Transcripts
1. Welcome: It happened so fast. I'm not sure exactly when and how. I just remember seeing that beautiful match box label on Pinterest. [MUSIC] I couldn't stop myself from pinning. I got inspired. There was so much to observe and learn and so many new design ideas to be brought to life. I made matchbox label techniques, illustration, Vintage Design, and Print Textures so that we can travel back in time together and we did. We observed, we brainstormed and learned how to transform ideas into visually simple yet effective matchbox label designs. We'll learn how to digitally replicate all printing techniques and how to make unique misprints and apply old vapor textures. We focused on designing concepts and illustrations. But to fully understand matchbox labels, we now need to dive deeper into. [MUSIC] Hi, I am Nina, even though everyone knows me as Di Ujdi. I'm an illustrator and pattern designer based in Belgrade, Serbia. This is a class about matchbox label topography. In this class we're continuing our time traveling journey into the world of vintage design by observing matchbox label type spaces. We'll learn about different font styles and how to replicate vintage text arrangements. I'll share with you some of my favorite websites for inspiration or for finding open-source fonts that you can use and easily change and adjust for your design projects. Last but not least, to make our designs look vintage and unique, we'll replicate errors, misprints, and old paper textures. This time, I'll show you the whole label design process using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Just as I said in a previous class, this is an intermediate class for illustrators, designers and all youth and individual enthusiasts. With this class, you'll complete your matchbox label journey with knowledge in both illustration and typography. These design skills will be of great use in your professional design journey. Whether you want to make vintage replicas or create modern designs with a vintage twist. What can I say except, thank you for joining me again and let's get started. [MUSIC]
2. Project: Your project is to create a matchbox label design with a typographic solution. In the previous class, we focused on building our design from ground zero. We did a lot of brainstorming and sketching until we found a right design idea. If you already watched the previous class and developed your final label design, you can use that illustration or design idea as a starting point and adapt it by focusing on typography, or you can start a new design project. To help you dive right into creating without wondering what to design, I made a project guide. It's a PDF document I already shared in the previous class, but you can also download it from the resources section of this class. There you'll find ideas for creating different types of matchbox labels from starting and designing your own matchbox brand, to coming up with the advertisement ideas that will be placed on a matchbox label to designing a label that will spread awareness or celebrate important events. As before, I'm also sharing with you a link to my Pinterest board with the ever-growing collection of different matchbox labels. It's a wonderful source of inspiration and examples to learn from. Whether you're designing for work or for personal practice, there are many ways in which you can use the techniques in this class. Some possible projects that come to mind are package design, postcards, music records, posters, book covers, or simply matchbox label designs. I cannot wait to see what you'll come up with and I'm looking forward to seeing your inspiration, thought process and of course, the final matchbox label design. Once you finish, make sure to share everything in the project section of the class.
3. Study The Old Create The New: In this lesson, we're going to observe a few different matchbox labels that can serve as great examples when it comes to font styles, text placement and arrangement, and text print imperfections. I call this visual detective work, and I really love doing it. I printed some different matchbox labels to use as samples for observation. Before we continue, I suggest you go to the class resources section and find the link to the Pinterest board where I gathered a lot of different matchbox label designs. First of all, take a look at all these designs and find five to 10 matchbox labels that stood out to you because of their topography. Whether it's because of a particular font style, placement, or interesting ink smudges. You can print them out or gather them in a digital mood board that you'll have in front of you. You can first follow along with my examples. I'll try to cover many different variations but at the same time observe the matchbox labels you've chosen. As we go through each step, try to apply that knowledge to your examples and take notes. To be able to talk about different fonts and styles that we can observe on these matchbox labels, we need to brush up on some typography basics. As you probably already know, we can divide typefaces into two main categories: serif and sans serif. Serif typefaces have decorative features at the end of the letter strokes that are called serifs. While sans serif as their name indicates, don't have them. Now if we go into details, there are more groups that we can distinguish for both serif and sans serif fonts. First of all, let's take a look at different serif groups. We have old style or humanist, transitional, modern, and slab serif also called Egyptian. Humanist serif typefaces belong to the renaissance period. They were designed to mimic classical calligraphy and strobes that human hand makes. Transitional serif typefaces, sometimes called Baroque, are in-between old-style and modern. Compared to the humanist, they have more contrast and sharper serifs. Modern serif typefaces have thin, straight serifs like little blocks, and they have a more pronounced contrast when it comes to thin and thick lines. The last group we have are slab serif typefaces. As you can see, these are very bold and heavy