Decorative Text T-Shirt Design Tutorial (Adobe Illustrator)

So here is one that I would recommend on Creative Fabrica and it’s called butter and garlic as you can see by this example it can look really really nice it’s a script font and it has as you can see down here also a Sans variation and Extras if we scroll through these

Example mock-ups right here we can see the alphabet we can see some more design examples this is the Sans serif font right there it’s sort of handwritten the style of it and here’s another really nice example now this is only one option there is other fonts like this they’re a

Little bit harder to find you often find them within actual script font sections here’s an overview of the free Doodles as well I will leave this font in the description down below and I’ve also got an alternative which is this one right here by Adobe fonts now this is really

Unuseful if you’ve already got an Adobe Illustrator or photoshop subscription because oftentimes you get the fonts included I don’t know if you need a Creative Cloud subscription to be honest that is what I have personally and I do get access to these fonts so good life

Is one that I’ve used a lot in the past it has multiple different font Styles and also these extras included so um here’s a quick overview of the style so we’ve got to make this bigger we’ve got brush we’ve got a script version contents Sans and different serif

Options and then the extras right here here is a quick example of some of the extras that I’ve used quite a bit so this option right here is one that you can easily mirror and use around text these arrows are quite nice and this little whatever you want to call it and

You get certain bits of text that are often used like and and off and with that sort of stuff and you have some presets there in the extra address once again check out GoodLife on Adobe fonts if you have a subscription that includes their font library or use that other

Font from creative Fabrica which is linked Down Below in the description so here we are inside of Illustrator this is a design I created with garlic and butter the other day here’s another variation with a different color scheme and I wanted to quickly explain to you how these fonts actually work here we’ve

Got a bit of text in Myriad Pro and if we change this to butter and garlic right here the normal font obviously we get the script version then we’ve got cute caps right here which is the Sans serif and we’ve also got butter and garlic bonus so once you click into this

You’ll notice whatever letter you press you will get a different little symbol that pops up if you hold down shift you know if you do a capital A you will get a different result than a lowercase a in this case so those are both A’s right

There now one quick tip is just typing out the entire alphabet at once like I’ve done right here and then then expanding the shapes so you can easily move these around by the way you also get different shapes for the numbers like one two three four other symbols

Like the brackets Etc can also give you results right here but as you can see got a variety of very very nice shapes that we can use to decorate a text and the good thing is because it’s included in the font the shapes actually match the font perfectly right they they

Belong together there’s also a bonus doodle file that you get in Adobe Illustrator file or you can download an SVG with this font that also holds some additional Graphics right here I don’t think all these are included in the actual font version right so this is just an Adobe Illustrator file with

Extra Graphics essentially which you can also use you don’t have to use both you can just use one of these options I just wanted to show you that that also comes with a font but moving back here let’s actually drag and drop or drag these all

Over to a new app board I downloaded some phrases right here for a coffee themed design from the vexels quote generator I’m going to use one of these now and create a design from scratch so you can sort of walk through the process with me and see how I do this let’s just

Go with the first phrase I quite like that one obviously you can do this for other niches as well you don’t have to just do it for coffee the graphics some of these Graphics do match coffee quite well but most of them you can use for pretty much any Niche so let’s change

The color right here and start off with one of these butter and garlic fonts let’s start off with caps version right here because that one is nice and easy to read and let’s put life begins at the top let’s put coffee at the bottom by the way you get a different option right

Here for each letter when you do capital and lowercase they do all appear Capital but there is still variation in the lettuce if you want to mess around with them this is the stat of the layout I suppose Life Begins and then after in the middle could be the other font

Option which is this one right here don’t like how that tea looks so you can also adjust this right here with the glyphs and get different variations yeah I’m not a big fan of that Tee so in this case I think I prefer to use this font

For the middle and let’s see if we can change this one right here to the scripty option make that look nice that does look a bit better I’ve begins after coffee and in this case I do like to keep some gaps next to some of the words

Because that’s what we’re going to fill in with our bonus Graphics right here extras we can move this up a bit I’m just looking at the the line of the C right here and the F’s and the spacing compared to the word after so I don’t

Want to have like a massive Gap I want them to be relatively even so what can we do in terms of glyphs right here do any of these look good and that’s a bit a bit large maybe this e looks cool the C does not have any glyphs unfortunately

And I believe these are the ones we can just leave the same yeah let’s leave those the same and let’s start not actually filling out some of the empty space with the decorative extras let’s get rid of all this text and move up all of these Graphics right here so first of

All I want to move something next to after right here and I do recommend choosing things that you can easily sort of mirror and stick to some sort of symmetry so in this case once you’ve got the first piece aligned you can hold down alt on your keyboard then as you

Can see your arrows can change there you can then click and drag and hold down shift while dragging to stay in line with the previous graphic with the graphic on the left then once we’re over here we can start rotating this and you will notice while rotating if you hold

