- [Instructor] Sometimes it's fun to cast readability aside
in favor of intriguing shapes.
This highly stylized typeface lends itself
to being distorted and reshaped.
Firstly I'll right click and Create Outlines.
Then Ungroup so that I can select each letter individually.
Now I'm going to draw some guides.
To the top,
to the center,
and to the bottom.
Let's zoom in with my rectangle tool.
I'm going to draw a rectangle that is the height
of that negative space between the crossbars on the E.
And I'll make that a bright color.
And then I'll duplicate that and spin it through 90 degrees.
These will be my measuring sticks just to make sure
that the spacing between elements is consistent.
I'll place the horizontal on the guide in the middle
and then we can drag down guides to the top
and to the bottom.
Now I'll come and Unlock the Guides.
We no longer need that middle guide,
I'll lock the guides again,
Command option or control alt semi-colon.
So I'm now ready to start reshaping the letters.
Firstly, the U, that's going to be half height.
The Z I'll move over,
and that will also be half height.
Move the next Z over
and you'll see that my smart guides are kicking in
to indicate the spacing between these shapes is consistent.
Now it's going to get a bit more tricky
because I'm going to skip the L for a moment
and come to the E, move this one over,
reduce
its height.
I'm now going to reshape the Z
and then fit the L into the space that is created.
So for this, I need to make sure that I have just
the right anchor points selected,
holding down my shift key.
I'll drag that over so that it meets
the right edge of the E.
Now I find that when I'm doing this
there's a high probability
of selecting things that I don't want to select.
I'm going to select the E, press command two, to lock that
so that I can now come and select the top of that Z
and bring that down to my halfway line.
Now I'll come and get the L,
and let's bring our vertical measuring stick into play here
just to make sure that that's sitting where it should.
I'm going to reduce its height.
And then distort the letter so that
the right side only comes up as far as the midpoint line.
All right, so now,
our measuring sticks have served their purpose,
we can delete those and I'll turn
off the guides, command or control semi colon.