Lessons

Lesson Info

Typography & Students Homework

I want to touch on some typography points. I'm going to scan in some of my own hand lettering that we're going to use some tomorrow, so I'll show you how to scan in that, and get it illustrated. We're going to type on some pads, and then we all had some homework yesterday that we've been talking about. The students here in the studio have done a really great job coming up with sketches and a storyline and a theme for their collections, so we're going to invite them up and look at everybody's work that they have done so far, and I hope that that time will be just really encouraging to all you guys at home, and motivate you to dig in and do this work too. So the first thing I want to do is scan in a little bit of typography that I've done, and I have an idea that tomorrow we are going to be designing a little greeting card. So I just have, "Oh Hello!" Maybe some gift tags that say "to" and "from." So this is just something quick that I've put together, but I'm going to scan it in and sho...

w you how to turn your hand lettering into vectors in Illustrator. So if you missed our scanning segment, we are using an HP Photo Smart 5510. And most scanners work pretty much the same. I'm going to open up this scanner here on the Mac. Go to Scanner. So I have already done a little bit of hand lettering before the course, so if you missed this, the pattern collection that I will be making for us live tomorrow and been illustrating on today, calling it Nourish, and it is about all the ways that I like to nourish my creativity. So I wanted to do a little bit of hand lettering for the title, and I'm also going to use this in a pattern tomorrow. I just use this paint pen. I introduced it in segment one of session one. I believe it's called a Tomboy or, I think it's Tombow, ABT N15. So it just has a really inky kind of point to it that gives a little bit of a brush stroke. So it's kind of new, so it's pretty inky, but the more you use those, the more brush they get. And this is a scan that I did, right out of my sketchbook, just like we've been doing all day. I increased the contrast to get that really white and black contrast up, but this background is just a page of my notebook. That's how white we got the background, which is going to make this scan beautifully and also live trace beautifully. So I need to decide between all of these, and I think that I'm going to use this one right here. So that's just an extra scan. I'm going to delete that, and zoom in here. I might use this one up here. Zoom in here and use the image trace feature. So right now we're working with a jpeg. When I do image trace, it will turn it into vector. So the default that I like to use for a black and white image like this is just Black and White Logo. It's going to take just a second, and right off the bat, it has traced this pretty good. I can play with the threshold a little bit. The first thing I want to do is scroll down to the Advanced menu, and select Ignore White. What this is going to do is remove that white background behind the word Nourish, and so even though we're on a white artboard, you can't really tell, but that white paper is now gone, and it's transparent. So I can play with my threshold a little bit even though I think it looks pretty good. But I can take it down a notch, which makes it a little lighter, and also kind of increases the imperfections along the edges. That increases it significantly. So I'm going to take it back up somewhere along in there. So there are some nice imperfections that make this look like indeed I hand-lettered it. And I think we're good with that. So we're going to close the image trace panel, and I'm going to go ahead and Expand this. Is that a pretty big trend these days? Is it a big trend? I think so. I think people love to be able to take their words. I'm not a calligrapher or a typographist, but I love to jot things down in my notebook, scan them in really quick, and this way I can use them in my pattern work. But I also love to use them on my blog, overlay them on images, and you know, it's just a fresh perspective from a font, because nobody else has it but you. So I will right click and ungroup this. Select the No Stroke and No Fill box, and select Same, Fill Color to get all those little bits. Hit the Delete button to get rid of those. So this one's not making the cut. And I actually think I'm going to use the top one, so I'm just going to delete that too. I'll bring this up in size a little bit and I tend to write on an angle, so I just want to rotate that back down just a little. And I like what this looks like black, but I'm going to play with some color too. So I've done this several times today. If you missed it, I'll walk you through it again. I want to load the color pallettes that we've been using. They're not up because this is a new art document. So you just go to the flyout menu in Color, open Swatch Library, User Defined, and Creative Color Pallette. We'll just use one for now, so I can change the color of this guy to peach is I believe what I used for my logo. One really nice thing to do to sort of add some dimension to your text is you can outline this. Right here is our, fill is pink, and the outline can be maybe orange. You can increase the weight of that down in your Stroke panel. But something I like to do maybe even nicer than that is no stroke, but make a copy of this by hitting Command C, and Command B copies it behind. Then you can just change the color of it to maybe the dark orange, and using your arrow keys, move it down and over, just to create a little bit of a shadow. And you know what, I need this to have no stroke but an orange fill. That's why that wasn't coming quite through nicely. So I might tuck it back up just a little bit, but I'm just using my arrow keys to do that. So this I think looks really great now. I added some text down here that says, "nourish your creativity," so to do that I just grab the type tool by hitting T, and start typing. Nourish your creativity. So to play with this a little bit, your character is your fonts and all