Graphic Design Tutorial Articles by Printplace.com: Letterpress Text Styles In Illustrator

Monday, March 05, 2012

Letterpress Text Styles In Illustrator

In this special tutorial, we will teach you how to create letterpress text styles in illustrator. This is a great effect for when you want your titles to get that letterpress effect we all love. This is great to apply on poster print designs, postcard prints or even themed brochures and pamphlets that need text that is highly noticeable and memorable. So just follow the steps below and see how you can do this in Illustrator. It should be pretty easy even for novices.

Create a new document. Make sure that you choose the right colour values and resolutions. For printing, use a CMYK colour, 300 ppi and of course your chosen dimensions.

Once done, use the rectangle tool and colour it with the appropriate background colour that you need. This will be your background for your text. You can use a placeholder for now as we can switch this with another colour or even texture later.

Now, type in your text.

Once typed in, remove any fill colour you used or any default stroke that was applied. You will see your text disappear, but it is there so do not worry.

Next, go to your appearance window/panel. Select the new text shape you just created so that the appearance panel has the properties for this shape. Now, go to the top right of appearance panel and select “Add new fill”.

With that new fill, use a colour that you want as the base for your pressed letter effect. It would be good to use something darker than your background.

Once done, select this new fill and add an Inner glow effect to it. Find this by going to Effect -> Stylize -> Inner Glow. Make sure you tweak the glow attributes accordingly. Again use a darker colour background here, with a reduced opacity to 90 and a blur approximately 3pixels. Use the Soft light mode as well and most importantly select Center as the source of the glow.

Then, we will need to add a new fill layer to create a slight shadow. Just select the add new fill option again and drag that new fill option at the bottom of the fill layers. Colour it an extra darker colour of your base colour as this is your shadow. Then go to Effects -> Distort and transform -> Transform. Change the vertical move to 1-4 pixels depending on your text size.

Now we will add a slight reflective effect to our text. Just duplicate the steps above. However, instead of a darker colour use white, and instead of 1-4 vertical move value use negative -1 to -4 values.

This will add that light reflective look to complete our pressed effect.

Note that you can still change the text at this time and preserve your effects. Also, you can save this style by opening the graphics style panel and saving it as your own custom style.