I love doing grunge effects in Illustrator. You can do some simple and cool grunge looking effects with the hand drawn brush tool in Illustrator. You don’t have to go overboard, just use the hand drawn brush tool to outline a shape and you can make a sign more interesting.
Grunge Border
Draw a shape with the pen tool. Give it some perspective as you draw it.
Select the brush tool and choose a hand drawn brush if you have it–I did the outline in black.
For the fill, use a simple gradient of two shades of Grey.
Select the shape and add an Gaussian blur drop shadow to give it some depth.
Add some type, I used (Portagol ITC), scale it with the free form tool and give it some perspective with the rotate tool.
Add a drop shadow to the type under filters. I used 80% Grey. Added a subtitle with a script font.
