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72Tutorial

Grafﬁti fonts

CAP81.tut_font 72

13/1/06 6:31:09 pm

73Tutorial

Grafﬁti fonts

T u t o r i a l

[ a r t i s t ]

W i l l B a r r a s

[ w e b ]

w w w . w i l l b a r r a s . c o m

M a k e g r a f ﬁ t i i n y o u r o w n s t y l e b y b u i l d i n g h a n d w r i t t e n f o n t s e t s i n

P h o t o s h o p

I l l u s t r a t o r C S 2

a n d

F o n t o g r a p h e r

…

ost of us walk, cycle or drive pastgraffiti for most of our lives, oftenwithout even being aware of thetags, outlines and pieces in oururban environment. Graffiti is strategicallyplaced on buildings and billboards that areimpossible to overlook, or in obscure spots thatare like little treasures when discovered.As the graffiti movement inspired by 1970sNew York has spread across the world, eachcity or region has developed a distinct style,providing plenty of inspiration for the observantdesigner. In this tutorial, we’re going to usesome of these ideas to create a graffiti font.If you already have a graffiti style of your ownor know a graffiti writer who can produce somelettering for you, then the work will be easy toconvert into a font. If you are less familiar withgraffiti, grab your camera and get outside. Takepictures of graffiti letters, tags, throwups –whatever pieces you find that capture yourattention – and begin to practise the differentstyles by hand until you find one you arepleased with. In doing so, you’ll quickly realisethe close relationship graffiti shares withtypography and graphic design.If you are itching to make your own graffitifont and do not have the time to create yourown, there’s a hand-styled design on the CD soyou can get started. To complete this tutorial successfully, you must be competent in

Fontographer

Photoshop

and

Illustrator CS2

Expertise provided by Stephen Faustina, the art director on Francis Ford Coppola’s

All-Story

magazine and a mainstay of grafﬁti culture, both in conventional media andon the street. See more at

[w]

www.sfaustina.com.The components needed to complete this tutorial can be found on the

Computer Arts Projects

disc 81 in the DiscContent>Tutorials>Tutorial Files>Grafﬁti Fonts folder.

CAP81.tut_font 73

13/1/06 6:31:17 pm

74Tutorial

Grafﬁti fonts

Biting

Any grafﬁti you gravitate to issolely a piece of inspiration toget you creating your font set. Ingrafﬁti culture, to directly copy awriter’s letters or style is referredto as biting. We’ve provided fewexamples, taken in SanFrancisco, on the CD: look inthe Inspiration folder.

Now that your letters have been traced andvectorised, you will need to ungroup all theletters. With all the letters still selected, go toObject>Ungroup. Deselect the letters.

Save this

Illustrator

ﬁle and name itletterstage.ai. At this point, we are going tostart building our ﬁrst letter of the alphabet. Keepthe letterstage.ai document open, then create a new

Illustrator

document: name it A.eps and make theartboard A4 with a landscape orientation.

We must change this ﬁle to an

Illustrator 3

EPSto enable its import into

Fontographer

. SelectFile>Save As from the Format dropdown menu, thenselect Illustrator EPS and click Save. The EPS Optionswindow will open. Select Illustrator 3 EPS from theVersion dropdown menu and click OK.

Part 2:Building your alphabet

Make a template so your font set is consistent

Part 1:Getting started

Design a character set and convert to vector-based shapes

Test out different felt pens, such as pilots, paintpens and ultrawide markers. The darker the inkis, the easier it is to convert to vector. Explore inkflows and tip thicknesses: these can contribute toyour own graffiti hand style. Keep repeating thealphabet, including arrows, asterisks or simplecharacters you want in your graffiti font set.

After you have found a pen and a style youare comfortable with, start writing out your fullcharacter set in sequence. Make sure the letter sizeand styling stays consistent: pay attention toconsistency in shapes such as ascenders anddescenders. The CD includes examples for referenceor to use in the rest of this tutorial.

Scan the sketches into

Photoshop

in greyscalemode at 300dpi. If you are using the CDexamples, open beef.jpg in

Photoshop

. Now we’lldarken the letters so they are solid black, making iteasier to convert the letters to vector. Choose Image>Adjustments>Levels. Set the input levels to 100,1.00 and 215. Select Layer>Flatten Image.

Using the Eraser tool, clean up the corners andany spots, dust and pencil marks you findaround each letter. Smooth out any abruptinconsistencies in the line, ready for when the lettersare converted to vector. When satisfied, save the fileas beef.tif and close.

Now launch illustrator CS2 and open thebeef.tif ﬁle. Next, we are going to make theletters into vector art with the new Live Tracefeature in

Illustrator CS2

. If you don’t have

Illustrator CS2

, you can make your vector in either

Streamline

Corel Trace

To make your vector in

Illustrator CS2

, selectthe letter ﬁle and go to Object>Live Trace>Make And Expand. If a dialog box appears saying,“Tracing may proceed slowly”, click OK tocontinue.

Illustrator

now converts each shape toa vector.