Have you ever wondered how those social media-friendly graphic quotes are made? We’ve got you! In this tutorial, our creative Greenville NC professionals will show you how simple it can be to create long shadow text Illustrator effects! All it takes is four easy steps within Adobe Illustrator, and you’re on your way to creating polished designs to ramp up your social media page or personal portfolio! Follow along with our graphic design Greenville NC expert by clicking on our YouTube video below, and feel free to refer back to these steps for creating your long shadow text Illustrator effect for later on.

Step One

With a fresh Artboard ready, grab your “Text” tool from the tool panel on the left side of the program. From here, type in your desired text. Don’t forget to change your typeface to a bold, simple style to make your composition pop. Center the text within the text box, and center the text box within the Artboard. Size your text to your desired dimensions, and that’s it for the first step in creating your long shadow text Illustrator effect.

Step Two

Now that you’ve created your text, it’s time to build out the rest of your composition. Start by creating a rectangle with the same dimensions as your Artboard. In this tutorial, we’re using a 1080x1080 Artboard. Select the “Rectangle” tool, click anywhere on the Artboard, and enter the dimensions of your Artboard. Make sure to center align your rectangle to the Artboard.

Now, choose your desired background fill for your long shadow text Illustrator effect. With your rectangle still selected, click into the “Object” drop-down menu, hover over “Arrange,” and click “Send to Back.” Your text should now appear in front of the rectangle. Again, while your rectangle is still selected, we will lock it in place to prevent it from moving around the Artboard while designing the rest of your composition. We will do this by hovering over the “Lock” subgroup in the “Object” drop-down menu and clicking “Selection.” Now, we’re ready to begin our long shadow text Illustrator effect!

Step Three

Select your text and copy it to your clipboard, as we’ll be needing this once we’ve created our long shadow text Illustrator effect. With the text box still selected, click on the “Effect” drop-down menu, hover over “Distort & Transform,” and click “Transform.” For this effect, our creative Greenville NC designers will only be manipulating the “Move” and “Options” elements within the “Transform Effect” menu. Set the Horizontal and Vertical pixel values to 0.75 px within the “Move” element to create your desired result. Within the “Options” element, change the number of copies to 800. Click “Ok” to apply the changes. You’ve now created your long shadow background for the text!

Step Four

Recall that we still have our text copied to our clipboard from earlier. Paste the text box to the Artboard on top of the shadow that we just created. change the top layer of text to your desired color. Our creative Greenville NC designers recommend a light tone such as white to promote a stark contrast against the colors of the long shadow text and the background.

Now, it’s time to change the color of our long shadow effect to polish the design. Select the layer of text that holds your long shadow text Illustrator effect. Change the fill within the swatches panel to a color that’s slightly darker than that of your background rectangle fill to make the shadow appear more organic. This allows the light text at the front to really make a statement!

Red Shark Digital | Graphic Design Greenville NC Experts

There you have it! You just created a super polished long shadow text Illustrator design in four simple steps. If you followed along with our long shadow text Illustrator tutorial, we’d love to hear about what you think. Don’t forget to share and tag us in your long shadow text Illustrator creations! Our creative Greenville NC agency loves to see how creative you guys can be. If you found this tutorial helpful, check out our Red Shark Digital YouTube channel and give the video a thumbs up. Subscribe for more content like this from our creative Greenville NC team and let us know what you’d like to see from us next!