Shape-shift your letterforms in Adobe Illustrator.

Choose your font.

Start by browsing Adobe Fonts. For this tutorial, Andrew will use Shape Builder to riff on a font with rounded letters, and demonstrate how it’s possible to create a totally different style of letters by adding rectangular shapes.

“Many sans serif fonts can work for this technique,” says Andrew. Here, he’s selected the medium weight of ITC Avant Garde Gothic as his base font, which has “near-perfect circles for the counters and bowls, as well as a general symmetry in the negative spaces of the letterforms.” This will provide a good starting point to play around with shapes.

Create outlines.

Once you’ve set your phrase, use the Selection tool and click on the text object. Then, right-click and select Create Outlines. Right-click again, and select Ungroup, which will allow you to alter and move individual letters as editable vector shapes.

Pro tip: You can also select Create Outlines with the shortcut keys Cmd+O. Either way, you may want to make a copy of your text before you do so, as you won’t be able to change your message or font choice after this step.

Create shapes.

Create a simple shape — here, Andrew has created a blocky cross by drawing and combining a tall rectangle with a wide one, using the Rectangle tool. (You can use the cross shape he’s provided in his practice file, or try making your own.)

Place your cross shape under the letter o, and adjust the size and placement so that it flushes with the outer edges of your letter. Copy and paste the cross shape and position it behind the p and the u, centering its placement around the rounded portion of each letter. (In a later step, you’ll see why we’ve chosen to start with these three letters.)

Knock ‘em out …

Now it’s time to edit the overlapping areas. First, use the Selection tool to select the entire word and the cross shapes you’ve placed. Then, select the Shape Builder tool. Press and hold down the Option key to use the Erase mode (this will be indicated as a minus [-] sign near your cursor). Then, hover over the areas where your letters and shape intersect to delete or “knock out” parts. In this case, let’s remove the negative space from inside the letters o, p, and u.

… then merge ‘em.

Now that we’ve removed the negative space from the inside of each letter, let’s merge the remaining parts of each letter and shape combo. Use the Shape Builder’s default Merge mode setting (indicated as a plus [+] sign near your cursor) and click on each pairing to combine shapes.

Mix, match, and riff.

Here comes the fun part! Playing with type means looking at letterforms more closely and seeing how they have been designed using the same building blocks. “One of the greatest tricks to customizing type is riffing off of those similarities to create letters in the same style,” Andrew says. 

Let’s say you’ve finished altering your u. Simply turn it on its side, and now you have a c! Flip it upside-down and now you have an n; put two together to make the m. Flip a p to make a d, then mirror it for a b.

Make the finishing touches.

Keep finessing and tinkering with your custom shapes to get a consistent treatment for each letter. Use the Direct Selection tool to make fine-tune adjustments to anchor points to get the proportions just right. (ICYMI, we walkthrough anchor points in our previous tutorial here.)

Refine, rinse, and repeat. Show us your shape-shifting type creations by tagging us on Instagram @adobecreate.