How To Customize Fonts To Make T-shirt Designs - Illustrator Tutorial

[Music] what is up to all my internet friends out there in the world Charlie pangas here I'm so pumped at it's Monday and I thought to myself how am I gonna start off this Monday right and that's when I hit me I got to show you guys how to customize type to make t-shirt designs in Illustrator that's what we're gonna do today but before we get into it can you guys find the alpaca in the room he's hiding somewhere and you guys are way too good at finding him so hopefully I found a pretty good spot for him this time and by the way you guys came up with some amazing names and I think I landed on one that I really like I'm gonna share that in the next video let's go ahead and get this video started the great thing about fonts is there's so many different font styles and there's so many different things that you can do to customize that font if that makes sense instead of just going with the normal default so our goal is to stay away from default as much as possible we don't want to just type something out and call it done because that's boring right so we really want to take it a step further and really utilize the font to its full potential instead of like I said just letting illustrator determine how that font looks as soon as you type it out so I'm gonna demonstrate what I mean by that but there's so many endless possibilities here guys so let's go and begin I want to hit T on my keyboard I just want to type out create okay it's gonna be really small but we're just gonna resize it just like this and we're gonna zoom in a little bit so we know what we're doing here by default this is what illustrator tells the font to do it has a set amount of kerning line-height and everything like that that's basically all in Auto but what we want to do is we want to take it a step further so before I even customize anything what I want to do is hold an option hover over the font and I want to click and drag up and that's gonna duplicate it so we're just creating an extra duplicate copy so we have a master copy from here I'm just gonna zoom in a little bit and we're gonna start messing with the kerning of the font so if I hit T on my keyboard again I can tap anywhere I want in between these characters and I can even use the left and right arrows to go left to right obviously so we can go in between each character if I go in between the C and the are you can see this little line right it's a faint black line and if I hold an option I can actually hit left on my keyboard or right and I can change the letter spacing just by doing that see how cool that is I want to start changing the letter spacing of things and just kind of tidy it up I guess you can say and figure out what I want to do with everything so I'm really gonna try to match the the spacing in between everything and this doesn't have to be perfect but I definitely you know want to make sure it looks pretty consistent so again I'm gonna go through everything real quick and this is gonna change drastically so we're not gonna mess with that one yet but basically we're gonna start focusing on this a first because we're gonna do some pretty cool stuff with that a what I want to do is make the e touch there are a little bit I don't mind that so the main thing is making sure this top of the art and the top of the e is you know the same space as everything else so I think that looks pretty good I don't mind them touching we're gonna leave that the same and now what I want to do is I want to outline the text and we're gonna basically think about this font as shapes instead of one text line if that makes sense the one thing I want to do is ungroup everything again we're gonna look at everything as an individual shape so if I if I get rid of this a look at that's an individual shape right this T is an individual shape so now we can really do a lot to this what I want to do is select only certain anchor points of each letter so I want to go to my direct selection tool which I'm on or you can just hit a on your keyboard and I'm gonna select the right side of this Irae here it's on the left of the a I want to drag it all the way over until it hits the a I want to do the same thing for the T on the right and I want to drag it over to the left until it meets with the e and as you can see we have this eight now but it's not quite what we want we're basically just having a lot of fun here right we don't want to spend too much time on this we just want to have a little bit of fun and this is all subjective you can do whatever you want to these characters you can drag them however you want you can have as much fun as you want with these now that a is kind of hidden right and we don't want that so what I want to do is I want to go to this a and I want to go to object and I want to go to path and I want to do offset paths so we're gonna do an offset path on this and we're gonna fill it with white but this is way too thick so we're gonna go to like a three see what that looks like I think three looks pretty good so we're gonna go okay and we want to fill that with white and as you can see now things are kind of hiding right and that's exactly what we wanted now the a is popping out again but what we have an issue with is this T because now the T is in front of everything so we can either you know select that and send it behind everything by either right-clicking arranging it and sending it to the back or we can use the shortcuts which is a shift command and the left bracket to send it back but I kind of liked how it's in front of everything so I'm gonna look at it one more time so we're just gonna keep that for now with this left II on the left of the a I think I'm just going to keep this center of the e the same I think I like it just default so it matches this on the right but what I do want to do is I want to extend the tea on the right side more so I'm going to go ahead and go to my direct selection tool hitting a on my keyboard and I want to select the top right corners and I just want to drag those all the way over so let me select those real quick it's like both points holding shift and you can drag to the right and what that's going to do is it's going to allow you to extend it see just like that now this is looking alright I don't mind the way this is looking but what I want to do is I actually want to drag this en and we're gonna copy the same gap in between this a and the T and we want to copy the same width right so we want this line right here in between the T and the e to be the same as everything else but you can always draw out guides and stuff like that to get it perfect but for this video I'm not gonna worry about that so what I'm gonna do is go to my rectangle tool and I want to make sure it's on red or something so I can see what it looks like and I'm just gonna draw a little box kind of matching the same width down here as you can see we're trying to make sure it looks pretty consistent so I think that looks pretty good and then I just want to drag it in place and rotate it and make sure it's right under the T if that makes sense so there's not a gap and I'm gonna fill it with white and then what we could do is we can actually