The distressed and grunge looks are hot these days. This quick tutorial will show you just how easy it is to create this effect on text in Illustrator.Let’s begin with some text. You can add small and simple design elements if you would like. Stay away from anything too complex.

We have our starting point, we need to gather our tools. Make sure that your Brushes Palette is open. (You can open the palette by going to Window > Brushes.) Now, go open a the Artistic-ChalkCharcoalPencil Brush Library by going to Window > Brush Libraries > Artistic-ChalkCharcoalPencil as shown below.Next, take your pen tool and draw a few lines through the text at various angles. Select a stroke color from you Color Palette, making sure that your stroke color is different than the text and any design elements you are using.Apply one of the brushes from the new Brush Library to all of your lines. I am using the top brush called “Chalk”.Now select the text and the brush strokes and expand it all by going to Object > Expand. Once the artwork has been expanded, we want to merge it all together. Open your Pathfinder Palette by going to Window > Pathfinder. With the expanded artwork selected, click on the Merge Icon in you Pathfinder Palette.Now, select the color of your brush strokes from the swatches in your Color Palette. Once the color appropriate color appears as your Fill Color, select all of the strokes by simply going to Select > Same > Fill Color. This will select all of the little shapes created by you brush strokes. With the shapes selected click the delete key on your keyboard or select the No Fill swatch from the Color Palette.Removing the color from those spots around the design creates the distressed/grunge look we are going for. 

Designers and recreational users alike will often find themselves looking to use special characters, like numerical fractions and trademark/copyright symbols.  The Glyphs Palette can save you the hassle of tweak, tweak, tweaking your standard text until a fraction looks right or creating a symbol by manually combining shapes and characters.

To open the Glyphs Palette, goto Text > Glyphs on your Illustrator menu.  The palette will open and display the glyphs available in the selected font.  Simply change the font on your Character Toolbar or Palette to change the glyphs being displayed.  To insert a glyph, place your text cursor somewhere on the artboard or with a line of text and then double click the appropriate glyph within the palette.

Incorporating textures into your vector artwork is a great way to add visual interest.  Manually drawing a detailed vector texture in Illustrator can be labor intensive and time consuming.  But creating custom dynamic textures using the Live Trace tool makes Illustrator textures quick and easy.In Part One of Easy Vector Textures, we’ll walk through the simple steps of creating a texture.  Part Two, will be an exercise in using some of textures in a design.Let’s start by selecting a photo that shows the type of texture you want to create.  I am going to use the weave texture shown below.Once you have selected a texture, place the photo into your Illustrator document (File > Place). With the photo selected, create an expanded trace of the image by selecting Live Trace in the Object menu (Object > Live Trace > Make and Expand), which can be seen on the left.  The trace will be a simplified black and white vector version of the texture image. In order to use the texture to modify a larger design, we want to separate out the black and get rid of the white – to leave negative space through which the objects behind the texture will show through. Select all of the white portions of the traced texture by, first clicking on a portion of the white using your Direct Selection Tool, and then choose Select Same > Fill Color for the Select menu. (For for information on using the Select Same option, see QUICK TIP – Easy Way to Select Multiple Objects.)With all of the white portions of the texture selected, hit Delete on your keyboard.Now you are left with only the black portions of the texture.To see how the texture can be used to modify a flat object, draw a rectangle and fill it with the color of your choice, as seem below.Now select your texture object, fill it with a slightly different shade of the chosen color, and place it on top of the rectangle. Now we have an object with a detailed texture – that only took us a matter of seconds!Here are a few more simple samples of quick and easy textures creating using the Live Trace Tool: