Computer Arts Tutorials

Design a classic serif poster

From choosing the perfect font to bespoke glyphs and ligatures, Emiliano Suárez reveals how to manipulate serif type in your design work

As graphic designers, we tend to follow some golden rules: the message must be clear, the colours must have some harmony and the text needs to be balanced and readable.

But sometimes, in order to create something different or something that stands out, we need to take those rules to the limit, mix them up, or even break them. That’s what this tutorial is all about. Pretend for a moment that all the glyphs and characters in words weren’t created for text, they were created to illustrate.

Every letter is like a very special and unique brush – and you have thousands of them. Just look at your Character palette in Illustrator and imagine how many possibilities typefaces can give you. We are going to explore another way of writing (or a fresh way of illustrating, depending on how you look at it). So, be ready to despoil your mind and start having fun with typography.

Skills
Select the perfect font for your project
Combine glyphs in fresh, creative ways
Add texture with Adjustment Layers

01 When starting a project from scratch it’s always useful to go back to basics – so grab a pencil and some blank paper and sketch some lines. The important thing here is to discover our primary axis, or the core of our eventual image. It doesn’t need to be the final thing, but it will give you an idea.

02 The message is important, but in this case how it looks is more important to us. So if you have a favourite quote use it, or simply go to Google, type ‘Quote of the day’ and hit I’m Feeling Lucky. Here I’ve simply gone with the traditional pangram ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’

03 Choosing the typeface is one of the keys to this kind of project. Every typeface or font family has its own personality, and we’re going to take full advantage of this. I’ve chosen the classic Bodoni Roman for this particular project, because it has beautiful serifs and strong stems.

04 We’re ready to start playing, so type your quote in Illustrator. It’s important that we keep every word separated from the rest. Start building the main axis. Use the stems of the caps letters to intensify the chosen direction and set the Tracking to -50 in the Character palette.

05 Start filling the white spaces between words. This will give you the sensation of a more compact block of text. It’s important to bear in mind the total shape of your artwork, and try to balance between black and white zones. In this case we will need to separate the J from ‘Jump’ and the D from ‘Dog’ and align them to the top to make them fit.

06 To take advantage of the serifs we need to play with the ligatures between glyphs. As you can see I’m using the descender of the Q to blend seamlessly with the F, and also the serif of the F is also touching the base of the B. All these movements are going to give us the sensation that the words are flowing and that they are naturally positioned.

07 We are going to mask some parts of the glyphs to ensure that the letters are still recognisable. Use the Pathfinder palette. Hit Shift+Cmnd/Ctrl+F9 to show it. Create a round shape using the Elipse tool (L) and put it in front of your glyph. Select both and hit the Subtract icon, holding down Alt as you do so. This enables you to edit it later by double-clicking it. Repeat this step as many times you need.

08 Another good move is to resize some of the characters, especially if you feel that a particular part of the text needs to pop out. For example, I took the ‘ox’ of ‘fox’ and scaled it up a little so it fits better between both words. Make sure you’re holding Shift so you don’t distort the glyphs. Do the same thing with ‘Brown’, scaling it down so it fits better.

09 Once we have a good composition we need to start adjusting the spaces between words and glyphs. This will take some time, but it’s going to ensure that everything is in place and balanced. Create a square with the Rectangle tool (M) and start matching the gaps.

10 Time to polish our artwork; we’ve been resizing and masking and we are going to find a lot of nodes that are incorrect. So zoom in and with the Pen Tool (P) start getting rid of those nodes. Make sure that you don’t erase a key node or deform anything.

11 We’ve finished in Illustrator – time to give some spark to our design. Create a new document in Photoshop at 300dpi so you can print it later. Go to Illustrator, Select All (Cmd/Ctrl+A) and then copy. Go back to Photoshop and paste it in.

12 We are going to use a vintage-style paper background to make it look good. You can use any texture you like; I just feel that this kind of serif font works very well with vintage or retro textures. Import your paper image and put it behind your pasted artwork. Fill the background with black – you can do this with the Paint Bucket tool (G) and a black colour.

13 To achieve that age-worn look we need to select our typography composite layer, right-click on it and go to Blending Options. In the Blending Options start playing with the Blend If: sliders until you get that grungy look. Make sure that you select the right channel, which may vary depending on the colour of the layer that is behind – in this case I used the magenta channel.

14 Our next step is to create the final colour scheme for your design. In the Layer palette, create a new Gradient Fill Adjustment Layer. From the presets panel select Violet/Orange, or whatever combination suits you. Press OK and change the transfer mode of the layer to Color Burn. Put it on the top and decrease the transparency to 50% if you feel it looks too saturated.

