As my first experiment with typography, I wanted to create a 3D Text illustration and mess with the perspective of the piece. I’ve noticed many people using 3D programs for them such as 3D Studio Max and Cinema 4D, but with the lack of those programs, I had to settle to using Photoshop and Illustrator to do it. Here’s a tutorial on how I created my simple 3D typography illustration called “It’s All Greek To Me“.

Typography has always been a favorite topic of mine, and I can already say that I’m not even close to a beginner in knowing all the techniques, “rules”, and properties of typography. As I grow older as a designer, I want to slowly strive to be better artist in typography. There’s something about fonts, placement, and the way you decorate the letters that makes me really appreciate the simplicity of typography at the same time be in awe on the complexities of making good typography art. As I delve into this topic, I’ll share my experiences and hopefully I can get better as time goes by.

In the meantime, here’s a walk through of my first experiment with typography and utilizing Adobe Illustrator (I’m using CS4 but I’m sure it can be done with CS and up) and Photoshop.

Final Result

Preproduction – The Concept of the Piece

To be honest, I didn’t plan to make this piece about Greek letters, I just saw the greek glyphs in Illustrator and decided to use them. It wasn’t until I made the background for my piece until I decided to think of the saying, “It’s all greek to me”. Ever get that feeling when somebody is talking in a different language, and you’re trying to understand it, but at the same time you know you’re lost? This piece is attributed to that.

Step One – Creating 3D Text in Illustrator

To create 3D Text in Illustrator, you first create your text that you want to have. For my piece, I was playing around with the glyphs of my font. To see the glyphs window in Illustrator, go to Window > Type > Glyphs. I noticed a lot of greek letters in there, and I wanted to work with it, so that’s why I chose the text I did now. The font I used was Avant Garde.

After typing your text and giving them a color, it’s time to make them 3D. To do this, make sure your click on your text that you want to apply the 3D effect and then simply go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel. You’ll get a new dialog menu that will show you a few options on how you want to rotate your text, how much you want to extrude, and if you want to bevel it or not.

Depending on your piece, the settings will be different, so I’m going to leave that up to you. As a reminder if you wanted to see the 3D text live before you apply the effect, click on the preview check box. Please note that it may render slow/fast depending on your computer specs.

Step Two – Importing to Photoshop

Now that we created our 3D Text in Illustrator, it’s time to import it into Photoshop. The quick and easy way is to just copy and paste it into your Photoshop document. I created a new Photoshop document, 900×1200, and then I pasted the text into the document. You’ll get a dialog box asking how you want to paste it. Make sure you check “Smart Object“, and then you can click “OK”. By importing it as a smart object into Photoshop, you are now able to resize it up and down without distorting it.

As you can see here, I imported 3D text and from there I scaled it, rotated it around, and positioned it. (Don’t clear out the smart object unless you’re positive that you’re not going to change it). If the 3D text doesn’t look good at that angle, then it’s back to the drawing board with Illustrator to position it in the way that you want. You can also position the text correctly in Illustrator and import it into Photoshop. (Now that I think of that, that’s probably more efficient than what I did)

Step Three – Building Text together

Now we get to the fun part of playing Tetris with your text. Start positioning your text the way you want. I decided to build them at one angle to make it easy for me, but feel free to experiment around with it.

Step Four – Creating the background

For the background, you can already see that I made a linear gradient background from sky blue to light purple (Somewhat close to those colors). I also duplicated my 3D text a few more times and rotated it and positioned it to make a collage of my 3D Text.

Then I took that collage and duplicated it more and created a background from it. I merged them all together and set the layer to “Multiply“. I made “holes” in the background to reveal the background and underneath my collage background layer I put another layer of my collage set to Normal blending option. I gave my big collage background that’s set to Multiply a blending option of “Drop shadow” to show that the background looks like it’s breaking or peeling off.

Step Five – Post Production Effects

And finally the post production effects — I added a “Curves” Layer, “Gradient Map” Layer, and a few other enhancements to spice it up a bit.

Conclusion

This tutorial wasn’t too detailed on the steps, but I hope you got the steps for creating 3D text in Illustrator better. I’ll be looking up for sites about typography and learn some tutorials and come back for you guys to make a good simple illustration. Thanks for viewing my tutorial and enjoy.