Hand lettering is cool, but it can take an obscene amount of time to execute. What about when your design project simply doesn't have that kind of budget? Ever wanted to take a clean font and make it look hand illustrated? Well, if you know you’re way around Adobe Illustrator then you can do this. If you don’t know Illustrator I show you how to do it anyway.
This is the same technique I use to achieve the hand illustrated effect on the typography for cover images like this texture bundle product. Every cover image in that product's image gallery uses this effect.
The secret lies in Illustrator’s Effects > Distort and Transform > Roughen dialog. Watch the video above to see how to wrangle the settings to make it look right.
This is also especially handy when you want to take more than one font in a design and apply the same hand illustrated feel.
Note: Look, I know this doesn’t result in a 100% authentic hand lettered appearance. I KNOW. I have created hand lettered fonts from scratch. But that’s not the point of this. The point is to deliver an effect that has 90% of the real thing in SECONDS. To any font ever made.