15 Almost there. We need to improve the vintage look. To do this we are going to add some noise. Go to the top layer in the Layer palette and press Shift+Cmnd/ Ctrl+Alt+E to create a new merged layer of all our layers. With this new layer selected go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise, set it to 10% and press OK.

16 We’ve finished. When I work on this kind of project with great typefaces like Bodoni I like to sign the artwork with the family font name used in the process – it shows some respect to the original creator.

Emiliano Suárez
A designer from Argentina, Suárez loves typography, photography, illustration and especially graphic design in all its forms. www.watafak.com

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Computer Arts Magazine features lots useful design tips and thorough tutorials like this one on its website. Check them out.

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Hit Ctrl-P/Apple-P in order to bring up the Print dialog. On the General tab, be sure to click Print Non-Printing Objects, Print Blank Pages, and Print Visible Guides and Baseline Grids.

All Things Typographic

ALL THINGS TYPOGRAPHIC | NOVEMBER 2010

>> TypeTalk: You ask, we answer >> From Metal to Digital, Part 1 >> Reviving Caslon, Part 2 >> Calligraffiti: An Explosive New Art Form >> Psychiatric Answering Machine >> Bring Gourmet Typography to You! . TypeTalk: You ask, we answer Q. I've been hearing a lot about Web fonts but don't understand what they are. Can you explain? Check it out... Q. What is the difference begtween Metric and Optical kerning in InDesign? Even thought InDesign has been around for many years now, this is (still) one of the most common questions I'm asked by designers. In fact, many think these settings relate to tracking, and not kerning. For this reason I feel compelled to revisit this topic to quell the continuous queries! Check it out... . From Metal to Digital, Part 1 Today's digital fonts are a tremendous boon not only to graphic designers but also to anyone who uses type. The abundance, diversity, and availability of fonts increase productivity and enhance creativity. There are more choices today than ever before in the history of type and design. But this newfound "freedom" comes at a price. Read on... . Reviving Caslon, Part 2: Readability, Affability, Authority A scholarly, informative, well-illustrated article by William Berkson. The first half is an exploration of readability in general, and sets up the second half which explores Caslon, its history, and its many interpretations, including Berkson's own version, Williams Caslon Text. Read on... . Calligraffiti: An Explosive New Art Form By mixing beautiful and traditional calligraphy with the rawness and grittiness of graffiti, Niels Meulman gives a whole new way of appreciating both art forms. Meulman, also known as Shoe, is an artist, designer and art director who was born in Amsterdam and who's worked at international ad agencies like BBDO and television networks like MTV. Read on... Psychiatric Answering Machine Typography Animation Want a chuckle? Then don't miss this typographic animation which combines an imaginary psychiatrist's answering machine message with very clever motion typography. Don't miss this...

A Lesson in Kerning

I've been getting traffic recently from people looking for information on kerning. Seeing this made me remember when I had first started out and was trying to learn as much about design as quickly as possible. I searched for instructions on kerning and I found the results to be pretty disappointing. Even though now I feel like I have a pretty decent understanding of the concept, I've never heard kerning explained as well as Ed Benguiat explains it. The following explanation is derived from his lesson on kerning.

A Basic Definition

Kerning is the process of adjusting the space between pairs of letters.

Practical Application

If we were to take three lines of text: AMERICAN, AIRLINES, AROUND and just type it out in Helvetica bold it might look passable but our goal is to fix the spacing so that it doesn't look there are holes of white space in the words.

First decide how tightly spaced you want the words to be and then determine the space between the first two letters

Once you have the space between the first two letters established you can kern the rest of the text. This isn't a purely mathematical thing, it's visual. Each letter is unique and the amount of positive and negative space it has is different so you can't rely on using Illustrator to make sure the space is numerically even. The way you do this is by looking at three letters at a time and moving the third letter left or right until it looks like the middle letter is centered between the first and third.

Here are some examples of how the process might go:
This is a little too loose

This is too tight

This looks about right

Consistency Commandments:

Now that we've begun to space the letters there are some guidelines that will make it easier and faster so that you don't have to rethink each pair of letters

The space between two straights will always be the same.
For example if you have already established the space between "IB" you will know what to do later in a heading if encounter a "NM"

The space between two rounds will always be the same
If you have already established the space between "OC" you will know what to do when you see "OG"

The space between a straight and a round will always be the same.
If you have already established the space between "MO" you will know what to do when you see "HC"

Here is what you might get for a final product if you started off with the "AM" combination above

Here is what it looked like typed out without any modification, just for comparison

Newsprint magazine by Studio Newwork

Studio NewWork is a New York based design studio. They have pretty formulaic and grid based designs. Check out the ways they use type.
Also check out the tutorial they shared with computer arts.
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Using Grides in InDesign

Check out Computer Arts' other tutorials, here.

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