Retro Typography Tutorial with Adobe Illustrator

[Music] this is Nick with illustrator for beginners dot-com and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this retro typography effect using Adobe Illustrator so I'm gonna go ahead and open up a new document and I'm gonna set the dimensions to 1280 by 1280 pixels and go ahead and click create and what I want to do is just set up our document so that we're all working with a similar view we're gonna want to go to view and we want to deselect snap to pixel let me go back to view make sure snap to points the only thing you have selected here if anything else does select to go ahead and deselect that and from the window we're going to want a line color and transparency all selected and I'm just going to go to file and set my document color mode to RGB yours probably is set that way by default but I have my default set to CMYK but you know it really doesn't matter either one will work just as well so the first thing we're going to do is create some text so I'm going to grab the text tool click on the canvas and I'm going to choose a font I'm going to choose the month a font called Montserrat you can use any sans font you'd like any any like good bold heavyweight sans font should work well or even a serif font will work well just as long as it's a heavyweight I'm gonna use months to ride it's a free font if you want to look it up and download it montserrat and the weight I'm gonna use is bold I'm gonna change the text here I'm just gonna write a capital letter A for this tutorial like you saw on the thumbnail but if you'd like to use this for an entire word you're gonna want to take the entire word out now and once I've done that I'll grab the Select tool and I'm gonna hold shift and alt and click and drag one of these corner arrows to scale this up maybe a little bit bigger and what I want to do now is just convert this to a vector object instead of a text object so to do that I'll go to type and create outlines and I'm going to I'm going to set this to the color I like the letter to be like if you notice here is that this that letter red on the inside there I'm going to use that shade of red so I'll just double click our fill color I'm going to find a nice shade of red maybe something like that go ahead and click OK and what I'm going to do is create a duplicate of this so I'm going a whole I'm gonna click and drag and then hold alt to create a duplicate copy I'm gonna make this one a tan shade kind of like the background here on the thumbnail so to do that I'll double-click the fill color again and I'm going to select a nice tan shade I'll come down here the orange area then maybe I'll go with something like that right there go ahead and click OK and what I want to do now is give that an outline otherwise known as a stroke so to do that let me click on the stroke color to make that active and then I'll grab the eyedropper tool and then I'll hold shift and click on that area where the color is that I want to be and it's gonna give the stroke color that same shade and then I'll go to the drop down up here for the stroke color actually no I'll go to this drop down for the stroke size and I'll change that to 16 now let me go back to the Select tool let me bring this over here I'm actually gonna go to I'm gonna right click this and go to arrange sent to the back and then I'll click and drag over both of those and the aligned tab we're gonna make sure we have a line to set to align to selection and then I'm just going to Center that up on the vertical and horizontal axis like that so they're nice they're up against each other like that and once I have both of those selected I'm going to hold shift on the keyboard and click on the red letter a to deselect it and I'm just going to adjust the thickness of the tan letter a z' stroke to my liking I'm gonna make this maybe a little bigger I'm gonna go with something like 18 and we want something like that should be pretty good yours doesn't have to be specifically 18 just something that looks decent you know like this not too not too thick not too small if anything I'd like that to be a little thicker I'll go with 20 that looks pretty good now that now what I'm gonna do is go to object path create I'm sorry outline stroke and I'm going to hit ctrl C on the keyboard to copy that and then I'll hit ctrl V to paste it and what I want to do with this copy is I want to make this leap bring the tan back to the Phil let me activate the fill color double click on that and I'm going to choose a shade of blue maybe something like that go ahead and click OK and I'm going to give this in outline as well so I'm going to go back to yeah I'm gonna activate the stroke color grab the dropper hold shift click on the letter the color area and I'm gonna make the thickness of this maybe something like well start out with 20 and we'll see how that actually you know what I'm gonna do 40 and we'll see how that looks let me go back to the Select tool I'm gonna hold ctrl on the keyboard and grab this bottom left node over here and snap it onto the letter A like that and then I'm going to right click that and go to arrange sent to the back and that right there is I'd say that's looking pretty good that's what we're going for right now right there so what I'm going to do then is go to object path outline stroke and that right there as he is if the effects we're looking for so what I want to do next is duplicate that so I'm gonna hit ctrl C on the keyboard to copy that and then I'll hit control V to paste it and we'll have another copy of this large letter here and I just want to put this down here to the bottom right of the other letters like that because this segment right here is gonna make up like the I guess you can call it like the pop out 3d sort of effects so I'm gonna put this down to the lower right over here and then I'll right-click that and go to arrange send to the back and I just want to connect these corners together so to zoom in and out what I'm doing is just holding alt and rolling up and down the mouse wheel and to move the page around you could press down on the spacebar and then click and drag so zoom in on this area right here I'm gonna go to I'm gonna hit control shift and a to deselect everything I'm gonna grab the pen tool and I'm gonna snap to this corner right here then snaps to that corner come through here then throw here and then back to the starting point like that and I'm gonna do the same thing I'm gonna close these corners and as well and again to move the page around I'm pressing down the spacebar and clicking and dragging