letterforms that have bold serif endings that can both be straight or curved a bit. Now, let's take a look at sans serif groups. Sans serif typefaces were developed a bit later than serif at the beginning of the 19th century. At that time they were called grotesque, which means distorted and ugly. They were quite different from what people were used to or what was considered beautiful typography. Here we can distinguish these four main groups: grotesque, neo-grotesque, geometric or modern, and humanist. Grotesque sans serif are the early sans serif typefaces from the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. They were pretty much industrial and developed for advertisement and headlines. You can distinguish this group by solid and bold letterforms with relatively uniform line width, especially in the capital letters. Neo-grotesque sans serif appeared in the mid 20th century as an evolution of grotesque typefaces. They have bold strokes and upright uniform character. By the way, neo-grotesque sans serif typefaces are sometimes known as anonymous sans serif. One of the most commonly used representative of this group is Helvetica. Geometric sans serif typefaces, as the name implies, are built using geometric forms, which is something that gives these fonts very contemporary look. Humanist sans serif typefaces became very common in the 20th century. Just like old-style serif, they mimic calligraphy and have a variation in line weight. Now with all this visual information in mind, let's take a look at different matchbox labels to see what we can observe about typefaces and what kind of typefaces were commonly used. Here I have a few examples. First two matchbox labels belong to an older period and have this distinguishable Victorian aesthetic. On these old labels, you'll be able to spot the use of old-style serif like in this example and slab serif in the second one. On both of them, grotesque sans serif fonts. As we know, serif typefaces were very popular at that time, but because of the small printing area, defined strokes and serifs would get lost and would require a better printing quality. But better printing quality meant lower printing speed and higher price. So to fix this problem, they switched from serif to slab serif typefaces that had equal line weights and were generally more bolt. They also started using sans serif typefaces, which is something you can also see on these two examples. Especially on this one that is a great representative of the early grotesque typefaces that were used. You can also notice that by using sans serifs, they could print them in a quite small size without losing any details like they would with serif fonts. Now if we look at these more modern labels from the middle of the 20th century, you'll notice that the fonts in use are sans serif. We have examples of geometric sans serifs and also neo-grotesque and square serif here. In the next lesson, we'll practice this a bit. We'll find and match existing fonts to these matchbox label fonts. But for now, I want you to take a look at the matchbox labels you have, and take notes about different typefaces that you can observe and distinguish. The next subject I want to talk about is text placement. Now, there are different periods, styles, and types of labels, so it's very hard to put all this into categories. But what I want to do is to observe these matchbox labels to see what kind of texts placement is recurring and why and what kind of texts placement is inspiring for my own work. Here, I have three different groups. These ones are old-style labels. What is typical in these labels is the use of curved text and the use of bars. These two over here are more modern, but the text placement is very classical and you'll see being used in many matchbox labels. The text is placed in the box at the bottom, and it can also be placed in-between the illustrations or wherever you have some additional free space. The last group is very interesting because the text isn't placed and structured in a usual way. Instead, the text is placed all around matchboxes because a matchbox is something you can hold in your hands, and while holding it, you can turn it around and read the text. Now, take a look at your examples to see what kind of text placement was used and think about your project; what inspires you and what kind of text placement you want to use. Printing, especially in the days of vintage matchboxes, but even now is a process prone to errors. But if you like vintage designs, you'll notice that the more you look at them, the more you understand that what makes these designs interesting and unique includes all these misprints and design imperfections. In these two, you can see some typical misprints that are very common for this printing technology. The colors and all these labels were printed separately, and since the printing process was fast, some colors did not align perfectly on top of each other. That's why you'll see so many overlap misprints like in these two examples. The next interesting thing to observe is how color reacts to the surface in which it's printed. In the case of these examples, it's cardboard. If you put too much ink on the cardboard, it tends to soak in and smudge. If you take a look at these letters, you'll see that nothing is crisp and sharp. Lines have a texture, the corners are always rounded and smudged like in this example and this one as well, and also sometimes letters have different stroke weights because of the soaked ink. Now if we look at these two, we can also observe some design print imperfections when it comes to typography. In this example and many others, you'll notice that the text is often not aligned perfectly, like this name or even these blocks of text. In this example, you can observe imperfect kerning, especially here in between E and S, and also some inconsistent letters over here. These letters look a bit skew and shifted. Once more, take a look at your examples and take notes about misprints and design imperfections. In the next lesson, we'll take everything we observed and put it into practice.
