Create an Isometric Type Effect in Adobe Illustrator

hey there my name's Daniel white some people online know me as danske I'm a designer and instructor with Envato Tut's Plus and in this course we're going to learn how to create an awesome layered isometric text effect all in Adobe Illustrator and there's a number of different steps involved in creating this particular effect but by the end of this course you'll be able to take pretty much any fonts and any word and then create a similar effect yourself and before we kick off the course if you're looking to download a ton of creative assets that you can use in your designs then definitely check out Envato elements literally just one subscription gets you access to like over a million assets across a huge variety of categories so in this course you can use any font you like if you'd like to follow along I'm going to be using the font indigo if you'd like to follow along and use the same font then you can download it from elements and the link will be provided with the course and this font is just one of like over a million assets that are all included within one subscription so if you love downloading like tons of creative assets then definitely check out Envato elements ok so there's a brief introduction of what we're going to be doing in this course so now we're going to jump into Adobe Illustrator and get started okay so we're now in Adobe Illustrator first things first we need a new document so we'll start by going to file down to new and you'll see the welcome screen and I'm going to select 1920 by 1080 here you can pick any document size you like it doesn't really matter I'm using pixels and I'm gonna twizzle this down here get some more options now we're working in RGB color mode this is designing for screens you can use CMYK as if you're designing for print but we get a few more colors in the RGB spectrum so we're gonna stick with this one because we've got some quite punchy colors I'm gonna be using within this design 72 PPI is absolutely fine for this click create and you'll see that we get a new artboard and a new document so the next thing to do is to save this so if we go up to file down to save as and we can type a name I'm gonna call this course save that as an adobe illustrator file these are the settings that I'm using click OK there we go we have our document saved so all good just in case anything goes wrong okay so first of all we actually need to get ourselves a font so as I said we're going to jump to inverted elements we've got this nice font here a chunky font called indigo you can see a few different uses of this font here but when you're happy click download and it will download that font and if I just jump to my desktop it will download it most likely is a zip folder and what you can do whether you're on Windows 10 or Mac OS is double click this and it will either extract it or you can go inside the zip folder essentially we want to get the contents of the zip folder out onto our desktop or another folder location on our computer so you can see I've got mine here and if I just whip this up it might look something like this there is an outline version as well but where we're not going to use that so whether you're using the open type format or the true type just double click on the font and as I say whether you're on Windows 10 or Mac OS that have an option to install that font and there you go you're all good to get started and it should automatically load that font straight into Adobe Illustrator if it doesn't just give illustrator a restart and you should be all good to go okay so we've created a new document we've saved that document we've also installed the font that we're gonna be using in this course so yeah I will see you in the next lesson hey there welcome back to the course in this lesson we're gonna learn how to quickly create an isometric grid that we can use in Illustrator now we're not going to be using this too extensively with the design that we're creating it's gonna be isometric but it's not gonna be tied to a grid however we're doing a course on isometric design so I couldn't not include this because you might want to work a bit more specifically on that grid so whether you want to or not it doesn't matter it will be on its own separate layer you can turn it on or off and I'm gonna jump into Illustrator now and show you how to quickly create this isometric grid okay so we're now in Illustrator as we left off we have our new document and I'm gonna start by going up here to the line tool just left-click and hold until you see the rectangular grid tool let make a left click anywhere on the artboard and it brings up this dialog box and we can specify width and a height for the grid that we're going to be creating we can also choose the number of horizontal and vertical dividers so I'm just using this here so I'm going with 100 and 100 again now it doesn't matter what values you use but the important thing is that the width and the height and the number of vertical and horizontal dividers they are the same so this is good to me click OK and you can see we've got quite a detailed grid there now we need to turn this isometric so what we're going to do is we'll go over here to the transform panel click on the more options icon and you see you get a few more options now if you don't see this if you're on an older version of Illustrator what you can do is go up to window and then down to transform and I've got this panel here that I can use in fact what I can even do is I could dock this as part my workspace and then it just