zoom in select everything and hit command Y and we're gonna see frames pop up right it's gonna be like little thin lines and now we can drag this up so it's flush with the other line of the T so now if we compare the original font to the one that we just customized you can see that it's two different fonts almost right it's a completely different design and feel we are not done yet we're gonna take this design and copy at once and we're gonna make sure we flattened everything so we're gonna go to our Pathfinder and just make sure everything's merged together and then what we want to do is delete all the white because we don't want that anymore so we're just gonna go through it real quick and delete all the white and this is really quick we don't have to spend too much time doing this and we can even change the font color real quick so we can select the entire design and change it to whatever we want like red and then this is going to be a little easier to see because now we can kind of see what we need to delete so I'm just kind of going through and deleting everything that I don't need just like this and then you're left with a final design that you can change the color with what I want to do now is go to my rectangle and change the color to something different like a gray or something like that and then what we're gonna do is drag out a rectangle and we're just want to drag it all the way around the design and when you're dragging this out just kind of make sure everything looks nice and even just like this and then I want to send that behind everything so shift command and left bracket and that's gonna send it behind everything once you drag that box out a quick way to make sure everything Center is just selectable things make sure your alignment is set to align to selection and just Center everything horizontally and vertically and now your perfectly Center and then from here what I want to do is around the corner so I'm just going to select that shape with my selection tool and I just want to go to these little white corners and I just want to drag so now we're rounding the corners so now we have this box right that's pretty cool and we can change the color to whatever you want let's say we want to change it to black see now we have this red and black look which is pretty cool we can go crazy with the color but one thing that I like to use a lot is Adobe color themes there's so many different themes that are pre-selected for you if you go to Explorer and these all look pretty great so what I want to do is select this design or actually we're gonna use the same one what I want to do is select the background and I just want to select one of these colors real quick so we're just gonna select this blue and then now we want to select the actual font itself right and I want to select a different color so as you can see we have this really nice like concrete color going on right and you could do this until you're happy right like I can go back to crate and I can change it to this orange color look at that oh my gosh look at how poppy that is and if you put that on a shirt it's gonna look great so let's go ahead and start mocking this design up and we can do a couple more things to it as well while we're mocking it up so what I want to do is go to my little mock-ups real quick let me find them if I can we're just gonna drag one out so let's go to this black mock-up and just drag it out real quick so now we have a cool little mock-up right but one thing that I did notice is the mock-ups obviously a darker color so I'm gonna select this design one more time and I'm gonna inverse the color so I'm gonna take the back and make it that orange and then make the actual font itself that blue color just like this so now we have a really poppy color going right now we're just gonna resize this right and kind of fit it to where we want it on the mock-up so we can visualize what its gonna look like let's say we want to take it a step further and I want to add like a slant to it so I'm going to select this actual design real quick we're gonna transform shear we're gonna add a vertical shear to it real quick just to give it a something else you know give it like a little bit more flavor I guess you can say and then I want to duplicate it once just real quick and then I can do command D a bunch of times see and now we have a you know a font going all the way down the shirt we're really taking the extra time to make sure this design looks good before we print it because we can just wait until we print it to find out if it looks bad or not but this is a great way to really test your design to make sure it looks good and that's exactly what we're doing so so from here we can do the same thing we can add that slant again by adding that shear and just testing it out see what it looks like you know and I'm not a big fan of doing this but this is just one option and we could take this even a step further let's select all of them and I'll show you guys how to add a gradient to it so let's group them together and let's add a gradient and after changing that color field to a gradient we can go to the gradient tool and change the direction of the gradient see and really make it fade into the shirt so you look at that so there's so many different things you can do here and this is really how you're gonna step up your design game by learning how to customize fonts how delicious was this tutorial we just took a basic font and we transformed it into a cool t-shirt design using illustrator I hope you guys learned something from this video if you did let me know in the comments section below and you guys already know I make videos like this one every single week so make sure you are subscribed so you don't miss another video and hit the thumbs up button helps my videos grow so much and I just want to be honest with you guys I am so incredibly thankful for all of you and I am just having so much fun making these videos in 2019 and I feel so rejuvenated to just kill it in 2019 so thank you guys so much for your support I hope you guys are enjoying my content but that is it for me guys thank you so much for watching keep creating keeping awesome I'll catch you guys in the next video peace did anybody find the alpaca yet let me know in the comment section below I know he's somewhere he's got to be somewhere he just kind of walks around the office and hides himself and in the next video we're gonna reveal his name because he needs a name today's gonna be a good day this week is gonna be a good week have a great week guys I'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: Charley Pangus

Views: 72,840

Keywords: charleypangus, How To Customize Fonts To Make T-shirt Designs, adobe illustrator tutorials 2019, how to customize fonts in illustrator, t-shirt design, custom tshirt design tutorial 2019, illustrator shirt design, custom shirt designs illustrator, adobe illustrator (software), shirt design, typography tutorial, illustrator custom type, how-to (website category), graphic design (industry), illustrator shirt design tutorial, how to customize fonts in adobe illustrator, learn, tutorial

Id: 1RWs9j_NkSg

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019