In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques movie, Deke shows you how to create some custom hand-drawn letters in Illustrator, and keep them looking like they are part of one related typeface. 

The trick is to repeat certain shapes, namely the letter I, wherever they are appropriate. So, the straight vertical shape of the I also becomes the spine of the F, R, E, and P. 

Along the way, you’ll get to ignite these Illustrator skills:

• Placing a scanned sketch and making it a template
• Making the letters uniform with some base lines that are reused for each character
• Exploiting the nuances of the Paste command options in Illustrator
• Using the Pathfinder panel to combine the duplicated shapes into letters
• Using the Blend command to distribute the type character’s elements uniformly

If you’re a member of lynda.com, Deke’s got two follow-up movies in which he shows you how he creates the R, P, and U (which require special handling due to their curves and holes) and then how he puts this text to use in Photoshop. If you’re not a member of lynda.com, you can get a free week’s trail at lynda.com/deke to check it out. 

Of course, this is the text he used to fire up his project Designs dekeConstructed: Retro Superhero. Your free week of lynda.com (or your full-fledged membership) will give you access to learning how to make that entire project, too.