today not one not two but three different type of e-text effects that
you can do right now in the illustrator there sure to spice up your typography
so let's get right into it now the first text effect is a neon
typography design with some handy stroke techniques that you might not be aware
of so firstly of course we need some text and I'm using a nice bold thick
font from the family Aaron now we're going to need to outline the text and
then ungroup the lettering and you're soon gonna see why but I want to have
the lettering touching ever so slightly so just nudge each character into the
touching of the edges okay so now select all of your characters and then hit
command or control X to swap the color field over to a stroke now if you look
closely you can see the stroke outlines actually overlap and run into each other
this isn't going to be ideal for the design so the let's head into the
Pathfinder panel and unites the entire section of the typography now that's
looking better already but we still need to make some changes in the stroke panel
so firstly add a round cap in case you want to have do typography cuts anywhere
along a path and then also use the round to join but importantly change the
design so the stroke is aligned on the outside now we can increase the stroke
weights and you will see how needs that is already looking but let's go ahead
and add a gradient of the stroke itself so select the stroke and then in the
color palettes a degrading to the stroke
so now it's time to choose each color for the nodes on your gradients and I'm
going to be using three color nodes for this design today so as often is the
case we're going to apply the effects to the topography in the appearance panel
and once you have it open click the stroke layer and duplicate it in the top
right of fly down menu click the lower most layer and increase a stroke weight
to around this kind of amounts it's now time to add a Gaussian blur to this
thicker layer your blur might look pretty pixelated especially if your
design is quite large so increase the document raster effect settings that you
can find here and that will probably smoother now most blur effects so that
was the first of three typography designs today and you can really have
some fun with this one but let's move on to design and number
two this technique works very well in handwritten and calligraphy style
typography and again outline your text and then in group it as well there are
two crucial techniques for this second design and for the first one I will copy
the a here with command or control C and then select the first two letters I'm
going to use the minus front option in the Pathfinder panel
so then with command or control F I will paste that a exactly in the same
position it was copied from so now I can nudge the S over somewhat and that
easily reveals a nice effect for hand lettering the secondly you can take the
pen tool and manually draw in a section that we're then gonna cut into the
typography
so the crucial step for this technique however is that we can complete a
non-destructive workflow function in the Pathfinder window so once you have your
shape press a V for the selection tool and then hold down shift to select both
the character and the shape in the Pathfinder window
hold down the alt option key and then use the minus front option this creates
a compound selection which is very very handy we can then use the group
selection tool to select the shape itself or we can use a direct selection
tool to edit the anchor points individually now both of these
techniques can be used in tandem to create some very neat hand lettering and
it's going to add that finishing touch to typography but let's take a look at
the third and the final typography technique in Illustrator today now the
knockout typography effect is really really great for things such as posters
and brushes but I'm going to show you some handy techniques and steps that
elevate your workflow to the next level so I have the thickest version of LR
unavailable and then I'm going to press M for the rectangle tool to create a
rectangle to fit my text over the top off
the typography needs to be in the front of the rectangle and I'm gonna use the
eyedropper tool to sample the white from the artboard now I'd like to bring the
rectangle close to the edges of my text for the knockout text effects as I think
that does work best in most situations
so then I select both the text and the rectangle and bring up the pathfinder
window or one more time so again by holding down the alt/option key we can
use the minus front option which is going to allow the text to be 100%
editable if we just click minus front without using the autopsy key nothing
happens so do make sure to hold down the alt option key when you use this process
this is going to allow us to change the text itself as well as the fonts even
though the text is cut into the shape
now you can then use your knockout text on just about anything you want to but
it does often work really well on black and white photography and this instance
is no exception now if you want to change the color of the rectangle you
can use a group selection tool to select the rectangle and then change the color
from there but that was the third in the final way
to spice up your typography in Illustrator which one was your favorite
today and did you actually learn something be sure to click the video on
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peace