your characters are right up here. Not sure, I think I used something along the lines of, this will work. Right here I tend to type in lower caps, so if I want something in all caps, all you have to do is click on all caps, and it will change it to all caps. This is also where you find your kerning, your type size, if I want to increase the distance between all these letters, which is something I like to do a lot, I can increase it by 100 or 200, increase the size here, and I might play around with the font a little bit more, if this was a logo going out. But this is a nice way to add that. And I'm just going to bump this down and rotate it a little bit more. So there's not so much negative space. Something like that. Okay, and then yesterday we had a question on how to add text on a curve, on a circle, to where it goes up and down, and I wanted to touch back on that. So to do that, I'm just going to create a circle. I need to basically cut this in half so that I have a perfect circle curved to type on up front and down at the bottom. So the Scissors tool is what I use for that. It's under the Eraser flyout menu. I'm just going to click once on this anchor point and once over here, and what that does is basically chop it in half, or chop whatever it is you're working on. So now I can move this down here. This may look a little more familiar to you if I had no fill and just the stroke. So that looks more like Type on a Path that you're used to, but it would have worked either way. So to type on a path on the top, all you have to do is hit T for the Type tool, and as soon as you get close in to this path right here, you'll see behind my cursor it turns into kind of a curved S shape, so all you do is click, and that turns that into a path that you're now going to type on. So I can say, my name is, and you can over here under Align, or Paragraph, you can make that centered. Then if I want to come down here and add my name, it's the same thing, but because this was a circle, it's going to be upside down. And this is what happened yesterday, so I kind of wanted to touch back on it. So these little handles here are what's going to enable us to flip it up. So if I just grab this handle here, I can just flip it directly up just like that. All I'm doing is holding my cursor down and moving it straight up. So that way it's legible now. If you wanted it to where the top of the type was on the bottom of this, the quickest way I know how to do that is to change your baseline shift. So up moves it up, and down moves it down below that line. So that messes a little bit with the stretching of it, but you can decrease the width between your text there. Okay. So in a nutshell, that's typography. You can use the same scanning, if our scanner had been working, it's the same thing that we've been doing with our sketches, so you can do simple text, you can use big inky text, scan it in, and use the live trace tool. Then you can layer it on top of photos, use it as logos, all kinds of fun stuff. So next I want to introduce some of our students, and talk about our homework a little bit and the inspiration behind it, see some of your sketches and see also maybe what kind of stumbling blocks you ran into, or mental blocks you ran into, and see if we can kind of break through any kind of bumps along the way that you ran into. So Kristen, I was wondering if you might want to start? Sure, absolutely. Want me to bring my doodles? Yeah, come up here with your doodles, and I'll meet you around the front. So did you have a idea for your collection? I did. Yeah, so share it with us, your idea, maybe the name for your collection, or anything that you want to share with us or ran across along the way. Okay. I don't have a good name yet, except for just Fall/Winter 2014. That's good! I thought I might just start organizing my design life by seasons, maybe two per year. That's a great idea. But it's going to be Fall/Winter as a time of new beginnings. Oh. And I wrote something. Can I read it real quick? Yes, I would love for you to read it. Usually we think of spring as the fresh start season, and fall/winter is the downtime when leaves fall and bears hibernate. But this fall I'm opening a shop, so this season is full of new beginnings for me. Plus in the fall/winter there's back-to-school, New Year's resolutions, and a fresh whitewashing of snow that creates a landscape which causes us to see things that weren't in focus before. That's really beautiful. So I drew some snowflakes. Can I open these? Yeah. And then I did some text, just for some text. Oh my goodness. And then I started on some memes. Look at you, wait, wait, wait wait. That was way too fast. Look at this, how beautiful. This is fall, this is so beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, you're a really talented typographist. Thank you. Is that a word? I'll let you choose whatever you want to use. You can scan in or whatever. All right, that is really pretty. And some leaves. Oh, leaves. And a walrus. I want to see your walrus. Can you please show the camera the walrus? (students laughing) Look at this walrus! So you're one of those people who actually can draw. This is really, really pretty. Sometimes. And some beautiful snowflakes. And did you do these right from, sorry, did you do these in pencil first, and then some you did right from pen. I used a ruler, but I used pen. This is beautiful. And you're not afraid to work with pen, which sometimes I am, so. I was thinking I might turn those into Christmas tree ornaments. Yeah. This is so pretty. And you cut them out, which is perfect. Yeah. This is beautiful. Did you run into any hiccups along the way, any questions? No, I just really got inspired when you encouraged us to come up with a story yesterday. Good, I love your story. That got my wheels turning. And that is so true, except most people attach new beginnings with spring, and I love that you attached new beginnings with fall. Because isn't that true? Every season brings new beginnings and a new whole set of inspiration with the seasons change, especially in the South, where we are, the seasons