Skurrile Texteffekte in Adobe Illustrator – Ein Kurs von Graphic Design for Lunch™

1. Whimsical Text Effects in Illustrator Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, whimsical text effects in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating whimsical text effects. We're going to take a piece of text and we're going to give it a whimsical look. Along the way we're going to see what are some of the problems with formatting text so that it remains live and editable, as well as how to apply patterns to text and some really interesting effects around the edges of the text. We're also going to look at the touch type tool. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend this class and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. So if you're ready now let's get started creating whimsical text effects in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Understand the problems with Formatting Text: We're now going to have a look at creating some whimsical type effect. I'll click here on "Create New." My document that's time is going to be 1920 by 1080 in size. Again, I'm working in the RGB color mode. These color modes can be seen here in the Advanced Options area. I'll click "Create". You could be working in any size file, it doesn't really matter. I'm going to the Type Tool here. I'll just click here on the Type Tool. I'll click once in my document, I'm going to type the word "Fun." Now it's coming in by default at 12 points, which is way too small. I'll type 600 in here. That will enlarge it quite considerably. With my text still selected, I want to choose a different font. One of the fonts that I have downloaded for this project is called mystery quest. I'm going to give you the download link for this. It's a free to use downloadable font online. Have a look in the class project area for the download link for the font. Now, with my font selected, you'll see that the fill is set to black and there is no stroke. We're going to look quickly at what not to do because there are some problems with working with fonts, particularly if you want your font effects to be live so that your text can be edited. We're going to have a look at those right now. Let's change the fill on our font to a orangey color and let's change the stroke to very dark red here. I'm looking for colors that you can see very clearly so that you can see these effects. Not too concerned about the colors themselves, but just that you're seeing what's happening here. Now with my font selected, I can kick up the stroke weight. I can start increasing the stroke weight. But you'll see what happens when I do that is that I'm losing the internals of the font. Now, if you were working with an object, you could do something like this. Let's just go and get this object, let's put a dotted stroke around it because that's going to make it easier for you to see what we're about to do and what is not working here for us. I'm just giving it a rounded cap. I'm setting the dashed line on, I'm setting the dash to zero and the gap to 28 and tabbing away. You'll see that we get little dots around our shape. The way I do this just makes sure that the weight and the gap are pretty much the same value, 28 and 28. Dash is always zero if you want dots and just select the dashed line. Make sure of course that you're working with around cap, otherwise you're going to get something like this, which is not the same thing. Let's just go and have a look in the appearance panel. If I just close down the stroke and the fill so we can see what we're working with. I'm going to grab the stroke and I'm going to move it underneath the fill. When I'm doing so, have a look at that circle over there on the left. What happens is that the strike appears behind the fill. That's how it works with regular objects. Let's go and get the type tool, let's select either our text here, and let's go and try and do the same thing. Well, it won't work. You can't actually move the stroke sites behind the fill. There's problem number one. Problem number two is, well, let's have a look and see what happens when we select it with the selection tool. Well, over here in the appearance panel, things look a little bit different. If I double-click on the word characters to get access to our type, you'll see that now the type tool is selected. We have exactly the same problem. Effectively it would appear at first instance as if we don't have anywhere near the same amount of control over type as we do over objects. But you know what? That's just at the first view. In the very next video, we're going to solve this problem comprehensively so that we get all the tools available with type that we have available with shapes. 3. Pt 2 Create scallop edge text: In the previous video, we saw that there are problems when you try to format type as against formatting a shape. Now the important thing here is what we're trying to do is to keep this type editable. We could turn type into shapes and we would do that by choosing type and then create outlines, if we did that, then all bets are off. These are just regular outlines and they can be edited like any shape. But if we want to keep the fact that this is text intact, then we have to do something different. Let's select over this text with our selection tool and let's turn the fill and the stroke off so effectively we can't even see the text at this point. Now let's go to the appearance panel. We have the same look in their appearance panel as we had when we were working with the type earlier. Let's have a look down here. This is the add new stroke icon. This is the add new fill icon. Lets click on the add new fill icon. Now we're able to add a fill to type, and it's added in a different way. It looks like it's the same place, but