Tutorial · Digitizing Your Lettering - Create letterforms in illustrator
It's here! On this tutorial I show you how I vector my letters, what little tricks and tips I've learned from my mentors and idols and what I think will help you save tons of time and avoid frustration. If you have any questions let me know on the comments and I'll do my best to explain everything you need :) Link for practice file: ****** Music: Background Talking With You by Artificial.Music ****** Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 ****** Music provided by Audio Library ******
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Hey there!
Welcome to my tutorial on Digitizing your Lettering, this time I’m gonna show you
awesome insights I learned from the greats on how to best use Illustrator and save tons
of time when vectorizing your lettering.
So let’s get to it.
The biggest secret for vectoring lettering pieces are circles or ovals.
If you’re new to Illustrator I highly recommend you begin your digitizing by creating these objects
Ovals and circles are key to finding the perfect spot to place your key points, and although
the position of them may vary depending on your style of letters, try to always place
as few of them as possible, but make sure you covered at least the beginning and the
end of the strokes.
I start each object outside of the actual artwork, and I follow the key points located
in the ovals; by placing the first key point outside of the artwork I get a lot more freedom,
if refinement is needed, to manipulate those end points.
I place the key point holding shift and drag to make sure I have a big enough handle to
create the right curve, and if I don’t I can always just press alt and modify only
that last handle until I’ve drawn it just right.
I continue doing the same until I reach the first key point and close the vector object.
As you can see the ovals are located mostly at the corners and starting and finishing
parts of the strokes; some of them aren’t even covering any artwork but the negative
space or the background, those ovals are also helpful in defining the location of key points.
At the starting or finishing parts I draw two big ovals that cross each other, this
interception creates a “tail” or another stroke, and it’s on this tail that I start
drawing my vector object, again, outside of the actual artwork.
There are only two rules when digitizing your lettering: one is creating as little
key points as possible, this will make your lettering easier to manipulate; and second
is to keep all your handles in perfect vertical or horizontal lines, this will create a smoother
looking letter or vector object.
Once I’ve finished vectoring all of my letters and refined them as much as I wanted (which
I’ll be honest sometimes takes me hours & hours), it’s time to delete the tails
or extras that were drawn outside of the letters, in order to do this I merge objects using the Pathfinder
tools window; to do so I simply select letters intermittently (meaning I select one and I
don’t the one after) to avoid merging the letters to each other, and click on the “Unite”
Shape Mode button.
I repeat this step with the remaining vector objects and then select the letterforms and
group them using Command+G, then I make them invisible clicking on the eye icon next to
the group and go ahead a select the tails and hit delete.
Afterwards I can adjust any details I feel need refining and it’s done.
Thank you for watching, the Illustrator file is available on the description if you want
to practice, see me on the next one!
