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I was watching Justin Seeley’s recent video about making long shadows in Illustrator and I
thought, “jeez, why would anyone use Illustrator?!” No, I’m just kidding! I love Illustrator. But I
Now clone that text frame (I usually just choose Edit > Copy, and then Edit > Paste in Place) and
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While the frame is still selected, choose Edit > Step and Repeat and make the offsets really tiny,
you can probably use 1 point offsets. That’s what I did for the word “Long Shadow” at the top of
the page. But for print, you probably need to go smaller so that you don’t see jaggy edges. I’m
using a fifth of a point, which is pretty tiny. Make sure the Preview checkbox is turned on, so
you can see the result, and adjust the Count field until it looks right.
After you click OK, the duplicate objects will all be selected, and while they are still selected,
choose Object > Pathfinder > Add (or click the Add button in the Pathfinder panel). Now go get
a cup of coffee, because the more duplicates you made, the longer it will take to add them
together:
(See the spinning beach ball? On the Mac, that means it’s taking a long time. For this example,
or change its opacity or blending mode or whatever you want to do. Here, I’ve applied a color
swatch that is slightly darker than the background. Then I clicked through the object (Command-
or Ctrl+click to select through one object to the next object beneath), selected the original text
(Okay, to be completely accurate, this technique leaves one additional frame that you should
probably delete: the original outlined frame that was step-and-repeated. That is, after you did the
step and repeat, the original object was still sitting there. You can delete it now.)
If you just need a shadow, then you’re done. But in this case, I don’t want that shadow sticking
out the side of the green box, so I’m going to select the shadow-object, choose Edit > Cut, then
select the background frame, and choose Edit > Paste Into. That “clips” or “crops” the shadow,
like this:
Because the actual “shadow” object was made by adding a bunch of frames together, its edge is
kind of complicated. Here you can see it when I zoom in to the upper-right corner of the “S” and
Obviously, the longer the shadow, the closer together the duplicates, the longer it will take. I love
being able to create these kinds of effects in InDesign, because I have tons of control and I end
Update: I realize I need to go back and add something to this post… I want to be clear that I’m
not saying people should do these kinds of effects in InDesign, just that you can. After reading
this, some folks told me they would much rather do this in Illustrator because the final shape is
too complex for InDesign. That is crazy. However, there is one good reason why I would use
Illustrator to make long shadows instead of InDesign: The purist part of me hates all those points
So I prefer making these kinds of effects using Illustrator, not using the technique that Justin
showed, but rather using the 3D Extrude and Bevel filter. Here I’ve selected a text frame (in
look of the type. Then I make a huge Depth, and set the Surface to No Shading (which provides a
totally flat look). Now I can click OK and either convert the effect into paths in Illustrator (Edit >
Expand Appearance) or just copy and paste the frame into InDesign, which expands the
In the image above, I’ve selected the path on the top and changed its color to a slightly darker
orange. But you can see immediately that the diagonals are all pure and simple and easy to
manipulate — much easier and cleaner than having a thousand little tiny stair steps.
That said, I still stand by my original method: It works and it’s often easier and even more