it's not, it's really confusing. We shall, [inaudible] didn't do this, but it does. Where learning to play things the illustrated away. You'll see that now when I have the type select and I'm working on my fill, I've got the selection tool selected. We haven't switched over here to the type tool, we are in a different place in a illustrative if you like. So one of the things that we can do at this point, which we couldn't have done in any way, shape, or form. Working with the actual Type Tool selected is we can apply a gradient to our text and we can also apply a pattern fill. So those are two of the options that we get using this particular method rather than the one we did earlier. Let say because we can do a whole lot more as well. I can go to the strikes. I've sort of added a new stroke area here for my type by just adding a new fill. We just need to get access to it, here I'm going to click the drop-down list. I'm going to select a color for my stroke, Let's go for a very dark below. Let's go and put this same sort of stroke on your text. Go to the strike panel, we know needs to be around cap. We know we need dash line. We know we need zero for the dash, and we need a pixel weighed about the same size as the stroke weight. Well, we've got a pixel weight here of 28. But as stroke weight is only one, so we need to start increasing that. It looks like text has got the measles, but we're nearly there. So once we've done that, let's just click away. Let's move the stroke underneath the fill. Now you might get into trouble here, just recognizing that the fill is actually the fill and this opacity setting here. This is really confusing again about this dialogue. You've got opacity for the stroke, you got have no opacity for the fill, and you've got no opacity for the whole thing. When you're dragging stroke down, you need to make sure that it goes all the way under fill and fill is this line plus this line, let's drag it. We can't drop it here, but we can drop it here. We have the same sort of effect around our text as we were able to get around the object we've just done at by selecting the text with the selection tool before we begin, I think it's worth recapping that really really quickly, let me just go and get the type tool. Press D for the default settings. I'll just wind down my type here to about 200 points. Let's click in the document here and let's type the word fun. Select, divert with the selection tool, go to the appearance panel. We know that we don't want this fill or this stroke in the appearance panel. We're going to click down here on one of these. It doesn't matter which because whichever you select just opens up this little box where now we've got strokes and fills that we can actually do something with, here is a red fill. Let's go to the stroke. Let's put a yellow stroke on it. Let's go and make this a dot. So what we're going to do is round caps dash line,zero for the dash, something for the gap. Let's make it this time, 15 for the gap. Let's set the weight to the same amount. 15, got dots everywhere. Just come back into our dialogue here and drag this immediately below the fill. We've got a effect, that has little dots around the edge of our text, something that is not obvious from your work in illustrated what works with shapes like this does not work exactly the same way with texts, but it is possible you just need to know how. 4. Pt 3 Apply stroke effects to your type: The technique that we learned in the last video is just a starting point for working with text. Provided you can get effects like this dotted outline around your text, then there are other things that you can do as well. At this point, I want to get rid of the dotted strike. Let's just go back to the stroke, let's turn off the dots, and let's just put a line around it. Now, this line is actually way thicker. It's a 28-point line, so when it's in front of the fill, we get this thick outline. When it's underneath the fill, then we get the thick outline around the type, but we're not losing the fill, so we get more flexibility here. Let's go to this stroke, and let's see some other things that we could potentially do with it. We can go to effect and then distort and transform, and let's go to roughen. I'll turn preview on. Now because we're working with a stroke that is behind the fill, the fill is blocking out the effects, so we can still clearly see our text, but we're able to add some really cool effects to it. For example, the roughen filter, we've got preview turned on. If I select smooth and it looks like it's got dots behind it, if I choose corner, then I've got spiky ends. You can just adjust the size and the detail values to see what other sorts of effects you can get. If you wind the size down quite low and the detail down very low, then you get this chunky cut outlook if you like. You also potentially we'll get a different effect if you choose absolute as against relative. In this case, have a look and see what absolute is doing. It's giving us this cut out effect around the type as if it's been cut out of paper a little bit unevenly. We choose smooth, then that's a smoother effect. But this would be one way of getting a cutout text effect. This looks like it's been hacked away with a pair of scissors, a blue piece of text out of a navy blue piece of paper, for example. Those are the sorts of things that you're able to do as soon as you understand that by simply typing text and selecting it with the text tool is not the way to format texts. You just don't get the flexibility with it. Let's look at another thing we can do with our type, I'm going to select over my type I have my stroke here. I'm going to duplicate it, so I'll just drag it onto the new icon. That gives me two strokes. No basic change