Gradients On Text
by admin on 05/03/09 at 8:25 am
The next project demonstrates an easy but widely used techniques using text.
Type the following text using the Aero font with a size of 100:
We are going to give the text a linear gradient but first we need to decide which two colours to use. The design will be predominantly red so we will use #FF0000 for the starting point of the gradient and a shade of this for the end point.
Shades and Tints
If you add white to a colour, you make it lighter. The new, lighter called a tint. In contrast, if you add black to a colour you get a darker colour – a shade.
An easy way to create a shade is to do the following:
- Draw a black square
- Copy and paste it
- Change the top (currently selected) square to be your starting colour
- Reduce the opacity of the top square by increments of 10 (90%, 80%, 70% etc) until you get the shade you want. Reducing the opacity increases the amount of black in the colour and creates a shade of the original colour.
If you change the colour of the bottom square to white, then reducing the opacity of the top (starting colour) square will create tints of the original colour.
If you then draw another shape, you can use the shade/tint you just created by clicking the fill colour swatch of the new shape and then clicking the eye dropper tool on the newly created colour.
If you follow the above steps you can create the shade #800000 by reducing the opacity of the #FF0000 square to 50%. We will use #800000 for the end point of the gradient.
The above method for creating shades and tints is very useful!
Now that we have decided on the colours to use, let’s give the text a gradient. Select the text and click on the fill colour swatch. Click the Fill Options button at the bottom and change the Fill category to Linear Gradient.
Click on the Edit button to assign the colours #FF0000 and #800000 to the start and end colours.
Change the gradient direct like this:
Add a 2 pixel basic soft rounded white stroke to the text, by first of all clicking on the stroke colour swatch.
Then click Stroke Options and change the Stroke category to Basic and the Stroke name to Soft Rounded. Don’t forget to change the tip size to 2 and also ensure that the stroke is Centred on Path.
To subtly accentuate the stroke we have applied, give the text a glow with the following attributes:
This gives us the following:
The techniques you’ve used so far can be applied to any text you want to jazz up (it works better on fonts with thicker strokes). We’re going to add one final touch to give the text some depth.
Add an inner shadow with the following properties:
You should have something that looks like this:
