Inkscape Tutorial: How to Create Flip Text Effect

I'm Rick Johansson and this is iron Echo design one of the things that inkscape is really good at is typography I like doing these type of designs I'm going to show you today how you can do a flip text effect like this it's pretty easy to do we're just going to use one of the path effects called perspective envelope in a simple gradient so if you want to get started you can do the same word to the same word or I thought it'd be more interesting to have like an opposite so start to finish as long as the words are about the same length it'll work so let's get going here this is the page I have it set up differently that you might have as your default if you want to do this you go to file document properties and you'll see you have an option to change the color of the page go to any color you want we'll do black the format is A4 that's just the sizing and orientation I have it set to landscape it's just a nice way to have us all on the same scale if you want to follow along so let's write our text out I'm going to do the start to finish start if I go up to the modification area I'm using enter it's a free open- source font so thanks to Google I'm going to go to heavy for the style and for size let's try one 65 it'll be invisible if I bring this onto the page right now so down in your color ribbon you can change it to white or you can go up to object fill and stroke and on your fill and stroke menu if you're on the fill tab you can change the color here there's start contrl D to duplicate that change it to finish doesn't have to be perfect I think the effect works well even if the letter aren't the same but let's get it close that's almost perfect maybe we change the kerning on start if you highlight it and go up to character spacing we'll do -5 that will work fine okay so to use a path effect you need to make this object a path super easy to do it's selected path object to path same for finish path object to path and let's slap a gradient on each of these if you've never used linear gradients it's right here click on it the default will be whatever the base color was it's going to go from base color to full transparency we need to change that so click on the Arrow so you're on this side of the gradient and down on the alpha slider which is for transparency move it all the way to full opacity white to white doesn't do anything so we'll change this side to Black experimenting I found out it works a little better if you drag in the white a little bit and the black a touch as well that's all there is to the setup except we have to change the gradient it's going left to right we want it to go from top to bottom this tool right here it's called the edit gradients tool click it and you'll take the white side put it near the top and the black side play around with it but you do want to have some Darkness towards the bottom for now that's good to go if you think about when it flips down to the bottom part the gradient needs to be reversed so white will be the bottom of the letters and dark will be towards the top Rick from the edit Bay here the second gradient is the same as the first Just In Reverse doing a time lapse to speed things up all right let's do a save just in case path effects sometimes can get temperamental an added step just to make things nice and precise up here align to distribute if you click this the menu says where do you want to align this to we'll do it relative to page it might be last selected go to page and this one right here will let you Center it up oops that one was selected it'll Center up whatever you had selected like that all right let's do it we've got start selected path path effects the new menu comes up blank don't worry you can hit the Delta and see all the choices we want perspective envelope type set it to perspective and the key is to choose mirror movements in vertical nothing happens if you didn't know where to look this is where you go you hit edit paths by node and now you can see all the nodes of the text and let me zoom in these little tiny nodes here that is the path effects node that will do the effect for us let me show you how it works real quick before we do the design if I grab that node on the Corner if I drag that node to the right you can see the perspective is being mirrored vertically on both sides keeps things nice and uniform I can bring it up out and it does does this so with that we can then create the motion of 1 2 3 4 as it folds down ourself let's do contrl Z back to the way it was the very first one will barely drag it out just a tiny bit like that that's good enough control d duplicates it the duplicated copy has all the same path effects everything let's drag it out a little bit and down a little bit not too crazy they're stacked on top of each other right now it won't do the effect until we drag them apart so only go a little bit like that controll D duplicates it take that one go a little bit further contrl D for the last one and bring this so it is almost folded to the center that's all we want 1 2 3 4 and just for the illusion I'll contr d that last one we'll bring that one straight flat that's going to be the illusion of it switching into the second word finish all right let's now separate them I'll bring this down almost halfway just do halfway of the page and you can start to stack them so it looks more interesting I want to say that's a good start but that'd be too on the nose for the pun so we'll just leave it go to the line and distribute they're all going to line up versus the page here and before we move on we can play with the gradient now so I can go up to the first one double click I've got my handle and see maybe I want the top one to be darker go to the second one all I'm doing is bringing it up a little bit to have the darkness creep up I think you can also do it at the gradient level itself but that gets dangerous what I mean is if I go to the fill and stroke menu I can play around with the actual gradient and it affects all of them which you may not want move this up and we'll do the Finish side same exact approach I have finish selected path effects it should already be in your tray here here perspective envelope make sure you're on perspective mirror movements in vertical edit paths by node will let you do something with it and this time you grab from the bottom so if I take the bottom node you're going to kind of fold it this way see the motion there contrl Z the first one I just dragged it over to the side of touch contrl D the second one you can bring up contrl D the third one don't go too far out bring it up some more contrl D did I do contrl D or contrl S we'll find out in a second I guess we did it now I can put them into place and finish okay damage control here let's grab everything first of all go to the line and distribute Center it that's a bit better this one can come down that's good I think I'll just leave the gradient the way it is maybe this one can be a little bit darker so it casts a shadow that leads us to the effect I want to do for everything looks good we'll do one more grab everything Center and the last effect is just a drop shadow everything's together go to filters shadows and glows drop shadow you get a popup box this is presets to the way I wanted it but one thing you should always check on blur color see this is defaulted to Blue for some reason since I'm working with black and white I'll slide this blur color over to Black go back to options when I hit live preview you see the drop shadow there and the drop shadow here it's subtle but it's enough to have your eye feel like there's some weight to it and this is just all set to blur radius one horizontal one vertical one shadow type will really mess things up if you do it wrong if you're on outer cutout you're gone so stay on outer and we'll do apply have fun with it this wasn't a request it's something I felt like doing cuz I thought it looked interesting if you have any questions or ideas of something you want to see a tutorial on let me know in the comments and we'll see you next time

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 4,372

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Id: JVc6emAXfaE

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2023