to my type at this stage. The topmost stroke, I'm going to change to a different color. I'm going to make it pink, and It's blocking out the stroke underneath, which is understandable since we made a duplicate of it to get this far but let's have a look and see what happens when I wind the stroke weight of this stroke back. While I'm getting this layered look, and I can go to this stroke here and make it a bit heavier. I can get multiple strokes on my type with or without this roughened edge. Because they were copies of each other, each of these strokes has a roughened and edge effect applied to it. This pink stroke, if we didn't want a rough on the edge of it, we could just turn off the roughen effect. We get a regular pink line and a roughened blue line. But you can choose either to have an on or off, it's up to you, but those are the kind of options that you have. One of the things that we've been very careful to do so far is to make sure that this text remains editable. Let's prove that to ourselves. I'm selecting over the text, I'm going to the text tool. I'll click in it, and I'm going to change fun to fan, and the effects that we've applied to the texts are being copied to the text immediately. This is fully editable text. Let's just make it funky. The more letters I add, every single one of them is going to be formatted using a format that we have created. Now, I don't want this fun anymore, so I'm just going to remove it, get rid of this as well at this stage. By maintaining the editability of our type, we get access to the type tools, and there's one of them that's really important. Here in the type panel, the one we're looking at is the touch-type tool. Having created our type in the next video, we're going to have a look at the power of this touch-type tool. 5. Pt 4 Adjust type with the touch type tool: To use the touch type tool, we'll make sure a type is selected and then go to the touch type tool. With it selected, you can click on any one of the letters that are in the text that you're working in. You'll see as I'm clicking on each letter, that each letter gets a set of handles around it. Each one of these handles has a different logo in the corner. This one is the Move option. If we move it, that character is going to move. It's going to be better seen on this particular character, so let's go and move it out of the way, so I'm going to move it down a little bit. So individual characters can be moved, they can also be sized and they can be rotated. So you can build up really interesting effects here. You can drag this out to widen it and you can also drag it up here to make it taller. So you can stretch or squeeze your font characters as you wish. Select each of them in turn, do something with it. It's best probably most of the time to work from left to right. But this tool can solve at a minimum some of the kerning problems that you might get when you want letters to tuck into each other. In the original, the tail of the k and the tail of the y, were pretty close to each other, we can solve that by adjusting these letters. Let's make the y perhaps a little bit taller, and maybe make the k, a little bit skinnier, and perhaps even a little smaller. The editability of the text once you use the touch type tool, it's still there, but you may find that you get slightly different results. It's generally better to create your type and then do the touch type effects later on, but the text is still technically editable. Here, you can say that the result of changing the text has broken up the look of our texts so we'd need to attack this with the touch type tool again to get our result back. I'm just going to undo that because I liked my funky word. 6. Pt 5 Whimsical pattern filled text: The final text effect will be created here. We're going to put all of what we've learned together with a lot of new tricks and get a finished result. I'll click on create new and I'm going to choose 1920 by 1080, but this time I want to add boards. I'm going to ensure that I have selected two. I'll just click Create and I'm going to put text on one and my patent on another. I'm then going to target this one by clicking on it and then press Control or Command 0 which scrolls and re-sizes so that it fits this art board into the windows such that we can see what's going on. Let's go to the Type Tool. I'll just click once in my document and type my word in lowercase just because these text elements tend to look better in lowercase. Let's start with a font size at 600 and start by typing the word dotty. I have a font download and I'll give you the download link for this one. It's free and called sunshine puppies therefore let's just go and get sunshine puppies. It's a little bit big, but that's alright because we're going to use the touch-type tool on it and eventually it's going to shrink down a little bit when we squeeze it all up. Now we've got our type, we're just going to leave it as it is right now, because there's no point in setting it to know if PHIL NO strikes won't be able to see it. Let's target the second art board, press Control or Command 0 to bring it where we can see it. I'm going to the blob brush tall, double-click on it to set its settings. The blob brush setting I have here is just 12 points. I want a really small dot. The blob brush is a tool you can use to paint in illustrator. You select a stroke color and it paints fill the shapes. We still I haven't set to smooth ellipsis back off a little bit, therefore it's not quite smooth thus I'll click Okay and I'm just going to zoom into the top corner here, because I need a very small painted dot. With my blob brush tool, I will select stroke as black and I'm going to paint a small uneven shaped dot. You'll see when I selected that, even though I