Font patterns VS PowerClip patterns

13/01/2009

The art of wood inserts and incrustation can can be added to your web to print designs as if they were tailor-made. This technique is demonstrated on wood inserts, but can be applied to other substrates like tiles, textile or texture.

PowerClip approach

Using text fields as PowerClip containers is an easy way to achieve different text effects but it doesn’t let you control the precise alignment of patterns relative to the glyphs.

E.g. Place some floral patterns inside a text frame as PowerClips and align them so that they “go with the flow” of each letter.

Web-to-print Aligned Patterns inside a PowerClip /

It looks OK now, but what happens when the text is changed?

Web-to-print Misaligned patterns inside PowerClip /

The patterns stay in their original position and don’t follow the shape of the new letters.

Font editing approach

The solution to the pattern alignment problem is in creating a new font out of the original one and cutting the pattern out of each glyph. We do it with CorelDRAW X4.

The effect that we are trying to achieve for this example requires us to use two fonts on top of each other. One is the base font. The other font is the same as the base, but with floral patterns cut out of the glyphs. They overlap in the web to print template, so that they match perfectly, but PowerClip different textures.

We can start of with the 1.laitos font and use it to make a base font (1.laitos_B) and a floral font (1.laitos_floral). Read more about font customizing.

Web-to-print floral pattern