Lunar New Year typography card 2012

Lunar New Year is coming! This red colour card was chosen as a Lunar New Year E-card is because in our chinese culture. The color red is known as auspicious which represents happiness or good luck. As during chinese new year red packets were being given out as a form of luck and prosperity in the coming year.

Hereby Wish you a Happy Lunar New Year

Lunar New Year typography card 2012 step by step tutorial

Program: Adobe Illustrator
Version: CS4
Difficulty: Intermediate
Estimated Completion time: 30mins

Step 1

Open a New Document with size 128mm x 210mm. Use a rectangular Tool to draw a 128x210mm background.

Step 2

Simply select your background and use the eyedropper tool to tap on the gradient which you had just created. This will change your background to the gradient color.

Step 3

Step 4

Creating the banner. Firstly create a rectangular shape and use a pen tool to point drawn the shape out. Once the slip is done simply transform reeck it for the other side. Place the rectangular banner on top of the 2 slips and aligned them to t it nicely like the one below.

Step 5

Creating the STAMP. Select the star tool and hold on to ALT keyboard and click on your artbox area. A star option panel will pop up. Key in 60px for Radius 1 and 55px for Radius 2. The points represent the amount of sharp points you want for your stamp.

Next draw a smaller inner circle over the stamp and go to path nder and select minus front. This will create a punch eect on your stamp that leave a transparent hole in the middle of it.

Step 6

Next draw a smaller inner circle over the stamp and go to path nder and select minus front. This will create a punch effect on your stamp that leave a transparent hole in the middle of it.

Step 7

Once you are done with the stamp and the banner. You can start adding typography on your elements. I had indicate the font use for my types. Which is SteelFsh and Bebas Neue. As for the chinese font which can be download here.

The chinese character on the stamp mean “DRAGON” in mandarin and the four chinese word at the bottom mean “CHINESE NEW YEAR”

Step 8

Now group all elements together and Right click Transform Shear. A Shear option will popup. Select Shear Angle -12 degree, Axis : Vertical.

Step 9

Select the group of elements and test it on your background which you had previously created. Now what need to do is to create a shadow constrast for the elements to portray better. Select the 4 main elements and create a darker gradient.

Step 10

Select the 4 main elements and create a darker gradient.

Step 11

Simply group the elements together and shear it as follow. Shear angle is 12 degree and axis: Vertical.

Step 12

Last step, simply place the main elements on top of the background over the shadows and this is how it look like. you can adjust the shadow elements by using the subselection tool to align it nicely of the background. This should look perfect! Now you are done with your own Unique Typography card!.