I was recently messing around with the appearance pallet in Illustrator and came up with this interesting text effect that I thought I should share with you all. It is a great way to get familiar with the appearance panel itself and the beauty of this effect is that it will adjust itself accordingly if you make any changes to the text itself.
Step 1Start with a word
Create a new document and enter in some text. You can use whatever font you like, I’m going with Eurostile with a font size of 48pt because I really like it.
Step 2Remove the stroke and fill
Before we start adding effects to the text, we need to select the layer using the selection tool (v) and set the stroke and fill to ‘none’. You can do this by clicking the small red diagonal stroke in the colors pallet. Your text will temporarily disappear but don’t worry it will be back in view shortly.
Step 3Create a new fill layer
Keeping the layer selected, open the appearance pallet via the side panel or go to Window -> Appearance and select the ‘add new fill’ option from the drop down window. You should now be able to see your font again. Yay!
Step 4Create a second fill layer
Repeat this step and create another fill layer so that you now have two appearing in the appearance panel.
Step 5Lets create some spikes
Select the bottom fill layer, making sure you still have your layer selected, and go to Effect -> Distort & Transform -> Pucker & Bloat.
Set the slider to -200% and you should have something like the following.
Step 6Add some color to our spikes
We are now going to add some color to the fill layer we just transformed. With the layer still selected, open up your swatches pallet and select a black to white gradient.
Keeping your swatch pallet handy, open up the gradient pallet and drag and drop colors from the swatch pallet to the gradient pallet slider until you end up with something like the image below.
Step 7Duplicate our spikes
Open up the appearance pallet again and select the fill layer that we just transformed. It should have a nice little rainbow swatch next to it. We then need to duplicate the fill layer via the drop down menu as per the image below.
Step 8Modify the duplicated spikes
You should now be seeing two identical fill layers in the appearance pallet. Select the bottom one and go to Effect -> Distort & Transform -> Pucker & Bloat. When you are given the option, click on apply new effect.
Set the slider to 150% and hit ok. You should be left with the following.
Step 9Another duplication for good measure
Now, in the interest of adding a little more detail to the jagged look, go back to the appearance pallet, duplicate the top rainbow fill layer and then go to Effect -> Distort & Tranform -> Roughen and apply the following settings or experiment with your own.
I would also advise you to slightly vary the colors in the gradient pallet and experiment with various blending modes and transparencies for each fill layer to add a bit of depth.
Step 10Add some style to the text
It’s now time to work on the text itself. The first thing to do is remove the black fill by selecting the fill layer with the black swatch in the appearance pallet and setting the fill to white.
Keeping the fill layer selected, open up the transparency panel set the blend mode to lighten and the opacity to 50%.
Step 11Add a stroke to the text for clarity
As you can now see, we are almost done but the text just doesn’t quite stand out enough the way it is. Go back into your appearance pallet and select the stroke layer. Change this to white and lower the opacity to 85% via the transparency pallet. You should now have something that stands out a little more and is easier to read.
If you are finding the text a little difficult to read, try experimenting with various colors on different layers and even with colors on the font itself.
