Create superhero type in a single bound
Excerpted from “Before & After magazine, issue 38.”
Comic book headlines demand attention in many ways. Their three-dimensional, multi-perspective views create a lot of movement. They’re colorful, bold and rock solid—traits that can be fittingly associated with our comic book heroes. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how you can create superhero 3-D type in Adobe® Illustrator® CS.
1. Set, color, and stroke your type.
Open a new document in Illustrator, name the file, and click OK. Select the Type tool and click the artboard once. Type your word or words, which by default will display in black. Bold, san-serif fonts with tight character spacing work best. We used 40 point Futura Extra Bold Condensed.
With your type selected, double-click the Fill icon near the bottom of the Tool palette, which will call up the Color Picker. Select a bright, comicbook color and click OK.
Double-click the Stroke icon, select a stroke color and press OK. The stroke color will become the extrusion color of your 3-D word.
2. Warp your type.
Choose Effect > Warp > Arch. (Be sure to choose Arch, not Arc.) Turn on the Preview option. Choose a subtle Bend value of 20%. For distortion, set the Horizontal value to –25% and click OK.
This gives the appearance that the text is fading to the right and will be exaggerated slightly once the 3-D effect is applied.
3. Extrude and shade.
Let’s put the super into superhero! With the type selected, open the 3D Extrude & Bevel window (Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel). Once open, select More Options to display the full window. The default Position, Off-Axis Front, will work just fine. Set the Perspective to 50° and the Extrude Depth to 50 pt.
For a convincing effect, surface shading is necessary, so under Surface choose Plastic Shading. Next, set the Ambient Light at 20%, choose Black as the Shading Color, and leave everything else as is.
At this point our type is too dark, so we need to create another light source. Press the New Light button located under the shading sphere. By default, a second light source will be set in the center. Move the original light source just above it as shown above and click OK.
4. Do more!
Different settings, of course, yield different results. Above is an arch made by specifying in the Arch Options a Bend of 35% and a Horizontal value of 0%. In the 3D Extrude & Bevel Options, apply the same settings from Step 3, but this time change the XYZ values to 12°, 10° and 2°, respectively.
Re-create your look in one click by saving your work as a Style. With the type object still selected, choose Window > Graphic Styles. Option/Alt-click the New Graphic Style button located at the bottom of the palette, name your style, and click OK. A blank thumbnail appears for the text-effect graphic style.
