Inkscape for Beginners: Retro Style Text Tutorial

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this retro style text using Inkscape and at any point in this tutorial you could look down at the bottom left hand side of my screen to see which mouse clicks and keystrokes I'm using and before we get started with this tutorial you'll need to download a specific font called Montserrat ultra bold and I will have a link to that in the description of the video so if you want if you'd like to follow along with what I'm doing here in this tutorial make sure to download and install that font before you open up Inkscape if you--if you install it while Inkscape is opened it won't register you'll have to close out of it and restart okay so once we've done that we'll get started here in Inkscape by the way if you'd like to know how you can make Inkscape appear darkened with these custom icons a link to that information will be in the description of the video so the first thing we want to do is make sure the view is set the custom and then we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 and then we'll open up the align and distribute menu with this button up here and we're going to want less selected chosen from that drop-down and that will open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button there so the first thing we're going to do is create our text and I what I find easy to do is just to create this one letter at a time so for the sake of this tutorial I'm just going to use the letter A and then you can take what you've learned from this video and use it to apply it to any other series of letters or numbers that you'd like so I'll grab the text tool over here or you press f8 on the keyboard and the shortcut click on the canvas to get the cursor blinking and I'm just going to write a capital A I'll come up here to the text editor this T icon and I'm going to find that font called monster rot I'm actually just going to click on any one any one of these fonts and then start spelling out on our M o n s away mo n T s mo NT there we go right here montserrat and the style we want ultra bold and click OK close out of that grab the Select tool I'm going to hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and scale this thing up so it's about that big and I'm going to change this from a text object to a a path by going to a pack object to path and then click on the ungroup button right there so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to turn this green bring the opacity of this down in half and I'll right click that and go to duplicate and I'll make that red and I'm going to lower that one selection I'm going to lower it one step so it goes beneath the green selection and I'm going to give it a red outline by holding shift and clicking on the color red and that's going to put a faint red outline around the outside of it you can't really see it but it's there we're going to make it thicker by going to the stroke style tab and changing the width to I'm going to say 20 we'll try 20 maybe a little maybe 23 that's pretty good right there I'll leave it like that and then once we've done that I'll finalize that by going to pass stroke to path and then path break apart and what I want to do now is zoom in over this selection I'm going to press + on the keyboard a couple of times to zoom in and I'm going to hold shift and click on this outer red piece right here to deselect that and then I'll hold shift and click on this innermost red piece right here to deselect that and whatever is less selected just press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of it so we're just left with this large red piece and this little red piece in there and once we've done that I'll click on that little what little red piece and hold shift and click on the larger one and go to path difference and I'll press 1 on the keyboard to zoom back out to 100% and what I want to do now is duplicate that so what I'll do is I'll just print delete not delete I'll press ctrl D on the keyboard to duplicate that and I'm going to turn that blue and I'm going to give this one a blue outline by holding shift and clicking on the bluh and I'll send that to the bottom lower selection to the bottom at that button there and by default they should have made the 23 point stroke if not just change it to 23 or whatever this value was used previously for this red one and again we'll go to path stroke to pass pass break apart and then past Union okay so we have the outline of the design done we got to create now kind of like the 3d of kind of like the the beveled effect not really a bevel just whatever whatever you'd like to call that like that 3d drop shadow there to do that I'm going to click and drag over the entire design and click on it again to get these rotation handles and I'm sure to hold ctrl on the keyboard and grab this top right arrow and rotate this clockwise four steps so while holding ctrl I go one two three whoops three four four steps like that click off that to deselect everything and then click on just the blue object I'm going to delete that light I'm not delete duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and then just hold ctrl on the keyboard and click and drag this down I'd say about that far that's pretty good there and then we could lower that to the bottom as well and what we want to do now is close up these corners here these gaps between these corners we want to close them fill them in so to do that we'll grab the Bezier pen which is over here or you can just press B on the keyboard to grab that and I'm going to turn on the snap to cuffs nodes which is this icon up here snap to cuss nodes and I'm going to snap the cursor on to this corner and click snap it on to that corner and click and then bring it through this object here and click and then through here click back to the starting point it doesn't matter where you bring that line within the object just as long as it's within the object I'll do this again over here this corner here this corner here bring it through the object and then back to the starting point and then finally we'll go to these corners over here and do the same thing so we'll click on that corner click on that corner through the graphic back to the starting point and then we have our little objects here so what we'll do now is we'll go back to the Select tool and I'm going to hold shift and select all of those little we just created going to hold shift click on this one and then this one here so we have all three selected and then hold shift and click on this bigger blue object at the bottom here and with all four of them selected go to path Union and what we could do now is click and drag over the entire thing click on it again to get the rotation handles and hold control and rotate it counterclockwise for steps so 1 2 3 4 so it's sitting upright again and we'll click off of that to deselect everything so what I'll do now is I'll click on this blue object to the outside here and then hold shift and click on this other blue object here to the writer to the right outside and unify them together by going to path Union and we could turn off the snap to custom nodes now we're done with that and the next thing I'm going to create are these little law this little line pattern going through the letter A so to do that I'm going to grab the squares and rectangles tool which is right here where you just press f4 on the keyboard and I'll click and drag and create a great big rectangle going over the graphic there and I'm going to get rid of that out get rid of that blue outline I'm actually going to make this black and then I'll get rid of that blue outline by holding shift and clicking on the X and then we'll go back to the Select tool and I'll hold shift and click on the letter A Center it on the vertical axis and align the bottom edges and then click off that's a deselect everything now we'll click on just the black rectangle right there and I'm going to take this top hour and pull this down until it's going right above like the arm the green arm of the letter A like that