Class Project 06 - How do you make Anaglyphic Text using Adobe Illustrator CC (Create your own Anaglyphic text)

Hey there, in this video we're going to make Anaglyphic Text. Basically it's that kind of Cyan-y red color overlapping to interact, to kind of look 3D retro. Anaglyphic is a word that I'm probably murdering but you get the idea. Let's go off and make this Type in Illustrator. 

First up, and you don't have to do this. Open up 'anaglyphic.ai' from the 'Exercise Files'. The only thing I've done is I've made it kind of slightly solid off-white background, because I think it looks better on it. Anyway, grab the 'Type Tool', and type in some Type. We're doing some work for that bicycle brand that we were doing work for before, called Roar Cycles, or Roar Bikes. I'm going to make the font size really big. And it's easier just to grab the 'Black Arrow', hold 'Shift' and grab one of the corners. Pick a font size, any Font Type, anything you like. I'm going to use Abril. I like Abril, it is from, you can see it there, Fatface. That is from TypeKit, which if you're a Creative Cloud subscriber, you can go to typekit.com, and download for free. 

We'll start with this guy. I'm going to do some big letters to get started with. And I'll have kind of two versions, right? So this one here, I'm going to break apart into separate letters. So I'm going to go to 'Object'. You saw it at the beginning, I want to overlap it and do stuff. There could be separate letters, but I'm lazy. So I just want to go to 'Type' and go to 'Convert to Outlines'. Know the shortcut, 'Command-Shift-O'. What the hang is it for the long version? There it is, 'Create Outlines'. 'Command-Shift-O', so if you're on a PC, it's 'Control-Shift-O'. I'm going to right click them, and ungroup them. 

So now they're all kind of just separate. Now I want to find those colors. Basically you can get away with just guessing, whatever looks good. A nice easy way to kind of get something that's quite close is to go to 'Window', remember Color Themes from earlier? So Color Themes, where I could find them. It starts off at 'Create'. Switch to 'Explore', and type in 'Anaglyphic'. And if you're like me, I had to write it down, and you have to Google '3D glasses from the 80s'. Then you eventually find the word Anaglyphic. I never remember how to spell it, or even the word itself, in all honesty. 

So what we're going to do is click on this, I'm going to pick a bit of red. You don't have to pick all of them, or maybe I'll pick that up. And then, you grab that one, and that one, I'll pick that color. Stealing from that Color Themes Tool. Now we kind of need to do some interactions because, they look okay like this but it looks better with some Color Blending. We've done Blending loads in this course, but it's super useful, and versatile. So what we're going to do is have them all selected and you have to do them each individually to get that kind of perfect color, but you'll probably find switching to Multiply will give you that kind of Overlap effect. What I might do is just really overlap them. It's more of like a super graphic, kind of title-y thing than it is meant to be like perfect. 

Now this guy here is too dominating, he's too dark. So what I'm going to do is pick just a lighter color. 'Hue Saturation', I'm going to go to 'Brightness'. And maybe Desaturate it as well. Just because I felt he's dominating too much of those color spaces. That's going to be my Anaglyphic lettering. I don't like him still, I might just pick black and white and go to 'no' Saturation, crank it up. So I'm happy with him. I want to show stuff around. Now I'm just messing. Carry on with the next one, Dan. Can't help myself. 

Now it's looking kind of eligible but not eligible enough, creative. The other one is this guy here, I'm going to leave a copy up there. I don't have to break this one apart but I might just track it in a little bit. Remember our shortcuts from before. It's 'Alt' and the left arrow, '<', or 'Option' and the left arrow. Just to track, and little bit tighten it up. Just want to steal the red color. Now if I use the Eye Dropper Tool here, we're going to run into problems. First of all because it won't copy, you see. It says it's filled with red, but it's actually still black. If I grab the 'Type Tool', highlight it, you see, it's black but because there's two things kind of fighting it out, it ends up causing problems, so I'm going to undo before that thing goes red. 

What we'll do is select on this, and do it the official way. Let's click on the Fill of this guy and say 'Swatches', 'Add to Swatches'. There he is, and looks same as the blue one here. I'll grab the blue one and I'm going to say, you my friend, go to 'Properties', 'Fill' and add to the Library as well. Click 'OK'. We'll do it the official way. There are two versions of this. One is going to be filled with red. This one is going to be filled with blue, don't use the eye dropper tool that cause these problem. I'm going to have it so that it just kind of over offsets just a little bit. You can obviously mess around with this later. And the top one, or both of them, doesn't make a difference. If you go to 'Opacity', 'Normal', and go to 'Multiply' they give you that kind of cool, I don't know, I feel like Michael J. Fox would have approved. There you go. 

So that's the kind of Anaglyphic effect. You can do with anything obviously, it's pretty easy. Just make sure they're the right colors. Make sure the Blending Mode is set to 'Multiply', then kind of offset them left and right. You can decide on how much you want this to be, or how little you want it to be. It doesn't have to be on an off-white background, it doesn't have to be these two colors. I've sent it down with lots of different colors but the technique is exactly the same. 

All right friends, go forth and make cool Anaglyphic. I've said it like a million times, I'll hopefully drive it in there. Mainly for me, so when somebody asks me what it is, I remember the term finally. Anyway, I'll Google it. Regardless, next video.