Type Tips Weekly

- Hi, I'm Nigel French, welcome to Type Tips. This week, some experimental typography in Illustrator. These letter forms were created using the tilde key trick. And the tilde key is this one. It's location on your keyboard may vary. You choose one of Illustrator's shape tools and then you hold down the tilde key, and you can continuously draw to build up these interesting shapes. You can combine this with the shift key and/or the option or alt key. Now you do need to be willing to embrace some randomness here. I found that the arc tool gave me the best result. And in drawing letter shapes, I found that I needed to let up on my mouse button with every change of direction. So when drawing the W, there's one movement, and there's a second, and a third, and a fourth. Now in order to keep me on track, I also decided to work with a template. I've just created a template layer, which I'm going to lock, and I'll just be drawing over these letter shapes just as guidance for myself, and I added some guides as well. So now to recreate this, I'll come to my arc tool, hold down my tilde key, and draw my letter forms. Now, of course I can experiment with the different options for the arc tool, but I'm just going to go with them as they are. Now when you have your letter forms, template is currently turned off, I'll switch the stroke to a fill, and then I'm going to fill the shapes with a gradient and come and change the blending mode. In this case, I'm going to go with soft light and just so we can see what's going on, let me hide the edges, and I'll reduce the opacity on that to around 50%. So, like I said, you do need to be willing to embrace a certain degree of randomness, but combining this technique with transparency with a gradient and with a blending mode, you can get some very interesting results.