Procedural mapping style experiments

[ravells]

What an utterly cool project. Rep on the way! I'm not sure why its so difficult to reproduce the colours...wouldn't a straight colour picker (say 3X3 average) in photoshop do it? To get the bleed on the lettering it might with worth trying an outer glow layer style using black / multiply / low opacity....might help?

[su_liam]

For the faded look, you might add a white layer below your artwork and then reduce the opacity of your artwork till it looks properly faded. That's in photoshop, you should be able to do something similar in illustrator. I'd check, but I'm booted up in windows ("This is your brain. This is your brain on windows.") and all my adobe apps are on mac.

I have an idea and a couple tuts for distressed text. My idea is to duplicate your text layer, rasterize it and apply Filter>Brush Strokes>Spatter. I'd suggest a very light, blurred spatter. Because the prototype seems fairly hard-edged, just messy, I'd probably apply a threshold to the result.

In other news, tutorials:
For Photoshop
A nice video for Frustrator
A texty tut for 'strator