How to Create Sliced Text in Adobe Illustrator Tutorial

Author:

Matt Borchert

Keywords:

design,graphic design,adobe illustrator,illustrator,design tutorial,graphic design tutorial,adobe illustrator tutorial,illustrator tutorial,typography tutorial,how to slice text in adobe illustrator tutorial,how to slice text in illustrator tutorial,illustrator pathfinder tutorial,illustrator pathfinder window tutorial,tutorial,how to use the pathfinder window,adobe illustrator for beginners,how to use adobe illustrator,type tool tutorial

Subtitles:

So in this video. I'm going to be showing you how to create sliced text Just like what you see right here in these two different examples It's actually really easy to do once you know what you're doing So let's just jump into it and make it happen So first up here just to get a starting point the font I used in these particular examples is called by like this It's called Elsie And Elsie is a totally free font So if you want to use the same font you can go to the description Where I'll place a link to download it you can go ahead and pause the video download the font install it and then come back Here and then you should be ready to go But it doesn't matter what font you use you can even use this on different objects, or illustrations You've made if that's something you want to do So all that doesn't really matter so anyways what you want to do is write out something or have your object ready that you want to slice and Once you have that done We can get on to the next step here So once you have your text ready to go if you're using text what you're gonna want to do is outline it before we go ahead and do this It'll have to be outlined You might want to just hold on alt or option on a Mac? and then click hold and drag it somewhere else to duplicate the live version before you outline it just so you have a copy of It somewhere in case you ever want to go back and make changes later that might save you some trouble But once you've done that or you're ready to go just select the text with the direct selection tool Which is the black arrow in your toolbar right click on the text and from this menu that appears you want to create outlines? so just Right-Click the text and then go to Create outlines and once that's done what you're going to want to do is hit the backslash button on your keyboard or go over here to your Tool bar where you can select the line segment tool? It looks like a line going up into the right once again its backslash on your keyboard So just select that and once you select that you can go ahead and just draw a line And you just basically click hold and drag on your screen to draw this line But what I'm going to suggest that you do is you hold down shift when you do it Which will make it be there perfectly vertical perfectly horizontal or at a 45 degree Angle so I'm going to make mine at A 45 degree angle I'm just holding shift as I do this and then I'm going to let go So this draws a line and the reason why I think a 45 degree angle Makes it the easiest is in a few later steps It's really nice to have something on a perfect 45 degree angle So if you want to enlarge or make this line smaller in the future you can just keep on doing [that] on that 45-degree Angle it makes it much faster and easier to do that, but of course you can use any angle that you want But as you can see this doesn't have a stroke applied right here in my tool bar The fill is the one that is a big solid box and the stroke is the one that has a square missing in the middle So you just want to double click on that stroke and then select a color for that stroke? I'm going to make this black which has a hex code of all zeros six different zeros so select whatever call you want this stroke to line to be and then hit ok and also You can use any color you want if you want to use something like a bright Cyan blue Just you can see how it overlaps the black text really easily that's actually something that I do all the time So feel free to just select whatever color you want hit ok and then as you can see right here This line is now that color she just want to use the selection tool Which is a black arrow and kind of click hold and drag this line along the text Until you think it's chopping the text up in a way that looks interesting to you so as you can see in the examples Right here. This is sort of what I did I actually kind of have running little history of what I did So this was my main text that I used this is where I drew [that] line cutting through my type And this is what happened after [I] actually made that cut to happen and then at the end here I kind of arranged it in two different ways kind of in a stylized manner to make it look a little bit more cool But the way you place the line and where you place the line is totally up to you it might be helpful to you to Have your stroke window available. Which is right here at my screen I've dragged down here to get the stroke window on your screen if you don't have it you can go to window and then Sort near the bottom it is stroke Everything in this window is alphabetical So just look for stroke as it will appear and make sure that this window is opened So that way when you use your black arrow, or selection tool and you highlight over the stroke you can change the weight to be bigger or smaller to make this a little bit more visible or Not quite as visible depending on what works best for you And making sure that you can see that