Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you
how to make a soft fade 3D text effect in Adobe Illustrator. All right, let's get started.
Ok, so we're here in Illustrator, and I'm just going to create a new document.
So I'm going to Create new. I'll come up here to Web, and I'll choose Common, and then we'll
come down here to Create. And the reason I'm choosing Web is because we get a lot more
bright colors if we choose RGB color space, and web is always RGB. So first, I'm going to hit M
on my keyboard to get over here to the Rectangle tool. And then I'm just going to draw a rectangle
the size of our artboard to give us a nice, big background. I'm going to double click on the
white here. And then I'm just going to choose a bright blue background color. And we'll say,
OK. Next I'll hit T on my keyboard to get to my Text tool, which is right over here,
Type tool, technically, and I'll click once and I'm just going to type soft fade, and it's really
small, so I want to make it bigger. I'll get back on my Selection tool, and I'll get on a corner,
I'll hold SHIFT, and I'll drag it to be much bigger. I'm going to choose a big chunky font,
and the one I like a lot is Bemio. Now Bemio might not be available on your computer, so if it's not,
just choose a thick, bold font for this, and I think I need my background to be a little lighter
so I'm going to click this again, and I'll change it to more of a greenish tone, something around
here. Ok, I'll get back on my text. And I'm going to go to my Appearance palette. Now, if you're not
seeing this panel or any of these panels, and you want to have them open, you can just come up here
to Window, and they will all be right in here. So Appearance is right up here at the top. Now
I want to add a gradient to this text. And to do that, I can't have the fill in Characters. So if
I double click Characters, you can see it's right here. I'm going to click this and just delete it.
So now I'll click on Type, and then I'll add a new fill. You'll notice that it's in Type instead of
Characters. And now we can add our gradient. So I'll come up here to Window>Gradient. And
I'll just click on this bar. Now I want this gradient to go from top to bottom, so I'm just
going to set this to 90%. And then I want to flip it because I want the lighter color on top,
so I'll choose this Reverse Gradient button. So now we have our white on top and our black
on bottom. Now the top color, I actually want it to be the same as the background color. So
I'm going to get my little Color Picker here and just click it. I'm going to pull my Swatches out,
and I want to add this color to my swatches. So I'm just going to click New Swatch right down
here at the bottom. I want to make sure Global is checked, and we'll say OK. I'll double click the
darker side. If you see you only have black to pick from on this top button, you can come over
here and choose RGB. And then you get some color sliders. I'm liking something right about there,
maybe not quite as dark. Ok, that looks good. Ok, let's go back to our Appearance panel, and
instead of adding strokes to this, I'm going to actually add more fills and then just offset them.
And then we'll use Transform to get that 3D look. So I'm going to duplicate this fill color,
by just clicking and dragging it onto the plus button below. Now on the lower fill, we're going
to offset this. So to do that go to Effect>Path and >Offset Path. And I'm just going to offset
it by about nine. If you have Preview turned on, you can see what it's going to look like.
We're going to make this quite a bit darker, so I'm going to double click this. And we'll put it
right down somewhere like this, but I think I want it to be kind of a more purpley color. That one
looks good. So we'll say Ok. Now we've got sharp corners on everything. I think I want to change
those to round, so I'm going to click on my Offset Path again. I'll change the Joins to round here.
Ok, I like the way that looks a little better. Now I'm going to click the Fill again. And this time,
I'm going to transform it. So we'll come up here to Effect>Distort & Transform and >Transform. Make
sure Preview is checked. I've got my Horizontal number highlighted. I'm just going to hit my
down button to see what happens. I'm going to change my copies to...let's do seven copies.
So this is how we get the 3D look. So that last copy has been horizontally scaled this far. You
can kind of see it there. So we also want to move it a little too. We want to move it vertically.
I'm going to hit my up arrow, and I think three looks pretty nice. Ok, so we'll say OK.
I think I was having some kind of glitch. But basically your fill should be a solid fill. It
should not be a gradient. And I'm not sure why it won't let me choose just a solid fill instead of
the gradient. Let's look at the gradient panel. Anyway, the effect you want is like this. So even
though this is a gradient, it's going from dark blue to dark blue so it looks like a solid color.
Ok, so to get our white outline outside of this, I'm just going to copy this fill by dragging
it onto the plus button. We'll change our fill to white. I'll click on Offset. And this time,
I'm going to do about 16. Maybe a little more than that. Ok, and that looks nice.
So that's it. That's how you can get kind of a 3D soft fade effect. Now, we can try some other fonts
with this. So I'll make some copies. I really like Baby Olivia, for kind of a cutesy look, or Cheri.
That is also a pretty playful one, or this Albertha Regular one.
If you notice that some of the letters are a little too close together, you can put your
cursor between them, and then hold ALT or OPT and then arrow to the right or left. Now if you wanted
to change your colors after you're finished, there are a couple of ways to do that. You can click on
the design and then come over to your Appearance panel, click the fill color you want to change,
and then open your Gradient panel and double click one of these edges of the slider. Another way to
change the colors all at once is to come up here to Recolor Artwork. And if you don't see this
bar at the top that is under Window>Control right here. I've got this selected, and I'm
just going to click that. And now we can kind of move these colors around and see what happens.
You can also unlink the harmony colors and move them around individually if you want.
Or if you want advanced options, you can come in here and go to Edit. Then you
can make all the colors darker if you want or lighter. Although if you're not used to this,
you can end up with some pretty crazy color patterns. Oh, that's much better. There we go.
And we'll say OK. All right. If you liked this video and you want to see more videos like this,
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time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!