4. Font Styling: In this lesson, we'll talk about fonts, we'll practice finding modern fonts to replicate the vintage typography from matchbox labels. We'll also see how to create different adjustments and changes to the text appearance to make it look slightly imperfect. By the way, I'll be mostly focusing on open source fonts that are available to everyone. Before we start, I want to show you a few different websites that I use for typography, inspiration, and finding fonts. The first website is called Fonts In Use, and I find it incredibly inspiring. It's a huge archive of typography. What's great about it is that it's not a list of fonts, but it has this practical visual base to it. You're seeing how fonts are used and combined with one another. Also, it hosts both modern and vintage designs, plus you can search by project, or you can search by font, and see how a particular font you're interested in is used in many different projects. The next one is Google Fonts. It's a very well-known website for open-source fonts that you might forget about if you're using Adobe fonts, but they do have amazing typefaces that are absolutely free to use. Also, here you'll find a lot of fonts that are based on old classical typefaces, and that you can use for your project. The next website is called Lost Type. They have a lot of retro fonts that could be great for matchbox labels. These are not free open-source fonts, but the payment method is pay what you want for personal use license, so I thought it might be worth mentioning them as well. The next two websites in my list for open source fonts are a bit more experimental with very interesting modern typefaces. These fonts are not classical, historical, or vintage, but they can be great if you want to experiment with combining vintage and modern, futuristic vibe, which is something I want to try out in my project. By the way, you're free to use these fonts for personal and commercial projects as long as you credit their author. These are my go to resources, and as always, I'll leave all the links in the class resources so that you can find them. Now, let's go to Adobe Illustrator and start practicing. As you can see, I've placed a few different matchbox labels we've talked about. On one side I have old-style labels, and on the other, more modern ones. What we're going to do is find different fonts that we can use to replicate the fonts from these labels. I'll show you a few tricks on positioning the text, as well as adjusting it and introducing imperfections. Just as before, follow along with my examples, but also place your matchbox labels in Adobe Illustrator and create your own practice. Let's start with this one. What we can see on this one is a use of old-style serif font in combination with sans serif, which is a grotesque sans serif, considering the time period of this matchbox label. For the serif font, I'm going to use a very famous old-style serif called Garamond. It's a classical typeface made in the 16th Century by Claude Garamond, and the great thing is that there are many contemporary font versions based on Garamond's design. One is Adobe Garamond, and another is Google font called E B Garamond, that I'm using right now. This looks good. You can notice that some details are not matching. For example, this lower part of the V, it's not the same, and maybe the serifs on the C, but we're not making perfect replicas, we're just matching the style. What is helping me find fonts that are a nice match are the categories we talked about. If I copy this, and for example, instead of an old style serif, I use a transitional serif called Baskerville, you can see that it doesn't fit. It's more bold and square, and these serif endings, even though they have a curve, still look like blocks. My advice is observe the overall aesthetic while searching and matching fonts. For the grotesque sans serif font, I'm going to use the font I really like, and it's called Oswald. You can see that all the letters are almost on point except the R that has a straight line, and in the original it has a bit of curvy line. Now that we have the font selected, let me show you a few ways in which I can adjust these fonts to create an even closer resemblance. Let's work on this sans serif as an example. I will now duplicate it so that you can see the comparison. If we look at the matchbox label, the font they used has more elongated letters that are less wide. To get that, I can just select my text, go to Character, and then here I can adjust the Vertical Scale and Horizontal Scale. I can put 110 maybe on this one, and in this one, I can go with 90. If you look at it now, it has an even better resemblance. The trick with these settings is to be subtle and not overdo it. The next thing on my list is kerning. As you know, kerning is the space in between the letters. That is something designers like to adjust and make perfect. Kerning cannot be adjusted mathematically, you always need to do it visually. The best method to use is to squint your eyes and look at a text, and what you should ideally see is that the space in between each letter is more or less the same. But we're not going to do that. We're going to mess up this kerning in the best possible imperfect way we can. Again, the trick is not to go crazy with it, but to look at the samples and make slight imperfections. Before I start adjusting the kerning on this text, I also want to change the style from regular to medium, to have a better match, this looks better, and now to adjust the kerning manually. What I need to do is basically just select a text, and then I need to place my cursor where I want to adjust it, and I will hold "Alt" on my keyboard, and then I can just go with the arrow, right or left. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just look at this example and make changes to the kerning in my text. That's done. It looks very good. Before we move on to other examples, I want to show you Adobe Illustrator tricks for text placement, especially when it comes to the text that is on a curve or inside a wavy banner. Let me show you two options that you can use. The first option is warp effects. If I duplicate this and have it selected and I go to effects warp and then select flag, I can get something like this, or I can, for example, select arc and get a curved text like this. The only problem with this is the more you're bending it, the more your letters are getting stretched and distorted. But anyways, another thing you can do with this, and it's something I also saw a lot of times on many matchbox labels, is this thing. You can set the bend to zero and then you can drag horizontal distortion. With this effect, you can get this wonderful small letters too big letters effect, which can be great for slogans or something like that. Anyways, I do like using warp effects. But again, sometimes if the letters are too distorted, then I might use something different, and now I'm going to show you option 2. If you want to set this, you can just say okay. Let's delete this for now and I will now show you, for example, if you wanted to place your text on a circular thing, for example, like they did for Vulcan here. What you can do is you can create a circular shape and then you can go to Type, select type on a path, and then you can just select this outer area where you want to type. So let's select this, great, and