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Typeface Portrait of Steve Jobs: How It Was Done

7:11 am, May 14th, 2009, Leander Kahney

steven_paul_jobs_by_dylanroscover

Remember the fantastic portrait of Steve Jobs using Apple’s classic typefaces from last week?  Here’s a step-by-step guide showing exactly how designer Dylan Roscover created it in Illustrator and Photoshop (24 hours straight hours of work, no sleep).

Dylan, a self-described ‘design nerd’ who lives in Aloma, Florida, explains:

“I used Adobe Illustrator and the Pen tool to trace his facial contours the way I figured they would make sense, one by one using the Type on a Path tool for each path.

The larger lines of type were hand-kerned character-by-character to fit accordingly. Near completion I used the Magic Wand tool to select areas of text and apply gradual shading.

Everything was composited in Adobe Photoshop as a smart object to give it that deep blue effect and the background  + texture.

In total it look about 24 hours to complete during three days with no sleep (class assignment).”

Click the pictures for Dylan’s detailed step-by-step instructions.

The original photo I used for reference. This is a very personal depiction of Jobs which I feel conveys him very strongly and evUsing levels in Photoshop, I bumped up the contrast to help me better distinguish light from dark.Having imported the Photoshop image into Illustrator, I started with Steve's beard hair, using a lowercase Adobe Garmond &quThis was after about the first half-hour's work. I began with pure white for all of the type, ignoring color and shadow and focAn outline view of the type-only. The face completed, with shading added to the type. (You can depict the text here on a white background as well as black backgroDetail of the overall typesetting process. I would frame each path of the facial contours using the pen tool, and then copy and In certain areas and larger blocks of text, I would manually set individual characters. Fonts were grouped with each other to maI took the Illustrator file back into Photoshop as a smart object (File > Open as Smart Object) and applied the type as aSays Dylan: "Steven Paul Jobs took about 24 hours to complete in a three day period of no sleep."

Posted by Leander Kahney in How tos, News, Steve Jobs | Comment on this article

About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is senior editor of Cult of Mac, editor of two books about technology culture, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, and has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Observer in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

Email the author | Read more posts by Leander Kahney.

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6 comments

    This is truly inspirational, and great to see such an attention to detail. I think this as a type exercise would be great to give to students learning design, typography and a vector drawing package. I might just do that, they might not love me – but they will when they’ve completed it: )

    Thanks for the post and to Dylan for sharing the process with us.

    squareart, on May 16th, 2009 at 1:43 am

    [...] Es curioso ver las imágenes del proceso completo. [...]

    Steve Jobs creado con tipografía - colorate, on May 22nd, 2009 at 5:44 am

    Increiblemente estupendo diseño,

    enrique cervantes, on May 22nd, 2009 at 6:31 pm

    [...] illustrator. Nel caso siate particolarmente curiosi, trovate un tutorial con il makin’ of qui. Di seguito, vi sottopongo poi Inlingua, un concept creato dall’agenzia Kolle Rebbe [...]

    Design trends: words! « Lucida Lab, on May 25th, 2009 at 5:38 am

    [...] web site Cult of Mac holds a short explanation detailing how Rosco created the portrait using Photoshop and [...]

    Steve Jobs inspires creative designers, on June 27th, 2009 at 2:05 pm

    [...] Steve Jobs… This is a cool picture of Steve Jobs drawn completely in typeface.  Click here to find out how it was done and click on the picture to see a bigger image… (via Cult of [...]

    Look It’s Steve Jobs… « Katoque ’s, on August 13th, 2009 at 9:21 am