Glossy Text and still editable

[ZamJam]

Hi, I'm still working through how to make text like this and keep the wording editable when the client wants to make changes or for misspellings, just found out today that you can vectorized the glows made with the Shadow tool by selecting make editable shape.

Thanks for any thoughts.

[itsfransie]

Gave it a quick try. My text isn't as nice and glossy as yours, but it's easily edited.

First created the text, filled it with a red and black plasma, then applied a bevel. After that, I added a white outer glow with a 0mm blur to get the white outline. Adding a second outer glow required me to group the text line first.
Then I drew an ellipse and fiddled with the transparency a bit to get the glossy effect. Not particularly successfull, but it's a start.
Finally, select both the text and the ellipse and apply a clipview.

Now changing the text is a matter of editing the text line and then adjusting the ellipse.


Frans

[gwpriester]

Well done Frans

ZamJam - The glow effect is a bitmap, even if you convert to editable shapes. All this does is remove the ability to further edit the shadow/glow.

The shadow, and many other Xara effects are called Live effects because the effect can be edited at any time, tomorrow or next year, as long as you have not converted it to editable shapes.

There is a way to create a vector glow. See attached .XAR file and tell me how I did this.

[gray]

Looks good, ZJ.

[angelize]

First, I have moved this to the Xara Graphic chat area as this is more of a how to do this discussion than a look at what I have created thread

There is another way to achieve the shiny look and still retain some editability. This is not perfect but it should work for a single line of text like a heading.

Here is a quick tutorial and I've attached a .xar file that not only contains an example of this effect but one of this month's freebie files If you are following this months freebie hunt follow this link to find the next freebie!
Please direct all discussion of the Freebie hunt to the freebie hunt thread

Editable text instructions
1. click and type your text do NOT create a text column or area.
2. fill as desired and then clone your filled text and lighten the colours in the fill of the clone.
3. feather and offset the clone to create a slightly 3d effect.
4. create another clone of the text and make it white.
5. create a large black rectangle that covers your 3 text objects. This rectangle should be big enough to cover the entire text and enough extra space to cover any additional edits.
6. clone this rectangle and make this clone white.
7. draw a wavy line horizontally across the white rectangle approximately across the center of your text which is hidden underneath. select the line and the white rectangle and hit ctrl+4 to slice. discard the bottom portion.
8. select the remaining white shape and the black rectangle and group. hit Ctrl+X to cut this group to the clipboard.
9. select the top white text layer and right click it and select paste opacity mask. You can hold crtl + alt and click to select the shape inside the opacity mask and by adjusting the colour you can adjust the transparency of it. try experimenting with around 50% black.
10. lastly comes the trick that will make this an editable effect. select all the text layers and either arrange>apply soft group or ctrl+alt+g and as long as your text doesn't expand past the size of the rectangle inside the opacity mask you should be able to edit the text as if it was one.

[ZamJam]

Thank you all for your help and comments I really appreciate your input.

I used a bitmap fill on my above example to fill the text for Xara Pro X9.

gwpriester's, here is how I think you may have made your glow.

1. Type out the text and color it red.
2. Make a copy of the red text and change color to pink.
3. Use the Contour tool to expand the text out and then change the steps to 50.
4. Drop a colored swatch onto the very outer edge/ring of the contour.
5. The end result will be a back to pink gradient, next place the red text on top
of the glow by moving it to the front and align it to the glow.
6. Draw black rectangle and fill it with black and move it to the back then put all the
pieces together.

Thanks again for your help and giving me this project to do, really liked trying to figure how it was made.

Attached is the project file for critique.

[ZamJam]

Thank you Angelize, for your tutorial and really like the texture, will put it to some good use.

ZamJam

[ZamJam]

Thanks itsfransie, Looks great, I used a bitmap on mine, yours is very cool because you can type any length of text and then adjust the ellipse for the highlight, great job!

Tip: Turn off "Check Spelling as you type" to avoid underlined text from the spell check squiggles.

Thanks again.