painted with a strike, I now have a filled shape. I love the blob brush tool because it's a really nice tool for creating whimsical elements because you can paint with it. I will select this shape and I'm going to make it just a smidgen smaller. We're going to add the Stuart and transform effect, distort and transform and transform again. Turning on the preview I'm going to bump my copies up to about 20. To start off with, reflect Y so that we can get them to start moving then we're going to increase the horizontal and increase the vertical so that we get this sort of pattern. We are like done, I don't want it to be too far apart. I think of a way to overestimate how far apart I want this. Let's just bump up the copies. What we're trying to do is make a pattern that we can use to fill the dotty text in just a minute therefore I'll click Okay. Again effect distort and transform twice. Apply a new effect, preview on bump up copies to about 20 to start off with. We'll start moving the vertical. Hold the Shift key so that you can push these values out a little bit faster and then we're going to start reducing the number of copies. We're pretty much filling our art board I'll click OK. At this stage, if you think your dot is too big, then you can resize it. The easiest way is to go to the appearance panel with it selected and just turn off your transformations then you can zoom in and actually see a shape and select it because, the transformations have been removed from it. I'm just going to shrink it down a little bit and turn my transforms back on. Go that back out and say what you've got. Well, I haven't filled my document thus let's just double-click on the transform so that we can increase the numbers. Let's add some more to that one. Double-click on the other one too. Open the transform dialogue, turn preview on and just increase the values. What's really nice about these transform effects is that nothing is set in concrete. They can all be removed, but can also be easily edited before you actually commit to them. Now I've got a sort of pattern that I like better than the one I had before, I'm ready to go ahead and expand these sorts which go from one dot into lots of individual dots. I Object Expand Appearance and then object Ungroup because I wanted to get all of these out of the groups that they're in. I had to do that three times. If you go to the last pallet, you'll see that I've got individual dots, no groups. We're going to do our transform each object three time, making sure that I didn't de-select that selection before I did that. Let's just take this dialogue back to what it would be before we start. This is what it's going to look like by default. I want my shapes to reduce a little bit and so let's type in 80 percent and 80 percent. Some of them will be the smallest while some of them will be the largest. Turn on random, so that we get this random re-sizing between 80 and 100 percent. I want to start moving them a little bit, so I'll take this up to 20 and 20 on the vertical. I want them to rotate, so I'm going to set this to 360 so that they rotate between 0 and 360 degrees. One single shape now looks like totally different set of shapes. There's a total random look to this pattern that's all created from a single blob brush circle. At this point I can select a different rotation point. Tourism is looking for something I like and I want something nice and dotty so I'll just click OK. I've got all of my shapes still selected rotated and moved. Let's choose object groups so that we put them into a single group. There are a whole lot easier to manage and that's always a good thing at this point. Now let's open the Swatches palette to have everything showing. Drop this little icon down, make sure it says show all swatches so that you can go ahead and put your pattern in the swatches panel. We're going to grab this pattern and drag it into the swatches panel next to the existing patterns. There are a couple of patents that are shipped with illustrated by default, which we can drop them in there, if you can't drop them, for example, illustrator won't let you. Go up to the top next to the registration mark here and drop it in there because it will always go in. That's a file safe if you like. But I'm going put it down with the rest of the patterns. Let's go back to our text, Control or Command zero. We know that we have to turn off the fill and stroke, which we're going to do now. We're going here to the Appearance panel, and we're going to add a new stroke or add a new fill, it doesn't matter, we just need to get these two here, so that we can start working on our text. We want to fill this text with our pattern, instead of black, I'm going to drop the fill dialogue down, and pick up my pattern. This pattern is not a seamless repeating pattern, we haven't done anything sophisticated like that to it. All we've got is a heap of dots, that's all we need. I know it doesn't look very good right now, but hold on, we're going do something with it in just a minute. But before we do, let's go and give it a stroke color. I'm going to give it a black stroke, I'm just going to wind up the stroke white a little bit, I could do it in here, I can do it up here, it doesn't matter. I've got my stroke, and I've got my dots, and they are not enough dots, I want it to be way more dotty. Let's go to the fill, we need to make sure that we target the fill at this point, we're going to choose Object, Transform, Scale. This allows us to scale both the text and the pattern, or one or the other. What we want to do is, we want to transform our pattern, not our objects, so I'm going to deselect Transform Objects, and because I had uniform set to 40 percent, see how my patent has now got lots and lots smaller. This is