Shrinking a Mesh

Hi,

I want to light a text mesh internally and have the light pass outwardly through a diffused mesh. Getting kind of a light up sign feel like this:


However, to get that, I had to bend and mesh the warp by hand to fit inside as an emitter, like this:


Is there a quicker way to produce this effect? Or to just scale down the text accordingly to fit inside of itself? I’m doing some credits and will be doing a LOT of names which would become very time consuming.

Thanks in advance!

Shrink/fatten tool in edit mode, alt+S. Solidify tool/modifier.