Flash Explained

In this really easy lesson, I will explain to you how to create ice text in Flash 8 Pro. This effect is possible to obtain thanks to the blending filters. You will learn the following techniques:

• How to draw a borderless rectangle,
• How to select all the right options for a text field so that it will look good and be ready to have blending effects applied to it,
• How to tweak the options of the Glow filter in Flash so that you can have the real ice-text effect in your SWF movies.

See the example of this effect below.

1 Open a new Flash document.

2 Select the Rectangle tool (R). Go to the lower part of the Tools panel, and select the following options (look at the numbers in the screenshot below):

1. Click on the small pencil icon.
2. Click the little rectangle with the red diagonal line. This will block the outline color — thanks to this, you can draw a rectangle with fill color only.
3. Click on the color square near the paint bucket icon. Choose a dark blue color: in the palette that has opened, type #203E7A in the hex color code box.
4. Make sure that Object drawing is turned off.

3 Click and drag to draw a rectangle on the stage.

4 Choose the Selection tool (V). Click on the rectangle to select it.

5 Go to the left side of the Property inspector, below the scene. Change the dimensions of the rectangle manually: make it about 360 pixel wide and 60 pixels high.

6 Select the Text tool (T). Go over to the Property inspector again. Choose the parameters like this:

1. Select Static Text as type of text field.
2. Pick a font you like. Preferably, it should be a sans serif font, with clearly defined shapes. Avoid using fancy fonts for this kind of effect.
3. Choose a big font size: I selected 26.
4. Choose any color you like. This won't make any difference, since the blending filters will define the complete visual aspect of the text.
5. Turn on the bold and italic options.
6. In the rendering options menu, select Anti-alias for readability.
7. The Selectable option should stay turned off. The ice text you are making is a piece of design, so why make it selectable? 🙂

7 Click over the rectangle and type anything you like.

8 Press Esc on your keyboard to leave the text typing mode. A blue outline will appear around your newly created text field.

9 With the text field still selected, go to the Property inspector and click the Filters tab.

10 Click on the little blue plus icon to open the menu with the available blending filters.

11 Select the Glow filter. Do the following:

1. The Blur X and Y options should be set to 4.
2. Set the Strength to 330%.
3. In the Quality menu, select Medium.
4. Choose white as color.
5. Both the Knockout and Inner glow options must be checked.

There! You have a nice ice text made entirely in Flash. Now that was easy, wasn't it?

If you put this text on a white background, it won't be visible! Any other color works, but I found that dark blue tones work best. It isn't surprising, since they are associated with winter and cold.

Download the source .fla file

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