Design Tutorial 5 – Twizted Asteroid

Posted by ScotSpellman on Nov 2, 2011 in Diving Into Design | 1 comment

For my fifth design tutorial, I wanted to work on some new text effects. I stumbled across this really cool tutorial showing how to make an asteroid entering the atmosphere effect. Now to figure out what text to use. I came up with the name for our umbrella company for the Plantilicious website, “Twizted Designers”, so I wanted to play around with some text effects on “Twizted”. I didn’t even realize that this tutorial was written by Fabio, founder and acting president of Abduzeedo.com, until I was almost finished with it. I actually got to meet Fabio at a design conference at Platt College in San Diego last year. I was truly inspired by his work and how his blog just took off. He seemed like a really cool guy too, think he would be fun to hang out with. He writes a bunch of tutorials and blogs about his inspirations, definitely worth checking out his creations on Abduzeedo.com.

One thing I really liked about this tutorial is that it touches both Illustrator and Photoshop, showing how you can use them together to create something awesome. I started by creating the 3D text in Illustrator and then I brought it over to Photoshop for the remaining effects such as the clouds, flaming first letter, blur, etc. The most challenging part was all the fire and sparks coming from the ‘d’. It was hard to make it look real and not like a cartoon. I played around with it a bunch and overall am happy with how it turned out even though it doesn’t match the tutorials effect exactly. This ended up being a really fun tutorial.

Here is the finished product:

Download Scot’s AI source file: TwistedAsteroid.psd

View the tutorial here: http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/text-effects-tutorials/create-a-spectacular-flaming-meteor-effect-on-text/

Thumbnail: http://www.scotspellman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/TwistedAsteroidCropped.jpg