The first step is to find an appropriate font that will look like someone has written in the sand with their finger. For the tutorial, I chose to use Handwriting – Dakota since I like the rough quality to it.

After you’ve found a suitable font, create a new canvas in Photoshop. You can also use an existing one if you already have a design started.

Since there can be no writing in the sand without the sand, let’s create a sand background for behind our text. Fill your canvas with an appropriate sandy colour – I am using #f0ebdf. Now go to the top menubar and go to Filter – Noise – Add Noise… Check the Monochromatic box and set it to Uniform Distribution. You can fiddle with the Amount, but remember, you want it to look like sand, not a bunch of noise! I used 1.75% and was quite happy with the subtle texture. Click OK.

The great thing about this method is it will create a perfect tiling background – you don’t have to worry about seams showing up if you use it as a repeating page background for your web design! Now we need to add our text. You’ll want to make it a dark brown colour so that it can be read easily against your sand background – I am using #a0894e.

Next, we’re going to use some Blending Options on our text layer to create the illusion of a build-up of sand around our text, and to give our text some depth. In your menubar, go to Layer – Layer Style – Blending Options. To create the sand build-up, let’s add a stroke. The size of the stroke will depend on the size of your text – it should be in proportion to look realistic. Since I have rather large text, I am going to make my stroke 4 pixels. The position should be on the Outside, and change the blend mode to Overlay. Up the Opacity to 100% and change the colour to black (#000000).

If you click OK, your text should now look something like this:

Now, to create some depth, let’s add Bevel and Embossing. We’re going to give our text an Inner Bevel. I changed the depth to 50% and made the size 4 pixels; you can experiment with these values to get your desired effect. The important part is to change the lighting so that the text looks like it is ingrained into the canvas rather than sticking out of it. I changed the Shading Angle to -120 degrees and changed the Altitude to 30 degrees. Change both the Highlight and Shadow Mode to Overlay and lower both Opacity values to 50%. The Highlight colour should be white and the Shadow black. Click OK.

We’re almost done! Your text should now look like it is etched in the sand:

You can stop at this step if you prefer, but I’m going to add the final touch by giving our text a bit more texture. Make sure your text layer is still selected, and again go to your menubar and go to Filter – Noise – Add Noise… Use the same settings as before, but up the Amount a bit: I made mine 3%. Click OK and now you’re done!

The final product should look something like this:

Easy right? I hope you enjoyed my little tutorial. Comment on this post if you have any issues getting things to work, or if you would like to suggest improvements!

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In your .fla file go to the library menu and select New Font

A font properties menu will show up. Here you can edit the font name and the font. As you can see I have named font to be myFont Plain. This is because the font that Iam embedding is not bold nor italic. You can name it whatever you want but be descriptive to avoid confusion. The Font is named myFont. This is your main name for the font. Below are some checkboxes which help identify the style of the Font. If I style text with myFont, because I left the checkboxes blank the system will use myFont Plain. If I had created another font which was myFont, had its name as myFont Bold and then selected the bold style, I would have a Bold style for myFont. Now when I use myFont, I can use a bold tag around it and the myFont Bold will get shown.

After adding the new font you should be able to see it in your library. Right click on it and select Linkage. In the Linkage properties window check the box that says Export for ActionScript. You can name the class anything you want but make sure you don’t change the Base Class name.

Now go into your .as file. You will need to import the following classes to make this work.

import flash.text.TextField;
import flash.text.TextFormat;
import flash.text.AntiAliasType;

Now that we have our classes loaded we will create a text format and a text field and then add the format to the new text field.

var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
format.font = ‘myFont’;
format.color = 0×333333;
var myText:TextField = new TextField();
myText.text = ‘Some Filler Text’;
myText.embedFonts = true;
myText.antiAliasType = AntiAliasType.ADVANCED;
myText.setTextFormat(format);

And there you go. You now have textfield using custom font.

Known Problems

-I am using Flash CS3 on my Macbook Pro and I found that if you add a font to your computer in the fonts folder while Flash is open the font may not be displayed. Instead what was happening to me was I was getting a default font. This made me stressed as nobody was having this problem. But all you have to do is close Flash and reopen Flash and your font will work now. There is some refreshing issue that Flash has with this process in CS3.

I will be posting any other issues with possible solutions.

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First import the BlendMode Class into your document.

import flash.display.BlendMode;

Second you’ll want to set the textfields blendmode to LAYER

var myTextField:TextField = new TextField();
myTextField.blendMode = BlendMode.LAYER;

There it is fellas. Easy Breezy. Now you can change the alpha of the myTextField

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With HTML5 just around the corner many people are excited as to what this new technology will bring us. One of the coolest parts of HTML5 is the ability to watch video without any plugins what so ever! This means no Adobe Flash or DivX to watch movies on your website! HTML5 is still being finalized but the people at Jilion have already hopped on to the band wagon and created their own custom HTML5 Video player. They have created a beautiful interface for the video player and it is currently supported by most HTML5 capable browsers. You can check out the Sublime Video player and full details here. I hope more people will get inspired by this and create their own video players for their own sites. If you haven’t already heard Vimeo and YouTube have already created their own HTML5 video players that you can test out right now!

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]]> http://north.interactivedesignlab.com/archives/604/feed 1 http://north.interactivedesignlab.com/archives/81 http://north.interactivedesignlab.com/archives/81#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:07:34 +0000 Mike http://north.interactivedesignlab.com/?p=81 More >]]> There are a TON of different text editors out there, everything from Windows’ NOTEPAD.EXE to BBEdit to Coda. BBEdit is great as far as simple text editors go, but it lacks specialization. While it does have autocorrect features, Coda has a comprehensive CSS editor as well as the autocorrect. It also has an organizational feature which, a lot like Dreamweaver, but what Coda has over Dreamweaver is that it is simple, uncluttered, and easy to figure out.

So give Coda a shot if you want to build your alternative suite of tools.

Click Here for the Tutorial

Click Here for the Tutorial

Click Here for the Tutorial

Click Here for the Tutorial