Easily Make a Flipping Letter Effect in Illustrator

There are good chances that at some point you saw a flipping letter effect in some designs, and if you struggled to find out how the effect was made, you may think it was done by creating each letter separately, modifying each one individually, and then coloring each one with a gradient effect. But this effect is actually very easy to make in Illustrator and takes less than 5 minutes to complete. So today, I will show you how easy you can achieve this effect in Illustrator using nothing but the default Illustrator tools.

Step 1

Open Illustrator and make a new file at any size you want. In this case, I will make mine at 1800 x 1200 px.

Step 2

Select the Rectangle Tool (M), and make a rectangle covering your whole artboard using any color you wish. I will set mine to #cf4239.

Step 3

Select the Type Tool (T) and type the letter you want to apply the effect to. I will use the letter "D" for you to better see the effect with the color set to #d35a2f, but you can type any text you want and set any color you wish.

Step 4

Duplicate the letter by pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+F and move the copy to the right of your artboard as shown.

Step 5

Give the copied letter a lighter color, in this case, I will set mine to #e8ae4a.

Step 6

Select both letters and go to Object > Blend > Blend Options. Apply the following settings and click OK.

Step 7

Go to Object > Blend > Make.

Step 8

Double click over the blended object to enter Isolation Mode.

Step 9

Select the copied letter, and place it right on top of the original one.

Step 10

With the copied letter selected, select the Free Transform Tool (E), be sure to have the "Constrain" option selected and drag the middle right anchor point to the left as shown.

Step 11

Lastly, simply double click outside the artboard to exit Isolation Mode.

Some Final Notes

Now that you know how to easily make this Flipping Letter Effect, you can enter on Isolation Mode to edit your text and change the colors to your liking as you normally do in Illustrator like in the following examples.