line really clearly when you're working But once you have this line arranged on your text in a way that you think looks good I might suggest just selecting over everything by clicking holding that click and then dragging over this entire Object that you've created And then once again if you want to duplicate this just so you can have sort of a working Copy it might be helpful for you to do that to do that just Hold down alt on a PC or option on a Mac click hold and drag this down a little bit so that it's in its Own spot, and then you have a duplicated version right here So here is our duplicated version and one must suggest you do next [is] Highlight over just the stroke line that we created and then hit Ctrl C on a PC or command C on a Mac Which will copy it to the clipboard and I'll show you why I did that in just a second here But next up what we're going to do is make sure we have our path finder window open To get the path finder window open just go to window and then sword near the bottom we have path finder and The path Finder Window is going to be super useful here so we can kind of see different options for splitting up this text this is what ultimately saves a bunch of time so what you want to do next is use that black arrow or Selection tool select over everything right here so that both the text and your line to divide it is also selected and from The path Finder window we want to go to Path finders It's the options on the bottom row here, and the one on the furthest left is called divide We want to click that just one time which will divide the type by the line that is in front of it So just make sure you have this selected That your line is in front of your text and then hit the divide button in your pathfinder window And once you do that now if I zoom in the textures we can see a little bit better You can see there's a light blue line it might be really small on your screen But this is where it went ahead and divided the type so while the text is still selected here I'm going to right click it and then ungroup it and what that does it just makes it so each of these different Divided segments is on its own little thing So as you can see right here it cut the m right there and it cut the b on this little Top part right here So that right there we went ahead and cut the type really fast and easy to do that and the reason why I had you hit CTRL C over this line is now you can hit CTRL F on your computer or command F on a Mac which will paste that line back in place and I did that essentially so that if you wanted to do a stylized version just like this one right here This line is already in place and kind of ready to go So by hitting that CTRL F or command F on a Mac It pasted what you had copied just where you left it off So now kind of fun part where all we have to really do is just arrange this in a way that looks good to us [so] I'm just going to select this line and then this top segment And I'm holding shift as I click these multiple things So that it can select multiple things at once holding shift is just an easy way of doing that I'm going to drag this up over here. Just a little bit and let it go I'm going to hit CTRL F on the PC or command F on a Mac again To paste this line in place once again for this bottom section so both of these are kind of lined up now I'm also going to highlight over both of these line segments I'm gonna change the color to black instead of this cyan blue because I want it to go ahead and match the text here so I'm going to double click on my Toolbar in the Stroke Window which will bring up the color picker I'm just going to move it to the bottom here So it is all black and then hit ok feel free to make this whatever color you want if you don't want to use these kind of stylized Looking lines you of course don't have to you can also select both [the] lines and then once again [go] to your stroke window which is right here on my screen and Change the size of these lines to be bigger or smaller kind of depending on how you want them to look in Comparison to your text with this example right here It looks like three points is working well for me But depending on how big your type is that number might be different for you, so what I did on the type over here I look at this really quick is I actually just selected both these top points and deleted them the smaller points, so this little top section of the B right here I just click on that using the selection tool Which is a black arrow? And then hit the delete button to remove it and I'll do the same thing to this little leg on the M just clicking on That and deleting it to make this kind of stylized look happen And then you can just highlight over the areas you want to move and kind of arrange these in a way that you think looks Visually pleasing to you essentially so on this one I have this vertical line going down into the left here on the B And on the M that line is going up into the right so I'll just quickly go ahead and make that change This time what you want to do is hit A on your keyboard To select the direct selection tool which is the white arrow in your toolbar and the difference between white arrow And the black arrow is the white arrow can select a single point on an item as opposed to that entire line So if you click on the very end point anchor of this line for example You can then drag This line as you want to to move just that so if I do that really quick You can see that the top point