How is this designed?

Hi everybody,

I was wondering how to make the words look like it does in this cover?

With the words cut diagonally ( \ ) and not straight ( - ), then altered.

After a lot of attempts to make it right I finally come to terms with that I couldn’t do it, neither in Illustrator nor Photoshop, so that’s why I came here to all you creatives.

Would be very much appreciated if someone could explain this to me.

All the best,
Matt

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If you find/make a 3D landscape, you can use the shear tool to warp the outlined text into the proper alignment.

You can do that in Indesign. You would need to outline the lettering, crop it into separate elements with Pathfinder tools, and then Rotate and Shear the separate elements. Fiddly, but it can be done.

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Illustrator would be the better option in this instance, over InDesign.

Pity there is no “fold” button. That would be too easy.
:slight_smile:

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That’s funny. I wish a lot of things were easier in Illustrator.

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but…you know…I don’t use Illustrator, I use Affinity Designer.

Which has really great rotate/skew controls that would make this graphic reeeaaally easy to create.

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I will say, it was certainly manually done, as you can see that part of the top left C did not get “folded”, as well as the odd fact that the H is short compared to the rest of the letters in SWITCH.

I’m not certain, but the probability of it being hand done was my first thought too. Lots of people — especially newer designers — seem inclined to always look for a semi-automated way of achieving various effects using various application features. Sometimes, it just takes getting in there by hand and drawing things.

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In illustrator
Type your text > make a copy > convert it to outlines > separate the letters then with each letter…
manually skew the copy or go to >effect >3d where you have a plain rotation option with no extrude.

Hope it helps.

I know there’s a warp tool in Illustrator that can give you super clean wrap effects like the AT&T planet logo that iirc can be applied to a square angle but I can’t for the life of me remember what the process is or called.

You don’t need any warp tool. It’s actually pretty easy.
I done this in a minute or so. Not perfect, invest at least 5 minutes more and you’re done.


You can actually just cut the text. Group the parts you want to fold, use the shear tool and adjust the angle. For better results use the shear tool individually for each letter, just use the same angle.
After that you probably need to play around with the letters a bit, adjust some anchor points, do a bit more skewing but that’s it basically.

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