Easiest program to use to create typography prints

fabledmedia said:

Hi everyone, I'm hoping you can help me with. I am trying to figure out which program will be the easiest for me to use to create and print typography prints similar to these;

https://www.google.com/search?q=typ...Q&biw=1024&bih=672#biv=i|18;d|0FDSrPwTw4Y8aM:

I don't need all the fany stuff, I just want to be to design stuff using fonts and small design elements and suspect the adobe suite overkill for my situation. Can you guys help point me in the right direction?

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I know you say Adobe Suite is overkill but have you considered Photoshop Elements which is around $100. It is just a dumbed down version of PS but still enough for what you want to do.

Update: Jessica is right. I forgot that Elements does not have the tracking, kerning & spacing. Adobe Illustrator would be another good one. Subscriptions are reasonable.

Get the subscription service for Photoshop CS6 only. If you're going to be selling these prints, it will be a worthwhile expense.

The problem is that most of the very basic programs we could suggest you, like Pixelmator, do not have very good font editors. You'll be able to change the size and weights, but what really makes these designs tasteful is the kerning, tracking, and spacing. None of the basic editors even bother with those features.

fabledmedia said:

I was afraid you guys are going to say that. I actually own the adobe suite CS3, but never got into too deep because I was more comfortable with Corel. Do you guys have any good courses or training material you can point me towards?

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Yeah I know, bummer when you are hoping for answer that works for you. I would suggest a Gooogle search for tutorials. There are some good one for free out there. The other option is paying someone a subscription fee like lynda.com. Well worth the money.

I know you asked for an easy program, which doesn’t seem possible based upon advise from earlier responses.Three free programs you might consider together are Fontforge, Inkscape and Scribus.

Using Inkscape and Fontforge you can create your own glyphs from letter shapes you draw, scan into Inkscape and transfer into Fontforge as PS files from Inkscape. Once in Fontforge you can make revisions for kerning, etc and export the file as a font. You could also import illustrations into Fontforge and drop them into a standard glyph position you wouldn’t otherwise be using.

Scribus is similar to Indesign and can be used to create your final output. It can import vector and raster files, output various versions of PDF or png files and supports color management including CMYK. All these programs have a learning curve, with various degrees of difficulty and do not have as through tutorials as similar commercial programs.

Fontforge can be downloaded through MacPorts. Inkscape and Scribus have websites and the Fontforge website contains a manual and tutorials. Fontforge and Inkscape require XQuartz. Its been awhile since I downloaded Fontforge and I believe it may also need Xcode and Xcode Tools from Apple.

None of these are one-stop easy to do what you want to do, but consider the money you save as sweat equity!

The examples you reference are made in a variety of ways.. Many of those pieces are letterpressed or screenprinted.

If you are looking to create work on a single surface, you want to be using adobe illustrator to create your artwork -- most of the free or cheap vector tools just don't have the typographic control you need for this kind of work.

I would strongly advise against using photoshop as suggested earlier. If you want a high quality print you want to be working in a vector format.

fabledmedia said:

I was afraid you guys are going to say that. I actually own the adobe suite CS3, but never got into too deep because I was more comfortable with Corel. Do you guys have any good courses or training material you can point me towards?

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Oh, that's great then. You won't really learn from tutorials to be honest. It's more like you have to learn about typography. The Photoshop settings look like this:



And here's a few tips from that very same site I took the image from:
http://designshack.net/articles/typography/8-simple-and-useful-tips-for-kerning-type/

What would really benefit you tutorial-wise is to learn how to make custom shapes. Something like live tracing in Illustrator, then pasting it back in Photoshop to add it to your library of shapes could be an easy way of doing this. But shapes are good because then you have graphics that can be whatever size and not worry about pixelation.

lucidmedia said:

The examples you reference are made in a variety of ways.. Many of those pieces are letterpressed or screenprinted.

If you are looking to create work on a single surface, you want to be using adobe illustrator to create your artwork -- most of the free or cheap vector tools just don't have the typographic control you need for this kind of work.

I would strongly advise against using photoshop as suggested earlier. If you want a high quality print you want to be working in a vector format.

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Agreed on using Illustrator, you definitely want to keep everything easily scalable in a vector format.

And no offense intended, but there really isn't that much you have to learn. Most of the example pieces you linked to are using type scaled, kerned, and spaced in a variety of ways with a few rule lines.

That means learning the text tool options and drawing straight lines with the pen tool which shouldn't take you more than an afternoon to figure out. It doesnt get much easier.