Greetings, intrepid dekeReteers. In today’s tutorial, I am going to reveal an ingenious use of a hidden Japanese typesetting secret, dug out of the secret caves of Illustrator preferences and put in the service of elegantly creating professional-style movie poster credits.

Join me on this journey to the the Warichu feature, which is designed for stacking characters within a single line of type. Some time ago, a mysterious message officially known as Deke’s Techniques 099 (a lost video that can only be found here under the code name Deke’s Techniques 056: Creating Great Movie Poster Credits in Illustrator), revealed how Warichu allows you to gracefully stack two words one on top of another, perfectly setting the titles of all the people who helped make your imaginary opus possible.

Join me in these illustrated steps that reveal the awesome mystery:

1) Start with an unpunctuated running list of the titles and names of your collaborators.

As you can see in this image below, I’ve simply typed the job titles and first and last names of all my imaginary conspirators. I’m using Arial, but it quickly won’t matter.

2) Set the type to a suitable Hollywood-esque font.

Univers is great for this exercise. Set the Font Style 39 Thin Ultra Condensed and the Size to 20 points.

Note: Univers is a commercial font, meaning you’ll need to pay for it. If you’d like a shareware font that’s free for personal use, Deke recommends SF Movie Poster Condensed available from Shy Foundry.

3) Set the type to All Caps.

With the type selected, click Character in the options bar and change the kerning to Optical as shown below. Then, open the flyout menu (by clicking the icon at the top of the Character options panel) and choose All Caps.

4) Save the current Character settings as a style.

No one wants to have to set these things more than once, so create a style to quickly apply your current settings. (Do it. It will be good practice for step 9 when you’ll definitely want to do it.) If necessary, and it probably will be, choose Window > Type > Character Styles from the main menu bar.

In the Character Styles panel, Alt-click (Option-click) the page icon at the bottom to create a new style. In the Character Style Options dialog box, name your new style Normal Credits (portending the arrival of Awesome Mystery Credits later) and click OK. Once you’ve got the style established, make sure to apply it to your selected text (by clicking the style in the panel once you’re done creating it.)

5) Unlock the Asian Type preferences.

And now the real key to this typesetting treasure is revealed. Press Ctrl+K (Command-K on a Mac) to open the Preferences dialog box, then choose Type from the left-hand pane. Click the checkbox next to Show Asian Options to unlock the secret.

6) Apply Warichu to your first job title.

Select the first title in your running list of credits, then click Character in the options bar. You’ll see some new Asian language options in the panel, but the one you want is accessed via the flyout menu. Click the icon in the upper right corner of the panel and choose Warichu, the Japanese word for a traditional typesetting style. Your text will magically stack itself.

Potential Booby Trap: When you grab the job title text with the Text tool, be sure you’re including the trailing space after the last word. It’s possible I found out the hard way that not doing so will create alignment peril later on.

7) Adjust the Warichu settings.

The stacked text needs some fine tuning. Start by clicking Character in the options bar again and again opening the flyout menu of the panel. This time choose Warichu Settings.

To make the stacked pair line up with the larger name that follows it, you’ll need to tweak the Scale (smaller in this case) and Line Gap (to a negative setting so the words are closer together vertically). Set the alignment to Right Aligned to follow ancient movie poster protocol.

8) Refine in the regular Character settings panel.

In the regular Character settings, you may need to reduce the type size and shift the baseline a bit to match the stacked pair exactly with the full-size text that follows. In this case a size value of 20.6 and a baseline shift of -.9 (as highlighted below) are the mysteriously odd settings that work. 

9) Save the style so you can apply it to your other titles.

Depending on how many imaginary people participated in your imaginary movie, it could get quite actually taxing to apply all these tweaks to each job title. Instead, repeat the process from step 4 above, and create a new style that includes all your Warichu adjustments. Then you can select each title, click to apply the New Awesome Warichu Credits style, and voila, your entire team is properly acknowledged.