I used only the arrows in the next example:Įnvelope distortion make straight lines easily curved.
You must outline the text, ungroup and use the available distortion tools such as black and white arrows and the free transform filter (expand the result). I recommend you to sketch some cages for the letters and then stretch your letters to the cages - not exactly, but keeping a good letter spacing. Quite coarse, I would say! But it could be perfect if The Muppets visit as guest stars in The Flintstones.ĪDD: New edits in the question show that you really want make your own text but adapt the enveloping style to some degree from The Muppets. On top there's a grey version with black stroke. In Illustrator one can make the red extrusion. The fill is removed and a black stroke is inserted: Black and white tracing (after finding a good treshold) gave in both programs quite the same result. The green layer was copied and pasted to both Illustrator and Inkscape. Enlargening to 400% with On1 Resizer and filling to a new layer with the paint bucket gives at least in small size pretty good filled letters:
The black outline is not as bad as it generally is when somebody asks "Please, convert this to a sharp, smooth and accurate vector!" Its so solid that an image enlargener (not Photoshop's image resize!) can guess it's a sharp border and should stay thin. The automatic tracing problem earns some attention because one can meet cases where its accuracy is enough. The result will be much better if you at first clean the image in Photoshop (=remove the extras, leave only black text outlines, fill the gaps) but the needed work for perfect result will be the same as redrawing it. Illustrator's Live Trace of course can be tried, but the result will be poor when the image is a screenshot. Actually I would draw it in Inkscape, because the tools there seem to fit a little better to the job. If for some obscure reason I must copy the logo text, I would take the Pen and draw a copy (=manual tracing). Editing complex envelope distortion meshes is probably even more painful than editing the letters one by one. I do not believe you find an easy envelope distort mesh pattern which stretches whole text lines with few clicks just to the shown forms. The job isn't easier than redrawing it, I bet it's heavier. Ligature SH must be made by uniting in the pathfinder S and H. The text must be converted to curves and then you must edit the letters node by node to the wanted form. The plain text, of course, can be made by modifying a writing which is made with some resembling font. It has a red extrusion add-on, which is easily generated with Illustrator's 3D extrusion effect. I guess you want an exact replica with all details, but you want to start from ordinary text.
You seemingly have another answer which shows thoroughly how to distort ordinary straight text lines in a resembling style.
Obviously you asked about the text "The Muppet Show". I think I will probably resort to drawing it by hand if I can't get it right. Now, I do realize that the creator of that Muppet Show logo did not use a wrap or mesh tool (instead, he/she probably just drew it that way), so I don't know how closely can I recreate that effect with technology (well, maybe it's just a skill thing). The closest I can get is like this:īut it looks horrendously ugly. I pretty much figured out the extrusion part,īut I simply cannot figure out how to make the O in "show" inflate like that (and with the surround letters squeezing aside for it). My friend is making a Biology show, so I thought it would be funny to help her create a logo in the muppet style. I actually intend to first learn the skills needed to recreate the Muppet logo, then make one of my own in a similar style.
Thank you all very much for the wonderful answers! I understand that it's probably a hand-painted sign, but is it possible to recreate that with a normal font in Adobe Illustrator? Well, I'm not sure if you can call this a logo:īut yeah, I'm referring to the lettering that appears in the show's opening.