Illustrator Tutorials: Overlapping Text Effect in Illustrator

what's up guys Eric Vasquez here from teach me to design calm and in today's video I'm going to be giving you a quick tip for creating a logo with overlapping letters in Adobe Illustrator [Music] alright guys we're going to jump right into Adobe Illustrator here and create a new document that is 1200 by 1200 RGB and one artboard and hit create and the first thing I'm going to do is grab my text tool and we're just going to type out a few letters here I'm going to type out the letters do C alright and from here I'm just going to go ahead and change the font to good old Gotham it's got some nice rounded edges and maybe let's change it from bold to medium so from here hold down the shift and alt option keys and drag out from any of the four corners to scale it up and then hold the alt option and shift keys while dragging to create a copy off to the side well that's going to be our copy just in case we screw things up always good to have a backup for this part I'll select the text and just press command shift o to create outlines or you can come up to where it says type up here and choose create outlines from the menu now once you've done that we also need to come up to the object menu and ungroup these letters that way we can move them around independently of one another and what I'm going to do from here is hold down the shift key and just drag the D over so that it lays on top of the o and do the same thing with the C hold down shift and this time drag it to the left we're going to zoom in a bit and I just want to make sure that the gaps are about even here so I'm just going to drag in a couple of guides and just tap the C over a little bit so that it looks like the gap is the same on both of these all right maybe I'll have it come in a little bit more on both sides like that and we are good to go let me just show you guys something really quick I'm going to actually press M to get my rectangle tool and drag a square behind these letters now I'm just going to leave it filled with black and send it to the back by coming up to the object menu and choosing arrange send to back and then lock it by pressing command 2 or coming up to the object menu and choosing lock selection now once you've done that you can't select the background anymore but you can select your letters by clicking and dragging around so I'm going to grab my eyedropper and just sample some of this white so that our text is now inverted we have white letters on a dark background so hopefully you guys are with me so far but we're going to do from here is select letter C and press command C to copy it and command F to paste it in front then I'll press D on the keyboard to get my default colors and I'm going to select the stroke color here and just drag it to the fill so that we have this dark grey color for both now select the stroke make sure that's in the front and come over here to the stroke panel and change the weight to let's say about 12 that'll create a pretty nice thick outline for us now if I move it off to the side there you can still see the original white copy below so what I want to do from here is come up to the object menu and choose expand make sure fill and stroke are both checked off and hit OK and then let's open our Pathfinder from the window menu alright once you have the Pathfinder open we're going to go ahead and choose merge which is the third icon in from the left on the bottom row and we'll hit that once and that's basically going to merge our stroke and our fill into one shape now from here I actually want the seed to kind of overlap here so what I'm going to do is click and hold on my eraser tool in the toolbar and make sure that you select the knife now once you have the knife selected I'm going to cut through here and once here now that's just going to slice this apart so if you press a to get your direct selection tool click on this bottom piece hold down shift and click on this top piece and hit delete and you can now see how this bottom gray piece is just laying over the seat alright so what I can do from here is hold down the shift key and select the oh behind it and I'll come back up to the Pathfinder and choose merge once again press a to get your direct selection tool click on the gray shape and press Delete and there you go that's the basic idea for creating this kind of effect but now on the top we actually want the Oh to overlap the C alright so what I'm going to do here is grab the oh looks like there's some lines in here let me just move my cursor over that and delete those lines so I'm going to select the letter O the white copy press command C command F to paste it in front grab my eyedropper by pressing I and sampling some of this black from the background and then I'm going to click and drag my to the stroke come over here to the stroke panel and set it to about 12 points now we're going to do the same thing as before we come up to the object menu and choose expand make sure its own stroke are checked off and hit OK and then from the Pathfinder we can go ahead and choose merge now just like before you should have a copy in front and a copy and back so grab your knife tool and slice through the top and through the right leaving only the areas that you want to overlap so now I can grab this piece in the front hold down shift and select the C behind it and choose merge go ahead and switch back to your direct selection tool by pressing a select the black piece and then delete it so now you have this cool effect where the oh is coming in the front here and the C is overlapping the O on the bottom so let's go ahead and create that same effect except maybe we'll have the overlap on the bottom this time and the D overlap on the top okay hopefully you guys are with me so far once you kind of see this in action it's actually quite easy so go ahead and copy the D press command F to paste it in front sample the black here to get that color create a fill and we're just going to add a nice bold outline to it come up to object and hit expand then hit OK merge it and grab your knife tool now again we want the D to overlap on the top so we're going to put a slice through here and through here leaving only that top segment now select that segment oops first we want to get rid of any funky lines in here I'm just grabbing that with my direct selection tool and deleting it now press V to get your regular selection tool select both of these choose merge and then just delete it with your alright select both of these shapes here and then choose merge select the black piece hold down shift and click on the light behind it and then choose merge grab your direct selection tool and delete it oh but what's going on there we don't see our cutout here I think what we did is actually we have two copies of this circle so I'm just going to lock that for a second by pressing command two and it looks like we do have two copies just going to delete that one all right but there we go and we just have one more segment to cut out so let's unlock that by coming up to the object menu and choosing unlock all and this time we're going to select the O and kind of repeat the same thing at this point though are always kind of broken into two shapes on the top and the bottom so let's just go ahead and ungroup it now I can select the top shape and the bottom shape separately for this part though we just need the bottom so select it press command C command S and one last time guys let's just repeat those steps drag the fill color to the stroke increase the weight to about 12 points and then come up to object and expand it hit OK merge it and now grab your knife tool we're just going to cut here and here delete these other two pieces with the direct selection tool press V on the keyboard select this top shape hold down the shift key and then we're going to select the letter D and then we'll come back up to merge hit merge grab your direct selection tool and delete it alright so there you go guys that's pretty much the effect now the reason why I put it on a black background is so that I could show you guys how this looks but basically if I remove this background now this should be all one shape okay so I should be able to change the color but as you can see there's still a few kind of lines in here so let's just clean this up really quick let's say I just wanted to make this a solid blue color all right I'm going to hit OK and you can see what's kind of happening here first of all it's not actually changing the colors to what I want so I'm going to come up to window swatches and maybe choose one of these instead there you go illustrator is a little stubborn sometimes so now I'm just going to that extra shape in there select all three of these letters and hit merge one more time from the Pathfinder all right so now we can treat this as one shape one color and you can use it on either a light or a dark background like here all right and we've got our live type which I usually just kind of put on a layer of its own if I need it but that's basically the idea guys that's how you create an overlapping text effect that you can use on logos on title treatments and so much more so if you guys want to check out some of our other illustrator videos I have an Adobe Illustrator basics video series which you guys can watch totally free on the teach me to design YouTube channel and if you're somebody who is interested in learning more about logos and branding be sure to check out our brand new course guys it's over at teach media design comm slash brand U and if you enjoyed this video please give us a thumbs up comment subscribe and we'll see you next time

Channel: Teach Me To Design

Views: 166,133

Keywords: illustrator tutorials, adobe illustrator tutorials, illustrator video tutorials, adobe illustrator video tutorials, overlapping text effect in illustrator, overlapping text effect illustrator, how to create an overlapping text effect in illustrator, interlocking letters illustrator, illustrator text effects, illustrator logo design, logo design illustrator, teachmetodesign, TMTD, Teach Me To Design, design better, illustrator logo design tutorials

Id: _52SqovjRwk

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2017