In this Illustrator tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a trendy retro type treatment with a free font, gradients, blends, and some scatter brushes. It’s a relative easy tutorial containing techniques that can be quickly applied to many other type treatments and various graphic elements.

Last week I did an interview with an amazing designer named James White. One thing that I really like in his work is his use of retro style. So, I decided I should explore that more. Following that idea, in this tutorial I will show you how to create a very easy, but really cool, 3D and geometric effect in Photoshop. After that we will go a bit further and create our own retro Atari style video game cartridge.

In this tutorial we’re going to go a bit retro. You’ll learn how to create halftone patterns and creatively cut up an image of a model holding a boombox. You’ll then use those cut elements to make your design. We use some layer styles to get everything to come together cohesively. The effects are fun and you can apply these methods to other designs as well.