How to Customize Letters in Affinity Designer

1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Mark, and in this class, we're going to use a int designer version two to customize your letters. So we will start with just a text, and then by using several different techniques, we will turn it into our custom artistic design. We're going to finish two little projects. One will involve customizing letters manually with no two and Pen two. Another one will help us to practice text effects and warping. All right, let's get started. 2. Add Text: Today, we're going to learn how you can customize letters fonts in Apt designer version 2.5. Before we start, a quick recap. I just create a brand new document. A four was the size of this artboard. One artboard is all we need for this project. On the left side, you will see your tools. At the very top, there are some additional options like alignment, snapping, and some geometric operation that we're actually going to use today later in the video. On the right side, you can see your panels. You can customize this area, as you can see, I use color at the top, and I got my layers below. There are some panels that you can switch to under. If your interface look a bit different. That's fine. Keep in mind, you can always go to window and check which panels, which studios are turned on. They got this check mark next to them. If something is missing, you can try to turn on of some panels over here, you can even reset the whole setting here. You can go here and you can reset all of those panels to default. If you like to customize your tool panel, the one on the left, as you can see, I customize mine. I like to work with two columns of tools because I got rather small screen only 13 ". In that case, had to view menu at the top, and then you will have option to customize tools. From here, you can drag and drop the tools you want. You can also decide how many columns you need. All right. That was just a quick recap about after designer interface. I'm using version 2.54 Mac, but it's very similar on Windows version and even the iPad version. All right. So let's get started. First, before we jump into customization, let's create an artistic text. There's a tool for that on the list here. This A artistic text tool, let T is a shortcut. You can just click once and you can now type whatever you like. For the purpose of this demonstration, I will simply type my name. You can use the move tool to scale it up and reposition at the center of your screen. Let me just show you a brand new feature added in version 2.5. We got now support for variable phones. If you select your text and want to select a new phone, you will see some of those phones got this V. V stands for variable. If you select the phone like that, you will have this additional controller here when you can. Ue slides, to alter existing pond. Be sure you're using a variable phone. Otherwise, it will not show you can download variable phones from the popular websites like for example, Google phones. I will recommend some phones at the very end of the tutorial. We want to select a nice looking font for our text. Take your time. Check your phone list. If you can find anything interesting, you can go to website that I mentioned already. Let me show you that website. Here it is, it's called Google fonds fonds google.com. When you can check out popular phones and you can download them for free. If you found the phone you like, you can simply click on it, get the phone and you can download the phone file. Another website that we can use is called da phone.com. When we can check some top phones, you can click Top here. Then we can modify the search settings to see only free phones. So we don't need to pay for them and let's see 100 free funds. Submit. And now we can browse for cool looking free phones. All right. What if I want to use this one? I can simply click download. Then you can simply install the phone. This step will be a bit different depends on your operating system. On Mark, we open the font file and click Install. Then you can search for this font from within the affected designer. You don't even need to restart the program. If you type the name of the phone, you will narrow down the search. I remember the first two letters, and it's narrowed down the search, I can now easily select this font. Here we are. We got our text with our brand new font and now we are ready to customize it. 3. Node Tool: You may be familiar with the node tool. No tool is a great tool for customization of shape. If I grab the node tool, I cannot see any nodes to control this text. Unfortunately, we cannot customize live text. Before we can customize the text, we need to turn this text into shape. We will lose the ability to edit that text. Keep that in mind. At the very top, you should be able to see option to convert two curves. Click on that. Now, instead of the text layer, I got a group when each letter is a regular vector shape. As you may notice, I already got those control points, I got still my not to selected, and with that, I can easily pull those points around. I can delete a point that I don't need. Let's zoom in a bit. I using common plans to zoom in, hold space but to pond the camera around. Now with no tool, I'm able to make some custom changes to this text to those letters. Keep in mind, if you've got a node like that with the square, that's a sharp node. The circle one is a smooth node that you can adjust the curve. We can also turn a smooth node like that into sharp one. Click here. Take a look. Now it's sharp. You can turn it back into the smooth one just like this. Feel free to remove some nodes. This make the process a bit easier. Sometimes we got just too many nodes. Take a look here, two nodes close to each other. I remove one and now it would be way easier to customize this area of only one node. The node tool is super powerful. We can adjust all of those alignment points. We can adjust anchors to change how the shape is curved. That's definitely something that you want to do when you try to create a custom text custom visuals for your letters. He delete on your keyboard to remove those unnecessary nodes and spend some time with this tool. It's really powerful. I don't want to say underrated because it's very well known technique, modifying nodes with the node tool. All right. I can select two nodes same time just like that and I can pull them both together to maintain the letter shape. That's cool. You can even use the node tool to select the whole letter like that. But in our