Comments on: Making Letters Intertwine

By: Tiffany Hamilton

Tiffany Hamilton — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:59:26 +0000

Ahhhh Ha, thanks David, that was driving me nuts

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:26:14 +0000

Good question, Tiffany. I selected all the letters with the Type tool and set the Tracking to something like -100. You could also use negative kerning between each character for this.

By: Tiffany Hamilton

Tiffany Hamilton — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:52:39 +0000

I’m new to this site and fairly new to InDesign, I’m trying to figure out how to make the letters intertwine with not luck. How did you get the first set of letter to overlap? Are they all in separate frames first? Thanks

By: Dave Courtemanche

Dave Courtemanche — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:15 +0000

I gotta agree with Mordy here - set type in illustrator, convert to outlines, ungroup and adjust kerning. Switch to “Live Paint” tool and color away - the overlap of the letters create individual shapes that are easy to color. Piece o’ cake!

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:35:36 +0000

Paul, actually, the lesson I took away from this is that it’s more of an Illustrator thing than either a Photoshop or InDesign thing. It’s hard to do this in Photoshop and maintain the sharp vector edges, right? Easy in Illustrator.

By: Paul Martin

Paul Martin — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:20:21 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my question, I really appreiciate it. The conclusion if reached though is that photoshop is a far better and quicker option for doing this. Its a pity that indesign doesn’t make dealing with text much easier since text is much more an indesign thing than a photoshop thing.

By: Amy

Amy — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:11:41 +0000

Ah! Cool to know that changing the colors of the letters creates different objects. Putting a carriage return between text you want to separate when converting to outline creates different objects as well.

By: Alexandre Giesbrecht

Alexandre Giesbrecht — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:39:57 +0000

One other thing: if there are too many points, you can always create a rectangle and then crop it from the upper S.

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:21:17 +0000

Hmmm. I’m afraid David’s recipe highlights what a PITA the Pathfinder in ID can often be, with the (rounding-errors induced?) imprecision and other woes. I only use it at gunpoint . . . er, mousepoint?

By: Maggie H

Maggie H — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:13:09 +0000

I’ve also always done it the same way as in Alexandre’s illustration.