Transcript:
Hello. I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial today we’re going to create a double stroke text effect in Illustrator, in fact, we’re going to build it up to way more than double stroke. But if you want a double stroke, then we’re going to cover that first. We need use the font. Angelina, and I’m going to increase my font size to about 400 points. You want to match your font size to the document size that you’re working on? I’m going to give you a download link to the font and Jelena so that you can download it because it’s a really nice font. Now the word that I’m using is my Rakhi, It’s a Greek word, and it means throw your heart and soul into something, and I think that’s a really nice word to use for this effect because it’s got a favorite of heart and soul in it. Now, with our text selected, I’m going to the appearance panel. We’re going to be using that throughout. There’s one thing rather interesting about the appearance panel right now is that this type has a fill and no stroke, but in the appearance panel we’re not seeing either of those. There’s just type characters and nothing. Well, the fill is in the character’s area, so I’m going to open up the characters area and we actually don’t turn that off because we don’t need or want that, and it’s sort of given get in our way a little bit so with it turned off, we’re going back to type where it says no appearance and the type is selected, but we don’t have any appearance. There’s no fill and no stroke, so we’re gonna add a new fill at this point. I’m gonna click here on, add new fill, and I’m going to select the fill from a small palette of color, so I’m going to be working in, which is a sort of creamy yellow. So now we have a fill on. I type much easier to see what’s going on. We also have access to a stroke and I want to add a sort of red stroke to the text. I want it! Be nice and thick, so click here. In the stroke weight? Hold the shift key. Press the up arrow key. Make it nice and thick and disaster just struck disaster struck in a couple of ways. Firstly, there’s all sorts of pointy bits happening here, and secondly, my stroke just ate my text so first problem. First, let’s get rid of these pointy bits, and that’s got to do with their corners, the beveled corners or whatever we’re using right now. Right now we’re using a my to join. There is a round join that solved the problem, and there’s also a bevel join now. The bevel joins sort of solved the problem, but not quite with actually opened up a gap here so round joins going to be the best option for us problem. One solve problem, two solved. Where is our text well? The appearance panel works as a sort of layer stack and right now. The stroke is on top of the fill. If we move the stroke under the fill, then we’re going to see our fill back again now. When you’re in the appearance panel, these are little triangle icons and they allow you to expand and collapse, so the stroke at the moment is actually two lines and so to us our fill. This is the fill and this also belongs to fill, so just be clear on that because if we try and drag the stroke underneath the fill and try and drag it between these two here, you can’t because that is part of the fill as well, but you can take it underneath the fill, and that’s what it needs to be. So now we have our stroke and our text, and if we want another stroke, then we can just add another stroke now. This is coming in at the very top, which is just going to be a slight embarrassment in a minute, but let’s turn it into the color we want and let’s increase its size again, just clicking in the stroke width area and pressing shift up arrow Now it’s inherited, thankfully, this round join, so everything’s solved in terms of the spiking as there is no Spike Enos, but this big blue stroke is in front of the fill and it’s in front of the thinner red stroke. You can see this is a 90 pixel stroke. This is a 60 pixel stroke, so we’re going to need to take this stroke and drag it behind, absolutely everything. There is our multi layer stroke effect, and, of course, none of this is set in concrete. If you have a look at this and decide, it’s not thick enough, or it’s too thick or whatever you can come back and change any of these. So there is a double stroke effect in Illustrator now. If you want to use this over again in future, why not save it as a graphic style go to the graphic style panel with my text selected, just going to click on the new graphic style icon and that saves it as a graphic style. So if I come here and type a different word and this time, I’m going to use the font and is again another free font that I will give you the download link for. I think I’m over, do these. I’m overdue holidays. Let’s select the let’s click here on the graphic style and that style is now applied to this text and it’s fully editable. It’s not linked or anything like that, so you can come back in here and change the stroke width, So for example, with this one. If you wanted a narrower stroke, then you can just wind down this red stroke and make the blue green stroke a lot larger, it’s fully editable, but it saves you a lot of time in creating the text effect. If you save it as a graphic style, so if you came here to learn how to create a double stroke effect, then that is it, and you’re often on your way, but I have something else up my sleeve, and I think you’re gonna really like it, So if you want to hang around. I’m gonna show you a really really cool effect, so let’s just turn off holidays for now and lets. Go back to this text because what I want to do Is I want to add some dashed lines in it now? We’re gonna see a slight issue first, and it might be an effect that you like so. I’m going to show it to you, and then I’m going to show you a different solution. I’m gonna add another stroke now. I want it to be a small dotted line, so I’m gonna need to change the stroke width to something like about 4 now, we’re seeing this because it’s just underneath the fill and above the read, but you may want to move it around, so you can see it really clearly because you’re going to need to see it as you work on it. Now if I want to push this stroke out further away from the actual text itself, I can’t increase the stroke weight because that’s going to make a thicker line, so what I want to do is to actually move the stroke and we do that. By selecting the stroke making sure, of course, that our text is selected and Stroke is selected and we choose effect path offset path turn preview on and the default is 10 pixels. So you can see that the stroke is now still 4 pixels in weight, but it’s moved and I’m going to continue to move it and move it out here now. We’ve got a join problem here again, and we’ve got the same settings so we can do might around or bevel and again round is going to solve the problem for us. Bevel wouldn’t bevel’s going to open up a crack again, so just go and make it whatever you need it to be notice at this stage, too. That one of the problems. I have with this effect right now is that the stroke is going around each individual character. That’s something you may not like and. I’ve got a solution for that for you in a minute, but let’s just say that you like this effect. Just not its placement, so let’s click. OK, now let’s go and turn this into a dashed line or a dotted line, go to stroke and we’re going to select dashed line now. Your dash is always going to be 0 and your gap is going to be something like your weight. So they’re going to be within the ballpark of each other. If you use a smaller amount, so if you do a gap of 3 then the dots are going to slightly overlap if you were to do a larger amount like 6 pixels and the dots are going to be separated, and they’re going to be 4 pixels in height. Only right, now they’re dashes and the reason they’re dashes is because the cap hasn’t been selected, so we’re going to choose round cap, and that makes your dotted line and so you can see that increasing the gap just makes the dots go further apart, decreasing it and down to say three starts overlapping, and when you’re losing the look of the dots, so I’m going to push mine out to about 6 now if this happens and you get some double dots on top of each other, then click this icon here and that just readjust them so that they fit it. Just adjust the spacing a little bit. Okay, let’s go back to the appearance panel. What we want to do now is to drag this dotted line underneath the red stroke so that it is sort of cut off by the red stroke. We’re still seeing these sort of loopy bits. You may or may not like that. It’s up to you to decide. If you do like it and want to save it, we’ll select over it and go and open the graphic. Styles panel and add eat as a graphic style because that will allow you to use it later on. Let’s go back to our holiday text. Let’s target it and let’s reapply this new style, and you can see that it’s now got the look of this text here, so let’s just turn holiday back off again and let’s say that we’re not a hundred percent happy with how this strikes going and we’re looking for some other option. Well, the other option. I’ve got for you is actually really quite interesting, so let’s select over our text and let’s get rid of this stroke, so I’m just going to drag it onto The trash. Can what I want to do is build an effect. It’s a little bit more outside of this shape. So in the layer’s panel. I’m going to my text layer. Make sure that it’s selected. I’m going to put the text in a group, so I’m going to choose object and then group what that allows me to do is to treat this entire piece of text as a separate object and in doing so, I can put a dashed line a little bit differently using this option, so with my group selected. I’m going to add a stroke and my stroke is going to be my brown color and it’s going to be the same weight as I was using before, and I’m going to make it my dashed line so turning caps on zero for the dash six for the gap, four pixels for the line weight. Everything’s looking just fine now. Now, let’s go and push it. So with the dashed line selected, well choose effect and then path and then offset path. And I’m going to push it out now, actually, this time. I’m going to push it even further, so I actually like the effect that we’re going to get in just a minute when it’s actually outside everything problem here with these joins again, we know exactly how to solve that. We’re just going to go to round, and that’s going to clear that up, so lets. Click, okay. What’s happening here right now, With this dashed line or dotted line is that it’s behaving exactly as it did before, so we’ve put everything in a group and we just ended up with the exact same result well. The solution to that is to drag this line underneath the contents. So let me just widen up my own pearance panel, so you can see where we’re grabbing, so we’re grabbing here and we’re going to move this down underneath contents, And that means that this dotted line now appears outside of everything, so it’s outside the effect that was previously created now at this stage. I’m thinking that I could probe. I’ve set my path a little bit more, so what I want to do is double-click on the offset path to reopen it, so I can just push it out a little bit further. Let’s turn preview on lets. Take it back down to maybe about 68 and click OK. So this time. They’re slightly different. Effect has been caused by the dotted lines being applied to the group object rather than the text itself. It just has a slightly different. Look, if you wanted the dotted lines to actually be in over the blue. This is how you would do it. I’m going to just change my offset here and just bring it in a little bit to about here and what I’m going to do is add another blue stroke, so I’m going to click here on stroke. I’m going to make it this same blue color. I’m going to turn off the dashed bit, so lets. Just go into here and disable the -. I’m going to increase the stroke weight to push it out. Just past the dots. I’m going to fix the corners and I’m going to move this stroke underneath this one. So this time the dots are actually over the top of a blue stroke, and we’ve sort of got a double blue stroke. There’s a blue stroke here, and there’s also one here in the character area, the contents area. Here’s this blue stroke here now. If we turn this one off, you can see that it was actually blocking these dashed lines Going too far. So you probably will want these two strokes. You’ll want one here around the text and then the other one around the group, so let’s have a look and see how we would save these effects because they’re a group as well. We’re going to need to save two separate graphic styles now, first of all. I want to just turn this off because I don’t like that so much. So this is what I’m actually going to save, so let’s go to the layer’s panel. Let’s select the text itself mistake. Let’s select just the text itself, so here’s the text and I’m going to drag the text into the graphic Styles panel. So there’s the text now. I’m going to the layer’s panel. I’m going to select the group, so it’s something a little bit different. And now I’m going to drag the group into the graphic. Styles panel. You see, the graphic styles are very different here, so let’s go and see how we would apply it to another piece of text, so lets. Go back and get our holiday text. So just so that you can see that. This is all brand new. I’m just going to format holidays, just back to pretty much normal. How it would have been if we just typed it afresh with it selected. Let’s go to the graphic. Styles panel. The first thing we want to do is to apply the text effect. So this is the graphic style we created for the text effect itself, then we’re going to put this in a group with object group and then we’re going to click on the style that we created for the group and that just adds the extra effect around the edge. And, of course, all of this is editable. So if you want to come in here, select your text, and then if you say well. This needs to be offset a bit more, then let’s click on offset path. Let’s turn the preview on, and let’s just increase the offset here to get something a bit more appropriate for the text that we’re working with so there are ways of saving these Styles so that you can reuse them in future on other texts in the same document. And of course you may also want to save these graphic. Styles so that you can use them on any document in future to do that. You’re just going to click here on the flyout menu to save graphic style library. And then you’re going to save it. I’m just going to call this lad Strokes, So this graphic styles are now saved and you can share them with others. You can just send them the graphic style library as well but makes sure that they’re saved safe away for you so that they’re always going to be accessible. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. Click the subscribe button. Click the notifications button. Then we’ll let you know when new videos are released until next time, my names. Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.