case, each letter is a separate shape that that's not necessary. Actually, I want to ungroup this text, right click and ungroup. Right. Let's now try to move them a bit. What if I want to add rotation, no problem, as you can see, we can rotate the letter. Also you can put different colors. You don't need to fill all of the letters with exactly same color. It's totally possible to customize those colors like that. We did some customizations already using just the node too. What if I want to draw a new element and then unify that with existing letter. There are two ways of doing that. We can use the pen too. The Pen too required a bit of experience. Sake, look, I you click click, click click, click. You will be drawing this straight line. Of course, you can fill it with color. When you click and hold, click and hold, click and hold, you will be drawing those curvey lines. The good news is, if it's not perfect, you can always grab the node tool again and customize it. Adjust this to your need. Let's try to draw additional element that we will use in this design. I'm thinking about making this that are somehow connecting with this A, so I will start somewhere here and try to draw something with pen. Something like that. Let me fill it with color so we can say it. I just draw this additional element. I can grab a node two and be sure I'm happy with I can make some final adjustments. Now, the question is, how can I unify this? How can I add this new element to this letter behind? Let's select both elements. Now we're going to use this geometry panel at the top. Take a look. We've got bulion operations, and the very first one is called and we unify those two shapes. I want this to be behind the letter A, so I'm going to drag this on the layer panel to be behind it just like that. Let me just change the color. I want some starting color like that. Then I will select letter A to be a bit bright. How can I now connect letter k with this R thing here? I have an idea about moving this a bit up like that, and then extending this letter. I use the node to. I grab multiple nodes and try to extend the letter here. I can add additional node to have more control here. I'm going to align this letter with and scale it down a bit. All right. Again, I want to unite this with this shape. Let's select both again. This time, instead of using those buling operation, I will grab a shape builder tool on the left. Shape Builder tool plus, and we can unify all of those elements just by dragging the plus. All around and one more here, and we got everything unify nicely. I will delete this little element here at the very end. Gone. All right. Let's zoom out a bit. I will now make the first letter a bit larger, just like that. I wanted to go through this letter A. 4. Customize Letters: To do that, I will duplicate the whole thing. I select all L et's do C C and V. Now we got multiple copies for each letter in case we mess up something. That's a good thing to have. Let's customize it. What I need is I need this element to disappear. If I click this letter, and then I select this A as well, I can do it on the layer panel just by holding shift. I can use Sha builder. Remember that too with the plus mode, and I can unify those elements just like that. Now we get the color from that letter, but we can go back to our original color just by using the color wheel or by picking up the color using the color picker from this element. Now, I still got one more copy of that letter that I will not need, so I can delete that by clicking on it and then delete on my keyboard, or you can just hit this button here, remove layer in your layer panel. Let's take a look. We use the font then we expand that into regular shapes that we can modify with the node to. By doing that, we open multiple possibilities. In my case, I draw additional element using pen tool. What else can we do if we need to draw additional element? We can use a pencil tool as well. Pencil tool is over here. It's this yellow one. It's rather similar to Pen tool when we can draw a line, but it's a bit more begging and friendly. Keep in mind, you can close this shape by clicking at at the end in case you end up with the open shape without the line on one side. We can draw additional elements, but of course, we can use very long selection of different shapes. Let's say you need a hard shape and you want to unify this hard shape somehow with your text. Not a problem, we draw a hard shape, and then we can add it to the letter. Just like that, we can follow up with the no tool to make some custom changes. All right. So we got really nice, flexible workflow after you expand those texts letters into a shape. Remember, after you do that, you cannot really modify letters, so I cannot now change my mind and type something else. No, I start with letters with fund, but now I'm working with shapes really. All right. One tool some people like to use is corner tool, not very obvious choice for letters. But if we grab a corner tool, You can click on some of those sharp corners and you can round them up. Take a look. You can get some unique additional effect like that by rounding those corners up, and they're alive. I can change that later. But if you are help you with this effect, you can bake them in. When you scale this up and down, they will stay exactly the same. I'm going to click baked here and I'm going to click bake appearance here, and we use another tool, the corner tool. What if you want to get rid of part of the letter? In that case, I could use the knife tool. I can grab this letter. Pick the knife. Remember, start outside the letter and go across to another side, release your mouse, and we got the nice cat. Now I can move part of it out. I can even delete that. We can divide the letter into smaller pieces to get higher customization. All right. What I'm doing right now, I'm undoing. Whatever you make mistake or change your mind, you can press do. The shortcuts, command Z or control Z on windows. You can visit your history panel as well to see all of your changes and you can undo from here as well. And then we can continue from that state of your project. All right. Today we managed to use the type tool to type a text with our custom phone, we just download. Then we convert that into shapes and customize. What if you want to add some elements that you download from the Internet, it's really simple. Just be sure you download SVGs. Let me just paste example SVG into this project. 