change so much. So that's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, you have something you'd like to show us? Great, Theresa. Hi. Yeah, and so did you do this all on the train? Is that what we heard? I'm a very crazy busy person, so. What I liked yesterday that really helped me was resurrecting mistakes, so as soon as I got home, I dug out from two years ago, a mistake, that are going to be fabulous babies soon. Wonderful. And I'm so glad you didn't throw them away. I am so glad too, because I did that one time and totally regretted it. But at any rate, I have been hired, and I don't know why or how, to do a wrapper for a vehicle, and I didn't even know what a wrapper was until I looked it up. Like I say, I get jobs, and then I have to figure out how to do them. Anyway, my background is in beauty, so I am hired by a makeup school. They like my work so much, they wanted me to incorporate beautiful models with my pattern design work, and then this is going to be on a vehicle, so when they drive up to a event, then the work is all over the car or the van or the semi or whatever rig it is, I don't know. So anyway, so I have to design for that. And the problem is, I don't like to draw. I love to paint. I love mixed media and I love to cut, but not my body, just paper. (laughing) So that being said, my issue has always been to paint on acetate, which I have lots of examples of that, and take my drawings that are failures to create something pretty, so the name of this event, inspired by a personal bridezilla experience I had, is called Falling Up, which I can only up when you've fallen about as low as you can go. How nice. And how to be fearless and be almost like a beast, and I, with all these different ladies that I'm drawing, being in the Bay area we're very diverse, so I'm going to have like an African-American, Caucasian, someone that's polka-dotted, whatever. So I will have these people and then the patterns behind them will be what of their ethnicity. Beautiful. So I grabbed all these things up, and I had them, but I didn't want to act like I didn't do my homework, but I have a two-hour commute, and I wanted to watch TV, I didn't want to draw. So on the train, I came here this morning, and I drew. So what I did was I'm doing the African segment right now, so I just started freeflowing with my favorite oil pen Sharpie, just a variety of images that have a tribal feeling, because we sort of need to be almost like ferocious and savage to overcome whatever is breaking our heart. So that's what I did, and these are all my mistakes that are going to-- Not mistakes. Yeah, they're all my, they're going to be something someday. Images that will I think really help me to understand that it's all a big circle and it all means something, and not to give up, especially when you don't feel confident, and I have to say that this course was so intensely fabulous for me, because I don't hear well, and I don't learn fast, and I learned so much, I am just riveted to my seat, and I am so grateful. Thank you. So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And I love that you're naming it Falling Up, because you're so right. When we fall and we stumble, those are not mistakes, they are learning experiences, and we only come out from them better and more skilled and what we're doing. Thank you. Rachel? Have some things you want to share? I do. Great. I was writing down ideas all through class yesterday for what I wanted to do, and I came upon a theme from Poirot. I've been watching a lot of Poirot mysteries lately, so I was like, how can I incorporate that? So I kind of came up with the name of Dapper Dandy, because Poirot is rather dapper, and he is from the '20s, and so I started drawing little half-mustaches, because she was talking about her half butterfly, so I'm like, I'm just going to perfect one side-- That's right. Because that's so hard to reflect it on the other side. And the cane, and then he has his little pinch glasses, and of course a lot of times, sometimes they have a monocle. And then spats on shoes and bow ties, and suits with vests. That's so good. And then also, because the time that Poirot was in was the art deco period, so I briefly glanced at a Google search for art deco windows and then closed it out, and then started to draw just some kind of basic concepts that I got to kind of incorporate additional just graphic themes instead of actual specific objects into it. Nice. And I did kind of write a little bit of a story about kind of the character that I was designing for. So it's the Dapper Dandy is a distinguished gentleman of discerning taste. He is impeccably dressed. He enjoys strolls in the park and fine dining. He has discerning taste when it comes to everything. He is courteous, yet not shy to express his opinions. I love it. What a clear vision you have. And did you write that before or after your sketches? I wrote that, actually I wrote that this morning. I sketched last night, and I drew a couple more sketches this morning of the bowler hat and a watch and kind of like a tower, because Poirot lived in London. Nice. Yeah, so sometimes I do both. Sometimes I write my kind of little paragraph about my collection beforehand, which gives me like a really strong mission. I'm clear on what I'm doing. Sometimes it changes though, and so sometimes I write it at the end because the collection has molded over time. But I always at least have a clear vision of what I'm going for. So you've sketched in pencil. Yes. And so what's your idea now? I would say you can either scan these in, lock them and trace over there, or you can trace over them beforehand with nice pen on a light board and then scan them in and use live trace. What do you think you'll do? I might just trace over them just with pen without a light board, because I don't own a light board. A window. A window works great. Okay. Tape them up to a window. I did it for years. Okay, I will try that. Or I could just scan them in and just go from there. Yeah. I'll have to see where it goes from there. They're great. I love it. All right, thank you. Thank you so much.