/Graphics/ Distressing regular fonts
25/02/2009 | Filed under Develop > Graphics
Give your site a unique look by personalising its typography. Elliot Jay Stocks reveals how you can use Photoshop to distort your fonts beautifully
Many fonts, often available to download for free, provide a quick and easy way of using distressed typography in your projects. The style is more popular than ever, and designers are hungry for typefaces that break the rules and add a distorted flair to their projects. However, the fact that they’re fonts usually means that each ‘a’ will look the same, each ‘b’ will look the same, and so on.
On occasion a font might contain several glyphs (alternate versions of the same character), but it’s often very easy for an edgy font to become rather bland – even though distressed lettering is meant to be subversive.
To counteract this, why not make your own distorted, ruined, decaying typography? (You may have noticed by now that I like to destroy things!) In this tutorial we’ll focus on creating a title and navigation graphics for a hypothetical website, and each title and character will be unique because it’ll be distorted by hand instead of relying on a typeface.
By making our own custom Photoshop brushes we’ll be creating reusable tools that we can apply to other projects, and by taking the final adjustments over to Illustrator, we can exercise some tighter control over the output and make the files usable at a variety of resolutions.
About the author:
Name: Elliot Jay Stocks
Site: elliotjaystocks.com
Areas of expertise: Design, CSS, web standards, Photoshop
Clients: Carsonified, The Beatles
Least-loved household chore Ironing
Click here to download the support files
Click here to download tutorial PDF
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Comments
cagwait / 17/03/2009 / 04:51 / http://www.cagwait.com
Good article. Thanks for posting this
Kp / 22/04/2009 / 00:59 / http://www.backcountrygeneration.com/
Cools stuff man, looks great.
Simon Hamp / 21/07/2009 / 00:57 / http://Http://flipstorm.co.uk
A brilliant tutorial! Thanks forkeeping this online guys! I will definitely be trying this out. Design isn't easy when you're a programmer/developer, but it's something I'd love to improve so here goes... Wish me luck!
Salamander / 26/02/2010 / 11:17 / http://www.google.com
You just gave me a great idea. Thanks for the post, it's really helpful.
