Create an Isometric Type Effect in Adobe Illustrator

Hey there, my name's Daniel White. Some people online know me as Danski. I'm a designer and instructor with Envato Tuts+, and in this course, we're going to learn how to create an awesome layered isometric text effect, all in Adobe Illustrator. And there's a number of different steps involved in creating this particular effect, but by the end of this course, you'll be able to take pretty much any font and any word and then create a similar effect yourself. And before we kick off the course, if you're looking to download a ton of creative assets that you can use in your designs, then definitely check out Envato Elements. Literally just one subscription gets you access to over a million assets across a huge variety of categories. So in this course, you can use any font you like, but if you'd like to follow along, I'm going to be using the font Indigo. If you'd like to follow along and use the same font, then you can download it from Elements and the link will be provided with the course. And this font is just one of over a million assets that are all included within one subscription. So if you love downloading like tons of creative assets, then definitely check out Envato Elements. Okay, so there's a brief introduction of what we're going to be doing in this course. So now we're going to jump into Adobe Illustrator and get started. Okay, so we're now in Adobe Illustrator. First things first, we need a new document. So we'll start by going to file, down to new, and you'll see the welcome screen. And I'm going to select 1920 by 1080 here. You can pick any document size you like, it doesn't really matter. I'm using pixels and I'm going to twizzle this down here, get some more options. Now we're working in RGB color mode, this is designing for screens. You can use CMYK, that's if you're designing for print, but we get a few more colors in the RGB spectrum. So we're going to stick with this one because we've got some quite punchy colors I'm going to be using within this design. 72 PPI is absolutely fine for this. Click create and you'll see that we get a new artboard and a new document. So the next thing to do is to save this. So if we go up to file, down to save as, and we can type a name. I'm going to call this course, save that as an Adobe Illustrator file. These are the settings that I'm using. Click OK. There we go, we have our document saved so we're all good, just in case anything goes wrong. Okay, so first of all, we actually need to get ourselves a font. So as I said, we're going to jump to Envato Elements, we've got this nice font here. A chunky font called Indigo. You can see a few different uses of this font here, but when you're happy, click download and it will download that font. And if I just jump to my desktop, it will download it most likely as a zip folder. And what you can do, whether you're on Windows 10 or Mac OS, is double click this and it will either extract it or you can go inside the zip folder. Essentially we want to get the contents of the zip folder out onto our desktop or another folder location on our computer. So you can see I've got mine here and if I just whip this up, it might look something like this. There is an outline version as well, but we're not going to use that. So whether you're using the open type format or the true type, just double click on the font and as I say, whether you're on Windows 10 or Mac OS, you'll have an option to install that font. And there you go, you're all good to get started. And it should automatically load that font straight into Adobe Illustrator. If it doesn't, just give Illustrator a restart and you should be all good to go. Okay, so we've created a new document, we've saved that document, we've also installed the font that we're going to be using in this course. So yeah, I will see you in the next lesson. Hey there, welcome back to the course. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to quickly create an isometric grid that we can use in Illustrator. Now, we're not going to be using this too extensively with the design that we're creating. It's going to be isometric, but it's not going to be tied to a grid. However, we're doing a course on isometric design, so I couldn't not include this because you might want to work a bit more specifically on that grid. So whether you want to or not, it doesn't matter, it will be on its own separate layer, you can turn it on or off. And I'm going to jump into Illustrator now and show you how to quickly create this isometric grid. Okay, so we're now in Illustrator. As we left off, we have our new document. I'm going to start by going up here to the line tool, just left click and hold until you see the rectangular grid tool. Then we can left click anywhere on the artboard, and it brings up this dialog box. And we can specify width and height for the grid that we're going to be creating. And we can also choose the number of horizontal and vertical dividers. So I'm just using this here. So I'm going with 100 and 100 again. Now, it doesn't matter what values you use, but the important thing is that the width and the height and the number of vertical and horizontal dividers, they are the same. So this is good to me, click OK. And you can see we've got quite a detailed grid there. Now, we need to turn this isometric. So what we're going to do is we'll go over here to the transform panel, click on the more options icon, and you see you get a few more options. Now, if you don't see this, if you're on an older version of Illustrator, what you can do is go up to window and then down to transform. And