Down shift it’ll be easier to have this turn by 180 degrees so that’s a good start I think and now let’s carry on with the outside and some of these other gaps right here what else can we do I think these little stars look quite good

So where can we put these we could put them here but I would rather have them repeated somewhere so if any of your text gets any way just select all the text click Ctrl 2 on your keyboard and then it will be locked and you will have

An easier time moving things around and highlighting stuff without the text getting in the way so let’s actually maybe move this up to the top right here I want to mirror this now rather than rotate right you could rotate it but what if we want to reflect it right we

Can hold down o on a keyboard that will bring up the reflect tool and then anywhere on the app board you can just click and drag and hold down shift again and there we go that’s reflected those little shiny star symbols right there okay cool what about the top and the

Bottom there is some shapes that work quite well for the top and bottom where are they this one right here I really like this one because you can easily place that one on top like this also perhaps at the bottom let’s see if it works underneath this I’m going to use

Just the rotate tool in this case um the F’s are sort of off to the side of it so you could place it like that but it’s off center if we if we try and find the center here let’s align this to the center of the artboard pull out a

Ruler so control R brings up the rulers and line it up with the center then ah that actually works okay maybe over to the right a little bit there we go you just have to play around a bit to try and balance this out then just carry on

Looking through the shapes you won’t always do it first try that it looks good I don’t know if that actually looks nice I’m not sure let’s try a different one let’s try this option I’m not sure about that one but let’s just carry on we can also start adding some coffee

Mugs right here because that is the theme of this design will it work there no that’s too small like you can hardly see this when you zoom out it can hardly make how the actual coffee mug so we’ll have to make it a bit bigger you could

Have this um at the top and sort of create some symmetry here by once again copying it over and reflecting it with a reflect tool by hitting o and dragging it like this so there we go if you ever want to align two objects like this that

Are mirrored to the center group them both by holding down Ctrl G on your keyboard now this is grouped and we can head up to this right here make sure it’s aligned to outboard and then align this to the center so there we go got the coffee mugs sorted out let’s add a

Few of these right here as well try and align them somewhat to the text at the bottom and this part of the leaf goes or follows the shape of the E quite nicely so I think that works let’s copy it over reflect it once again with oh does it work it does actually

Work somewhat fills that space out nicely so once again what we can do is we can group these two and align them to Center and there we go we’ve got that bottom bit filled out as well sometimes you’ll just have to zoom out and look at

The design with a fresh set of eyes and see where are we still lacking some shapes I think here’s a bit of a gap that might need to be filled I do think maybe the coffee mugs are slightly too overbearing slightly too big so let’s make those a tad smaller yep I think

That works let’s find something to put over here into these Corners how about some heart shapes perhaps let’s copy these there we go do they look good I’m not sure they sort of compete with these Stars at the top so let’s maybe try one of these little things right here they

Can look quite good I use them in the other design and you can easily sort of place them around the edge of your design like this right there we go I think that looks a bit better than the hearts before copy this over hit o reflect it like this and

There we go let’s perhaps move these up a little bit and now I think the layout is somewhat balanced I would now just go ahead and actually unlock the text as well because that’s still locked as you can see you can’t select it so hit Ctrl alt t on your keyboard to unlock

Everything let’s actually move these shapes to the side a bit and let’s begin first of all outlining the text so we can align it to the center as well and make sure everything is aligned properly so let’s begin with this right here then after and coffee it has to be moved to

Tad as well and now make sure some of these shapes are also properly aligned to the center of the artboard and then you might still have to move some things around like here in this case it’s getting a bit close to the C in my

Opinion so let’s move this up a tad with the arrows and yeah that’s pretty much it just aligning some things to the center of the artboard and then we’re done with this design I think that looks a lot nicer than just having plain text and you can obviously easily create

Color variations what I like to do in these cases for these sort of soft designs is leaving the actual text at a bright color quick tip here is to group the text I mean you don’t have to but you can just lock it with Ctrl two so

There we go it’s all locked now you can select all of the shapes excluding the text right here and you can just select a new color so let’s go with some sort of brown just to suit the coffee Niche there we go or you could make another

Variation if we unlock all of these shapes right here again draw this artboard over we could make another variation lock the text and I think a nice green tone of color would work too there we go that does look really cool and now we’ve got an interesting looking

Design where the text still stands out even though we’ve added quite a lot of decorative elements to this again it’s quite a bit of trial and error and perhaps I could have added something small into this Gap right here as well and made this a tad smaller it’s just

Messing around and finding some sort of balance and a lot of the objects if you you know mirror them if you some symmetry between the left and right and they create quite a nice balanced design so yeah definitely check out the patreon creative fabric of inspiration as well

Those designs looked amazing probably a lot better than my examples right here and have fun creating these designs they might not work for every single Niche like if it’s a very masculine type of sport or whatever then these designs might not work but I think in many cases

You can keep this in the back of your mind to create some really interesting looking text designs if you want to expand your illustrator skills then make sure to check out this video next where I show you how to create horizontal Sunset t-shirt designs foreign