pops up there so once you've got the panel first thing you're going to want to do is make sure that this is unlinked so we don't want our width and our height to constrain those proportions as we adjust either one of them so we're going to select our height and in this box we're going to type 86 point six zero two percent very specifically this number and press return and you'll see it makes everything a little bit narrower it squashes it next what we're going to do is go to this box here this is the shear and we'll select this and press -30 press return and alongside that we have the rotate box and in this one we're going to type 30 and press return and there you go we have our isometric grid now you can of course scale this I could zoom out and I could just scale this up to be giant just so it covers the entire artboard and I can adjust the position now what you can do this with guides in Illustrator I like to kind of create this myself because now I get a lot more flexibility in what I can do with this I could for example I could make this dinner I could make that a guide sticker I can actually change the other stroke properties if I wanted I could have like dashed lines for example I can even add a color so I could go and add something like a cyan and then if you need to deselect it go to select deselect and there you go I've created my own isometric grid you can move it around you get a lot of flexibility with it now what I'm going to do is actually just zoom out it's a very big grid so I'm going to select this grid go over to my layers panel I've got mine doctor over here now at the moment we just have layer one that's what you get by default with a new document so I'm gonna call this we'll call this isometric grid and what I can do is I can lock this layer by clicking in this space here just so I don't accidentally move it by mistake and I could also just turn this off and back on so I can turn it off and on as I'm gonna like now if I go to the bottom of the layers panel I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to call this text now this is where our isometric text design is going to go as I mentioned a moment ago we're not going to be working too specifically with the grid in this course but it's nice to have it there if we ever need it just by turning it off and back on okay so we've set up our isometric grid is there on its own layer if you want to turn it off or on depending on the isometric design you're creating but we've also set up our new text layer and in the next lesson what we're gonna do is actually create some text and then make that isometric as well so I'll see you in the next one hey there welcome back to the course in this lesson we're gonna add our text and make it isometric so we'll jump back into illustrator now you can see this is where we left off we have our text layer selected here so first things first let's grab that type tool click anywhere on the artboard and we'll type some text I'm using the word drip I just thought the word dripped look pretty cool in this font but you can of course use any font and any word that you like so from the character panel over here in the property inspector I'm just going to type indigo do a search for that font I downloaded from envato elements then I'm gonna scale it down holding shift if I don't hold shift it will do this and skew out of shape that's not what we want and I'll pop that in the middle there and for the next step it's important to make sure that you're happy with your font properties your font size any letter spacing all that stuff because the next step we're going to convert this to outlines so illustrator won't register this as editable text anymore so just make sure you're happy with your text before going on to this next step so we'll go up to type down to create outlines and if I jump into outline mode that's command or control Y on the keyboard you'll see essentially a stylus wireframe of our document so we can see that these are just shapes now so what we can do with this now is we can actually select the text and again we can repeat that process for creating the isometric grid so we'll go over here to the transform panel change the height to eighty six point six zero two percent press return and then click on the more options icon and we'll share that by minus 30 and then we'll rotate by 30 and there we go we have our isometric text and what we can do is open up our layers palette and if you are using the isometric grid you can maybe scale this down a little bit and you can see here that everything lines up so that's all good it's trying to snap to lots of random things so if we go up to view we've got snap to pixel turned on so I'm just gonna make sure that I go to view again and we'll turn on snap to point because when we come to the next lesson adding color and things and creating shadows a bit further on it's gonna make life much easier with snap to point turned on so we'll turn that one on we actually won't need our grid for the remainder of the course but it's there if you would need it so we can turn that off and there we go so that wraps up the end of the lesson in the next one we're going to take a look at adding some color and the layer effect to our text hey there welcome back to the course in this lesson we're not only going to be adding color to our design but we're actually going to add this layered effect to our isometric text so we'll jump back into it now okay so I'm going to start by going up to file down to save like a good boy in case anything happens so we've got our isometric text here