I can change the font now to Garamond. I think it was bold, let's type. Basically in this way, your text will stay as it is and it will not get distorted. So this is another way in which you can create this curvy text without getting your letters distorted. Another thing I wanted to show you is how to create this wavy banner text without having to use a pen tool to recreate it. So I'll just delete this. As I said, instead of using the pen tool and then tracing this whole thing, what I can do, it's a very good trick. I can just select a line and create a line, and just put it in some color. Now the line is selected and what I can do is go to Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Zig-zag. So instead of this pointy ends of zigzag, we're going to select Smooth. Then because this wavy banner just has one wavy thing in the center, I'm going to put these ridges per segment to one, and I'm just going to adjust it. Let's check. I think this looks good. Now to continue and to put this effect inside the lines, basically to make it permanent, I'm going to go to Object, Expand Appearance, and now again I can go to type on a path and I can just start typing. Let's change the font. Okay, that's it for this example, and I think we can now move on to the other label. Here we can see a great example of the bold square slab serif font in combination with a sans-serif below, which is kind of similar to the previous one, but a bit squashed. For this, I can use Roboto Slab. This looks good. For the sans-serif instead of Oswald, I will go with the font Rubik. This font fits nicely because the letters are not that condensed and elongated as an Oswald, and letters have round edges and it has this fullness. Let's create also the third lower text with Rubik as well. Both of these fonts are Google fonts as well and what's great about them is that they are variable. That means that I don't strictly need to change the style over here. I can just go to here, to this variable settings, and basically I can just set the weight I need. This is really an amazing setting that you can use. So what I'm going to do here is basically the same thing I did in the previous example. I'm going to play with adjusting the kerning so it's similar to the matchbox label, and I will go to Settings again and change this vertical scale and horizontal scale. Again, just adjust your cursor where you need to and then hold Alt and you can set the [inaudible] That looks good. Now I want to focus on the third text. Basically, it looks like the letters are going up and down, and some letters look distorted. For example, if I put a line over here, you can see that these letters going up and down are very slight. Mostly we have, I think what is creating this effect of everything being very playful and a strange in a way is these letters that are shifted. I'm going to try to replicate that in my example. But what I want to do is do it in a subtle way. I'm going to first of all, maybe make this a bit smaller. Then I can do the right-click and create outlines. Basically I can just ungroup this first. I can just slightly maybe make these letters look funny in a way. Then even change the angle. Okay guys, I think this looks pretty good. Let's move on to the other examples. Over here we have two modern examples. They're probably from the middle of the 20th century and we're going to start working on this one first. What I'm noticing over here is this prominent circular ladder, which is something distinctive of geometric fonts. Here I could use the geometric font called Montserrat. Montserrat is another Google font and as you can see, it fits very nicely. Here I can go and make some adjustment with the spacing, so go to Character. Again we can do some kerning. I can also adjust the scale of it. This looks good. The next thing on my mind is to make these O's a bit bigger so I can go and create outlines. Then I can just select an O and just make it slightly bigger. Basically instead of trying to do the same thing for another one, I will just duplicate this one and we're good. Just maybe the last thing, the last adjustment can be to make all these corners a bit round. For that, I'm going to select this and press "A" so that I can access this direct selection tool, and I will just pull one corner and it will pull basically all corners and it will run this really very slightly. Great. I think this looks very good. Now let's try to replicate this text over here. I'm going to again use Montserrat, but this time we can go with regular I think. If you look these two are together, they are a good match. But the only thing that is not matching and that seems important to me is this ladder. Basically what I could do, is I could go ahead and find another font that could have this kind of M or I can duplicate this and just type a W and substitute these two, and that's what I'm going to do. I will turn this into outlines and this text into outlines as well. Let's just delete this M and rotate W, and that's it. It's a match. Now to finish this, I might just ungroup this. Maybe shift this A a little bit. Again, these letters look like the previous ones, like a bit shifted and funny looking and I really like that. Let's make this in perfect. To finish this, I will group it and do the same thing I did for this big one; I'm going to round the corners just a bit. Select this, press "A", and then drag this really slightly. But you can see the difference. That one is done. Let's create the last example. In this last matchbox label we have this simple text with huge spacing in between the letters. I've seen this font on a lot of matchbox labels and it really has this print vibe. The best match for it is the font I've already used in the previous examples called Oswald. Again, what I'm going to do here, I'm going to adjust the vertical and horizontal scale. Maybe I can put it to 110. I can do this in 75. This looks good for now. What I want to do is create these huge gaps in between the letters. To do that, instead of doing it manually like I did in the previous examples, I'm going to go to Character and then I will just set the tracking. I will set it to probably 900. This looks good. Tracking is basically like kerning, but you're just applying it to the overall letter spacing. Once you do that, you can go in and adjust the space in between individual letters as we did before. Okay guys, now it's your turn. Take two or four in matchbox labels and observe the topography. Try to determine what font category you can place them in; is it an old-style serif or a slab serif? Is it grotesque or geometric sans serif? This doesn't have to be strictly correct because there are many variations and many modern fonts that are combining some categories. But this can help you out to determine what you're observing and what you should be looking for. Once you start looking for fonts, it can be a bit overwhelming to navigate, especially a vast source such as Google fonts. I'll leave you the links to fonts I used and some blog posts that have recommended Google fonts, so you can use that as a good starting point. Once you've started matching the fonts, try out different things; playing with the letters and have fun. One thing is for sure, you don't have to worry about making everything perfect. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll start creating our matchbox label design.
