How to make a Neon Sign Glow Effect in Illustrator?

Course contents
SECTION: 4
Keyboard Shortcuts 14:06

Questions

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Course info

104 lessons / 10 hours 33 quiz questions 31 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hey there, I'm Dan Scott, an Adobe Certified Instructor with over 16 years of design experience under my belt, I'm part of the Adobe Expert program, and my online and in-person classes have been attended by more than a million people, just like you! Join me as we dive into the exciting world of Adobe Illustrator Advanced! In this course, you're not just leveling up in Illustrator, you're transforming into an Illustrator SuperHero!

In this course you will work on a bespoke brief designed to ignite your imagination, coupled with immersive course videos, you'll be crafting jaw-dropping graphics in no time. Throughout our journey together, you'll flex your creative muscles and construct projects that will elevate your portfolio to new heights. So, let's dive in and unleash your creativity!

You’ll learn:

  • - How to use artificial intelligence to boost your creativity in ideation. 
  • - The quick way to take hand-drawn sketches and vectorize and color them. 
  • - The building blocks needed to set you loose on a huge variety of beautiful effects and techniques.
  • - To make beautiful charts and graphs for your documents. 
  • - Color mastery to make quick color adjustments, Pantones, and blend it all together beautifully.
  • - How to master images inside of your illustrator workflow. 
  • - To harness all the secret gems that'll help you level up your typography skills. 
  • - All the tricks of the trade for drawing complex shapes easily. 
  • - To double your creativity with the Transform and Distort section. 
  • - To speed up your personal workflow to get the most out of your creative day.

Explore the full course outline for a comprehensive list of topics that will expand your Illustrator prowess beyond imagination.

If you're already comfortable navigating the basics but want to  unlock the true potential of Illustrator, then this Illustrator Advanced course is your ticket to becoming a master of Illustrator! So join me and the ranks of design superheroes and let's embark on this thrilling journey together.

Requirements:

- All you need is a copy of Adobe Illustrator, you can get a free trial from Adobe here to get started.
- A basic knowledge of Illustrator is required. I recommend watching my Illustrator Essentials course prior to embarking on this epic adventure.

Who this course is for:

- Creative adventurers who already have a basic understanding of Illustrator.
- Self-taught Illustrator enthusiasts yearning for structured guidance.
- Graduates of my Illustrator Essentials Course, hungry for more knowledge and skills.
- Visionaries who have developed their own unique Illustrator approach but crave exploration of the vast universe of tools, updates, and time-saving techniques.

What you'll learn:

- How to use Text to Vector Ai
- How to use Text to Pattern Ai
- How to use Generative Recolor
- When to use the Scissor Tool, Eraser Tool & Knife Tool
- Advanced Shape Builder Uses
- The differences between the Pathfinder Vs Shape Builder
- How to use the Join tool & Joining Path Ends
- Advanced Pen Tool Tricks
- Width Tool Advanced Techniques
- The Curvature Tool
- How to master corners with corner widget effects
- How to work with Compound Paths
- The difference between Expand & Expand Appearance
- How to create Graphic Styles
- How to make Symbols
- How to use the Smooth Tool
- Advanced use of Simplify Path
- What Live Shape Effects are for
- How to make Repeating Grids & Concentric Circles
- How to make Random Objects
- Advanced Keyboard Shortcuts in Illustrator
- How to add a Gradient on a Stroke
- How to add a Gradient in Text
- How to use the Freeform Gradient tool
- How to use Advanced Color Swatches
- How to use Global Color Swatches
- What is the difference between RGB vs CMYK color modes?
- How to proof colors
- How to use Pantone Spot Colors
- Recolor Artwork & Changing all colors at once
- How to use Blending Modes
- How to work with Images & Blending Modes
- How to make Black & White Images
- Learn Advanced Workflow Tricks
- All the Super Selection Mastery
- How to use the History Panel
- Advanced Fonts Tricks & Tips
- Use Retype to know what Font is being used
- How to put Text Inside a Letter or Shape
- How to use the Touch Type Tool
- How to add a Connected Stroke Around Multiple Shapes
- How to Offset a Stroke with Text
- How to make a Bar Chart in Illustrator
- How to make a Pie Chart in Illustrator
- Layer Power Moves
- Advanced Artboard & Pages Tricks
- How to Unlink vs Embedded Images
- How to Crop Images Rather than Mask
- How to Mask Inside Text & Multiple Shapes
- How to you use the Puppet Warp Tool
- How to use the Distort Envelope Shape & Type
- How to use the Envelope Mesh
- How to blend lines together
- How to make a Linocut Effect
- How to make 3D Gradient Lettering Blends
- How to spin text into a ring
- How to turn text into a 3D donut shape
- How to make a Duotone image effect
- How to make a Roughen Stamp Vector Effect
- How to make a Neon Sign Glow Effect
- How to use a Halftone Effect using Plugins
- Advanced Exporting Assets Tricks in Illustrator
- How to use the Dimension Tool

So what're you waiting for? Let's start the course now!
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hi everyone. In this tutorial we are going  to look at creating our very own neon effect in Illustrator. It's a great way of combining lots  of the skills we've learned already in this course  into cool neon effect. Alright, let's jump in. Alright, neon go time. Open up the neon, uh, file  or just find a font that kind of looks neon ish.

