www.nickhodge.com

Large com­pan­ies have spent many years and mil­lions of dol­lars ensur­ing that computer-generated text looks great.

Some­times, we’ve got to roughen the text up. Make it look more nat­ural. Remove the clin­ical accur­acy of com­puter gen­er­ated type. Here’s a tech­nique using Adobe Illus­trator 10’s Trans­par­ency and Warp­ing fea­tures to make text look bad.

Step 1: Type the Text. In this instance, I am using ITC Amer­ican Typewriter-Bold.

Step 2: Window>Transparency. From the fly­out menu choose “Make Opa­city Mask”. This will hide all of the text behind a mask. Opa­city Masks in Illus­trator 9 and 10 work the same as Layer Masks in Pho­toshop. In Illus­trator, how­ever, they are vec­tor shapes that hide (black areas) or show (white areas) the under­ly­ing object. The Opa­city Masks can be placed on an object-by-object basis. Using levels of gray, you can partly reveal under­ly­ing objects.

Step 3: Paint into the Mask. Here I have selec­ted the Mask as the tar­get (you see a solid black line around the mask in the Trans­par­ency palette). Using a Paint Brush, strok­ing with White (no col­our) and using a par­tic­u­lar brush from the Brushes palette I have painted white into the mask, thereby reveal­ing the under­ly­ing hid­den text. Brushes in Illus­trator are vec­tor shapes, so this will be sharp on output.

Click onto the left-hand pre­view of your object in the Trans­par­ency palette. By click­ing back on the text (or object) on the left hand side of the trans­par­ency palette, you return to nor­mal edit­ing of objects. The beauty of this tech­nique is that the text is still live and editable.

Step 4: Now to subtly warp the text. The pro­cess here is to cre­ate an envel­ope over the text.  Illus­trator 10 can­not warp live text, so what we are going to do is warp a rect­an­gu­lar shape that live text is envel­oped into.

Firstly, cre­ate a rect­angle that just encom­passes the text.

Step 5: Envel­ope Dis­tort: select both the newly cre­ated rect­angle and the Text. Go to Object>Envelope Distort>Make with Top Object. The text is now dis­tor­ted slightly into the rect­an­gu­lar frame.

Step 6: Use the Warp Tool. In this instance, I have used the Pucker tool to per­mit simple warp­ing of the rect­an­gu­lar frame around the text. As the text is inside the frame, the text warps into this shape. As this text has an Opa­city Mask applied, this is also warped.

Step 7: (Optional) To edit the text, Click on the object and go Object>Envelope Distort>Edit Con­tents. You will find you can still edit the under­ly­ing text.

Thanks to: Colin Smith for the first trans­par­ency brush­ing technique.