5. Label Design: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'll show you how I'm creating my matchbox label designs that are focused on typography. I decided to do two projects and show you different things. One will be focused on making a matchbox label design that looks vintage and traditional and the other design will combine vintage with modern and futuristic. I'm so excited to work on both of them and experiment. I'm going to work on label design for a brand called Horizon. This is something I already developed in the previous class. I'm going to use the idea and the illustration I already made and I'm going to adapt it for these two new typographic projects. If you remember, I made this illustration in Procreate. What you can see now is the vectorized version of that illustration. When it comes to colors, over here in the swatches, you can see my color palette and this is the same color palette I shared with you in the previous class. You can also download it in the resources section of this class. I'm doing this part in Adobe Illustrator and once I finish assembling my designs, I'll move them into Photoshop for creating a final print to look. Let's start with the traditional design. I will just move this for now. What I want to show you is that I made a list of possible fonts that I can use for my brand name and also made a list of possible fonts that I can use for these additional informations on matchbox labels. Here I have matchbox labels, the number of wooden pieces, the price, and also I can later maybe add some sort of serial number. These two are my main inspiration when it comes to text placement. I want to go with this classical, traditional matchbox label design where I can place the text in this box at the bottom and also I can place the other texts somewhere where I can see empty space. Also, what I liked about the next one is this number, 40. I also found different fonts that could work for a good Number 40 because I want to start my upper text like that. First of all, let's start by making a background on this art board. The format I'm using is an A3 paper size. Let's set the color. The first thing I want to do is create this outer outline. To do that, I'm going to go to "Object", "Path", and then "Offset Path". Basically, I'm going to set this to minus 20 millimeters and now turn this into an outline and change the color and maybe I can set it to four. That looks good. By the way, this is basically the correct way to do it. If you try doing it another way, for example, by duplicating your background and then, let me change the color, and then, for example, dragging it, you will see that what you'll get in the end is a rectangle that has different left and right side from the upper and lower side. Basically, if you scale it down like that, it will not be scaled proportionally. The best way to do this is by using an Offset Path. I will now create another inside outline. I want to have two of them so I will select this one. Go to "Object", "Path", and then "Offset Path", and I can maybe go with [NOISE] five. Let's see. This looks good. Let me just quickly now set up everything and then we can start adding the text. What I had in mind for the label name, for Horizon, is to use, let me see, this one. Yes, I wanted to use this one, especially because I like this letter z or number three, as you will. [LAUGHTER] Anyways, I'm going to use that one and I'm just going to place it here [NOISE] and maybe put it in this paper color that I set for the background. I can now maybe play with the kerning just a bit. Basically, what I had in mind is to align it horizontally but then not to put it in the center of this box, but maybe just to put it slightly up. Also, this is something I observed in a few different matchbox labels. This looks good. Now let's set to the upper text. As I said, I'm going to use, I like this Number 40. I'm going to use that and place it somewhere over here. Again, I'll set that to the background paper color. I'm thinking I'm going to add, up here, safety matches and then in the lower part I'm going to add all the information about them. Basically, 40 will be 40 pieces and it will also mean 40 safety matches. Anyways, let me create that and you'll see what I mean. I need to switch the keyboard. We're in Cyrillic now. By the way, for this text, I'm going to use my favorite font, Oswald. It just look so classy and traditional. I think it will really fit nicely for this label. Basically, I like the size of this but what I need is to end the text over here. I'm just going to go to "Character" and set the tracking. That looks good. Also, for the lower text, I'm going to use the same font, maybe lower caps. Basically, what I want to do actually is to fit both of these texts to be in the height of, for example, the number zero. Again, over here, I'm going to set the tracking but before I do that, I want to separate these informations with a little central dot that is in between and to do that, I have to go to "Type" and then go to "Glyphs", and I just need to find it. Let's set the tracking and character, so maybe 200, and maybe 200 over here. Let's see. I think this looks good. I might just move it a bit and maybe fix some kerning or mess up some kerning because we're not doing anything perfectly over here. This is a practice of making imperfections and it actually feels good. This is all set. The only issue I might have with this lower text is that it could be too small if printed as a small matchbox label. If you're doing this design for real matchbox label, I would suggest desk printing and then adjusting the font size. The next thing I want to do is create some color overlaps. I'm basically going to do something similar to this matchbox label that has cut-out letters and then it has a color on top of them. I was thinking I can do that for 40 and for this additional info so it makes sense while reading it. You can read safety matches separately and then this color thing also separately. I'm just going to group this and I'm going to duplicate it, Command C, and paste it in place, Command F. I can use this pink color that I also used for the design. Again, I'm going to put it in a multiply blending mode. That is done, I like how it looks. One last thing I want, because as you can see, this part is also in a multiply mode and this part as well. When these parts combine, we have this middle thing that creates a mountain silhouette and it's in this darker color. I want to do the same thing for these outlines. I'm going to do that by basically duplicating them, so Command C and Command F to paste in place, and I'm going to select again this pink color and put it in multiply blending mode. Basically this design is finished. I'm just going to unlock the layers. I'm going to group everything and basically move it to this next Canvas so that I can prepare some final adjustments for Photoshop. I will now ungroup this and let's