128. Text Guide
I am still working on the requests from last year, promise! I’m just finding these Q&A guides a lot easier than step-by-step walkthroughs, so I can get these done much quicker.
Another image-heavy post ahead, you have been warned! (Also, I have the distinct feeling someone else has used this title for a text guide before but I couldn’t find one - if it already exists, please let me know and I’ll change it!)
for lumsx
lumsx asked me: I'd love to know a little bit more about your text process. As you said you don't like writing general guides I'm dropping a few questions just in case they are easier.
1. What are your favorite fonts?
2. What are the reasons that make you think "hey, this icon needs text“?
3. Is there any particular process you follow when you use text on your icons?
4. This is not a question but I'd like to know more about your "text-background icons". Here are some examples:
1. What are your favorite fonts?
Nice simple fonts with plenty of variation (caps, italic, bold, kerning, etc.) and great for when you don’t want the text to be the main focus of the icon but still want to include text there. I also use them to go alongside fancy fonts, when I don’t want too much of a fancy font on the icon, but a plain sans font would look out of place.
Note: I don’t know whether it’s supposed to happen, but I think the Arabic Typesetting font is supposed to be Arabic letters, only for some reason it comes up with the Latin alphabet and I like the font it comes up in. Also, Dubiel comes in a non-italic form, but I only have the italic version. And Georgia and Times New Roman came as default fonts on my computer.
[examples (hover for fonts)]
The less ‘formal’ versions of Georgia and Times New Roman in that they’re clean and simple fonts, but I tend to use them when the text I want is more blunt/bold, if that makes sense? Also if the subject isn’t quite as fancy (I probably wouldn’t use Governor or Intro for a Downton Abbey icon for example) and is more ‘fun’ or informal, such as Disney, or the text itself is more fun, like in this Draco icon, then I’d probably use Governor or Intro instead of Georgia or Times New Roman. Also good when you want to highlight a particular word with a fancy font and then want a nice simple font to go with it so you don’t have two fonts competing in the same space.
Note: Whenever I try to use Intro in Gimp it always crashes so I’ll either use Governor as an alternative or I’ll copy the Intro text from PowerPoint and paste it as a new layer. Also, Futura and Verdana came as default fonts on my laptop.
[examples (hover for fonts)]
I love using these kind of fonts for ‘historical’ subjects like Game of Thrones, Once Upon a Time, Robin Hood, etc.
[examples (hover for fonts)]
I think I use these for more ‘angry’ text/colours/screencaps.
[examples (hover for fonts)]
Fancy/curly text (italics) - Good for adding text as a background element, and italics/slanted fonts are particularly good if you’re going to rotate the text too. Also very good to use for accent words (alongside a plainer font) or in conjunction with the ‘historical’ or ‘angry’ fonts.
Note: Before the Rain is another font that makes Gimp crash for me, so again if I’m using that one I’ll do the text in PowerPoint and then paste as a new layer into Gimp.
[examples (hover for fonts)]
Informal and/or handwriting-ish fonts. The informal looking ones I’ll use for more fun icons, the ones that look more like handwriting I’ll often use for more emotional/‘deep’ icons.
[examples (hover for fonts)]
One-off fonts I’ll use pretty much only to match the subject I’m iconning.
[examples (hover for fonts)]
(There are probably loads more I use often but didn’t include here. If you have a query about the font(s) used in a particular icon, please don’t hesitate to ask!)
2. What are the reasons that make you think "hey, this icon needs text“?
Usually one of the following reasons:
• There’s a quote/sentence I really want to use so I find an image that I can use it with
• A quote/sentence springs to mind when I see the image
• Negative space looks a bit too empty so let’s fill it with text
• I used to run away from text so now I try to challenge myself and use it more often
• I’m trying to make a more complex icon (maybe I’m in a contest where there are some particularly good makers/entries and I need to really step up my game) and one of the ways I’ll try is by using text
Using the examples you gave for the 4th question...
Ruby: She looked like she was looking up at the moon, and the lyric from the Pocahontas song Colours of the Wind popped into my head.
Sansa: Her costume made me think of a phoenix rising from the ashes and it seemed appropriate given how she’d just been a chirping‘little bird’ in King’s Landing and now she was going to soar (to stick with the bird imagery :P) and be amazing and magnificent.
Hermione: The theme was ‘Incendio’ (red/orange coloring, flames textures) so I found a screencap I could make to fit the theme and then because there’s a cauldron and in HP3 the choir sings the witches’ chant from Macbeth I thought that would finish the icon nicely.
Killian: I think I had recently seen an older icon of mine that had Killian and the words ‘Yo ho yo ho a pirate’s life for me’ (or in any case whenever I see Killian I think pirate and then that lyric) and I had to make a Killian icon (it was for the 1 show, 7 characters challenge at the7days) and I wanted to make something with this cap but when I cut him out the background looked too empty so I added this text and a texture.
Twelfth Doctor: This was for a LIMS so obviously I didn’t want to get knocked out but I struggled with the provided cap (didn’t want to use a skip as it was the first challenge of the round) so I thought I’d make it more complex by using text. In fact IIRC most of my icons for that LIMS round has text because in my head LIMS = challenging so I needed to make more complex icons than my normal, and for me complex = text (or composition, but I suck at that and didn’t want to get knocked out, so I stuck with text).
