Want to add some bling and glamor to your Digital Planner? Learn how to customize your digital notebook covers with gold foil text with this quick tutorial on how to customize your digital covers with gold foil text in Procreate.
Adding custom text to your digital planner covers is a great way to make your Digital Planner look amazing, fit a theme and stand out in your note-taking app library.
But why stick to any old boring color when you could make your planner super glamorous with gold foil text?
In this post, I will show you how to change the color of your planner cover text into a beautiful gold foil using the Procreate App.
This is a premium app that is only available for IOS devices, which means you will have to purchase the app. (If you don’t have an IOS device, you can create a similar effect with Photoshop.)
Be sure to follow along in the video below.
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How To Customize Your Digital Covers With Gold Foil Text With Procreate
To start open the Procreate app.
In the ‘dashboard‘ select the ‘import’ option at the top right of the Procreate app screen to import your digital notebook cover. You can import documents from your device or cloud services. In the video, you will see that I organize all my documents in OneDrive so I can simply look for my item and import it.
If you are looking for a beautiful new cover check out these realistic-looking digital covers on my Etsy store.
Once you find the folder that has your Digital Planner cover, tap on it and import it to Procreate.
In the video, I selected a digital planner cover without any text. This will make it easy to add customized colored text.
For this tutorial, I’m going to add the year to my planner text on my cover. You can of course do whatever text you would like to make your planner unique.
It is important to make sure that you are not creating the text on the same layer as the original planner cover. To create a new layer, go to the ‘layers‘ tab at the top right of the app screen once you have your file open and tap ‘+‘ to create a new layer.
You can write your text with your handwriting and a stylus if you choose but in this tutorial, I am going to add a text with a nice font.
To do this head over to the top left hand of the screen and tap on the tool that looks like a spanner. In the drop-down menu that appears you will see ‘Add Text‘.
Next, add the text you want on the cover of your Digital Planner.
To change the font of the text simply tap on the text you have just written. A drop-down menu will appear with the texts that are available on your iPad. Don’t forget you can download fonts to your iPad to use in your Digital Planners like the Flamingo text I have in the video.
Want Beautiful New Fonts? How To Add Fonts To Your Digital Planner
Next, increase the text size a little bit to make the text fit better on the cover and place it where you want it to sit in your final copy.
To make this text gold foil you need to first make a gold foil gradient and then add that effect to the text.
This sounds hard but don’t worry, I will walk you through all of that!
Creating Gold Foil Text In Procreate
Firstly you will need to create an extra layer for the gold foil gradient. Head to the ‘layer‘ tool and tap ‘+‘.
Next, go to your ‘color palette‘ which is the circle icon on the top far right of the screen. Here you are going to add the shades of gold that you want to use for the gold foil text.
To achieve the same foil text that is the video you can use the 3 shades of golden yellow colors that I have used to create the gold gradient, the hex codes for these are below.
Gold Foil Gradient Hex Codes: #f7fab4 #e6d38f #cc975c
In the video, you will see I already have the colors in my color palette as I was testing these colors before sharing them with you.
To add the colors to your palette you have to go to the ‘color palette‘, the fourth icon on the bottom of the color pallet menu is the ‘value‘ tab. Tap this and add the 3 codes, one by one, to the box for hexadecimal codes. To do this simply type them in.
Now that you have three shades of gold, make sure you are on a layer above your text. To do this head to the ‘layers‘ tab and have the new layer you created selected.
Have a little fin next and just start coloring random parts of your screen with the 3 gold colors you added. Make sure you cover all the text area.
It will look messy and crazy but trust me, it will all come together soon.
Now it is time to merge these colors together as a gradient using the ‘Gaussian Blur‘ tool. From the top bar on the left side next to the spanner icon, tap this icon and a drop-down menu with the ‘Gaussian Blur‘.will appear. Tap to select. Then tap the screen anywhere and swipe to the right slowly to increase the amount of blur. Adjust as needed until it looks something like the example in the video.
If all your text is not covered you can also make this blurred section a bit bigger to make sure it covers all the text.
Go back to your layers and lock this gradient to where the text is in the layer below. To do this tap on the gradient layer and then in the drop-down menu that appears, tap ‘clipping mask‘.
And now you can see the gradient is only applied to the text. You can still move the gradient background until you find the right place you want for a perfect effect.
When you are happy with the foil effect just pinch the text and gradient layers together to combine them.
You could actually stop here but if you want to add some shadows under the text so it pops up a little more keep reading.
Adding Shadows To Text In Procreate
The first thing you will need to do is duplicate your new layer. Slide the gold text layer to the left slowly and tap on ‘duplicate‘. You will now have 2 identical layers.
Select the bottom layer and click on the ‘arrow‘ tool on the top left of the toolbar, it is the fifth icon along. Use this to move the layer just a bit off to the side of the original text. This creates a shadow that is not exactly under the text, enough so it can be seen.
Next, turn ‘alpha lock‘ on so that you can color just the text in this shadow layer. To do this tap on the layer you are using as the shadow and then tap ‘alpha lock‘ that appears in the drop-down menu.
Now head to the ‘color palette‘ and select black. Color over that text ( you don’t need to be neat or precise here). You will see that only the text in the shadow layer gets colored because of the alpha lock.
If black doesn’t look great you can use white or any other color. Have fun experimenting until you get a great contrast that works.
Now turn off the ‘alpha lock‘ and add a bit of blur to the shadow, using the ‘Gaussian blur‘ tool again to edit the shadow.
Once you are happy with the overall effect pinch the text and shadow layer together in the ‘layers‘ tab to create one complete layer.
Next, check that the size is appropriate for your cover and once you are happy with it you can pinch the text layer and combine it with the digital cover. Now you only have one layer and everything is combined in one easy document.
All that is left now is to import this image to your note-taking application.
So head back to the Procreate gallery by tapping on ‘gallery‘ at the top right of the app screen and select the cover you have just edited to share.
You can choose the format you want here, In the video, I export it as JPEG as I find this is easiest for most note-taking apps. In the ‘share‘ tab you should have the option to add it straight to the app you use for your Digital Planning. If this does not come up you could also just download it to your device and then import it to your note-taking app.
I have a few posts on how to add an extra cover to a digital document in Noteshelf, GoodNotes, Notability and ZoomNotes. If you need to learn how to do that so you can add your new customized cover to any digital document you want just click on the post for your preferred application.
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