of the line stays in the same spots but the bottom point was what was moved and the reason why I thought it would be helpful for you to hold shift when you Drew this line So it would be a perfect 45 degree angle is that on this step you can do the same thing when you select a point? And also an easier way to select a point if you don't know exactly where it is because you can't see it You can just use that white arrow kind of draw a little box where that point would be and then it should highlight that point on your screen as like a little blue dot and then you just Click hold and drag this up, but this time as I drag this up I'm going to hold shift on my computer So it stays on this 45 degree Angle I'm going to move this line until it basically ends up on the end of this M the point right here And then we do the same thing for the B. Except them grab this point at the top of the B I'm going to get that point selected with the direct selection tool Click hold and drag it down while holding shift and kind of get it to the top point of this B so if I zoom in a little bit closer by hitting CTRL+ on a Pc, or command + on a Mac you can see if these don't line up really great There's a few different ways you can go ahead and make these appear to be more lined up You can use a selection tool, and then click on this line and once you click on it You can use your keyboard arrow keys to kind of nudge it back and forth until it gets looking a little bit better to you You might want to zoom in even more so you can really see what you're doing here? You can also click hold and drag this line and kind of nudge. It softly until it appears to line up pretty well Alternatively and this might be a little bit easier if you highlight over one of these lines and while that line is selected and highlighted You want to go to object and then you want to go to? Expand and from the Expand menu you just want to make sure that expand stroke is Selected and if that is selected you can go ahead and hit ok and what that will do is it will convert this Formerly stroke line into an object so it's going to treat it like a solid object like a box instead of like a stroke line Then if I want to I can go ahead and zoom in here on this point Use the white arrow on what used to be the stroke But right now it is a box so we can just grab the point of the box right here that you want to move And you can kind of nudge that until it seems to fit the characteristics of the letter a little bit better So right there. I just did some quick moves using that direct selection tool, or the arrow I made it fit the lines of this M a lot better than it previously so I wanted to do that on this B as Well, so where is this box right here? It's kind of hard to see when things are overlapping in a strange way, it actually looks like the B letter is Placed on top of this line if you ever want to arrange the way things are ordered so you can select things a little bit Better you can just go ahead and click on that element right click go to arrange, so once again Just click on the element so it's selected right-click it go to arrange And then you can either bring it to front or send it to back to make it on the very top or the very Bottom using the control brackets as you can see in these little shortcuts is a faster way of doing that too But you can do that however you want, but this line actually hasn't been outlined yet So we want to go ahead and do that as well so with this stroked line selected. I'm going to object Expand and then Make sure stroke is selected and then expand that stroke So now we have an actual box here as opposed to a stroke line So if I go back up at the top here this one is actually pretty good I don't know Why this is ooh me all crazy like [that] But anyways if I go back up here you can see this won't actually load pretty darn close as it was but I can just Grab this point really quick, and then make it match that anchor point, so it's an actual perfect connection Which it was not too before then of course if you want to continue moving these lines after you've expanded the stroke you can of course do that. Just highlight over both of those points with the direct selection tool So that both points are selected then click hold and drag whoops I might want to zoom in a little bit So it doesn't try to do some other weird stuff click hold and drag on those points Then just make sure you hold shift as you do that So you can still do this just the exact same way using the direct selection tool after you've expanded it It's just you want to make sure you have every point that you want to move selected when you do that But as you can see here that was pretty quick to do and it kind of replicated what I had done previously here so that's just a quick example of how easy it is to chop things up in illustrator slice them up and make them look a little bit cooler a little bit more stylized if that is a look that you're going for That is it for this video if you found it helpful, please hit the thumbs up button it lets me know I did a good job and also feel free to leave a comment about what you thought about the video If you have any questions you want to ask or if you want to see other different topics in the future you can feel free to Leave your video suggestions in the comment section and if you want to see more videos like this Please subscribe. I do my best to keep creating content. Just like this for designers Thanks so much for watching