start making the adjustments. If you remember from the previous class, to mimic the printing technique, I need to keep each color in one layer, and then each layer goes in a multiply blending mode so that we can create new colors and overlaps. Also what is white is actually paper, so it needs to be a cutout. First of all, I'm going to connect all shapes that I have that are in this light pink color. I have this. Also, if you remember, we have these outlines and now this text. Now, because the text is still a text, we need to create outlines. This is a group, so I cannot do it like that, but I can do it in another way. I can go to Object and just expand. Basically the results are the same. Also let's select these light pink outlines. You can't see them now because they're in a multiply, but here they are. I'll select them, and also I need to expand that as well because what we need is shapes. Let's select that object, expand. Now, I'm going to select outlines, text, and the shape of the face. What I'm going to do is go to Pathfinder and select Unite. Basically this will group them and the objects that are touching each other, they will basically connect with each other. That's great. The last thing we need, because this is now a group, if you go to the layers, you'll see this is a group made out of many shapes. I'm just going to press Command 8 and create a compound path. Basically, when you do that, you're telling Illustrator to consider all these small shapes as one thing. We have that finished. I can now turn it off, so it doesn't bother us, and we're going to do the same thing for the teal color. I'm selecting the outlines. Again, Object, Expand. I'm going to select the text, Object, Expand, and I think we're set. Let me just lock this. As I mentioned before, everything that is white, like this text, for example, needs to be a cutout because what is white is actually a paper color. What we're going to do now is to create two groups or two layers. One is going to be this teal color and the outer is going to be this white text. Let's select everything we have in a teal color, and just as I did before, I'm going to go to Pathfinder, and Unite, and now I can just press Command 8 and turn this into a compound path. I'm going to do the same thing for the text, I'll just select everything. I'm going to just unite this, and again, Command 8 for compound path. Now, we have these two compound paths. What I want to do is to create a cutout in this teal color. I'm going to select both of these, and in the Pathfinder, I'm going to find Minus Front and just select that. Now you might not see the difference, but if I pull this here, you can see that the text is actually now just a cutout, and what you're seeing is the background. Basically that is done. I can bring back this pink color and I can set both of these to multiply. But before I do that, as you can see, once I did the minus front, this compound path has turned into this immense group of all kinds of shapes. Again, I'm just going to go and create a compound path by pressing Command 8. Now I can set this to multiply and also I will set this light pink to multiply. That's it. This design is finished and prepared for Adobe Photoshop. Basically, in the next lesson, we'll take this design, add it to Adobe Photoshop, and add imperfections and make it look vintage. But before that, let's create a modern, futuristic design. You can also do something like this for your project, because it can be a great practice where you can experiment, combine different influences and styles, and see where it takes you. In my font list, you can see more modern and experimental fonts when it comes to my brand name, and over here in the other texts, I wanted something that can have an old computer text look. Basically, I wanted like '80s vibe with a futuristic look. For the text arrangements, I was really inspired by this matchbox label. I had an idea to create that kind of base design for this label. Let me just quickly set this base up and then we can start adding the text. [MUSIC] Now we're at this point where I have to add my design inside this square shape. To do that, I'm going to use a Shape Builder tool. I'm going to select this rounded square shape, and this thing I want to erase, and I'm going to press "Shift M" for the Shape Builder tool, and now you can see this little cursor with plus appearing. If I want to cut this shape off, I just need to press "Alt" and it will become a minus and I can just click and delete that. Now I have my design inside this rounded rectangle, and I could maybe also just duplicate it and create some black outline. I think this looks good and it also fits with this line over here. I wanted to keep it somehow to point out where the matchbox begins and where it ends. Everything is set. I'm now just going to add the typography. For the brand name, I'm going with this font called Bogam. Let's grab that. Just like before, I'm going to go to Character and set the tracking because what I want is to fill this little box. This looks good. I really like this font, but again, watch out, for example, these kind of fonts might work good digitally or printed in a larger size. Because if you take in consideration these small gaps that you have here once you zoom out, they will basically disappear. Then this font, if it's printed in a very small area like a small matchbox, it might not be visible at all. Now for the lower texts, what I want to do is, as I mentioned, I want to create this '80s old computer style typing. My goal is to fill this whole area with text from one side to the other. What I'm going to use is, I think I'll go with this one. It's called Space Mono, and it really has these cool looking letters and I really like the letter M. It's just beautiful. Let's start typing over here. Okay, guys, this is the text I just made up. Maybe it's silly, maybe it's funny, and maybe it's stupid, I don't know. [LAUGHTER] It doesn't matter because we're just playing around here. Now I'm just going to adjust the spacing and move all these things around so they go from one corner to another or one border to another. A last minute decision. I really didn't like how that text looks, so I think we're just better going a bit minimal like this without it. Again, some last minute decisions. I think I want to move this around just a bit. I'm basically just grouping this and then I'm aligning it. Last thing on my mind, I like this text, but I also want to create some misprint. I'm going to do that by smudging it a bit. I'm going to copy it and then paste it in place, just move it by a pixel, basically, and then I'll get these letter smudges that look in a way, digital and futuristic. I don't know, this is just an experiment, but I think I like how it looks for now. Let's ungroup this. Maybe here I can go with some gray color. Yeah, this looks much better. Okay, guys. I think we're done. No, we're not done. I'm spotting