Inkscape Tutorial – Uneven Letraset Effect

I was browsing Pinterest, the way you do, looking at old ads and the raw graphical style they often used:

You get the idea. (Actually, looking at it now, it’s pretty straight, oh well)

As often happens, I was suddenly inspired to pointlessly recreate the style in Inkscape. So here’s how.

  1. Start Inkscape and create a new document.
  2. Using the Text tool type your desired slogan:

  3. Change the font and weight as you wish. I used the default “sans-serif” and set it to bold.
  4. Select the text and stretch out the letter spacing a little:

  5. With the text object selected, Path > Object to Path. This will turn the text object into a group of paths, one for each letter in your text.

  6. With the group selected, Object > Ungroup, to break the group into paths.
  7. You now have a bunch of individual paths. Make sure they are all selected, and select the Tweak tool:

  8. In the toolbar, select the following settings:


    Width sets the size of the circle within which the tool will act. Force sets how much of an effect it has – we set it low because we want a subtle effect. The Mode setting allows us to choose what kind of effect we want – we want random movement.

  9. Click and drag the tool over your selected objects. You will see the letters move a little. Keep “painting” over the objects with multiple strokes until you are “happy”.

  10. For extra fuzzy-photostat-ness, use the Filters > Morphology > Cross-smooth filter with these or similar settings:

  11. Then stick it on an old paper textured background (there are lots of tutorials for that out there), and save it as a JPG, with a high compression setting to get that “bad scan” look:

  12. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? !
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