3. Is there any particular process you follow when you use text on your icons?
It’s more of a general icon-making process than specifically for text, but when I icon anything I always use PowerPoint alongside Gimp. I’ll copy the image onto a new slide and play around with a couple of rough crops and see if I can find something I like, and only then will I copy the (original, uncropped) image into Gimp and crop it properly, then resize to a 100x100 canvas. I’ll do the colouring and texture work (again, I always copy the textures onto the PowerPoint slide first, mainly because Gimp won’t let you copy an image directly onto a canvas - you have to edit the image itself - and also so I have a record of what textures I used on each icon) and then if I decide I want to include text I’ll go back into PP, type the text I’m going to use into a text box (or several, if I’m using multiple fonts/kernings/lines) and play around with fonts, rotation and warping until I find something I like, then recreate this in Gimp.
Sometimes I can’t directly recreate what I had in PP (I still have no idea how to warp text in Gimp) so I’ll have to copy the text box from PP and paste it as a new layer in the icon and then edit it from there like an image/texture (as opposed to using the text setting in Gimp and being able to adjust size/kerning/colour etc.), but most of the time I can get it pretty much the same. I probably should figure out how to do all that in Gimp, or switch to a software that has warping settings, but I’m too stuck in my ways / too lazy to get used to a new software/method.
4. This is not a question but I'd like to know more about your "text-background icons". Here are some examples:
I usually put text behind the subject when I want to include a longer quote/sentence but don’t want to obscure the sentence. In these cases, I try to make it obvious what the obscured words are, e.g. from the context of the non-obscured words (Ruby, Sansa), positioning the obscured text so that just enough of the word(s) can be made out to figure out what it says (Twelfth Doctor), or using quotes that will be recognised (Hermione).
I tried to find some more examples to explain what I mean:
Regina: This was for the Alphabet round at turbo_rumble, specifically the L is for LETTER prompt where you had to prominently show your chosen letter. The letter I picked was R and I was going through a massive Regina phase at the time (still am tbh :D) so I decided to make all of my icons of her. I think at the start of the round I had a folder of Regina caps I thought I might be able to use and this one had been calling for me to do a negative space icon with flame textures (there were flames in the original screencap and I love taking elements from caps and incorporating them into negative space icons with cut-out subjects) and big angry looking text. Since I had to prominently feature the letter R I came up with some text that had a load of Rs in (she will rip out your heart and tear it apart) and then highlight the Rs with a bright red font colour.
Ariadne: Even with the textures the icon looked like it lacked something because the background was pretty empty, so I took the other dominant colour from the image and slapped some text in the background to fill it. The choice of text itself was me being lazy though, could definitely have come up with something better :P
Elizabeth: This is Elizabeth’s coronation so the phrase ‘long live the queen’ kind of went hand in hand with the screencap. Not sure why I chose to put it in the background - maybe because I liked the font but you can’t really use it for small text as it gets cluttered, and if the text were to be large it would obscured too much for the icon and take the focus away from her? IDK, something like that.
Elsa: I always thought Elsa looked vulnerable and alone in this screencap so I knew from the start I wanted to use the ‘a kingdom of isolation’ lyric, and then because her ice castle is on a mountain-top in the Disney film I found a stock texture with mountains for the fake background. I also made it more of an extreme negative space icon than my usual because I wanted to highlight that isolation, and also so the text would be less obscured without having to make it massive.
Jaime & Claire: The image I used was pretty rubbish - it’s a HQ still but they’re a really small part of it, and the stuff around them looked boring - so I wanted to cut them out, and then I couldn’t find a stock texture I liked enough to use as a fake background (which often my go-to method) so I overlayed some text (‘the laird and his lady’, since his is the first time we see them as that) over the stock background instead.
Sailor!Killian: It’s a sailor saluting, obviously I needed to put ‘Aye aye Captain’ on there! But I also didn’t want the text to hide the gorgeous sailor, so I put it in the background but made sure it was obvious what it said.
Captain Hook!Killian: Captain Hook/Killian Jones + Pirates of the Caribbean quote + compass texture = obvious, in my head anyway! I could probably have put the text at the front but I think I’m just in the habit of putting large amounts of text to the back.
Simba: I have always loved the pun of this lyric (I’m gonna be the mane event :D :D :D) and it went perfectly with the screencap, but obviously I didn’t want to steal the main focus (;P) so it had to go to the back
To be honest, I think most of the time I use text it is inspired by the context (screencap, scene, quotes), and if it happens that the text would take up too much space/take the focus off the subject, then it goes as part of the background. I really like icons where you have text between two layers (so there’s a cut-out image at the front, then a text layer behind, and then the background is in fact another screencap (or the same screencap but edited differently) but I don’t think I’ve done any like that yet - maybe that’s something for the future!
There we go, that’s it (finally)! I hope you find something useful there amongst all my ramblings! Feel free to ask any other questions you have :D