a mistake. Here we go. This I is an absolute mistake. But now when I'm looking at it, I can basically put it in black and then it will fit with the type, with these outlines and everything. Yay. I'm happy about this. Just as before, what I'm going to do is I'm going to group this, I'm going to copy it, and then I'm going to select this next art board and paste it in place. Let's again, prepare this for Adobe Photoshop. By the way, one thing I didn't mention while making this traditional design is that it's always great to have one canvas with everything that is original and unchanged because basically, when you make cutouts, when you expand your font, there is no more editing. A good thing is to actually have this as some go back to if you want to do more edits, and then you can have a duplicate where you make all these final preparations. Again, we're going to make all the preparations. I'm going to first start with the black color. Let's ungroup this. Let's select all the text and go to Object, Expand, Okay, and I also have this outline here, which I also need to expand. Great. Oh, and this one as well. I think everything that is black is expanded and now I can select all the black parts. Now I can just go to Pathfinder, Unite and then Command 8 for the compound path. That's done. Let's move it so we can see the rest. Now I have this pink background and this face shape, which is in pink. I also need to merge that, so I'm going to go on Unite. What happened? Oh, I see. I cannot do that before I make a cutout. I'm going to now switch, I'm going to select everything that is white, Unite, and then compound path Command 8. Then we have this huge rectangle background or however you want to call it. Now we're going to do the Minus Front thing. Select the white things that are going to be cutouts, select the rectangle and Minus Front. Let me see. You can see we've created cutouts. Let's put it back. Now once I've created the cutouts, I can select this. Let me just show you this pink part, select the rectangle, and now I can unite them. This is all united. By the way, this is how it looks right now. The last thing we have is this gray thing, and that just stays like that, and then multiply. It's just one shape and it's fine. I'm going to put this into multiply and I'll bring back my black layer. Okay, guys. This is done and we're done when it comes to design. Both of these look very digital and clean. My next step is to save both of these labels as PSD files, and in the next lesson, we'll continue working on them in Adobe Photoshop to really make them stand out and look authentic.
6. Print Effects: Now is the time to add all those intentional print imperfections and finish everything with a wonderful old paper overlay. The best program for that is definitely Adobe Photoshop. Either way, you could have also said the whole design in Photoshop if you want it. I'm personally more used to designing in Illustrator and working with vectors. So that's why I'm using both programs. Illustrator for arranging the overall design and Photoshop for these finishing touches. I basically have two designs. So instead of repeating myself, I'll use them to show you different things you can use in Photoshop to get interesting final results. Let's start with the traditional design. As you can see, I opened it as a PSD file. You can also see that I have three layers and that's exactly what we set up in Adobe Illustrator. Now if you've watched the previous class, you might remember that what I did with this design, as I changed its color a bit, so it was not in this teal color. I changed it to more navy blue, and the way I did it and the way, I'm going to do it now, instead of just picking any color I want, I'm going to do it by replicating this printing technique where every color is a new layer and one color's overlap, they create different colors. So basically I'm going to select this teal color layer. I'm going to hold Alt and duplicate it. Because all of these layers here are in multiply, you can see that the color has already changed. But to get this navy blue, what I need to do is use the pink color from my color palette. I'm going to go here to solid color, and I'm going to select this pink. Now I'm going to turn this into a clipping mask. I think this is just the most complicated way of changing color in Photoshop. If you basically know some other way, just go for it because I'm so used to Illustrator and sometimes even some very basic things in Photoshop I do it just in the most complicated way. Also if you have any tips about this, write them in the discussion section. Anyways, we have a clipping mask, we have this layer. I'm going to select them both, and I'm going to merge them together by pressing Command E. Here it is, the color is changed, but the layer is back to normal, so I'll set it to multiply. Here we have this lovely navy blue kind of purple color. It looks amazing. Just as in the previous class, I'm going to set the opacity to 50 percent to make this change a bit more subtle. This looks great. The next thing I want to do is create misprints. I'm going to now select some layers and I'm going to nudge them to left, right, and create these misprint overlaps. Let's start with this one. Just to watch out for the letters so that you don't nudge this whole thing too much and make everything a bit strange. Again, be very subtle. I feel like to zoom In. The thing I really like is actually this effect that these misprints have on letters. I find this very beautiful. It just makes the lettering more interesting and effective. Once I've finished making my misprints, I'm going to select everything and group it. You can see I selected the layers. I can do Command G and make a group. Now I'm going to duplicate this group. So right-click, duplicate the group. I'm going to turn off one group and I'm going to merge this one. The reason I have one group off is again, like I told you in the previous lessons, I like to keep things safe. So once I'm merging something and making it final, I always like to know that I still have a sort and I can go back to and work on if needed. Now this is merged into one layer, and I can add some print effects. So I'm going to select it, it's selected. I can go to Filter. I can go to noise and add some noise. So let's see that, this really will give it that paper look and if you observe these match boxes, they all have these dots because of how the color was getting soaked into cardboard. I think maybe a bit less. This looks good. Another thing I want to use is called ripple effect. We'll go to Filter, Distort, and Ripple. So what this will do is basically make all these perfect digital vector lines. The sharp lines. It'll just make them rough. Everything will look actually imperfect and printed, and that's what we're looking for. I don't have any advice on how much you should add. But I do suggest going to your own letters to see what works. For