- [Instructor] Let's explore how we can create letter forms
derived from a grid.
Inspired by the work of Wim Crouwel,
famous Dutch graphic designer, this is my finished version,
and here is the starting point.
Let me just explain what we have here.
Three layers, background, template,
over which we'll be drawing the letter forms,
and some text.
Above these layers, I'll create a new layer
which I'll call grid.
And I'm going to change the color of the layer
because that's going to affect the selection color
of the grid squares and I want to make it
a bit less intrusive.
So let's go to cyan.
And then I will lock all of the other layers.
So now I'm going to get my Rectangle tool,
and I'm going to draw a square over my square art board,
and then come to the Object menu, Path, Split into Grid.
I would like 60 rows and 60 columns
with a gutter space of zero in both cases.
I need to make sure that all of these rectangles
have a fill of none,
and that they have a stroke of none as well.
Now I can zoom in.
I'll come and get my Live Paint Bucket and click
anywhere on the grid to make it into a live paint group.
I'll choose black as my color.
And it's now just a question of moving around the letters
and filling them in with the color.
And my rule of thumb here,
and one which I can overrule if necessary,
is that if the grid square has more than 50% gray in it,
then it gets filled with black.
And this is obviously going to result in a very different
looking letter shape to the one that we start out with.
So it is a bit time consuming, but it's also quite fun.
If you do go wrong, all you need to do is switch to none
as your fill color and then apply that to the grid square.
So that's my first letter completed.
Let's just review this.
I'm going to click outside of the live paint group
to deselect it, come to my layers panel
and hide the grid template
which ultimately is just going to go away.
That's just there for essentially our tracing purposes.
And by the time you've gone around all of the letters,
it's going to look like this.
What I did in addition was with the live paint group
I decided that this might look best
if we have a very light gray stroke
applied to it.
So I'm going to go for a very light gray stroke,
and also I need to reduce the white of that stroke.
I'm going to come down to 0.25.
So that's how you can use a grid
to create your letter forms.
Obviously if you start with a different tracing template,
you'll get a very different result.
And if you have a different number of grid squares,
that will also yield a very different result.
But go ahead and experiment with this.
You'll find some very interesting results.