what I'm going to do is select this and I'm gonna go up to window down to swatches and I've got my swatch panel docked up here my workspace and we've got lots and lots of colors so let's pick a color we'll double click on this one here doesn't matter what color you pick the important thing is that you check global now what global allows us to do is if we check swatches global if you update that swatch at any point every instance of that color will be updated throughout your entire document so it's a fantastic way to work I highly recommend it that's what we're going to be doing in this video so we have our global swatch you can give it a name now if you like click OK and you can see it applies that color to our text now what we're going to do is go up to effect down to 3d and extrude and bevel and you'll see this window pop up here and I can turn on the preview button so we'll check that and it makes our text 3d gives it some depth it's all little bit of a weird wonky angle so but what I'd like to do is we'll just reset all of these that's the x y&z axis we'll set that back to zero so it's exactly as it was and we could crank up the extrude depth as well just to make it a bit more obvious so you can adjust these values here or you can click on these and adjust the angle or you could hover over this cube here and adjust the rotation that way so I'm going to click on the bottom with the red lines appeared this is going to rotate just over this axes here so I'm just going to bring this up ever so slightly the extrude depth is a bit much so maybe I'll change that to a hundred maybe we go 450 so you can find kunis you could make it massive if you want some really tall text and what we can do is if I bring this up here we can actually go more options and we get a few more options so we've got plastic shading you could have no shading or you could have diffuse shading so you get lots of different types of how the 3d effect can shade but we're actually going to do is we're going to select no shading so now it looks like this we'll click OK and you can see it looks terrible we can't actually determine where the top is the top surface or the sides are but if we select everything and go to object expand appearance we can go into our outline mode remember that's command or control Y if I just scale this up a little bit we now have a 3d wireframe view of our letters so if I select this it's all grouped together if I go to object and ungroup you may need to do this more than once there's a shortcut key there we'll do it a few times I can now take these letters on top and if I hold shift on the keyboard and press the up arrow key a number of times I can lift those off like so then what I'm going to do is drag over everything underneath now in outline mode you can see these are just lots of random shapes it's a bit messy we're gonna clean this up and make it one shape so if we go to window down to Pathfinder and select unite that's the top left option it will combine all these random pieces into a single shape there we go just like that one single click and we're done so I can come back out of outline mode and if I just select my word up here I can hold shift and use the down arrow key and nudge this all the way down now I like to use this little shift and nudge technique because it allows me to just hold shift use the arrow keys to move something out make some changes and then move it back I know it's going in exactly the same place it started you could manually drag out and then drag it back in but there's always that chance that it's just not gonna be exactly where it was before so that's why I do that and then we can go object and group so we'll group that surface together so it now all moves around and then if I select the the side the depth essentially what I can do from the color picker is double click on this and I'll just gonna go down make that a little bit darker something like that just to bring back that depth okay so we've got some isometric text we've added some depth to it next I'm going to select this darker color and go to edit copy edit paste in place and you've got some shortcuts there then again hold shift and use the down arrow key to nudge that down so what I'm gonna do now isn't gonna go up to my swatch panel and add another color so I'll just double click on another swatch check preview check global of course and adjust the sliders so something like this I'm gonna have it graduating from this lighter color to some darker colors it's gonna be like quite a nice gradient hopefully but if they're global swatches I can always fine tune that at the end so we'll just zoom in I'm just gonna position this just so it lines up we'll zoom in nice and close now at the moment you can see this is actually on top so what you can do is go to object arrange send to back and it will put that darker shape behind everything and if I select that again I'll go to edit and copy but this time I'll go to edit paste in back so that's what I probably should have done because it will paste this behind everything else and then they can again move that down double click another swatch check global click OK and just repeat the process so we're just copying pasting it behind shifting it down a little bit finding another swatch making that a global swatch and there we go so we've got one more we're doing that last one I'm just doing with shortcut keys there when you repeat this process over and over again you'll learn the shortcut keys for sure so there we go so I've just done that really quickly and now I've just got to fine-tune all these distances I'm just going to get them as close as possible just so we don't get any kind of any like white gaps like that want this to be nice and tight you can of course a zoom in thousands of percent to ensure maximum accuracy so there we go I can pop up back in the center and you can see we have a few little oddities happening here so if I click on this one the Purple's seem to be in front so if I just go to object arrange center back there we go so that seems to have fixed it so when you have this many layers it can get a little bit complicated but remember you've got that object and the arrange option up there so you can just move certain objects in front of others or move other ones behind and one last thing we're going to do is just gonna fine-tune those colors so remember we have these as global swatches so we can double click on the swatch check preview and I can fine-tune this something like that so it's gradually getting darker and going for more from like a turquoise teal color through to a purple so there we go something like this and then the last one make that even darker and that's the beauty of these global swatches you really do get maximum control to fine-tune that as much as you like click OK so there we go we've taken our isometric text you've made it 3d with some layers we've added color with global swatches and in the next lesson we're going to be adding some shadows just to give everything a bit more depth hallo welcome back to the course so we've added some layers some color in this lesson what we're gonna do is add some shadows to our text just to give everything a little bit more depth so we'll jump back into it now and I'll show you how to do this rightio so this is where we left off we have our text we have it layered and we have lots of colors all set up as global swatches but it still looks quite flat now you might want this style which is fine that looks great but we're gonna we're gonna add some shadows to give this a bit of depth so remember when we went up to view in the previous lesson and went snapped a point this is going to come in handy so if we zoom in nice and close what I'm gonna do is just grab the pencil and I'll start with this one so I'm gonna click here and this is nice and easy we have straight lines essentially this is a this is a fun dr. dot so if you lose your point like this at any point just go command or control Y to jump into outline mode remember you get that wireframe there we go we've completed shape so essentially what we're going to be doing is defining a light source just imagine where the light is coming from and then we're going to create shadows based on that so I've just created this random shape here and what I'm gonna do is select the gradient tool and over here from the property inspector just gonna click on the gradient options icon and then click the gradient slider this will add a default black to white gradient and I'm gonna leave this running from left to right just so the gradient it doesn't go weird if I rotate it you can see it kind of comes from an angle I kind of want to keep it in line with my lettering you kind of just degrading if you like though you can also adjust how far the gradient comes across so it could reach all the way across or it could be very very short like this or you might want to go to the gradient panel and just swap that around altogether so it depends entirely on what you're going for but once you've done that with the black to white gradient just select it go to opacity here and just change the blending mode from normal to multiply now if you're on an older version of Illustrator just go up to window down to transparency and there you go you get that same panel popup now this is this is pretty intense so I'm going to bring that up pasty down quite considerably we'll go with mmm we'll go with 30% and then I can go back into the gradient and just fine-tune that if I want to have that a little bit narrower or I could swap it round again so you can see I'm just really fine-tuning the gradient the opacity so it's going to be darker in this part here and then it'll be lighter here so we'll leave that one like this I'm gonna do another one now so we've got got a little one here so there we go tiny little gradient remember select it change the blending mode to multiply and then adjust the opacity depending on how strong you would like that gradient to be so you can see already we've just literally done two and it takes it from being flat to having much more depth okay so that's pretty easy we've got the dr. dot we've got lots of straight edges that's easy what about circles or circular edges or rounded corners because trying to get the pencil and to draw around this corner exactly well it's not only going to be imprecise but there's a better way to do this so at the moment have this artboard I'm actually going to go to view and then down to hide edges nope that's the wrong one there's another one there we go hide artboards so i still have an artboard but it's just hiding the edges so i kind of have this infinite canvas now which is just going to make things a lot easier so if i just select everything here and then i'm going to go to edit copy edit paste in place hold shift and use the down arrow key again [Music] just nudge this all the way down here what I'm going to do is try and create a shadow on the inside so if I just drag over everything to select it and then grab the shape builder tool over here on the Left what this allows me to do is join individual segments together into a single shape so I can just click and drag through everything in this circle just make sure you capture everything and that is now a single shape but I can actually click on this if i ungroup it first maybe get well ungroup that a few times this individual piece I can now move around so again I can use shift and up we're using that shift and nudge technique again and boom there we go it pops it back in that spot and I've isolated that shape now while we're here I'm gonna do another one so we're going to add a shadow here on this curve so this one is probably one of the more complicated ones so I think how I'm going to get around this is I'm gonna start by grabbing the pencil what we'll do is we'll click we'll add a shape I'll bring the gradient to about a halfway point I'm just gonna hold shift and click to keep my line perfectly vertically straight so there we go I have a random shape and I'm just going to fill this with a random color for the time being just so I don't get confused with the gradient now if I go into outline mode again that's command or control Y I get that wireframe view this looks incredibly complicated but if I select everything and grab the shape builder tool what I can do is I can actually hold down alt or option on the keyboard and you can see the plus changes to a minus and whereas before the shape builder tool combined shapes together this will actually remove them so if I hold down alt or option and then click and drag you can see it will trim off anything outside of the selection so everything I'm dragging through now with alt or option held on my keyboard is being completely removed so I'm just going to do this we'll get rid of absolutely everything and then now what I can do is let go of that and then just go back to the normal one so we'll just click and drag without holding any other keys on the keyboard combine all this together now sometimes you will get like random artifacts like this if you zoom in far enough you can see these random pieces you can use the direct selection tool up here to select them and delete them so these random little pieces of path and this bit over here looks to have gone a little bit weird so we could use the shape builder tool or we could select everything and we'll try the Pathfinder panel and we'll see if we can unite that there we go so I hope we've got this random little piece here so again direct selection tool so sometimes when using the shape builder tool you do get this these random anchor points just happen to find their way into certain places and it's just a case of diagnosing how how they cut there and then getting rid of them with the direct selection tool it's a great way to kind of isolate certain areas select anchor points and remove them so that's kind of how you do it so now we can come out of outline mode and again we'll hold shift use the good old shifter nudge technique and we could go and apply our gradient all over again but actually what I'm going to do instead is use the eyedropper tool and just click on a gradient that I've already done and it will instantly apply that same gradient with those same settings and that same blending mode of multiply now it's a little bit intense there so I might just bring the opacity down just a pinch and we have this one up here so we can eyedropper tool that one as well now one doesn't seem to want to work for some reason so if you do get anything like that just not working don't worry about it just go and change that to multiply yourself and I'll bring that down like so so there we go we've added some depth to the edge of a shape that was straight we've added it to the inside of a letter but we've also added it to a curved one around the corner so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to speed this up go through do those same three techniques across the rest of the entire shape and then we'll be ready to move on to the final lesson [Music] [Music] okay so there we go I finished adding the shadows it just helps give everything a bit more depth and just feel a little less flat so we're going to move on to the final lesson in a moment where we're going to be looking at adding some highlights using freeform gradients hey there welcome back to the course we've arrived at the final lesson have created our text we've made it isometric we've added layers to it we've added color shadows to give it depth now what we're going to do is we're going to add a few highlights in places just to finish everything off we're going to be doing this using the freeform gradient tool so we'll jump into it now and get started okay so this is where we left off we've added the shadows to give it some depth now we need to add some light or some highlights so what we're going to do is select our trip this is our surface layer here we'll go edit copy edit paste in place and we use the old shift and nudge technique to just nudge that out of place and then what we can do is go over here you grab the gradient tool now you can use the linear gradient tool or the radial gradient tool but I like this tool because it just gives you a bit more control over your gradient and you can preview those changes in real time so first of all what I'm going to do is I'm going to ungroup all of these letters just so everything is separate there we go fantastic then what I'm going to do is grab the gradient tool with one layer selected go over here and from the gradient panel just click freeform gradient then by default it will add these random points you can see you can move them around very powerful feature we only need to in this case so I'm just going to select these hit delete or backspace on the keyboard so the light is going to be coming from over here on the right so with this selected I can double click and pick one of my swatches and then I can double click on this one and pick that same color as my surface so it's this kind of turquoise ETO color and I could move this around to really fine-tune that highlight if I wanted it coming more from down here a bit over here and all I'm going to do is do the same for this one here so I'm going to select this click freeform gradient just remove all those excess points and then just add that color like so so we'll just do it for these remaining letters here it's a free-form gradient and we'll just double click on those points brings up a swatches panel and then you can go and add in the swatch you'd like so I could actually have this coming from mm maybe the right a little bit more just move these around and then we'll do the D as well freeform gradient remove all of these and then we'll just add in our own ones now what you can do with linear gradients and radial gradients is you could select all of these letters and then go to object compound path and select make in fact if I just show you we'll just add a default black to white gradient it applies the gradient to every single letter because they're not touching each other but if I make them a compound path the gradient runs through the entire thing so you can typically do that with freeform gradients but in this instance it didn't seem to work in the way I wanted it to so that's why we've done it individually but there is another way to do it all in one go with compound paths there we go we've got it done now what I'm going to do is select everything just go and regroup all those letters and use the old shift energy technique there we go and this is what I do it just so it's exactly where I left it in exactly the same position now these highlights are a little bit bright I could go in and edit the color but what's easier is I could just select this and adjust the opacity and just bring that down so you can see here this is where we were we have that flat surface at the top now I would just bring this up to like 70 percent and it just adds a little bit of light coming from this direction and I could double-click to go inside the group select this grab the gradient tool and go and find you and this move this around a bit if I wanted and then just come out of isolation mode so by double clicking a group you go inside it into isolation mode you can edit changes and make changes to things without actually having to ungroup the object but then you can just come back out and then everything's still grouped so that's really really cool and because we have the lights coming from the right and it's casting shadows on the left side there's just a few things I've noticed that don't quite add up so I've added a shadow here so we'll remove that one there's one right here on the side which isn't going to be there because of course the light is hitting it from this angle and this one here I'm just going to flip the gradient to the shadow is in the correct place so the more you understand about lighting and decide where your light source is gonna be and where the shadows are going to be cast it just makes this entire process a little bit easier and maybe even this one let's just swap the gradient around so it's coming from that side and then I can zoom back out and I can still fully edit everything I can adjust the highlights I can adjust the shadows and all the colors so we've applied all these effects on top of this text and this is where global swatches really do reveal their value because you just open up that swatch and you can start messing around with color so I could make this one here a bit more blue preview that change yep that's good to me click OK and I could go and change the color of all of them if I wanted and I don't have to kind of dig into all the layers and go underneath the shadows or anything that's just really really easy so now I've done all that I'm going to go to view show up boards and bring my art board back then we'll finish this off with a background color so I'm gonna grab the rectangle tool just draw a rectangle that is the same width and height as my artboard object arrange center back and we'll just double click a color pickup or you can go and create a swatch looking for something like this maybe a little bit darker a little bit darker still will keep going but you could go lighter it's entirely up to you so there we go that wraps up the course we've created our isometric text effect all in Adobe Illustrator so if you would like to download the project files what I'll do is I'll package those up with the course but now you can take this technique and you can apply that to your own font your own word and create some isometric texts so I really hope you enjoyed this course take care and I'll see you soon you

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 295,317

Keywords: isometric text illustrator, Isometric Text Effects, isometric illustrator tutorial, Isometric Graphics, isometric illustrator, isometric design, isometric design illustrator, adobe illustrator tutorials, illustrator tutorial, logo design, illustrator, adobe illustrator tutorial, illustrator tutorials, adobe illustrator cs6, Adobe Illustrator, isometric, 3d text, Dansky, text effect illustrator, Envato Tuts+, adobe illustrator, isometric text effect, 3d text effect illustrator

Id: FUPvu3kaN3o

Length: 36min 32sec (2192 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019