I've got this panel here that I can use. In fact, what I can even do is I could dock this as part of my workspace, and then it just pops up there. So once you've got the panel, first thing you're going to want to do is make sure that this is unlinked. So we don't want our width and our height to constrain those proportions as we adjust either one of them. So we're going to select our height. And in this box, we're going to type 86.602%, very specifically this number and press return. And you'll see it makes everything a little bit narrower. It squashes it. Next, what we're going to do is go to this box here. This is the shear. And we'll select this and press minus 30, press return. And alongside that, we have the rotate box. And in this one, we're going to type 30 and press return. And there you go. We have our isometric grid. Now, you can, of course, scale this. I could zoom out and I could just scale this up to be giant just so it covers the entire artboard and I can adjust the position. Now, whilst you can do this with guides in Illustrator, I like to kind of create this myself because now I get a lot more flexibility in what I can do with this. I could, for example, I could make this thinner. I could make the guides thicker. I can actually change the other stroke properties if I wanted. I could have like dashed lines, for example. Or I can even add a color. So I could go and add something like a cyan. And then if you need to deselect it, go to select, deselect. And there you go. I've created my own isometric grid. You can move it around. You get a lot of flexibility with it. Now, what I'm going to do is actually just zoom out. It's a very big grid. So I'm going to select this grid, go over to my layers panel. I've got mine docked over here. Now, at the moment, we just have layer one. That's what you get by default with a new document. So I'm going to call this, we'll call this isometric grid. And what I can do is I can lock this layer by clicking in this space here, just so I don't accidentally move it by mistake. And I can also just turn this off and back on. So I can turn it off and on as and when I like. Now, if I go to the bottom of the layers panel, I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to call this text. Now, this is where our isometric text design is going to go. As I mentioned a moment ago, we're not going to be working too specifically with the grid in this course, but it's nice to have it there if we ever need it just by turning it off and back on. Okay, so we've set up our isometric grid. It's there on its own layer if you want to turn it off or on, depending on the isometric design you're creating. But we've also set up our new text layer. And in the next lesson, what we're going to do is actually create some text and then make that isometric as well. So I'll see you in the next one. Hey there, welcome back to the course. In this lesson, we're going to add our text and make it isometric. So we'll jump back into Illustrator now. You can see this is where we left off. We have our text layer selected here. So first things first, let's grab that type tool, click anywhere on the artboard and we'll type some text. I'm using the word drip. I just thought the word dripped looked pretty cool in this font, but you can, of course, use any font and any word that you like. So from the character panel over here in the property inspector, I'm just going to type indigo, do a search for that font I downloaded from Envato Elements. And I'm going to scale it down holding shift. If I don't hold shift, it will do this and skew out of shape. That's not what we want. I'll pop that in the middle there. And for the next step, it's important to make sure that you're happy with your font properties, your font size, any letter spacing, all that stuff, because the next step we're going to convert this to outlines. So Illustrator won't register this as editable text anymore. So just make sure you're happy with your text before going on to this next step. So we'll go up to type, down to create outlines. And if I jump into outline mode, that's command or control Y on the keyboard, you'll see essentially a stylus wireframe of our document. So we can see that these are just shapes now. So what we can do with this now is we can actually select the text. And again, we can repeat that process for creating the isometric grid. So we'll go over here to the transform panel, change the height to 86.602%, press return, and then click on the more options icon. And we'll share that by minus 30. And then we'll rotate by 30. And there we go. We have our isometric text. And what we can do is open up our layers panel. And if you are using the isometric grid, you can maybe scale this down a little bit. And you can see here that everything lines up. So that's all good. It's trying to snap to lots of random things. So if we go up to view, we've got snap to pixel turned on. So I'm just going to make sure that I go to view again, and we'll turn on snap to point. Because when we come to the next lesson, adding color and things and creating shadows a bit further on, it's going to make life much easier with snap to point turned on. So we'll turn that one on. We actually won't need our grid for the remainder of the course, but it's there if you would need it. So we can turn that off. And there we go. So that wraps up the end of the lesson. In the next one, we're going to take a look at adding some color and the layer effect to our text. Hey there, welcome back to the course. In this lesson, we're not only going to be adding color to our design, but we're actually going to