Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To and today I'm going to show you
how to make a retro comic book text effect in Adobe Illustrator. Alright, let's get started.
Alright, I'm here in Adobe Illustrator, and I'm just going to come over here to Create New.
We'll come up here to Web. And then I'm just going to choose Common, which is this first one here.
And then we'll Create. And the reason I chose web instead of print is because web uses RGB,
and it gives us a little bit brighter colors. I think this comic book effect will look really nice
with bright colors. Okay, so the way we're going to do this is we're going to build an appearance.
So make sure that your Appearance palette is open. And if you're not seeing that,
or some of these other panels, and you want them to show, you can just come up here to Window,
and they're all available right in here. Here's the Appearance one. So you can just get that one
ready, I'm gonna actually pull this out, and just resize it a little bit. Okay, now hit T to get on
my Text tool, which is right over here. And I'm going to just click once, and I'll type 'Hello.'
I'll get back on my Selection tool and select it. And then I'll hit CMD T, or CTRL T for the
Character palette. If you're having a little trouble finding that one, it's under Window,
and then type and Character, if you want to go that route. In our Character panel,
I'm going to highlight the size and change it to 160. This will give us some nice big text, I'm
also going to change my font to something kind of thick and chunky, and I like Montserrat for this.
And I want this to be all caps. So I'll just choose this All Caps button right down here.
Now you'll notice in our Appearance that we've got Type and Characters right here, and if I
double click Type, nothing happens. But if I double click Characters, you can see the fill,
which is black, is right down here. We actually don't want to build an appearance with something
in the Characters area, so I'm going to click on this and just get rid of it right down here.
Then I'll click on Type. And I'll come out here to the flyout and choose Add New Fill. And now if
you double click characters, there is nothing inside. But if you click on Type, you can see
the fill in there. The reason that you don't want to build in Characters is you can't actually pull
them out of here, and you're limited to one fill and one stroke if you're working with Characters.
With type, we can add all kinds of different things. Okay, so let's click on our fill,
I'm going to come over here to my Color panel and just choose red, like that,
just a bright red. You can also double click your color, and choose a color here and then pick what
shade of that color you want over here. This one's looking pretty good, we'll say OK. Next,
we're going to duplicate this fill. So I'm going to click and drag until I'm over this little plus
icon, and then release. So now we have a red copy right on top of our other red. I'm going to change
this top copy to orange. So I'll just double click the color. I'll come down here to the oranges,
and I want this to be really bright, maybe a little more toward yellow like that. We'll say OK.
And now you can't see the red at all, because it's exactly on top of it. I'm going to
offset this orange text, so I'll make sure to click on this. And then we'll come up here to
Effect > Path > Offset path. You'll see if you have a number in here, you might get some pretty
weird effects, especially if you have Preview checked, which, it's fine if you have Preview
checked, for sure. I'm going to offset by -3, and I can click in another text box
to get it to update if I've got Preview checked. So now we've brought in the edges by 3 pixels of
our orange text, so we can see the red underneath. We'll say OK. Now I'm also going to move the
orange over and up a little bit. So to do that, I can transform it. I'll click on my fill again,
I'll come up here to Effect > Distort and Transform, and Transform. I'll come down here
to Move. I'm going to put 2.8 in here to move it over to the right, and then -2.8 to move it up. If
you put positive numbers in your horizontal, it'll move it to the right. If put positive numbers in
the vertical, it'll move it down. I actually want to go up so I'll put a negative in front of it.
Okay, and this looks pretty good. It looks like it's lining up with the top. Okay, we'll say OK,
and now I'll zoom in by hitting Z on my keyboard and drawing a box around this. And you can see if
we get really close, that it's not exactly there. So if you want to make sure this is exactly where
the red starts, you can come in here to Transform. You'll need to have that selected by the way,
and then maybe add a 5 here and a 5 here. And see, it got it a little bit closer. So you can really
kind of tweak these numbers to get it to line up exactly, but since this is just a tutorial,
I'm not going to worry about it. We'll say OK, and then I'll hit CMD zero or CTRL zero on Windows,
to have that artboard fill my screen. Okay, so next I am going to duplicate this fill - click
it and drag it down to the same little plus icon. And now this still has all of those same effects
and everything that we put on the one below it. It has Offset Path and Transform. What we're going to
do now is add a black outline and shadow around it. I'm going to make sure this one is clicked,
and then I'll change my color to...I usually go with almost black on this.
And we'll say OK. Now we've already got offset here, so I'm just going to click on this
and change it to 9, and let's see what happens. So now our path is offset all the way out. We'll say
OK. Now I want this fill to actually go underneath these two. So I'm going
to click it right out here in the blank area, and drag it underneath my yellow and red text.
So now you can kind of see what's going on. To get a really nice looking shadow,
I'm going to come down here to Transform and change our Move to .4, and .4. And then I'm going
to make 40 copies of that. And we can click into one of the other dialog boxes to see what happens.
We'll say OK. Now if we zoom in by hitting Z on the keyboard, and then selecting this area, you
can see it's a nice smooth shadow. So now we only have one thing left. And that's to do the halftone
dot pattern. So to make that, I'm going to come up here and duplicate this orange layer again.
Now we'll want to apply a black to white gradient that goes from the top to the bottom of our text.
So to get that effect, I'm going to come up here to Window > Gradient. I'll just click on this
bar down here to fill it with a gradient. Now I actually want my white on top and the black on
the bottom. So I'm going to change my angle to 90°. And this is close, but it's exactly
opposite of what I want. So I'm just going to flip those colors with this button right here.
And I would like to see a little bit more white, so I'm going to pull this slider over....and
maybe we'll pull this one over just a bit too. So we have a lot of white showing through at the top.
Okay, and that looks good. Now we want to change this to a halftone dot pattern. And to do that
we'll go up to Effect > Pixelate and Color Halftone. I went to max radius to be 20. All
of these channel angles are fine. So we'll say OK, OK, and these are pretty big, so I think I'm going
to change my color halftone. We'll put it at 8 and say OK, OK, and this looks a lot better. I'm going
to zoom out with CMD minus or CTRL minus on a PC. Now you'll notice that we lost our orange
fill color. So to get that to show back up, I'm going to click on the fill. I'll come up here to
opacity, and by the way, if you're not seeing this bar, that's also under Window. Window > Control,
right here. We'll come up here to the opacity. I'm going to click on the word itself,
and then instead of Normal, we'll change this to Multiply. And now we get the orange showing
through. Now if you want to have a little more orange showing through and less black down here,
we can open up our gradient panel again. We can move our white over and move this center point
over even a little more. So it's whatever your preference is. I think this looks nice. I think
our orange would look a little nicer if it was brighter. So I've selected that in the Appearance,
and I'll just come over here and double click. I'm going to move my slider up a little more towards
yellow, and that looks pretty good. We'll say OK. Oh yeah, this pops so much more. Now let's add a
cool text effect like an Arc. To arc this whole word, I need to click on the type itself. So this
selects everything that's inside the type. If you were on, say, Fill, it would only arc this part of
the appearance. So we'll need to be on Type. And then I'll come up here to Effect and choose Warp
and Arc. But this amount of bend looks kind of crazy. So I'm going to change it to 20. I will
distort it horizontally by 50. We'll see how that looks. Okay, I'm liking this. So we'll say Okay,
and now I'm going to just stretch this in. They always say not to stretch your text. But to me,
it looks like the warp is actually stretching it in a bad way. And that's it! It's that easy
to make comic book text in Adobe Illustrator. Okay, if you liked this video, please click on
the Like button. And I'll see you in a couple days with another graphic design video. Thank you!!!