It's gotta be on a dark background. I'll show you how to do the brick work at the end. Um, this kind of like faded effect. Now there's lots of different ways of doing this. There's some built into uh, illustrator. I'm gonna duplicate this and show you it.

You could just go window and actually go to help. Go to um, illustrator help  and if you type in neon here, okay, neon, you'll see  that there's a few different options. The neon glow artistic me doesn't work very well. Um, there's a graphic style built in. You're like Awesome. I like graphic styles and these ones me, you might be done.

You feel like that is it? Love it. Okay. There's nothing wrong with it. I guess I'll get a bit like  it's not custom, it's not good. Okay?

But these are perfectly fine. We'll leave this one over here. Okay? And that's perfectly fine. Let's make our own graphic style. Okay, with a lot more work.

But I think it looks cooler. The other interesting thing to look at, if I click on this,  can you see what they've done under their parents panel? They've added a stroke. A stroke, a stroke, stroke, stroke. There's just lots of strokes, okay? And they've lower the opacity of them.

That's all they seem to have done in this one. Okay? So what we are gonna do though is something different. Okay? So we are going to add a fill to it. Know that, remember with text we kinda looked at a earlier  the, you have this kind of overall parent  thing called the type.

Okay? And if you go inside the  characters, it has its own fill. Okay? And we're gonna leave that alone. We're gonna come back out to work on just the overall  and we're gonna throw over the top a fill, okay? And that fill is going to be any color you like.

Okay? Um, we're going to expand that. I'm gonna use a gradient 'cause I quite like it. Okay? It's my little hack on the million tutorials  out there on Eon Glows. Okay?

So I'm gonna start with this. It's in your exercise files,  otherwise you can make your own using the gradient tool. We'll just pick a plain color, okay? And what we're gonna do is, uh, with this fill,  we don't want it for the fill color, we want it  to affect the glow, okay? Or the blur in this case. So we're gonna have it selected  and we're gonna go to effects.

And we're gonna say, I'd like to add a blur  to this Fill gian blur. Okay? And you get the hint of what's gonna go on. Okay? And this is basically we need two or three. This will depend, you know, the radius  and how many you need will depend on the kind  of neon glow you want and the kind of font you are using  and how big the actual document is.

So just play around with this. Get with something. Start with something small. Okay? Can you see the hint around the outside? Let's click Okay, I am gonna have it selected  and I'm gonna hit this option here  that says duplicate that fill.

So I've got two of them. Grab the top one  by clicking on Gian blur and have another one on the top. Okay, that's kind of in the medium kind of range  of um, glows click. Okay. And do you need another one? That's up to you.

Now I'm gonna do maybe one more click on this. You can actually have two gian blurs. You can duplicate the gian blur  but end up kind of canceling each other out  when they're in the same fill. So I'm gonna undo that. So we kind of need two fills  or in my case I'm gonna do three. This top one's gonna be quite big  and kind of expansive like that.

Now um, the layers in the appearance panel here are quite  important 'cause watch this. I'm gonna say characters, which I know if I go inside  of it has a fill color, okay? But I can't see it, right? It's not white. So you can say, oh want you guys on the top. So now we get that kind of like crisp edge  that makes it more legible.

If we wanna maybe tone that back again,  we can add a new fill. Actually let's duplicate an old fill. Okay? And let's have this one above my characters. And let's have a fill color of white only  because I want blur it as well. Okay?

I'm gonna say you have a blur calcium blur  of actually I already have it applied. Okay, you don't need apply signal one go into here. I can say you kind of just  to fuzz up the edges a little bit. Cool, huh? Now you might be running into  a couple of problems. Now the the pixelization you might be like  why is mine pixelated?

And with it's actually you don't need it selected. Go up to effect and go to document rust the settings  and you can have your resolution down at 72. If I click okay, it's really yucky and it's fast, okay,  but it doesn't give us the true effect. So let's go to effect document RA settings. Let's go to 300. Um, and the other problem you might have  is you might have some clipping.