5. Extras: I just paste a vector object. How do I know it's vector? I can see all of the curves with individual colors here on the list. Let me just group it using common G. Now we can use that object to decorate or customize our text as well. If you want to keep it separately, you can just put it like that, and that's fine. If you want to unify it with the object, you can do it as well, keep in mind. If you bake it into the letter, they need to have exactly the same color. Let's try to bake this into a letter. Only the flower part, this part, and the leaves will be like that. My be scaled down a bit. I'm ready to ungroup now. This will be a bit messy for a while. Now I will delete those two leaves here. Click on it and delete. Nice and I want this flower to have the same color. I was thinking about unifying this with the letter, but if I do that, it will jump behind this one. I will really just keep it in the same color and then group it together when I'm ready to do that. Now I want this guy here to be in this brighter color. Cool. This can be white or we can use all of those elements. I'm holding shift to select more than one. We can use an action here in the Boling operations. So far we use add, I'm going to subtract. Why? Let me just show you something. If I go a different backdrop behind, like that, let's move it to the bottom. If I got backdrop like that, those additional shapes here are still white. I want to turn them into holes. I want to use them to make holes in this shape. Select them all once more. Select the flower below and use the next action called subtract. Take a look. Now, we got holes instead of shapes filled with white color. All right. I'm going to select those colors here. What's left, it's white. Do I want this to be white? How about the contrast? Let's put a contrast in color like this, yellow. Not bad. We can scroll out and duplicate those leaves maybe somewhere around this area to balance this pit. C. Let's get rid of this temporary backdrop and here's my customized text. We use several different techniques, including knife, bul and operation, shape builder to, pen two, pencil to, Of course, I mentioned a shape to as well. You can use a basic shape tool. If you need a star, it's over here, we can customize it. Use the build in shapes. Why not? We don't need to only download additional elements from the stock sites. We can use what is already here in the program. All right how we can save it now. Let's say you want to save it as P and G and use it as the watermark. Select, everything nicely. File export. We want to search for PNG format and not the whole document, but only selection. Like that. To get this nice selection out without the backdrop. Click Export and you will end up with a nice click Export, and you will end up with nice PNG. But we can also save it as SVG as the scalable graphics. We can do the very same thing and select a scalable vector graphic format SVG. Take a look. Again, on the selection will be included. I also recommend to save a native Amina designer file for if you want to wok it org on it in the future, right. So we can just click File and save us, store your project on your computer or Pad. I show you all basic techniques for customizing phones, customizing letters. Of course, we could draw the whole letters ourselves, using penci pen to, Dabolan operations that we can use to add different elements to them. We can use ready to use stock. Vector graphics like I just did with this flower, we can draw it ourself. There are so many options for us. I hope you've been able to follow up this tutorial and you end up with a nice looking text like this. 6. Text Effects: Before we wrap up this class, I still need to show you two more techniques for customizing your text, your letters in affined Designer. So we did a great job with this custom name here. But now I'm going to start a separate mini project, you could say, just to showcase those two letters. So if you like, you can follow along. You can make a second project just to test out those features. Keep in mind. The one we just finished as the main project for this class. So we already did all of the heavy lifting. All right two more techniques. So I'm going to click File and I will make a new project. I like to work with some kind of horizontal a board like that. Let's grab a text to once more and type in our text. This case, we can keep the text alive. We don't need to actually go for convert to curves. That's a good thing because you can later on edit your text once more. All right and feel free to adjust the phone. Try to select something rather bold. I got my sample text, so I changed the color from black to any color because black is more like a lack of color. We need some color in. We need some bold font and some sample text. Now we are all set up. The next way how we can customize this is to select the layer of the text and then go all the way down here to F X. That's right, layer effects. So we can customize the text by adding layer effects. Keep in mind, we can, of course, mix this method with the previous show methods using no tool and similar stuff. But I want to do it on the regular text, so you can see all of the interesting effects we can apply. We're adding effects by clicking those checkboxes on, but that's not all. We still need to modify settings for each effect. So in this case, I want inner We can make this radius larger. We can make this profile very sharp, so it's almost like made of stone or metal like that. Of course, we can change direction of the light. We can check how strong this light is, how the shadow will mix with the original color. We can't control. We got something called outline when we will create a line outside. The next thing. That is to mimic some kind of TD effect. But I already apply this the very first vivo slat emboss effect, so I don't need this TD. It's very similar thing. In a shadow when you want to make this to look as some kind of hole. I will switch of the first effect to show you this one a bit of radius offset, and we got shadow but like inside, those letters are like creating a hole. We got inglo We can change the color of this glow. Keep that in mind as well. Take a look, we can have a color on that glow, and we can even add a bit of noise to it to give some kind of texture and have two colors to blend in. By default, it's from edge, but we can do it from center as well. Color overlay, we put a new color on the top of existing one. Gradient overlay is a bit more interesting because we are replacing the color with the gradient. Of course, you can even mix it using overlay, so you can actually