Vector Halftone Week: major vector Halftone tutorial

The combination of Illustrator and Phantasm CS with its Halftone tool as the basis, an even richer single graphic style could be created that would remain completely dynamic.

This comprehensive video tutorial is very much inspired by a wonderful Adobe Illustrator effect produced by JET on the Adobe forum with the use of a script. When first seen, it immediately impresses. However, the question was whether such a rich effect could be recreated for editable text so that it remained completely dynamic; ie. it was possible to alter the underlying text at any point.

Software required:

• Adobe Illustrator CS4 or above
• Phantasm CS Design, Studio or Publisher

Skill level: Intermediate to high

 

Introduction

The good news is that the combination of Adobe Illustrator and Phantasm CS (Designer, Studio or Publisher) with its Halftone tool as the basis, an even richer single graphic style could be created that would remain completely dynamic…

This tutorial is already lengthy and therefore does not go into some details such as the creation of a simple background, nor the basics of live Effects or creating gradient swatches. It is therefore aimed towards those already familiar with Adobe Illustrator.

Watch the tutorial movie

If you have problems viewing this movie, click on the movie file link: www.astutegraphics.com/movies/blog/glitter_halftone.mov

Variations on a theme

One of the great things about using live Effects is that it’s possible to play around with settings and create a series of variations on a theme.

Suggestions for changing settings include:

• Changing the levels in the Hue/Saturation Colorize instances to alter the colors
• Altering the Blur settings, or even swapping the Gaussian Blur for a Smart Blur
• Different levels of the first/top Blurs on the primary Fill and Stroke changes affects the ratio of small and large Halftone dots (and adjusting the Halftone’s Dot Gain does similar)
• To create a more random Halftone dot pattern, duplicate the Roughen Effect applied directly after the Hue/Saturation effect
• Add Warp live Effects to the overall object or individual Fills/Strokes to make a bulging style, yet remaining completely editable

Have a play. Here are some variations we achieved…

Further information

The reason that this tutorial is only applicable to Illustrator CS4 and CS5 users is the use of transparency in the gradients for the symbols. This could be replicated using an opacity mask, however, for some reason the Roughen effect no longer acts on the underlying Halftone pattern. (The other anomaly with the Roughen tool is that it places itself at the top/start of an Effect stack, unless another Roughen effect is already present, in which case its second…!)

Note that this overall style is built up from many components, some rasterized such as the Grain Effect. When saving the file, if the file is made PDF compatible option is ticked in the save dialogue window, it can time a minute or more to save the file. If unpicked, saving as a native Illustrator file takes only a small fraction of this time.

Freely available Jane Austen font used in the main tutorial video may be found here…