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I’m going to teach you how to create that washed, vintage look to your typeface by using nothing but Illustrator.  The cool thing about creating distressed text in Illustrator rather than with Photoshop is that your image will be fully scalable without losing any resolution.

For this tutorial all you’ll need is a good texture image –  try a wooden fence or ocean waves – and a saying you want distressed!

Step 1: Select your typography and texture image and get them open in Illustrator.

Step 1: Get your text and your texture ready!

Hand-drawn or rather digitized versions of hand-drawn fonts can add a more personal touch to your designs.  Not only can they add a personal touch to your creation, but they are a lot of fun to look at and add to your collection.

Sometimes while designing you come across a project that can benefit from the use of one of these hand-drawn fonts. Maybe you need to create a poster for a band or cd cover, or you’re working on a personal portfolio site in which you want to add a bit of your personality into it.

Most of these are available under a Creative Commons License. Make sure to check the author details before using for a commercial purpose.

Enjoy!

Scratch by Sir Speedy of Clovis

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1. Day Roman

This font is a great alternative to the usual boring Times New Roman.

Get it here!

2. Anivers

Suitable for an  intro in a magazine or a base for a logo.

Get it here!

3. Fontin

Roman, italic, bold & small caps.

Get it here!

4. Gentium — a typeface for the nations

The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional ‘extended’ Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use. Gentium also supports both polytonic and monotonic Greek, including a number of alternate forms. Expansion of the character set to include more extended Latin glyphs (Unicode 5.1), archaic Greek symbols, and full Cyrillic script support is underway and will be released in 2008.

Get it here!

5. Cicle Font

Sans-Serif, 7 weights, freeware.  All parts awesome

Get it here!

6. Romeral, a display typeface

Romeral is designed to produce a noticeable visual impact that invites the audience to the reading due to its sizable thickness.  Plus it’s really cool.

Get it here!

7. Fertigo Pro

Subtle curves make this font.

Get it here!

Below are some of my favorite images by Swiss modernist graphic designer Hans Neuburg.   This particular style really appeals to me due to the minimal and clean compositions.  When he used color it was subtle yet very in your face at the same time without detracting from the overall design.  One of my design heroes for sure.  Images courtesy of AisleOne‘s Flickr Gallery

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