How I made the ‘Classic Toys & Collectibles’ logo for the web form test.
In Illustrator I created a document bigger than would be used. I think added the main title ‘Classic’ to the file. I picked a font that would look a bit kiddish and fun. Made the text a solid black, so the effects added would work the best. After that, having the text selected, I then selected: Window > Appearance, this is adding the effects to the font without converting it to outline, if I needed to, I could then change the text without having to redo all the steps; I was thinking I might come up with a more cleaver name for the fake company.
Within the Appearance pop-out I added a stroke, picked a thickness this will be the outline color for the text, in this case yellow.
Created a second stroke, this is going to be the depth of the letter, pick a dark color for that. Then added a Transform effect ‘fx’ in the move area I used .9 for both; this controls the ‘depth’ of the text, using the same number for both seemed to work the best for this. Kept rotate at 0°. In Options clicked both ‘Transform Objects’ and ‘Transform Patterns’ then for ‘Copies’: how deep you want the characters to go, I used 35.
Next, I created a fill this is where I put the dot pattern to give it an old comic book look (the inside of comics was colored in with dots. To get the dots click the dropdown on the color then click the upper right dropdown from there then select ‘Open Swatch Library’ I used Patterns > Basic Graphics > Basic Graphic Dots.
Below that add another fill, this will be the background color of the letter, I used a red here.
Then another stroke, this will be the drop shadow, selected a size of 9, an effect, same as before I used copies: 50; changed the opacity to 20%.
For the rounded box below that I selected the box with rounded corners from the Illustrator menu, then selecting the text with the appearance and grab the icon in the upper left corner, same horizontal line as ‘Type’ and dragged and dropped this onto the rounded box to copy the style over to it. I then went in and altered the settings, such as background and stroke color.
The text in center is just the same font with solid white then added a thin black stroke to the text. The black stroke just helps to break the line from the white and the blue background.
