Travis showed me this trick the other day on how to make a quick grid in AI. I always make my own grids but this is a great way to crank out something good and fast when you don’t have the time to obsess.

First thing is to create your page margin that your information will be inside, then draw a big box. Select the box, go to Object>Path>Split into Grid… you will have your settings there to make how many columns etc you need… DONE.

Here at YouWorkForThem we take some extra steps to bring you very unique stock art and fonts. We once filmed small fish and sea animals from Thailand to create these stock videos. Our recent handset font, Muck, was created using a process many people know already, screen printing.

 

1) We started with a hand-eye redrawing of classic serif fonts creating our own modern hybrid of an alphabet onto A4 printer paper. Drawing by hand, we get a more organic feel right from the start.

 

2) We then visited some friends at a local university who let us go wild with some ink and basic screen printing tools. Its always good to have friends still in school or know the professors! We used a 6 inch roller to roughly lay black ink over the custom alphabet we had drawn. 

 

3) Shuffling back via taxi and braving out-of-control rain storms, we got the papers (now with extra weathering) back to the office to dry out for the weekend. Note - keep these wet prints outside. The fumes and stench will blow you away if you do not.

 

4) Once the papers had dried, we edited down the best ones. Then started scanning for 2 days at 600 DPI all the papers. Once scanned, the items were taken into Photoshop, adjustments made and converted to Bitmap TIFF files. 

 

 

Final result is a very intense and textured font that you can hand set yourself. Hand-Sets are not the type of items you want to compose an entire block of text with, unless our into that kind of torture. They work best for headlines on posters, packaging or even in motion graphics.

Watch Video - We understand many of you out there already have endless ideas and methods for using our stock imagery/vectors. But at the same time, we know there are some people out there that ask, what can you exactly do with these products you sell? Well, the options are endless and reach from print to web to video to anything really (tattoo anyone?). In this video we will show you how you can take a handset font, compose your own type layout in Adobe Illustrator, then paste into Adobe Photoshop and give it a whole new texture and depth using an Escapism image collection.

The products used in this video are Inkantation (type) and Escapism 21 (image fill).