example, I think this is just too much for me, so I might go down a bit and make it more subtle. This looks good. The next thing I want to add is the final paper overlay. Let me just go to the folder and add this paper. Basically, this paper is just the paper I scanned. I think the resolution was 1200 pixels. It's just a scan of the inside pages of an old book. So basically if you have something like that at home and if you have a scanner, that's going to work perfectly. What I like is to find these papers that are smudged and have these really rough pages, or old looking paper. If you don't have a scanner by the away, this paper will be available for you to download it across resources so you can test it out for your project. This looks good. Now I'm just going to set the blending mode for this paper to Linear Burn. Also what I can do is adjust the levels for this paper. I'm just going to go to Adjustment and select Levels, right-click "Clipping Mask", and here I can just make it a bit brighter. That said guys, the traditional matchbox labeled design is finished. You can see how different it looks once you add just a few correct filters on the paper overlay. It really has that old-style vintage vibe to it. If you're ready, we can now start working on the modern matchbox labeled design. In that one, we can be more experimental. I also want to show you another super interesting way of using paper overlays. Let's begin. The design is open in Photoshop. For this one, I want to use some texture for the background. I don't want to leave it plain and in this solid color. So in the next tab, you can see the texture image I have. Basically, what I did was with my phone, I quickly photographed a plastic bag up close because I wanted to capture some creases for the texture. This can give the background some interesting futuristic plastic look. What I want to do now is adjust it a bit. We'll go to Adjustments, and I'll go to Brightness and Contrast, so we'll just set that a bit. Basically, just play with these settings. What I want to do is make these creases more visible. Actually, my ultimate goal with this image is to create a monotone image. To do that, I will now go to Image, Mode, and first of all, I will select Grayscale. What is asking me is to flatten the image. Yes, I want to flatten it. Now I'll go back to Image, Mode, and now I can set Duotone. As you can see, once I'm in duotone options, I have the option to select monotone and this is the same pink color from my color palette. Basically, to change the color, you can just select this and set whatever color you want. I will just press "Okay", and that's it. I can now just unlock this background and I will just copy, command C and basically paste it in this other tab I have opened with my main design. I'll just drag that over here and I can select it with the right-click and create a clipping mask. That's it, here is one simple way to change the plain background and do something unexpected and interesting. Also, you can play with this. Try photographing different textures that you can find and see how they look when you incorporate them into your design. With this thing done, what I'm going to do is the same thing I did before. I'm just going to go ahead and nudge a few layers just to make these interesting misprints. That's done. Unlike last time, what I want to do is to use the ripple effect, the effect that was making all these straight lines look a bit imperfect. But because I have this image, the texture image, I cannot merge everything this time, so instead of merging everything, I'm just going to go ahead and select each layer and apply this ripple effect, so filter, distort, and ripple. I finished adding this ripple effect to all the layers, and now I can just select everything like last time Command G to make a group. I'll again duplicate this group, I will save one as a backup and turn off visibility, and for this one, I will just merge it into one layer. Basically, all that is left is to add a paper overlay. This time I'll show you one amazing trick. First of all, let's add the paper. This time I want to use the parts of the paper that have very visible creases. Once I have the paper set, I'm going to change the blending mode again to Linear Burn. This looks very nice. This time I'm not going to adjust the levels. I'm just going to maybe move this slightly over here. This is much better. So what I want to show you is actually how to use something called displacement maps. It's such a fun trick that can make this whole digital design very realistic because it creates an illusion that your design is actually placed on this paper. It will bend and it will reshape it, especially around these paper creases. To do that, I will now copy the paper, Command C, and I will open a new file. I will basically open it in the same size. Now to paste the paper, I need to paste it in place. That's very important. I will do that by holding Shift Command V. That's it. Now what I need to do is go to image mode and turn this into grayscale. We want to flatten it, and I will just save it as PSD file. Now I'll go back to my main design. What I need to do is select this layer with the design on it and I will go to Filter, I will go to Distort, and then select Displace. Basically, again, this depends on your design, it depends on your typefaces, and of course, it depends on the creases you have. Basically, just dust this out. I like to keep it stretched to fit and wrap around and I will go with eight. Now the last thing I need to do is to select this displacement texture we saved. Here it is, it's done. If I zoom in, you can see how these letters are reshaped, and not only letters, also the whole design is stretched around these creases. This is basically such a great and effective visual trick that you can use for adding all the vintage vibe to any digital design you're making. So this modern, futuristic, vintage design is finished and now if we place these two finished designs together, you can see how they look in comparison.
7. Thank You: Hey, I just want to say, thank you for spending time with me and watching this class. I hope you enjoyed this whole learning process and discovered something new in typography. I hope you continue exploring. Once you start your project, document it and share with us your matchbox typography observations, inspiration, and ultimately your finished design. I would love to hear what you think about this class. Make sure to rate and review it. As always, if you have any questions or something I was showing wasn't clear, feel free to ask me anything in the discussion section of this class and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. To get notified of about my next classes, follow me here on Skillshare, and you can also get in touch with me on Instagram @DIUJDI. I'm sending you lots of love and good vibes, and I'll see you in the next one.
Di Ujdi, Illustrator & Art Explorer
