my coffee pot in. I'm going to hold the Shift key to just enlarge it in this illustration. Next up, I'm going to add some type so I'm going to type 2. I'm just going to click down here and I'm going to type tea for two. I'm going to select the type and enlarge it quite a bit. I'll place it in position over my teapot and I'm going to choose a different font. Now, the font I'm using is called of wildflowers and wings. Again, it's a free font available from Daft Font and I'll give you the download link for that. I'm just going to type it in because that's going to be easier, of wildflowers and wings. That's just a cute little font. Let's just place it in position and we probably want to enlarge it. But first, let's change the color of it so we can actually see it. With the type 2, I'm just going to select over the type and enlarge it a bit yet. Now, I'm going to the last palette because I want to take a second copy of this text away. I'm going to select it and drag it onto the New Layer icon and that will give me two text layers. I'm going to move it underneath my teapot and I'm going to turn it off and lock it down for now. The next thing I'm going to do is to create my cutout text effect. I'm going to select these two layers, the layer that has the teapot on it and the layer that has the text. We're going back to the Pathfinder, hold Alt or Option as we click on the "Exclude" option here and that will give us the cutout effect. Now, I'd like my teapot to be a red teapot so let's go to this layer. Let's click on the "Compound Path" and let's make it a deep red. For an illustration like this, it would be nice to have a pattern behind the teapot so I'm going to select the Rectangle Tool and I'm going to click to create a rectangle that is the size of the artboard. At the moment, it's on top of everything, so we'll go to the last palette and just drag it down below all the other objects on this layer, including the bare pace of type that we have. Now, we're seeing everything is red right now because our compound shape is red too so we're just seeing red on top of red. I want to fill this with a pattern. There are a number of patterns that are shipped with Illustrator. Some of which are going to work really well for this particular illustration. I'm going to the Swatches palette. I'm going to click this "Fly Out" menu here and go to Open Swatch Library and then Patterns, and I want to go into Nature and I want to go to Nature_Foliage. This opens up a palette. Now, I've rearranged this palette already into larger icons by going to the Fly Out menu and choosing Large List View. It just helps us see the patterns a little more easily. The patterns that I'm looking for are these black and white ones because black and white and red just look really good together. The options include Blossom, there's also Daisy. Of course, if it's too big our pattern, we know how to size it down. There's Full Leaves. Floral Vines is really pretty. There are a lot of black and white patterns in here that you could use. Leaves Graphic and then there's Lotus Squares, Morning Glories, and a few others. I'm going back to Floral Vines. I'm going to make the pattern a little bit smaller by going to Object, Transform, Scale. I don't want to transform the object so I'm going to deselect that option, turn preview on, and then just select a nice size for my pattern. I think probably around 60 percent is good and I'll click "Okay". Now, that image is really quite nice, but there's one other thing that we can do here and that involves the second copy of the type that we kept aside. I'm going to go back here and turn this layer on. What we've got is type that's appearing where the cutout text effect has taken place. But this type doesn't have to stay green. I'm just going to turn the Lock icon off so we can move and work with this type now. I'm going to click on the type layer and I can choose a color such as black for this. I'm getting an interesting effect occurring here. Now, because I've got two type layers here and they're both contributing to this effect, if I like this effect then if I want to move my type around, I'm going to need to make sure that I move both lots of type. I'm going to come here to the Compound Shape, open up it. I'm going to select on the type layer, tea for two, and now I'm going to come down here and Shift-click on this version of tea for two. I have a type layer within a Compound Shape selected and a type layer that's all by itself. Now, if I go to the Move tool, I can just move the type around. In both paces of type, the type that is a part of the cutout compound shape and also the type that is providing this black background are moving together. Just want to be careful if you do use an effect like this, that you give yourself the best chance of success by making sure to select both layers if you go to move them. There is a more practical example, something that you might use for a business card or a logo or something like that created using this cutout text effect. Your project for this class is to create one or both of the effects from these videos. Either cut text out of a photo or create one of the other two cutout text effects from the video. You can use the same images as I have and the same fonts, or you can use fonts and images of your own choosing. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned a lot about cutout text effects in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you, people who want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.