add this layered effect to our isometric text. So we'll jump back into it now. Okay, so I'm going to start by going up to file. Time to save like a good boy, just in case anything happens. So we've got our isometric text here. What I'm going to do is select this. And I'm going to go up to window, down to swatches. And I've got my swatch panel docked up here in my workspace. And we've got lots and lots of colors. So let's pick a color. We'll double click on this one here. It doesn't matter what color you pick. The important thing is that you check global. Now, what global allows us to do is if we check swatches global, if you update that swatch at any point, every instance of that color will be updated throughout your entire document. So it's a fantastic way to work. I highly recommend it. That's what we're going to be doing in this video. So we have our global swatch. You can give it a name there if you like. Click okay. And you can see it applies that color to our text. Now what we're going to do is go up to effect, down to 3D and extrude and bevel. And you'll see this window pop up here. And I can turn on the preview button. So we'll check that. And it makes our text 3D, gives it some depth. It's all a bit of a weird wonky angle. But what I'd like to do is we'll just reset all of these. That's the X, Y and Z axes. We'll set that back to zero. So it's exactly as it was. And we could crank up the extrude depth as well, just to make it a bit more obvious. So you can adjust these values here, or you can click on these and adjust the angle. Or you could hover over this cube here and adjust the rotation that way. So I'm going to click on the bottom with the red lines appeared. This is going to rotate just over this axis here. So I'm just going to bring this up ever so slightly. The extrude depth is a bit much. So maybe I'll change that to 100. Maybe we go for 150. So you can fine tune this. You could make it massive if you want some really tall text. And what we can do is if I bring this up here, we can actually go more options. And we get a few more options. So we've got plastic shading. You could have no shading. Or you could have diffuse shading. So you get lots of different types of how the 3D effect can shade. What we're actually going to do is we're going to select no shading. So now it looks like this. We'll click OK. And you can see it looks terrible. We can't actually determine where the top is, the top surface, or the sides are. But if we select everything and go to Object, Expand Appearance, we can go into our outline mode. Remember that's Command or Control Y. If I just scale this up a little bit, we now have a 3D wireframe view of our letters. So if I select this, it's all grouped together. If I go to Object and Ungroup, you may need to do this more than once. There's a shortcut key there. We'll do it a few times. I can now take these letters on top. And if I hold Shift on the keyboard and press the up arrow key a number of times, I can lift those off like so. Then what I'm going to do is drag over everything underneath. Now in outline mode, you can see these are just lots of random shapes. It's a bit messy. We're going to clean this up and make it one shape. So if we go to Window, down to Pathfinder, and select Unite. That's the top left option. It will combine all these random pieces into a single shape. There we go. Just like that. One single click and we're done. So I can come back out of outline mode. And if I just select my word up here, I can hold Shift and use the down arrow key and nudge this all the way down. Now I like to use this little shift and nudge technique because it allows me to just hold Shift, use the arrow keys to move something out, make some changes, and then move it back. I know it's going in exactly the same place it started. You could manually drag it out and then drag it back in, but there's always that chance that it's just not going to be exactly where it was before. So that's why I do that. And then we can go Object and Group. So we'll group that surface together so it now all moves around. And then if I select the side, the depth, essentially, what I can do from the color picker is double click on this. And I'm just going to go down, make that a little bit darker, something like that, just to bring back that depth. Okay, so we've got some isometric text. We've added some depth to it. Next, I'm going to select this darker color and go to Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in Place. And you've got some shortcuts there. And again, hold Shift and use the down arrow key to nudge that down. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go up to my swatch panel and add another color. So I'll just double click on another swatch, check Preview, check Global, of course, and adjust the sliders. So something like this, I'm going to have it graduating from this lighter color to some darker colors. It's going to be like quite a nice gradient, hopefully. But if they're global swatches, I can always fine tune that at the end. So we'll just zoom in. And I'm just going to position this just so it lines up. We'll zoom in nice and close. Now, at the moment, you can see this is actually on top. So what you can do is go to Object, Arrange, Send to Back, and it will put that darker shape behind everything. And if I select that again, I'll go to Edit and Copy. But this time, I'll go to Edit, Paste in Back. So that's what I probably should have done, because it will paste this behind everything else. And then I can again move that down, double click another swatch, check Global, click OK, and just repeat the process. So