Current mood:	working
Current music:	Ween // Baby Bitch

Tutorial: All kinds of text-related stuff.
spaced_oddity requested some sort of font/text tutorial, so here's the result. Mostly it's just me rambling on about the joys and sorrows of text use in icons, when you should or shouldn't include text, and some of the basics. I don't consider myself an expert on text but I'm hoping this will help, well, someone. XD

Notes: Image-heavy and made with Photoshop users in mind, although I'm sure some of this stuff can be applied to PSP users as well.


Tools



This is the text toolbar as seen in Photoshop CS2, although something similar appears in earlier versions as well (and probably in PSP). This toolbar has a few very important elements that are essential for making text on an icon tolerable.



The red arrow is pointing to the Anti-Alias drop-down box. Anti-alias is VERY IMPORTANT to remember when using text in icons; unless you are using a bitmap font (such as Sevenet or the 04b series), the anti-alias option should always be on.



Photoshop has five different anti-alias options: none, sharp, crisp, strong, and smooth. I personally use strong the most, but experiment with the different settings and see what you like best. Just remember, it's important that you don't leave it as none or else scary things start happening. I'll go over this a bit more later.



This is the last tool I'll go over before we get experimenting with an icon. If you are using Photoshop but aren't sure where this little box is located, go to Window (beside Help) in the top taskbar and make sure Character is checked.



The red arrow is pointing to the drop-down box that controls the text tracking. In a nutshell, tracking is the amount of space between each letter; the smaller the number, the closer together the text will be, and the larger the value, the more space there will be. I can't explain it very well but we'll be playing around with this later.



As you can see, there is already a preset of values you can choose from; you can also type in your own value (for example, -350 or 1500).

Okay, enough of the boring stuff. Let's try using text on a base and see where we end up, shall we?

Starting Out

Usually I already have an idea as to whether or not an icon is going to have text before I get started. I can only say that it's good to try and plan ahead, and this is why cropping a base a particular way can lead to a disaster.

I'm going to use this lovely picture of Auron for this demonstration:



Okay, so let's crop this baby to standard icon size (100px by 100px).



That's an okay crop - there's plenty of room at the side for text.



That base is pretty good to work with too. However, let's take a look at this cropping job:



With the main subject in the dead-center of the icon, it leaves very little room for text of any kind.

On that note, I'd like to point out that it's easier to fill up an icon that has a lot of "blank space," such as the first example base, than it is to try and make more room for text.

Choosing Colours

Part of making text look good is choosing a colour that compliments the icon in some way. I'm going to add on a personal note that I don't think lime green should be used on 99.9% of icons. Ever.

Carrying on, let's use one of the Auron bases from earlier to explore the various ways we can find the perfect way to colourize our text.

1. The Eyedropper Tool

An easy way to find a good colour for text is to use the eyedropper tool and select a colour right from the base. This ensures that the text colour fits in nicely with the rest of the icon. In this case, I chose a yellowish colour from the top-right corner (#eae9c3).



2. Using grey and blend modes

Sometimes using grey can lead to interesting results. I used a light grey (#dfdfde) set to Vivid Light:



Similarily, you can experiment with dark greys as well on the Vivid Light blend mode. Since the base I'm using is fairly dark, using dark grey doesn't work very well. However, dark grey works wonders if you're using a light or muted base.

3. Using black and white

Using plain black or white text can look interesting, but it really depends on the base; sometimes it just doesn't look right. But for the sake of examples, let's see what it can do. First the same base as above using white, the second using black:





Once again, we find that darker colours aren't working too well with this base.

4. Background boxes

Let's say I'm a stubborn icon maker and I REALLY want to use black text with my fancy Auron base. You would think that I'm off my rocker because it's obvious black hardly shows on the icon and it's looking quite terrible. Well, that's where the lovely rectangle tool comes in! *drumroll*



This baby's gonna help make hard-to-see text more...see-able. Remember that shade of yellow we got from the eyedropper tool? I'm going to select the rectangle tool and make a yellow rectangle shape to go behind my black text.



We can do a few different things from this point on. If you want, you could leave the box the way it is. OR, we can get creative! We could lower the opacity of the rectangle so it's not as bold; in this case, I lowered the opacity down to 25% for a subtle look.



Or we could change the blend mode of the rectangle. I decided to change it to Overlay at 100% opacity:



Experimenting with colours and blend modes is the key at this point.

Font Choice

Every now and then there are font trends that go around, and unfortunately, some fonts just aren't suited for particular icons. Just because someone is overusing a certain font, it doesn't mean that it'll look good when you use it. We're going to find out more through a few examples. I'll start with the font I used for the colouring examples above, which happens to be Arial at 14pt.



OH MY GOD EWW THE TEXT IS SO UGLY. That's because I forgot to have my anti-alias settings turned on! NUDGE NUDGE. I'll turn it on to Strong to fix that ugly mess:



Ah, much better. Now, let's try another default font that everyone should have - Times New Roman, 14pt.



Not bad, not bad. How about a cursive font? Let's try Scriptina because everyone uses that font so it must be good! We'll try it at size 24.



I hope I'm not the only one who would agree that this font style doesn't seem appropriate at all; it does nothing for the mood of the icon ("Auron may be brooding but the swirly text helps brings out his eyes omg!"). Umm, no. Let's try a bitmap font! Let's use 04b_03b.



Okay, now we've got a whole lot of nasty stuff going on. Bitmap fonts look good when used properly; when they aren't used at the proper size and/or if the anti-alias isn't turned off, they go funky. To use this particular font properly, set it to size 8 and turn the anti-alias off. As a side note, most bitmap fonts look best when everything is in capitals.



Even after the ugly mess has been fixed, the bitmap style doesn't suit the icon at all. If I were going to finish this icon, I'd probably choose to use Arial or Times New Roman.

Tiny Text

I'm going to be honest. I love tiny text to death and I probably overuse it in my own icons, but if used properly it can be a nice accent to an icon. However, there is no reason why anyone should ever need to download tiny text brushes because it's simple to create from scratch. Also, I'm glad I haven't been asked this too much, but I hate people who insist on knowing what the tiny text says. Half the time I just pound on the keyboard until I have enough lettering to work with, and sometimes I copy and paste random lines from my Livejournal when I can't be bothered to type anything. At size 1, I could lie and tell you it says something when it probably says "lkasjdkljasflkasdl;fkas;dfasdfkljasdfl" and you wouldn't know the difference. </rant> Anyway. >>;;

In the bases above, below 'shadow;' you'll notice that I added a line of tiny text underneath to help spice things up. I typed a line of jibberish, adjusted the tracking in the Character box, and voila. For the sake of tutorials and such, I'll do a few more tiny text examples.

If you just want one line of tiny text, type a sentence. Any sentence. I usually type a sentence about the subject in the icon. Or, type randomly for a few seconds. OR if you feel silly doing that, open up a webpage and copy and paste a few words into the textbox. No one is going to be able to read it anyway, so it doesn't matter what goes there. For the font, I use Arial at size 1, and I'll set the tracking to 850.

If you want a blurb of tiny text, go to a site like A-Z Lyrics and copy and paste parts of a song. You can be choosy and find something that goes along with your icon, or you can choose whatever comes up first. I used Arial at size 1, with the tracking set to 450.



The settings above the tracking adjusts the amount of space between each line of text (the leading); I set this value to 2 so that the lines are close together.



And that is all for today. There are tons of other text-related things I could ramble on about but this is pretty lengthy as it is, and I'm terrible at explaining things. >>;;

That being said, please feel free to ask questions or whatever. :D