that's pretty good now let's convert that to a path by going to pass object to path and then I'll right-click that and go to duplicate and I'll hold ctrl and just click and drag this one up to about here and I'll take this top arrow and pull that down about that much about that much that's pretty good then I'll right-click that and go to duplicate and hold shift and click on the green letter A and align the top edges with this button here along top edges click off better deselect let's click on just this top one here and take this bottom arrow and just bring that up until this line is really thin so we're going to make a series of lines going in between here that increase with size so to do that we're going to use the interpolate extension so with that selected I'm going to hold shift and click on this line right here so we have them both selected and go to extensions generate from past interpolate and this little menu here should pop up and you're going to want to have these parameters set right here exponent zero interpolation steps five interpolation method to duplicate n paths no interpolate style yes life preview go ahead click live preview to suit that looks like so you can see this kind of like it kind of gets jumbled here there's too many steps in there so we're going to lower this to four let's see how that looks maybe I'll try three we'll do three see how that looks all right that's pretty good and now I'll just once once it looks good like that just go ahead and click apply to finish that then close out of that menu and we're going to get these into these series of new lines in here and with let's go in and select those and ungroup them with the ungroup button and then hold shift and click on the line up top and then the line below them and then the big rectangle at the bottom and we're just going to make sure that they're all spaced out evenly by coming density to the distribute panel and clicking the button that says make vertical gaps between objects equal click on that will unify them all together by going to pass Union and then hold shift and alt and click on the lines right over where the green letter A is so we have that in the green letter A selected and go to path intersection and what we can do now is we could click and drag over all of this bring the opacity all the way up and we can begin coloring this in so I'll click off of that now to deselect everything I'm going to click on just this blue object here and I come down here to the color picker I'm going to find like a dull shade of like navy blue well you'll start out with this shade here 2 1 4 4 7 8 and I'll come over to the fill tab and under the HSL tab on it come over the s row and slide this to the left a little bit just a dull to give that make that a little more dull just to really fit the vintage retro sort of look then I'll click on the letter the red the red letter a there come down here the color picker I'll make that yellow this shade here what is this ffcc zero zero and I'll come over to the L row and slide that to the right to make that like a really dull almost like a beige 10 like a beige almost white kind of color and I'll take the green object here and I'll just make this this shade of red over here which is c83 737 that's pretty good if you notice here I kind of have this at a slant tilted at a slant to do that I'll click and drag over everything click on it again to get the rotation handles and hold control and take this top arrow here and slide that to the right one step and then hold control and take this corner arrow and rotate that counterclockwise one step like that and click off of that and deselect everything to the next step now is to apply the vintage texture over it which is what we're going to do now so to do that we're going to use a raster image and I will provide a link to that in the description of the video so go ahead down to the description find the link to that image and download it and save it somewhere where you can easily access it in your computer and once we've done that let's click on this dark letter blue this dark this dark letter a here right click that and go to duplicate and then hold ctrl and move this off to the left and now click and drag over that entire graphic there excluding that object and group that together and what we want to do now is go to where you have the image saved that we're going to use the texture I have it here in my folder I'm just going to click and drag it into Inkscape and it's going to ask me if I want to embed or link it I'm going to click OK to embed it and if you're using Mac you're not going to be able to do the click and drag functions you just go to file and import if you're using a Mac and that'll do the same thing so here's our texture image here I'm going to bring the opacity of this down because kind of like to see what's going on beneath it and I'm just going to hold ctrl and shift and scale this down until it's just a little bigger than the letter A there and then I'm going to bring the opacity all the way up I'm actually going to put this over here over this object and I'm going to click and drag over both of those so I have them both selected and I'll bring the opacity down a little bit just to show you I have them both selected there by clicking and dragging over both of them bring the opacity all the way back up and just make sure it's centered on the vertical and horizontal axis and then go to object mask set and what I'm going to do now is come over to the L row under the HSL tab I'm going to slide that to the left to make that a lot darker like that and I'll come and put this over the letter here I'll just hold shift and click on the letter and just Center it up on the vertical and horizontal axis click off of it to deselect everything and now click on just the the mask layer here and if you notice this is kind of a little too dark so what we can do now is we could take the opacity and bring that down until it looks pretty decent like that somewhere around like 46 that looks pretty good and if you notice if you'd like to make it look even better if you notice my thumbnail use kind of like a backdrop we could do the same thing just apply the texture to the backdrop as well so I'll do that I'll show that to you real quick grab the squares and rectangles tool and just create a rectangle going over it bring your opacity all the way up and come down to the color picker and I'll make this like a really like a shade of like light blue like that maybe even lighter that's pretty good I'm going to select tool lower that to the bottom hold shift click on the letter A Center it on the vertical and horizontal axis click off of it to deselect everything and I'll click on just this uh this light blue rectangle right here and I'll right click that and go to duplicate and again coming over to the L row I'm going to slide that to the left to make that darker like that and I'll just bring in another copy of our texture here click and drag that into Inkscape bring the opacity down so I can see what's beneath that hold ctrl and shift and scale that down so it's a little bit bigger like that that's pretty good then I'll hold a shift and click on the rectangle Center it on the vertical horizontal axis bring the opacity all the way up go to object mask set send lower that to the bottom and then raise it one step raise selection one step and you can bring the opacity to that down a little bit as well just uh just what isn't so like like a harsh you should bring it down makes it look nice and that's pretty much it we're done we have created our retro-style text and lettering using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thank you for watching [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 87,144

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape logo, inkscape logo design tutorial, inkscape for beginners, vector, vector design, vector graphics, vector logo, vector tutorial, vector icons, graphic design, learn graphic design, graphic design for beginners

Id: 62msKgMVirQ

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 17 2017