In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke creates cast shadows for some colorful 3D-style letters in Illustrator.

Namely, he begins by riffing off last week’s episode on chromatic type with these chunky, decorative Zebrawood-set letters:

And turns them (and the "blocks" that they sit upon) into full-fledged shadow-casting objects.

The trick here is to capture the outline of the letters, offset it, then use the Transform effect to create the shadow (which is really just a 50% opacity fill repeated many—-160, in fact—-times down and to the left. For example, the red selection here is the the unfilled outline for the number 9 around which these "shadows" proliferate:

You can see how it all works in the video without having to bend your brain around faux-wood blocks of letters.

Deke’s Techniques, casting fabricated shadows to make your message more virtually substantive!