we're just copying, pasting it behind, shifting it down a little bit, finding another swatch, making that a global swatch. And there we go. So we've got one more we're doing. That last one, I'm just doing the shortcut keys there. When you repeat this process over and over again, you'll learn the shortcut keys for sure. So there we go. So I've just done that really quickly. And now I've just got to fine tune all these distances. I'm just going to get them as close as possible, just so we don't get any kind of any, like, white gaps like that. I want this to be nice and tight. You can, of course, zoom in thousands of percent to ensure maximum accuracy. So there we go. I can pop that back in the center. And you can see we have a few little oddities happening here. So if I click on this one, the purple seems to be in front. So if I just go to Object, Arrange, Center Back. There we go. So that seems to have fixed it. So when you have this many layers, it can get a little bit complicated. But remember, you've got that object and the Arrange option up there. So you can just move certain objects in front of others or move other ones behind. And one last thing we're going to do is just go and fine tune those colors. So remember, we have these as global swatches. So we can double click on the swatch, check Preview, and I can fine tune this. Something like that. So it's gradually getting darker and going more from like a turquoise teal color through to a purple. There we go. Something like this. And then the last one, make that even darker. And that's the beauty of these global swatches, you really do get maximum control to fine tune that as much as you like. Click OK. So there we go. We've taken our isometric text. We've made it 3D with some layers. We've added color with global swatches. And in the next lesson, we're going to be adding some shadows just to give everything a bit more depth. Hey there, welcome back to the course. So we've added some layers, some color. In this lesson, what we're going to do is add some shadows to our text just to give everything a little bit more depth. So we'll jump back into it now and I'll show you how to do this. Rightio, so this is where we left off. We have our text, we have it layered, and we have lots of colors all set up as global swatches. But it still looks quite flat. Now you might want this style, which is fine, that looks great. But we're going to add some shadows to give this a bit of depth. So remember when we went up to view in the previous lesson and went snap to point, this is going to come in handy. So if we zoom in nice and close, what I'm going to do is just grab the pen tool and I'll start with this one. So I'm going to click here and this is nice and easy. We have straight lines. Essentially, this is a fun dot to dot. So if you lose your point like this at any point, just go command or control Y to jump into outline mode. Remember, you get that wireframe. There we go. We've completed our shape. So essentially what we're going to be doing is defining a light source. Just imagine where the light is coming from and then we're going to create shadows based on that. So I've just created this random shape here. And what I'm going to do is select the gradient tool and then over here from the property inspector, just going to click on the gradient options icon and then click the gradient slider. This will add a default black to white gradient. And I'm going to leave this running from left to right just so the gradient doesn't go weird. If I rotate it, you can see it kind of comes from an angle. I kind of want to keep it in line with my lettering. You can adjust the gradient if you like though. You can also adjust how far the gradient comes across. So it could reach all the way across or it could be very, very short like this. Or you might want to go to the gradient panel and just swap that around all together. So it depends entirely on what you're going for. But once you've done that with the black to white gradient, just select it, go over to opacity here and just change the blending mode from normal to multiply. Now, if you're on an older version of Illustrator, just go up to window, down to transparency. And there you go. You get that same panel pop up. Now, this is pretty intense. So I'm going to bring that opacity down quite considerably. We'll go with 30%. And then I can go back into the gradient and just fine tune that. If I want to have that a little bit narrower or I could swap it around again. So you can see I'm just really fine tuning the gradient, the opacity. So it's going to be darker in this part here and then it will be lighter here. So we'll leave that one like this. I'm going to do another one now. So we've got a little one here. So there we go. Tiny little gradient. Remember, select it, change the blending mode to multiply and then adjust the opacity depending on how strong you would like that gradient to be. So you can see already we've just literally done two and it takes it from being flat to having much more depth. Okay, so that's pretty easy. We've got the dot to dot. We've got lots of straight edges. That's easy. What about circles or circular edges or rounded corners? Because trying to get the pencil and to draw around this corner exactly, well, it's not only going to be imprecise but there's a better way to do this. So at the moment I have this artboard. I'm actually going to go to view and then down to hide edges. Nope, that's the wrong one. There's another one. There we go. Hide artboards. So I still have an artboard but it's just hiding the edges. So I kind of have this infinite