see the original color and use the gradient as the overlay on that. We got glow. In this case, you will see the glow outside. Let me change the color of the globe and the blending mode to normal. We can actually see it outside. Can you see this glow now? It's all around. We got the shadow, so the shadow pop up. We got offset, we can move it outside like that, and we got shadow outside the text. Take a look. We put probably too many effects, but that's demonstration, and the last one is blur, so we can blur the whole thing. In my case, it's blurring really because I got so many effects on it. I will not really do. Let's click Close, and take a look. We just use as text. Pick the phone and color and then put several effects on that layer and we end up with some custom text. All right. What if I want to go back to those effects? Very same thing. Select the text, click F X here at the bottom, and as you can see, we are back here with this pop up window when you can make changes, for example, I can switch off this or the globe. All right. What if I want to use the same effect twice? Let's try. We got this outline, this black line around the text, if I click Plus, I can add the same effect again. I want the one below to be larger, and the one above will be white or almost white. We can have outline twice. Take a look. Here's a new effect. By the way, if you set up some effect and you really like it, you want to transfer this to object or another text. Let's say we got another text. Let me just use type two. We've got this another text here, and I don't want to start from scratch. I want to transfer this. You can simply select the text and then come and see. Almost like you try to copy the whole thing. Then click on that new text and then go to edit paste style. If you want to paste with color or paste paste effects. T. We don't need to do it from scratch, we can copy and paste effects as well. That's handy. That's the one technique I want to show you. You can customize the text by applying effects. 7. Warp Tool: All right. That's the one technique I want to show you. We can customize the text by applying effects. What's the second one? I mentioned the second one. The second one is warping. I can click on this text, and then again, it's in the layer section again here at the bottom. We got warp. If you click on that, you got some presets. Like arc, take a look. We customize this text not only by adding effects, but also by warping it to be on the curve. We can control that from the slider. Over here at the top. We can change the preset to perspective where you can move those points all by yourself using your mouse. You can change it to fish eye and many similar effects to customize your text. The horizontal and vertical versions. Let's stick with the arc and here it is. For this second quick mini project for this sample text, I show you two ways. We can apply special effects using the layer effects menu. We can also use the build in warp to warp that text. Keep in mind, we still got a working text layer in this work group, so I can actually still go in and type a new text. Here it is my name. If you want to take it even further, you could, of course, click convert to curves. And then we will be able to actually make all of the changes that we learned about before. So now I already expand each letter to be a shape, and now I can use all of the techniques from the first part of this video when we learn how to customize letters using no, how to draw additional elements with Pen two and Pencil two. Here, here's my second mini project. All right. So for this one, you use. Effects and warp layer. And if you really like, you can also extend that at the very end to make some final changes with the node two. All right. Now you can choose. Do you want to share the first main project or this second mini project with us? You can export that nicely and share in the project section below. I hope you enjoy this class, and I will see your project, so I can give it some feedback. A quick reminder to export the text, simply position this nicely on your artboard, and then we can try to export the whole artboard, so file export, and we can even go with JPEG, in this case, export the whole artboard, and we are done. 8. Fonts: As I promise a little bonus, I'm going to suggest you a few interesting fonts. We want to customize letters. This initial fond, the starting point, it's also very important for us. Let's take a look. This one very nice looking font here, honey grapes, and it's completely free. That's also a big advantage for us. We don't need to invest any money to get this fund as our starting point. We're getting the fund. And then we applying everything you've learned to customize it, make it our own. This is very cozy fund. But what if you're doing something rather serious like a certificate or some kind of badger stamp, we got this old London fund, also completely free. That's the free fund again, and it's remind you those old university diplomas, very nice style. How about something modern? Next one is bold but modern, almost like those glamour brands. Nice geometry, strong font. That's mont. Again, it's a free font, so you can easily download this and install for free. If you're working on any form of e sport teams, sport teams, some jerseys, college font is a perfect for that, and it's really easy to customize. We can work this font into arcs and stuff like that. Stuff that we learn about already. That's a nice font as the starting point for sport or e sport or school stuff. The last one is a rather cute font. We got little days. It looks like handwritten text can be used as the blackboard text as well. Again, we can customize it. We already know how to expand fonts and make our own custom changes. You can grab all five phones completely free on the website I showed you before. This is font com. Just search for the name of the font. College type it in, and you will see the download button for free font. There are hundreds of free phones on that website. You can grab them and use them as the starting point. Choosing a good phone before you start customizing your letters, that's definitely an important step in this kind of projects that are based on typography. That was just a little bonus, give you some ideas that different phones for us to use, and there are some websites like Google phones or dafont com that offer some free funds. We don't need to have fortune to start of this project with a nice fund. All right, again, congratulations on reaching the very end of this class by