As a designer I’ve always enjoyed tutorials and found them educational and interesting to see how different designers go through their design process. With that in mind, I have playing around with the idea of showing people how I go about creating some custom typography and the perfect opportunity came in the form of an email from Blue Llama Studios.. They approached me about helping out with their upcoming full length adaptation of their award winning short film VEER, which focuses on a down on his luck skater. They needed some help creating a fictitious skateboard company, so after some initial brainstorming and talks over some cold ones, DieNasty was created.
With the name chosen I began sketching some rough designs. The design will be used on banners, t-shirts, and skateboard decks so it’s needs to be simple, yet impactfull and show up on film. The main actor has a good amount of tattoos and tattoos are discussed in the film so I decided on creating a script font for DieNasty similar to script fonts of traditional tattoos.
Step 1: SKETCH! Almost every project I work on begins with paper and pencil.
Step 2: After a few rounds of sketches I go back and sketch a cleaner version that I will use as a guide in Adobe Illustrator.
Step 3: Using the sketch as my guide I start to build sections of the letters. This way I can reuse sections for similar letters. Make sure you save these versions in case you want to go back and make some changes.
Step 4: Once the letters have been designed I will start to clean up the letter by merging sections (D) once they have been merged you can start adjusting the curves slightly. Don’t get to caught up in this process though it’s better to save all the fine-tuning till the end.
Step 5: Once all the letters have been built, remembering to save as different versions I will then merge all of the sections.
Step 6. Fine-tuning. This is the sections where you should spend some extra time cleaning up the design by adjusting curves and eliminating unnecessary anchor points.
The finished product.
There you have it, a custom script font from start to finish. I hope you have enjoyed the tutorial and I plan on doing some more so if you have some feedback please let me know what you think.
I apologize to all those not familiar with illustrator but this tutorial was indented for those with a good understanding of the application and more of a basis for the design process as a whole.
Nice. good job.
well done