To improve my illustrator skills, I have been practicing the tutorials at VectorTutsPlus.com.  This is a great website if you are interested in learing Illustrator or Indesign, as they have a range of tutorials from very beginner to intermediate.  Most of the advanced tutorials are only available with membership.  They also have quick tips and inspiration articles which are very cool.

So the latest tutorial I did is How to Create a Trendy Retro Type Treatment.  Here is a brief overview of the steps involved (see the link for the complete tutorial).

So I started out with a letter size document in Illustrator and created a rectangle to fill the artboard.  Then I filled this rectangle with a purple radial gradient.

Then I created two 45 degree angle lines on each side of the rectangle and blended them together using the Blend tool.  I specified 15 steps in this blend, so there are 17 diagonal lines total.  I filled these lines with a similar gradient texture.

Next I learned how to create a new “scatter brush”.  This brush can be set to randomly scatter whatever shape you start out with, and it can vary the size of each shape as well.

Using the brush tool, I drew some wavy lines with my new scatter brush.  It created a very nice subtle background.

Next I added a few highlights by taking the original brush shape and scaling it up to place randomly around.  I varied the size and the opacity of these shapes.

Next for the type treatment.  I used the “Museo” font, which you can download for free here.

I typed out my name and adjusted the “tracking” to -100, which pushed the letterforms close together.  Then I took parts of each letter and connected the letterforms so each word is a completely connected shape (except for the ‘i’ dot in ‘Callie’).  I added a white-to-green gradient fill.

I created a black teardrop shape to make into a new art brush.  An art brush is different from a scatter brush because the shape of the art brush will follow the stroke that you draw exactly.

I drew two teardrop shapes next to the letterforms and filled the shapes with a blue-green gradient.

As the final steps, I copy-pasted these teardrop shapes all around the text and alternated the colors.  Some of the shapes are mirrored for variety.  The left most and right most teardrops are elongated.

I also tried a different color version:

This version has a different background pattern and different colored scatter brushes:

 

Thank you to Rype (vectortutsplus author) for posting this excellent tutorial!