With Halloween right around the corner wouldn’t it be nice to throw a spooky get together? With this tutorial I’ll show you how to make an invitation flyer that you can customize and print as needed! Though this tutorial is meant for Sketch, feel free to follow along in the vector software of your choice. These options can be easily transferred over if you’re familiar with another application.
1. Set Up Your Document
Step 1
Open Sketch and select the Artboard icon on the top toolbar and choose the A5 option along the top of the Artboard itself.
Step 2
With our Artboard created select the View icon from the top toolbar and choose Show Rulers.
Step 3
Now Sketch only provides a ruler in Pixels because it is prioritizing screen design at the moment so we’ll need to make a bit of a guesstimate for our print trim guides. Double-click the ruler section and drag the Guide about 10px in from each edge. This will be our Safe Zone for printing purposes. Anything you want to ensure makes it though the trim process after printing should go inside these Guides.
2. Create a Background
Step 1
Select the Rectangle (R) tool from the Shape menu in the top toolbar and create a rectangle that is 20px wider and higher than our Artboard then center it in the page and fill it with a flat grey color from the Inspector panel.
Step 2
In the Inspector panel click the “+” icon in the Fill section to add a new fill layer on top of the other one. Select Pattern and enter the following information then click “back” at the top of the Inspector panel.
3. Add the Invitation Information
Step 1
Let’s type out our main invitation information. This information should include the Day and Date, the Name of the Party, the Time, the Location, and the Street Address. Feel free to add or remove information according to your needs and adjust the layout as needed.
Please be aware that we will be applying different styles to different words in the text so we want to type these out separately so we can add them in easily later on without having to split up the text the hard way later on.
Select the Text tool from the top toolbar and click on the Artboard then begin entering your text. For this main information text we’ll be using the font "Friday13" in various sizes. As mentioned before we’ll be using direct styles for this information so I’ve broken it up as the following:
- Day size: 28
- Date size: 28
- Halloween size: 80
- Fright Night size: 74
- Starts: size: 28
- Time size: 28
- Location Name size: 51
- Street Number size: 22
- Street Name size: 22
- City, size: 22
- State size: 22
Since this is our main information and the most important we need to make sure and arrange these text layers inside the guidelines we set earlier.
Step 2
Let’s skew the name of our party a little to give it a custom made feel. Select the text “Halloween” and “Fright Night” and select the Vectorize option from the top toolbar and choose Vectorize Layer. This will convert our text into vector shapes that we can now alter.
Step 3
With this new vector shapes selected choose the Transform tool from the top toolbar and then grab the right middle handle and drag it up a bit. You can also drag the corner handles on the left side to skew the text shape even more.
Step 4
Let’s style our text. To make it easier to see I’ll style the larger words “Halloween” and “Fright Night” since these will be using our two different styles across the rest of the text.
Begin by selecting the word “Halloween” then in the Inspector panel click the Fill card and adjust the color as seen below. We’ll also add an Inner Shadow with the following information.
Step 5
With this style created click the “Link” button at the top of the Inspector panel then click the “+” icon to save this style.
Step 6
Select the “Fright Night” text and we’ll adjust the Fill and Inner Shadow as follows. Once adjusted click the “+” icon at the top of the Inspector panel to save this as a linked style as well.
Step 7
Now, select the following text.
- Day
- Starts:
- Location
- Street Number
- City
…and click the off white style from the top of the Inspector panel.
Step 8
Do the same for the remaining text only this time choose the red style.
Now that these styles are linked should you wish to change the style color or shadow later on it will update across all the elements automatically.
Step 9
Select all the text elements and Group (Command-G) them together. Duplicate this group and open the folder underneath to get to the elements in that folder.
Select all the regular text layers and then Vectorize them to turn them in to shapes.
With these shapes selected click the Union tool from the top toolbar to join all of these shapes together.
Step 10
With this new shape made change the fill and remove the Inner Shadow and add a regular Shadow with the following settings.
4. Create a Wall of Text
Step 1
With our main information done let’s fill out the rest of the empty space with more text. Since this is Halloween we’ll use your run-of-the-mill Halloween words like “Ghoul”, and “Spooky”, and “Haunted”.
To give it some extra presence and texture we’ll also be using a few different font choices. I’ll be using:
Feel free to keep use any variations you wish. Keep in mind that we’re going for a grungy weathered look to these fonts so it fits in with our theme. The color of this text will be the same dark grey as the fill/shadow for the larger info text we chose earlier.
Step 2
Arrange these words in the empty space surrounding our main information text. Rotate them, adjust the font, and stretch them in size filling every nook and cranny but leaving enough space between words so they’re still legible. You may find it beneficial to Vectorize these type layers so you can adjust the size and angles as you see fit.
5. Create a Spiderweb
Step 1
Select the Vector (V) tool and click off the edge of the Artboard and click again in a diagonal line across the page to the other side. Move over a bit and click again then proceed like before by moving to the opposite side of the page and clicking creating a crossing star pattern. We’ll be using a red border the same color as our red text from before.
Step 2
With the base strands of our web created lets move in to the crossing strands. With the Vector (V) tool click to create crossing strands filling out your web. You don’t need too many, you don’t want to cover all your fancy text, just enough to get the general idea.
Step 3
Finally arrange the layers so that the web is behind the main invitation text but above the wall of text elements we made.
Point of No Return!
Beware! You’re guests won’t be able to say no when you hand them these invitations. You can now export the finished piece either for the web or send it off to a printer to hand out just in time for your Halloween Party. If printing I would recommend adding a glossy layer to the darter grey elements just to give it a nice sheen on the finished piece. I hope you all have a spooktacular Halloween!
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