what it was at a 100 percent, we can take it down to whatever size we like. I think actually 40 look pretty good. Let's select 40, I had Preview turned on so I could see what I was doing, and I'll just click Okay. We've made our pattern, and now we've scaled it to suit the text that we're working with. At this point, we could go ahead and work with the Touch Type Tool, I'm going to go and select the Touch Type Tool. Let's start selecting all of our characters and do something with them. I'm not going spend a lot of time on this, but I just want you to see that the principle is as exactly as it was, with the other text elements we were working with. There is nothing different to the fact that this one has actually got a pattern in it, it's working in exactly the same way. Next I want to add a fill behind this, I want my text to be on a background. Let's click on the rectangle tool, click once in the document, my Artboard is 1920 by 1080. I'm just setting my rectangle to the exact same size, click Okay, I've got to no fill, no strike rectangle. Let's target the fill, and let's go and fill this with a gradient. I've got a blue sky gradient that is shipped with Illustrator, that'll do for now. Just filling it with that, and I'm going to the Align panel, which you can also get to by choosing Window, Align. Open the flyout menu, make sure you've got Show Options enabled, so that you can see this, Align to options. Make sure that Align to Artboard is selected, because then, this shape that we've selected, we can click Horizontal Align Center and Vertical Align Center, and it aligns directly over the artboard. We need to move it behind everything with Object, Arrange, Send to Back. There's two things I don't like about this, one is that the gradient is a linear gradient. Let's just go, I've got my shape still select to fill, this to target here. Let's go to the gradient flyout, again you can get to that by choosing Window, and then Gradient. Here what I want to do is turn it from Linear into Radial. The center of the gradient is in the middle of the document, I don't like that either. But I do like the fact that it's life, if it were the wrong way round, you could click here and just reverse it. At this point I'm going here to the Gradient tool, there is Gradient panel over here, Gradient tool over here, it's confusing, but that's how it works. With the Gradient tool selected, I've now got a little X mark, and little crosses here, and this is the current gradient. Well, I'm just going to drag where I want my gradient to be. I want the middle to be under the letter T, I'm going to click and drag. This moves the gradient off center, it's a bit further down here. That's a reasonable look, you could fine tune it, we're not going to bother right now. The other thing I don't like, is the fact that the texts and the dots, we can see the background through them. What we need is white fill here, or a pale blue, or something to block out the background. Let's go back and select add text, which is on top. Let's go back to our appearance panel. Here is our stroke, here is our current fill, and the current fill is this dot pattern. Well, the dot pattern comes without a white background. We need to solve this a different way, and we're going to solve it by adding a second fill. Let's click here on Add New Fill. The new fill is just exactly the same as the old fill. We've got dots here, and we've got dots here. Well, we want one of these to be white, and the one we want to be white is the one at the bottom, because we want the black dots on top of it. Let's just drop this down, and select the color we're going to use, white or whatever you're going to use. If you get them the wrong way round, this is what you're going to get. You're going to get a white fill, but the black dots are underneath, and so you won't be able to see them. You need to make sure that the white fill is underneath the black dots. It's also possible to apply an effect to the text. Let's go back to selecting the text, back to the Appearance panel. Click on the Type, so the type itself is selected, and choose Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Zig Zag. If I turn Preview on, you'll see that this totally distorts the letters. We have the same options as previously, we can choose Smooth or Corner, Relative or Absolute. Then we can just adjust the size to suit. I'm going to bring the size way down, and adjust the ridges per segment. You can do that until you get a result that you like, and then just click Okay. What we have here now, is a very whimsical look to our text, it looks like it's been drawn by hand. There are some inaccuracies in it around the edges, around these points here you'll see there's inaccuracies, the sorts of things that you would get if you had actually hand drawn this type. But it's all done from a piece of Type in Illustrator, it's just standard type. Here in the Appearance panel are all the options, you can just turn anything off at any time, and you just have the original font. All these effects have just been applied to a regular font. 7. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to reproduce one or more of the text effects that you've seen in this class, and post an image of your completed text element as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've enjoyed learning things about texts, and creating some whimsical text effects in Illustrator. Now as you are watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt that asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoy this class and learn something from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend this class to others, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to 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.