Vanderpol

Simulating typography printing problems in illustrator and photoshop is really easy. You can read the whole process below and download the source.

There are about 15 steps to go so let´s start in illustrator.

I recommend a fat typography with Serifs (they give all the grace to the design). In my case I went for BernhardModernStandard, in like 50-60 points size .

Avoid typos like Bodoni, the effects we are going to apply will make them invisible.

But the typefont should not be too large either like Impact.

Then, remove the filling black color. So that you have a black stroke and no filling color.

Then go to menu Object -> create outlines

Now you have separate letters to manipulate.

But before applying our effects we need to rasterize them.

Object -> rasterize. Choose hight quality 300dpi

Now let´s go for the efects.

Choose “live trace”.

…with the following settings: Choose “black and white” in the menu, uncheck “fill” but keep “stroke” checked, and then enter the same figures.

Look in the preview : your effect has to remove some inside parts of letters (like in the “A” or “E” letters). If not, maybe your typo is not appropriate or your settings do not allow that.

But with my settings it will work, and you should get this:

You can stop here and export your file into JPG, or open photoshop and copy paste your layer, and play a bit more.

Duplicate your layer and move it with the keyboard arrows several pixels to the right and to the top.You can add a red color in the layer effects as “filling color”

It starts looking good… seems like the printing is not aligned. Let´s continue.

Duplicate your black typography layer once more (ctrl+j). Put it under the original layer, and move it several pixels to the left and to the bottom, so that the letters cross each other. Choose a cyan this time.

I have decided to hide the original black layer so that we have a very big contrast between red and blue.

Then you can add textures and water colors brush strokes using  very bright / saturated colors, like this.

And you´re done with it. Thank you for following this tutorial.

Download source

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Tags: Tutorial, typography

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 11:48 and is filed under Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.