In this video brought to you by Packhelp, I'm going to be
showing you how you can get that handcrafted feeling back
into your designs once you vectorize them.
So I've got a document full of logos that I've worked on in
the past and you can see some of them have this handcrafted
feeling, like this one, the happy few.
Now, this didn't always look rustic handcrafted and
sometimes we need to have them look like out to give that age
feeling, to also make it look a little less clean and perfect.
It gives more characteristic to the design.
And someone who does hand lettering and has done a lot of
logo type design, I love that handcrafted feeling.
But how do we get it back once we've vectorized our work?
Well, I'm going to take my logo here.
I'm just going to copy it and we're going to go to a new document.
Now, the first thing I like to do is roughen it.
Now, this is a really simple method of doing it.
We go to Effect, down to Distort and Transform.
And then we go to Roughen.
You'll see that it goes a bit crazy like that.
And we have this dialogue box come up.
Well, all we need to do is press absolute, which will give
the absolute value, not a relative value, then smooth and
we play around depending on the size of the object.
We just play around with this.
We're going to want it a little bit rough.
We don't want it too rough all the way through.
I'm going to go for five and one.
Press OK.
They see when I press OK
it looks good.
But what we need to do is actually expand it because that
effect is still in place.
So we go to Object, Expand and you'll see a bunch of anchor
points have just been made.
Now, in Illustrator, this can have a few problems.
It can slow down your computer.
The more anchor points, the more information.
And most of this information inside of this design is unnecessary.
You can see how many there are.
Luckily, Illustrator has a feature to get rid of these
anchor points and also to help out effect.
Select the shape right click and we're going to go to simplify.
And you'll see here we can keep going and simplify this all the way down.
We want to get it to a point of where it gets rid of most of
those unnecessary anchor points, but doesn't affect the main
design all too much.
We can go to autosimplify and I think I like that.
That's gotten rid of most of those anchor points, but still
giving us that handcrafted feeling.
Now, the next step is to duplicate this and we're going
to repeat this process again, but in a different way.
Firstly, highlight the duplicated version, go to
Object, Rasterize.
And what this will do is this will basically screen cap it,
make it into a rasterized image.
So make sure it's at 300 PPI RGB press.
OK.
And you see here that it's just turned into an image.
That means we need to image trace it back in, which will
turn it into a vector art.
So highlight this and up here you'll see this image trace option there.
Hit that image trace option and you'll notice nothing's changed.
But it has.
It's now vector again.
It's just done all the information.
It's traced all back in.
Next to it we've got this little box.
Click that and that gives us this image trace dialog box.
We need this.
We're going to go to the preset of a black and white logo.
And we're going to bring the threshold all the way down.
And depending on the size of this, it might lag a little bit
in the Illustrator because it is rendering out all the way through.
We're going to bring the path down to low.
This is how many paths there are on the actual image trace.
Corners
I'm going to bring that all the way to the bottom.
I don't like corners.
I'm going to bring out noise.
Pin down threshold just a little bit more.
Then the most important option is to press this Ignore White.
If you don't have Ignore White on, it will keep the white in
the background as a vector white.
But if we press Ignore White, it will get rid of that
automatically for you.
Then all we need to do is press expand.
And now you have your shape there and it looks rough and ready.
Here's like a before and after.
Here's the clean, here's the rough.
There's a lot more character to the rough.
But that's not all we need to do.
We actually need to go into Photoshop and make it more
vintage, make it more handcrafted through a set of effects.
But before I do that, I just want to thank the sponsor of
this video, Packhelp.
Packhelp is a customizable packaging marketplace.
There's something for all designers of all abilities.
You can use the dialign templates like this if you're a
designer or use the online editor if you're not a designer pro
or even order pre made products too.
In fact, we created this awesome box using Adobe
Illustrator using the guides taken from the website.
Something designers can sometimes be worried about when
going to print our dialigns.
We downloaded the PDF template straight from the website which
showed us exactly where the cuts and folds would be made
when designing the artwork.
They also have an affiliate program where you can create an
account and earn up to €65 commission each time someone
makes an order through your link.
Mine is down below.
Plus the Packhelp teamed up with One Tree Planted to make our
planet even greener.
Based on your order quantity, they calculate the number of
trees you can plant and it's always more than you use.
Go check them out in the link below to see what you can
design for your brand.
It's also great for your clients, too.
Okay, back to the video.
A really good way of creating a cool textured effect of your
logo on an object with a cool amount of texture on it is to
take it from an Illustrator like this.
We're going to copy it, paste it as a shape layer.
I'm going to change the colour to like, nearly white, scale this up.
Now, this doesn't look very good inside of the photoshop
right now. What we want to do is get this to sort of merge
with the background, and there's a really easy way of doing it.
I'm going to go and right click on this and go to blending options.
This will bring up this dialog box here.
Now on blending options, we have Blend If.
This is a really crazy powerful tool that I use all
the time, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold option or alt.
And you see this little thing here.
This is the arrow that you use.
Now, if I just use this arrow, it kind of looks okay, but not very good.
Well, these arrows can be split.
You do that by holding option or alt and clicking, and you can see
we get a much nicer feather right there.
But before we do that, what we need to do is add more realism.
The way that we do that with vector work is to make it less sharp.
You see here, it's very sharp.
All the edges are very defined.
So what I like to do is go ahead and right click on the
logo converted to a smart object.
Go to Filter down to Blur and Gaussian Blur.
I'm going to add number one as a Gaussian Blur.
I'm going to zoom in and you can see it's less sharp.
And that's the most important thing when trying to create
this to look real.
Then we can go back to blending options, and I'm going to use
option and move the underlying layer on.
So this means that anything on the underlying layer with this
colour or this gray is going to appear through.
We can do it for white if it's the opposite way
if the background looks like a lighter colour, we can see here
how it works and you can see what we get.
We get this amazingly realistic textured logo like.
So this effect can be used in so many different ways with
your design work.
And honestly, I normally just use this effect here to roughen
up some of the logos that I've created in the past.
It's really important when we're creating logo types,
especially vintage ones, that need to have that organic look
to be created cleanly first.
So we have a lot more control after.
By that I mean, if I take this Raspaderia
R that you guys have seen a lot on the channel lately, you can
see that I need to keep this all nice and simple with the
line work and all the handles so I can edit certain parts.
Trying to edit this logo first would be a nightmare because of
all these different points.
But if I went to the original one and I wanted to edit
something, we've got all the points that we need to quickly
go ahead and edit anything.
So this method really gives you the ultimate control of your design work.
If you're new to this channel.
Thanks for watching.
We upload twice a week and the goal of the channel is to make
you a better designer, to give you that creative juice every week.
So thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
See you soon.
Goodbye.