Cool Trick! How to Make a Broken Glass Effect in Illustrator

Making broken glass text is simple to do and is very effective. First what you want to do is pick a font. To help pull off the broken glass effect, pick a bold font and make it all caps. Once you’ve chosen your text, adjust the scale of each individual letter to make it look a bit more scattered. Once you’ve done this you need to convert the text into an object. Go to object > expand, and you should be all set.

Next, create a new layer for your document. On this new layer, use the pen tool to create triangles where you want your text to have the broken glass look. Here is an example of what mine looked like at this stage:

After you’ve added in all of the triangles, select each triangle and click on Object > Path > Divide Objects Below. Once you’ve done this to each individual triangle, select the whole thing and click Ungroup. Now you can move around all the pieces of your text that were cut up by the triangles. Do as much adjusting and rotating as you need until you are satisfied with the outcome.

Here is my final piece:

By Kristen Jones

 

Cites:

http://www.vectordiary.com/tips-and-tricks/broken-glass-effect/