From the course: Type Tips

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The tilde key trick

The tilde key trick

From the course: Type Tips

The tilde key trick

- Hi, I'm Nigel French, welcome to Type Tips. This week, some experimental typography in Illustrator. These letter forms were created using the tilde key trick. And the tilde key is this one. It's location on your keyboard may vary. You choose one of Illustrator's shape tools and then you hold down the tilde key, and you can continuously draw to build up these interesting shapes. You can combine this with the shift key and/or the option or alt key. Now you do need to be willing to embrace some randomness here. I found that the arc tool gave me the best result. And in drawing letter shapes, I found that I needed to let up on my mouse button with every change of direction. So when drawing the W, there's one movement, and there's a second, and a third, and a fourth. Now in order to keep me on track, I also decided to work with a template. I've just created a template layer, which I'm going to lock, and I'll just be…

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