Fluorescent Text Effects that Glow Using Illustrator

This tutorial is on how to create a glowing text effect in Adobe Illustrator. This effect is great to apply in flyer printing and even when designing for business card printing. While you can rely on your desktop publishing application for better fonts and text styles, there is nothing like using Adobe Illustrator to fully realize that fluorescent text effect. So why not go all the way with your titles by creating them in illustrator right?

In this special guide, we will go through the step by step process of creating text effects that make your title look like a fluorescent type light or energy. This will be great applied to your poster titles, booklet covers, catalog headlines and of course your web design headers. So carefully read through these steps to learn.

1. First, let us create a nice dark background where our fluorescent text effects will inhabit. With a new document open, use the Rectangle tool and just create a large black rectangle shape.

2. Next, consider adding a gradient colour to our background to add a slight dynamic look into it. For our purposes we are using a Black-DarkGrey-Black combination. The gradient type is linear and the angle is 90 degrees.

3. Now type in your text. Choose the font that you want to use for your glowing text of course, and for now use a fairly light colour. Enlarge the size to 60-72pt when necessary.

4. Now, to be able to apply effects to this title, go to Object -> Expand… from the menu bar. Press ok to select the default options.

5. Then, set the Path’s Colour to none, and the stroke should be your own custom colour that is about 2pt in thickness.

6. For our example, we are going to use the colour Yellow.

7. Next, duplicate this title by pressing CTLR+C and CTRL+V while the title is selected. Increase the stroke of this duplicate to 4pt, and reduce its opacity to 50%.

8. Re-align the text titles to get an effect like this:

9. Now, duplicate the original 2pt title again. This time select Effect -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. Use a 3 pixel radius to get this kind of blurred effect.

10. Then, just place it back onto our text to achieve that glow effect.

11. Finally, to add more subtle glint or shine effects, we will use the ellipse tool. Simply create a long thin ellipse near the key text places where you want glints to appear.

12. Apply a Blur to it by selecting Effect -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. Then just duplicate this all over your text to add random glints and glows.

13. Once you look at it from a normal size, you will see the glow effect shine.

14. Finally, just apply the same techniques on other line art to achieve your glow titles and lines.

Author’s Bio:  Irene Thompson is a professional writer and a graphic enthusiast from PrintPlace.com, an online printing company. She has been living in Houston, TX since 2004. Her design experience includes print graphic and illustration.