canvas now which is just going to make things a lot easier. So if I just select everything here and then I'm going to go to edit, copy, edit, paste in place, hold shift and use the down arrow key again. Just nudge this all the way down here. What I'm going to do is try and create a shadow on the inside. So if I just drag over everything to select it and then grab the shape builder tool over here on the left, what this allows me to do is join individual segments together into a single shape. So I can just click and drag through everything in this circle. Just make sure you capture everything. And that is now a single shape but I can actually click on this if I ungroup it first. There we go. We'll ungroup that a few times. This individual piece I can now move around. So again, I can use shift and up. We're using that shift and nudge technique again. And boom, there we go. It pops it back in that spot and I've isolated that shape. Now while we're here, I'm going to do another one. So we're going to add a shadow here on this curve. So this one is probably one of the more complicated ones. So I think how I'm going to get around this is I'm going to start by grabbing the pencil. What we'll do is we'll click and we'll add the shape. I'll bring the gradient to about a halfway point. I'm just going to hold shift and click to keep my line perfectly vertically straight. So there we go. I have a random shape and I'm just going to fill this with a random color for the time being just so I don't get confused with the gradient. Now if I go into outline mode again, that's command or control y, I get that wireframe view. This looks incredibly complicated, but if I select everything and grab the shape builder tool, what I can do is I can actually hold down alt or option on the keyboard and you can see the plus changes to a minus. And whereas before the shape builder tool combined shapes together, this will actually remove them. So if I hold down alt or option and click and drag, you can see it will trim off anything outside of the selection. So everything I'm dragging through now with alt or option held on my keyboard is being completely removed. So I'm just going to do this. We'll get rid of absolutely everything. And then now what I can do is let go of that and then just go back to the normal one. So we'll just click and drag without holding any other keys on the keyboard. Combine all this together. Now, sometimes you will get like random artifacts like this. If you zoom in far enough, you can see these random pieces. You can use the direct selection tool up here to select them and delete them. So these random little pieces of path. And this bit over here looks to have gone a little bit weird. So we could use the shape builder tool or we could select everything and we'll try the pathfinder panel and we'll see if we can unite that. There we go. So I hope we've got this random little piece here. So again, direct selection tool. So sometimes when using the shape builder tool, you do get this. These random anchor points just happen to find their way into certain places. And it's just a case of diagnosing how they got there and then getting rid of them with the direct selection tool. It's a great way to kind of isolate certain areas, select anchor points and remove them. So that's kind of how you do it. So now we can come out of outline mode. And again, we'll hold shift, use the good old shift and nudge technique. And we could go and apply our gradient all over again. But actually what I'm going to do instead is use the eyedropper tool and just click on a gradient that I've already done. And it will instantly apply that same gradient with those same settings and that same blending mode of multiply. Now it's a little bit intense there. So I might just bring the opacity down just a pinch. And we have this one up here. So we can eyedropper tool that one as well. That one doesn't seem to want to work for some reason. So if you do get anything like that just not working, don't worry about it. Just go and change that to multiply yourself. And I'll bring that down like so. So there we go. We've added some depth to the edge of a shape that was straight. We've added it to the inside of the letter. But we've also added it to a curved one around the corner. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to speed this up, go through, do those same three techniques across the rest of the entire shape. And then we'll be ready to move on to the final lesson. Okay, so there we go. I finished adding the shadows. It just helps give everything a bit more depth and just feel a little less flat. So we're going to move on to the final lesson in a moment where we're going to be looking at adding some highlights using freeform gradients. Hey there, welcome back to the course. We've arrived at the final lesson. We've created our text. We've made it isometric. We've added layers to it. We've added color, shadows to give it depth. Now what we're going to do is we're going to add a few highlights in places just to finish everything off. And we're going to be doing this using the freeform gradient tool. So we'll jump into it now and get started. Okay, so this is where we left off. We've added the shadows to give it some depth. Now we need to add some light or some highlights. So what we're going to do is select our drip. This is our surface layer here. We'll go edit, copy, edit, paste in place and we'll use the old shift and nudge technique to just nudge that out of place. And then what we can do is go over here, grab the gradient tool. Now you can use the linear gradient tool or the radial gradient