516 Using chromatic-style fonts in Illustrator

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, this week you I'll show you how to work with so called chromatic style fonts in Illustrator. Now, If you've never heard of such a thing, once again chromatic style fonts. You can look them up online and you'll find all kinds of examples, it's pretty old school stuff, but it's a lot of fun. We'll be working with this font called Copal. Which is available from Adobe Typekit if you're using CC, if you're working in CS6 or earlier, you can find free versions of Copal online. It includes three different styles that are designed to be mixed and matched together to create highly colorful display type just like you see here.

Here! Let me show you exactly how it works. Alright here's the final chromatic font effect just so you have a chance to see it on screen. We're going to be starting off inside this document and again, the words so what are set in the font Copal which is available with Adobe Typekit. But you can do a search online for chromatic fonts or chromatic type and find all kinds of great examples. Alright, so I'm going to start things off by drawing a big rectangle in the background here and so I'll go up to the view menu and make sure my smart guides are turned on, so in my case they aren't so I'll go ahead and choose the command.

And then I'll grab my rectangle tool, and I'll drag from one corner of the red outline, which represents the bleed, to the other corner in order to create this big rectangle. And I'll make sure my fill is active here inside the swatches panel, and I'll go ahead and select the second to darkest drab brown. Which, if you're working in a basic RGB document starts off R =115. And I'll go ahead and click on that color in order to assign it. Now I don't want it to be at the front of the stack, so I'll right-click on it choose arrange, and then choose send to back, where you have that keyboard shortcut of control shift left bracket, or command shift left bracket on a Mac.

Alright, now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll click on my type to select it. And this time I'm going to select the darkest of the drab browns, which begins R =83, and then you get G= 71, B = 65 which produces this fairly ho-hum effect right here. Alright now I want to add a drop shadow by going up to the effect menu, choosing stylize and then choosing drop shadow. And I'll go ahead and select the darkness option here and make sure its set to 100%. So that whether I'm working in RGB or CMYK, I'm adding 100% black.

I want to set the X offset value to negative eight and the Y offset value to eight points and that's going to go ahead and cast a shadow down and to the left. And the only reason the text is suddenly looking red is because I have my smart guides turned on. Is because I have my smart guides turned on We want a blur value of zero and I'm going to take the opacity value to 33% and we should be able to turn on the preview check box and see that modification occur on screen. At which point, I'll go ahead and click okay in order to accept that change and the letters should calm down a little bit as well.

Now at this point I'm really hating that flashing and so I'm going to turn off the smart guides by going up to the view menu and choosing the smart guides command. Alright now lets make a copy of this type by pressing control C or command C on a Mac and then go ahead and press control F or command F on a Mac in order to paste that copy in front. Now I want to change the color of the text just so it stands out. And I'm going to go with this bright shade of orange which reads R = 251, G = 176, and B = 59. Alright,this is not the style we're looking for this is the solid style, notice that but if you click on the style pop up menu we have two other styles to work with.

Again, assuming that you have Copal installed on your system. I'm going to go with decorated in order to produce this effect right here. Now I want the drop shadows to be thinner than all this, and darker as well. So I'll go up to the window menu and choose the appearance command, which in my case brings up the appearance panel in the lower right region of the screen. And I'll click on words drop shadow in order to modify that dynamic effect. Now I'll turn on the preview check box and I'll take the X offset value up to negative three and I'll take the Y offset value down to positive three and I'll go ahead and crank the opacity value up to 100% in order to produce this nice crisp black shadow right here.

Now notice in my case the mode is set to normal because we're working with black, normal and multiply are going to produce the exact same effect. Alright, now go ahead and click okay to accept that change. Alright, I want to paste another copy of the text so I'll just press control F or command F on a Mac to paste that original text that I copied. And this time I'm going to change it to a medium more saturated brown. This guy right here, which reads R = 40, G =98, B = 57. and then I'll go to the style pop up menu up here in the control panel, and I'll switch from solid to outline to produce this effect here.

Now notice because we copied that original text, and pasted it in front We have a little bit of an extra drop shadow on the inside of the letters as well as a darker shadow on the outside. We don't want that, so with the drop shadow selected here inside the appearance panel go ahead and click on the trash can icon in the bottom right corner in order to get rid of it. Alright, now I want this outline to be a little brighter so I'll click on the word opacity, once again up here in the control panel and I'll change the blend mode from normal to color to produce this bright effect right here.

Alright, now I'm going to press the escape key to hide that panel and I'll click on a rectangle out here in the background in order to select it, and I'll copy it by pressing control C or command C on a Mac then deselect it by pressing control shift A or command shift A on a Mac and paste it at the front of the layer by pressing control F or command F on a Mac. Alright, now I want to use this rectangle to create a little bit of texture, and to do so you want to go up to the effect menu choose texture from nearly the bottom of the menu and choose texturizer.

And that's going to bring up the big filter gallery which by the way produces a raster effect in other words it converts the rectangle to pixels on the fly. And I'm looking for the texture to be set to sandstone, a scaling value of 100% is fine a relief of four is just fine as well. All these other settings are fine in fact. At which point I'll just go ahead and click okay in order to accept that change. And now in order to blend this texture in with the type in the background, click on the word opacity up here in the control panel and change the blend mode from normal to overlay.

And that's going to produce this effect right here. And now with that rectangle still selected, you can infuse color from the swatches panel. And I decided to go with this bright shade of brown R = 198, G = 156, B = 109. Which produces the effect that we saw at outset of the movie But, you don't have to stick with that. I'm going to switch back to the layers panel here and I'm going to twirl open the type layer by click on it's twirly triangle, and now I'll go ahead and target this top so what layer which represents the outline type, and you can do that by click on the circular meatball in the right hand column, and then I'll go ahead and change the fill to this dark shade of purple.

And next I'll target the top rectangle by clicking on it's meatball, and then I'll switch it's fill to this medium shade of green. After which point, if I'm satisfied with the effect I'll just push control shift A, or command shift A on a Mac in order to deselect the text. And so, here we have two variations. The one that I showed you at the outset of the movie, and the one that I've come up with on the fly right now. Two variations on a chromatic style font effect. Produced using the font called Copal here inside Illustrator.

Alright now if you're a member of lynda.com, I have a follow up movie in which I show you how to use chromatic style fonts, but this time inside Photoshop which allows us to integrate a photographic background, we have also got some blend modes and some layer effects as well as a layer mask or two. And so, stuff that is just handled very differently in Photoshop than it is in Illustrator. If you're looking forward to next week, I'm going to show you once again, chromatic style fonts, this time Zebrawood. But notice, this font has a certain sort of 3D appearance to it, which just forces us to add a few cast shadows.

Off the letters as well as the boxes in the background using dynamic effects inside Illustrator. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.