the mouse there we go let me zoom back out let me go back to the Select tool I'm gonna hold shift and collect and click all three of those objects we just created and then hold shift and you know what once we've done that I'm just going to right click that and go to arrange sent to the back and that's exactly what we're looking for we can click off that's deselect everything and the next step would be to create these this makeshift sort of like I guess you can call this like a light shining a light coming down on the letters but it's kind of like faked so to do that I'm going to grab the rectangle tool I'm going to click and drag to create a rectangle going over the top of the letter like that I'm just gonna make this green or you know what we're gonna have to click on we're gonna have to click on the fill color to activate that and then we can make it green and then come up here this second this second drop-down where it's green and just change that to a red slash we want the stroke we want no stroke on this one and I'll just take the opacity of this and bring this down about in half and what I want to do is oops I want to grab the select tool and I'm gonna hold ctrl on the keyboard and grab the rectangle at this corner and snap it to the top left corner of the red letter a like that and then I'm just gonna click and drag this over to the left while holding shift to lock it onto the horizontal axis bring it over there like that and I'm just going to take this node down here and just make that a little smaller we want this to be about that thick I'm gonna create a duplicate copy of this by holding alt and clicking and dragging it and then I'll hold ctrl grab this corner and snap it onto this bottom corner of the letter a down here the red letter A and again I'll just hold shift and just move this over to the left and I'm gonna take this one I'm gonna make it smaller I'm gonna take this top note and just click it click and drag it down like that to make that thinner we want this to be significantly thinner and height than the original one and once we've done that we could hold shift and click on the other rectangle so we have both green rectangles selected and we can go to object blend make and that's gonna create what's called a blend between the two objects it's gonna create a bunch of different other objects that kind of transitions to the other ones that kind of like copies off of each other but we want to edit that so we've got object blend blend options because as it looks right now it doesn't look very good so we want to make this look a little better the spacing I'm going to choose specified steps and I'm going to change that to maybe six and that will check preview to see how that looks okay that right there looks pretty good I'd say that's what we're going for but you could try out different things you could try out like eight and then talk with a preview off and on I don't quite like how that looks I'm just gonna stick with six here go ahead and click okay and then finally we want to go to object blend and expand so we can actually work with that now and once we've done that I'm going to hold shift and click on the red letter A so we have both the green objects and the red letter A selected and I'm going to come over here the Pathfinder tab if you don't have a Pathfinder tab go to window and choose Pathfinder and I'm going to click on this button right here that says - front go ahead and click that and it's going to delete that area from there and once we've done that we can click off the graphic to deselect everything I'm gonna hold alt and roll down the mouse wheel to zoom out and what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna give this a little bit of a slant or I guess you can call it a shear as you see here and the thumbnail so I'm gonna click and drag over everything and I want to group it all together by hitting ctrl G on the keyboard and then I want to come over here to this this the scale tool and click and hold on that till we get this flyout menu and we can grab the shear tool and with the shear tool I'm just gonna click and drag it up a little bit like that and just make sure to hold shift so it locks it on to the vertical axis we have to redo that okay there we go that right there is what I'm looking for give it a nice little shear and the final step would be to add this worn out kind of grunge texture so to do that let me go to the Select tool to do that I'm going to use an image a raster image I will have a link to it in the description of the video go ahead and download and save that image for you to use or if you want you could just go to the website and right click it and go to copy and then paste it into illustrator whatever is easier for you I have it saved to my hard drive so I'm just going to use it from my hard drive when we go to a file place and it's this texture over here texture 13 and I'm just gonna click wherever I want it to be placed and there's our texture image I'm gonna hold shift and alt and scale it down until it's just a little bit bigger the letter here just like that that's that right there is a good size in proportion to the letter that we're looking for and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hit ctrl C to copy that image and then I'm gonna click back on the letter and I'm gonna come over here to the transparency tab and again if you don't have the transparency tab visible go to a window and click transparency and then I'm going to click this button that says make mask and the object is going to disappear momentarily but that's okay I'm gonna click on this black box right here and I'm gonna hit control V on the keyboard to paste it in and now what you could do is take this texture and move it around because it's now pasted onto the image as a mask and you could just adjust it to however it looks good you could even scale it up or down you can rotate it around a little bit if you'd like you can distort it I'm just gonna rotate mine around like that that looks pretty good once you're happy with how your how it looks you can click back on this box over here with the object in it and now you'll be able to move around the object and scale it up or down or rotate it or or do whatever you'd like with it and as you can see we are finished we have created our retro typography using Adobe Illustrator so if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Design Made Simple

Views: 110,244

Keywords: illustrator, tutorial, beginners, learn, vector, graphic, design, logo

Id: cjceWv57Jpc

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 07 2018