The one who typesetted the One Piece popularity poll in chapter 415 was me. Fnuckale cleaned that page to make it look nice and sharp, but the Japanese text was still on it. Then I typesetted over the Japanese, and finally sent the PSD to Silveril for removing the Japanese beneath my text and redrawing.
It was a three-person, three-step process
Anyway I guess I can tell you about typesetting it. Basically, the primary goal for me was to have it look as much like the original Japanese as possible, but just in English and horizontal text. I don't like to use vertical text because I think it looks bad. I'm not going to go into
placement, since that's just something you have to play around with. Instead, I'll give you some pointers on how to make the text stylized to look the way you want it to look.
The primary tool at your disposal here is your Layer Blending options (right-click a layer, select Blending Options). Use it like CRAZY!
Stroke is the basic one, use it like crazy. Use the eyedropper tool to select the correct stroke color (from the original Japanese).
Sometimes the text has TWO strokes! How do you handle that? Use Stroke, and THEN use Outer Glow at 100% opacity and a high "Spread" setting (50%-75%). Now you have two strokes, voila!
The color of the text itself should be the color of the Japanese text (white, black, etc.). But sometimes the text is TWO colors (gradient)! What do you do? Gradient Overlay! Go in there and select the gradient you want, go inside to edit it and change the left slider's color to one extreme, and the right to the other. Use the eyedropper tool. If you didn't understand that, here's an visualization:
Say I have a word with gradient coloring. The top is blue, the bottom is red, and it gradually fades from blue to red from top to bottom. I go into my gradient overlay settings, double-click a gradient, and I will see two sliders. I double click one slider, and then take my eyedropper tool to click on the blue (nearest the top) and then I double-click the other slider and click on the red (nearest the bottom). Sometimes you get it backwards, but that's OK because you can change the direction of the gradient at will. Now you have it.
With those three weapons in your arsenal, you can typeset like crazy!
By the way, in case you were wondering, I used the font Gill Sans and its many variations to do 90% of the text on that poll.