tool but I like this tool because it just gives you a bit more control over your gradient and you can preview those changes in real time. So first of all, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ungroup all of these letters just so everything is separate. There we go, fantastic. Then what I'm going to do is grab the gradient tool with one layer selected. Go over here and from the gradient panel, just click freeform gradient. Then by default, it will add these random points. You can see you can move them around, very powerful feature. We only need two in this case. I'm just going to select these, hit delete or backspace on the keyboard. So the light is going to be coming from over here on the right. So with this selected, I can double click and pick one of my swatches and then I can double click on this one and pick that same color as my surface. So it's this kind of turquoisey teal color and I could move this around to really fine tune that highlight if I wanted it coming more from down here or a bit over here. And then what I'm going to do is do the same for this one here. So I'm going to select this, click freeform gradient, just remove all those excess points and then just add that color like so. So we'll just do it for these remaining letters here. So freeform gradient and we'll just double click on those points, brings up the swatches panel and then you can go and add in the swatch that you like. So I could actually have this coming from maybe the right a little bit more. Just move these around and then we'll do the D as well. Freeform gradient, remove all of these and then we'll just add in our own ones. Now what you can do with linear gradients and radial gradients is you could select all of these letters and then go to object, compound path and select make. In fact, if I just show you, we'll just add the default black to white gradient. It applies the gradient to every single letter because they're not touching each other but if I make them a compound path, the gradient runs through the entire thing. So you can typically do that with freeform gradients but in this instance, it didn't seem to work in the way I wanted it to. So that's why we've done it individually but there is another way to do it all in one go with compound paths. There we go, we've got it done. Now what I'm going to do is select everything, just go and regroup all those letters and use the old shift and nudge technique. There we go and this is why I do it, just so it's exactly where I left it in exactly the same position. Now these highlights are a little bit bright, I could go in and edit the color but what's easier is I could just select this and adjust the opacity and just bring that down. So you can see here, this is where we were, we have that flat surface at the top and I can just bring this up to like 70% and it just adds a little bit of light coming from this direction and I could double click to go inside the group, select this, grab the gradient tool and go and fine tune this, move this around a bit if I wanted and then just come out of isolation mode. So by double clicking a group, you go inside it into isolation mode, you can edit changes and make changes to things without actually having to ungroup the object but then you can just come back out and then everything's still grouped. So that's really, really cool and because we have the lights coming from the right and it's casting shadows on the left side, there's just a few things I've noticed that don't quite add up. So I've added a shadow here, so we'll remove that one. There's one right here on the side which isn't going to be there because of course the light is hitting it from this angle and this one here, I'm just going to flip the gradient so the shadow is in the correct place. So the more you understand about lighting and decide where your light source is going to be and where the shadows are going to be cast, it just makes this entire process a little bit easier and maybe even this one, let's just swap the gradient around so it's coming from that side and then I can zoom back out and I can still fully edit everything, I can adjust the highlights, I can adjust the shadows and all the colors. So we've applied all these effects on top of this text and this is where global swatches really do reveal their value because you just open up that swatch and you can start messing around with color. So I could make this one here a bit more blue, preview that change. Yep, that's good to me, click OK and I could go and change the color of all of them if I wanted and I don't have to kind of dig into all the layers and go underneath the shadows or anything, it's just really, really easy. So now I've done all that, I'm going to go to view, show artboards and bring my artboard back then we'll finish this off with a background color. So I'm going to grab the rectangle tool, just draw a rectangle that is the same width and height as my artboard, object, arrange, center back and we'll just double click the color picker or you can go and create a swatch and we'll go for something like this, maybe a little bit darker, a little bit darker still, we'll keep going or you could go lighter, it's entirely up to you. So there we go, that wraps up the course, we've created our isometric text effect all in Adobe Illustrator. So if you would like to download the project files, what I'll do is I'll package those up with the course but now you can take this technique and you can apply that to your own font, your own word and create some isometric text. So I really hope you enjoyed this course, take care and I'll see you soon.