Let's have a look. I think I have got mine off by default. Let's go to effect. Let's go to document ruster settings  and let's create a really small clipping mask. So you might find that your edge is getting clipped on. You can see the glows getting like trimmed off mine's  actually okay, but if you're getting a line around the  outside, okay, ooh, you can kind of see it there.

It's quite hard. Can you see the line there? See banged up against the edge. You're like, oh, how do I stop that? Okay, what you can do is you can get a effect  and you can say document rust settings. Again, you can say actually I want it  to clip the blur, but I want it to be massive.

So just crank it up to a really big size. Let's type it to a uh, 500. Okay? And nothing happens. The weird thing about it's you need  to go of give it a jiggle. Do I need to resize it or just move it?

I resize it. There's lying gone. I'm trying to look  around, clean my screen. Yeah, it's gone. So sometimes  with those RAs effects you need to kind of, even  with the resolution, you might need to give it a resize  or a move just to tell um, illustrated like go  and look at that again please. Like can you play around with it and like redraw it  and that new clipping mask setting we just did  and that might be us.

I'm digging it. You can play  around with different gradients. One last thing you might do is I might actually  with this uh, top fill here,  actually this tippy top one is I might add another effect  that says, uh, stylize and do an inner glow. Okay? And for me, I've picked this like, like yellow,  that's not quite um, you know, not quite yellow,  not quite white, just this kind of like, I dunno,  I feel like it's a cool neon effect. And you can decide whether it's edge or center  and depending on your text you can decide on  how blurry it is as well.

Kind of a bit of experimentation. Now you can see mine where you can't see mine,  but my computer's struggling a little bit. It's because I've got my resolution up  to my rasa resolution up to 300. So what you might be doing,  especially if you're in a maybe a, an older computer,  you might be doing a lot of this,  Okay? Under maybe  one 50 or 72  and only at the end switching it to 300, get it close  and only when you're kind of finished you want  to give it the, the full noise okay? To kind of really see how it finishes.

Now the cool thing about it though is there's a lot of work  and a lot of fudge in around. Okay? But we know  that if I select this I can make it a graphic  style reusable. I'm gonna add one in here. I'm gonna double click it and call it neon. And now it means  that I can grab my type tool, type something else.

I'm gonna make it bigger. I'm going to make it white. I should pick a better font. But I can just set my graphic style  and hopefully it should go through  and add the neon glow to it. Not the greatest font. Let's go back to Lakehouse Lakeside.

Nope. Lake something or other. It is lakeside. Cool a Alright, before we go, I promised I would show you  how to do the vignette against the brickwork. And what did I actually did was, um, let's right click this  and unlock the rectangle. The only thing that's happening is there's a rectangle on  the top with a kinda a transparency gradient on it.

So nothing really to do with the brickwork. Okay? So, um, let me show you how to recreate it. Let's grab um, a rectangle. It's just filled with black, okay? In your swatches panel there is a soft  vignette already in there.

Okay? And that's kind of the basic way. I don't really like that one for some reason you can adjust  it by hitting the G key okay? And clicking on it G key even. Okay? And you've got this transparent swatch in the middle  that's black that they've kind of, you know, pulled out  to kind of add a hole.

So see through hole and you can adjust. They've kind of got these different ones in here. I prefer just making my own, um, 'cause I'm cantankerous. Okay? So I'm gonna grab black  rectangle, I'm gonna have it selected. I'm gonna go and pick uh, black to white, okay?

Gradient. And I'm gonna pick uh, radio gradient  and you can kind of see where I'm going and hit G. This middle one is going to be black. For some reason in this document I've reset my black  to not be full black. I dunno how I did that. I've never done that before.

There you go. This one here on the  outside is going to be full black as well. And what I'm gonna do is this  inside slider is with it slicked. Okay? Double click it. I'm gonna say the opacity on this in  one is zero and that's kind of how I did it.

Um, there you go. Okay. And what I did was, is you go over there,  okay and you go there. I'm gonna resize it so it fits. I'll show you one last little trick while here  is you can have that kind of fuzziness over the top. That might be cool.

You can play with a layer order okay? And move it back so that the text is above it. The other thing you might do is with uh, it's selected,  you can go to opacity  and you can say actually let's find dark and normal. Something that's gonna interact with the image quite well. Anything lighten screen,  you wait there, it's gonna go through them all. Alright.

The one I liked was soft light. Okay. And you can see it's, I don't know, it's very cool. Um, on off kind of has a bit more kind  of interaction with the background. There you go. That's why I do a kind  of a fake vignette effect.

Alright, my friends, that was Neon Glow in Illustrator. Hope you picked up some new tips and tricks  and kind of working out that a lot of the effects  that we're learning adjust all the techniques we've already  learn in different combinations. Alright, I'll see you in the next video.
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