Typographic Art needs more help

[Laurilli]

Hey Forum People. 

I need some help to get better with affinity products! I made this pice of art for a cover in affinity photo. 

I like it very much, but what really could be better is the pink "Shadow" which i just copied the main layer and put it behind. In this case the corner or not really fitting, and must be painted with hand. 

The second thing i really struggle with, is that i want to have more flattend edges. And i dont know how to do it! 

Would be happy for any feedback. 

Thank you

Laura ❤️

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forum @Laurilli

We probably need more information about what you are trying to achieve.
For instance, what exactly do you mean by “not really fitting”?
That could be interpreted in many ways and we don’t know what you want to do or how it should “fit”.
Also, what do you mean by “flattened edges”?
That, again, can be interpreted in a number of ways and “flattened” is a specific word used in graphic art.
If you can show us an example of what you want to try and replicate that would help.
Also, what sort of “cover” are you making?

[Laurilli]

Hello @GarryP and thanks for your answer. 

I want to achieve a nice shadow standing behind the green one. 

My problem is, that the green edges, you can see pixels. I want it to be flat or sharp and not like stairs. 

Secons point to clear out is that the pink one is not a real shadow, at the corners of the green you can see first blue and then pink. You cannot see another edge which would be there if its 3D. I dont know how to describe it better. 

 

Thank you  

maybe this is a refernce. At the edges you cant see staris, they are sharp 

and the "shadow" is really a shadow and connected with a edge from the corners starting.  

[GarryP]

Whenever you have a pixel-based document which contains ‘lines’ that are not horizontal/vertical you will always get ‘stairs’ because you are limited to drawing in squares (the pixels themselves).
You can do various things to help them to look less ‘stairy’ but they will always be there at some level.
You can try creating the document at a higher resolution but that won’t always work, especially if you have no control over how the image will be displayed.
You can try using various Blend Options but that may be tricky to get right depending on the colours used.
You can try changing the export Antialiasing options but that might not help depending on the image itself.
You can try using a different angle of the ‘lines’ but that might spoil the ‘look’ you are trying to achieve.
There isn’t usually one ‘magic bullet’ which can fix an image, lots of things need to be taken into account and worked with.
As for the ‘shadow’ going blue, that’s another artefact of what I’ve talked about above – colour, angle, blending and design all coming together to create what you can see.
If you look at the ‘Phase’ example you gave and zoom in you will see that the ‘shadow’ isn’t a pure colour and has a transition colour where the software has tried to blend two colours together because it has to guess which colour to choose from partial-blue/pink/white/grey where a pixel isn’t a full pixel of one single colour – see attached image.
It just so happens that the person creating the ‘Phase’ example did it well enough that the things you see in your example cannot be seen as much.
Lots of experimentation may be needed to ‘fix’ your example but I’m not the best person to be advising.
Hopefully one of the experts will see this and be able to give you some good tips.

[Etheiy]

Hi, when I'm trying to create typographical art, especially things I want to not have that pixellated 'stair' effect, I typically stick to vector objects.

So I would use Designer, and each letter would be a vector object - that means that I can export it really big or really small and the software will handle the pixellation.. This way if I want to export it as a 120x120px JPG it will export alright, but if I ALSO want to export it as a 1200x1200px image it will be okay (no huge oversized pixels!).
Using vectors also means when I copy the letters and change them to pink in order to get the shadow, I can easily edit the 'nodes' of the pink version in order to give the appearance of a three-dimensional object (making the corners connect).

For example, I've quickly redrawn your 'F' below.
Using the Pen tool, I redrew the F shape as a vector (1 and 2)
Then I copied the F and made it pink, and put it behind the green one (3) which as you see, doesn't make them look connected or three-dimensional like in your example of what you wanted to achieve. We can fix that really easily with vectors.
Next I use the Node tool (4) to edit the nodes (the corners) of the pink F. I added nodes by clicking on the lines between them (my screenshot tool wouldn't pick that up for some reason, sorry) and then dragging the new node so that it snaps to the corner of the green shape (5)
I made this vector file at 600x600px and then exported it as a 120px jpg and a 1200px jpg, both attached. You can see that they both have pixels (as JPG is a raster format) but that these pixels aren't hugely obvious when the file is effectively scaled up by double the original size, and also that when I exported the tiny version, the export itself handled all the blending of colours to try to keep the edges looking somewhat true to the original. Of course, the smaller the export, the more obvious the pixels will be, and very small images have a lot less pixels to work with, so you lose crispness.

I hope this helped/wasn't too simplified (I have no idea how familiar you are with vector objects or affinity designer so I went with explaining what I needed to know when I started using them a few years ago).
I really like using vectors because I never really have to worry about my working file's resolution/size. I can export an A0 from a 600px file and it usually turns out just fine. It was really useful in my studies - before I started using vector graphics, I would have to work with high resolution raster (pixels) images and it would be very slow work because of all the extra information the computer had to hold on to, whilst with vectors it is much faster and scales well.
 

[Laurilli]

@Etheiy Thank you for your amazing description! That helped me very much. I would have come up with me myself  Have a great next week! 

[v_kyr]

See also ...

• 3D Text
• 3D Text Effect
• Via Bevel + 3D Effects settings