Typographic Poster Design Tutorial in Illustrator (Part 2)

Key Takeaways

hello gary simon of designcourse.com today is february 4th with our 34th video of the year and we're going to finish up the typographic poster that we started yesterday in adobe illustrator cc so as always check out designcourse.com if you haven't yet and subscribe here on youtube here's a preview once again of what we're going to design all right so now what we want to do is take our two pieces of text there they're currently type layers so hit ctrl shift and the letter o and that will if you control h that'll convert them to outlines that's good i let's go ahead and zoom up now i'm just going to kind of work with this text to make it look a little bit cooler i guess you could say for lack of a better term uh so what we want to do is we'll come in and we'll zoom up a little bit more actually i'm going to create like kind of like a cut like so the d is cutting into the c a little bit so we'll take the uh pen tool and we'll cook work real close to there and just kind of have to imagine you know where this is at we could have changed the color so we could see it but that's fine and just kind of left click and drag just a little bit and hold alt and left click and then come in right around there and then we'll end it right there uh now if you make this black of course you can see kind of the effect and real quickly we will take both of these right here and we want to get out our i where are we at here pathfinder and we will merge those and then we will take this and this and subtract that shape all right so now it's transparent all right so that looks pretty cool okay so let's continue on with these uh kind of these cuts i guess you could call them i i had to pause the video because my toddlers and wife came home they're really loud you probably hear them throughout the course of this video unfortunately all right so i will take the pencil again um next one we'll just kind of do you know we're just kind of following these lines and these shapes and just you know it kind of creates a cool effect basically so i'll click right there and kind of end it right around here and that happens so i'm going to ctrl z to undo and get rid of that pathfinder and we'll come out right around there oops hold alt left click and then kind of end it right at this corner all right and then connect it back up i hold shift select both of these objects we get our pathfinder back out and do that all right so zoom out here and we will uh let's see here we're going to add let's see two more all right so let's zoom back up man they're loud down there i hope you can hear that it's very irritating but that's life working at home with your kids all right so we'll come down here create one that kind of just goes right around here so let me click right on that edge and left click and pull and drag alt left click and it doesn't matter the fill right now it's just we're only concerned about the shape i'll take this hold shift select both of them and do that and then just one more time we'll come down around here all right so right around there alt left click and join up take the move tool select it hold shift and minus front all right so let me zoom out just to see kind of what this thing looks like i if you hold your spacebar by the way and then left click you can drag this around all right so that's looking pretty good so far um let me go ahead and take both of these and let's change the color there's a default color in the swatches here it's just uh this blue right here leave it at that i want to take this as well let's go ahead and group these so hold shift select both hit ctrl g to group them and i'm going to make it kind of dark we'll try that i think that's yeah probably pretty decent right around there and let's go ahead and start working with our uh the strokes that we're going to create so i'm just going to move things up here now this compound path i'm going to copy that ctrl c and then ctrl f and we're going to hide the bottom one just to kind of create a copy that you know that we can use in the future all right so now what i want to do i'm going to hit ctrl h to get rid of the outlines now what we want to do is go ahead and give it a stroke now we want to view our appearance right here so with the compound path selected we can see there's a stroke there's no stroke right now so if we just give this a stroke and let's see here it's black i think so we can change that to white and we'll go around five now what we can do with this stroke area selected we can go to effect we can go to distort and transform and then transform and this comes up so if we select on preview and we focus here on move if we slide this a little bit we'll see it only affects the stroke not the base you know dc there so take both of these and kind of just move them down just a little bit i'd say that looks pretty good right around there and then hit okay we now kind of have this cool sort of offset uh stroke thing going i i don't want to leave it like that so what i want to do is go ahead and go to object path outline stroke alright so now if we drop this down i created a group we have the dc right here and then we have the stroke text or not text but the outline right there and what we want to do on group with that selected we right click ungroup all right so basically that just takes them out of that group folder and now they're both right here so what we want to do is with both of them selected and they are we can go to object clipping mask make alright so that obviously doesn't look all that good in and of itself uh what i want to do is yeah don't do that that's not what i want to do i i want to make this right here this blue we'll change that to right now the let me go to gradient here there switch that if you go over there and our layers got hidden make that white all right so now we change this to white and now if we bring this back up we can kind of see that the stroke doesn't kind of go outside of the letters okay so now we can try to create some more of these strokes just to kind of give you know an interesting appearance to this text so i what i want to do is we'll close this up and i'm just going to duplicate that again so ctrl c ctrl f and i'll hide this bottom one we'll come down here to appearance click on stroke and this time we can give it maybe a lighter stroke like around three instead of five and then we will do the same thing we'll go to effect distort transform transform preview uh this time maybe we'll go the opposite direction and you can just kind of eyeball this hit okay i do want to make it look like a thinner stroke so we'll go to two all right and let's see how this looks so far all right now this one i don't think we're going to make it a clipping mask i think what we'll do is take this color real quickly maybe drop it down take a mid gray and we will move this to the bottom actually i want to separate those though so let's go ahead and go to object path we will go to outline stroke we'll delete this portion the actual text and i get that back up take this it's not a group because it's only itself so just ungroup and we'll put it beneath there all right so let me zoom up just a little bit so you can see this a little better all right i think i might do maybe one more type of stroke-ish thing all right so uh we will control c control off that base that we created the compound path hide this one we're going to do this one more time so we'll take our stroke here uh let's go three then we will go ahead and change this to uh i think like a lighter well maybe a darker blue right around here and with this selected we'll go to effect distort transform and preview and play with this a little bit i'm not sure if i want to go out that far or maybe all right we'll hit okay we'll do that same thing once again we'll go to object path outline stroke and then we will right click ungroup that get rid of this and we still have this all right now let me zoom out here kind of see what this thing looks like all right so you know you can also play around with uh blend modes for the layers kind of like in photoshop and after effects uh you can do an overlay and that kind of changes the appearance let me zoom up here real quick and i color dodge you know it's kind of just a matter of playing around just to see if you like any of these results what am i doing am i on the right layer i don't think i am there i think that's the new one we created so yeah if we go to overlay it kind of creates this transparent thing that you can only see on the background color dodge that looks too messy screen lighten color burn so you can experiment kind of use what you know you think kind of looks good and people are being loud downstairs once i can hear difference looks terrible exclusion hue you know whatever you want i think i'm just going to go to normal you can even just take the opacity down a little bit or a lot just to give yourself you know and you could use your arrow keys as well to kind of adjust these all right all right so let's go ahead and zoom out so we can kind of see this full effect that we have going here and i think that is it uh if you need to adjust things around here first of all we'll lock our layers so we can only select this and you could hold ctrl or no shift and alt to scale this thing as you need and kind of position it around and there we go hi let me go ahead and all right so basically i if you need to usually if you're you're going to print this for a you know for actual print you know and using a print company usually they would provide you with a a template file depending on whichever size you wanted to use and that would contain uh the bleeds and edges that you would need to kind of make sure you i guess you could say obey otherwise when you go to send it to them you know the print might not come out well but we didn't use that uh but pretty much you know the ideas that we use to design this you know are there they're definitely applicable to uh the process of print design for posters all right so uh check out designcourse.com if you haven't yet and if you uh haven't subscribed here to in youtube do so and i will see you tomorrow with an all new tutorial alright goodbye you