Word Art Tutorial

Tonight's entry is inspired by a couple of people who left comments in response to yesterday's word art freebie indicating they wish they could create word art. To anyone who has such a desire, by all means go for it - there is no reason why you can't create your own custom word art. The great thing about word art is that it doesn't require indepth knowledge of your program. All you need to know is how to type, change your fonts and move words around on your canvas.

I thought I'd share my process in the hopes that others who enjoy using word art on their pages will give it try. Of course there are lots of different ways to go about designing word art and no way is better or worse. Find something that works for you and got for it.

I start with a phrase, title or quote and type it out on my canvas. In this case I will be using, "Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. -Mark Twain" I then retype the quote breaking it up into individual words and phrases. Each word or phrase is typed in its own layer so that I can alter it without changing other words/phrases.



I choose a few key words that I want to be the focus of the piece. I then alter these words in some way to differeniate them from the rest of text and cause them to be the main focus of the reader's attention. There are many ways to alter words. Think of changing font, color, orientation (vertical/horizontal/diagonal, etc.), opacity, shadowing, capitalize (or all lowercase), style layers and/or size. The only guideline is that whatever change you make should be dramatic compared to the remaining words. If you are changing size, vary the size substantially, otherwise it might just look like an alignment mistake. If you are changing the font, pick a font from an entirely different font family.

I've decided to highlight the words 'wrinkle' and 'smile' by changing the fonts. I've chosen a grungy, blocky font for 'wrinkles' and a casual, whimsical font for 'smiles'.



The boldness of the font in the word 'wrinkles' made it the predominant word, but I wanted 'smiles' to be most dominate word on the page, so I resized the two words to offset the weight of the fonts.

Next I move the various words and phrases around on my page until I find a arrangement that is visually interesting and still easy to read. Once they are all in place, sometimes I will fiddle some more with color, opacity and size.



That's all there is to it. Once you finish your word art, delete the background later and save the word art as a .png file.