How to: Cardboard Texture in Illustrator

Mimicking the texture of a cardboard box is one of the uses of Live Trace in Illustrator.

Some graphic design projects require adding texture to a piece of artwork. Textures can be concrete, broken glass, or even something like cardboard. This texture is usually used as an underlay for a semi-transparent text layer, so that your art looks like printing on cardboard. Adobe Illustrator can produce textures that are vector graphics, which are scalable - they don't get pixilated or blocky when scaled to large images. For making raster image textures, Photoshop is the tool of choice.

Things You'll Need

• Digital photograph of cardboard.
• Adobe Illustrator CS 2 or higher.

Instructions

1. Start Illustrator with a new, blank document.

2. Place the cardboard image -- you will need to find one off of the Web -- by typing "Ctrl-D". Navigate to where you stored the image. Select the file. Illustrator will show the file on the artboard.

3. Use Illustrator's raster-to-vector graphics conversion tool, called Live Trace, to convert the image you placed to a series of vector drawing objects. To get to Live Trace, click on the "Object" menu, and then choose "Live Trace," followed by "Make." Illustrator will put up a dialog box with a lot of options; the ones you want are the limited color palette ones. What Live Trace does is define the boundaries for all of the objects it creates based on the difference between two colors in a raster image. The 256-color conversion will give you the closest match to the differences in colors in your original image of cardboard; if you don't need to preserve the colors, shifting to 256-tint grayscale can get you smoother blending between the brightest and darkest colors.

4. Create the design element for the text layer. Because the text is going on top of a texture, do not use fonts with narrow strokes, which can get lost in the changes in contrast on the layer underneath. This is a reason why printing on cardboard boxes uses thick, blocky fonts.

5. Convert the text to objects by selecting it if it isn't selected already, and going to the "Type" menu and choose "Convert to Outlines." You may want to adjust the text's color at this stage.

6. Click on the "Transparency" tab and use the "Opacity" slider on the right side of the tab to adjust the opacity of the text; somewhere around 60-80% should look right.

References

• Adobe: Tracing Artwork with Live Trace
• Adobe: Transparency Panel Overview