Transcript:
Hey, guys, this is. Spencer, from Pixel & Bracket. In this tutorial. I’m gonna show you how to curve text. And what I have on screen here. You can see one here and one here. They look nearly identical, but two completely different ways of getting there so. I’m going to show you how to do text on a path. I’m also gonna show you how to sort of warp text into an arc shape. Also gonna show you something. I just found out. Which is this cool little envelope, warp thing pretty nifty. And maybe you guys can use any of this stuff in any way. I’m gonna show you a bunch here. We go lets. Go right now! Alright, let’s start a new document and not do that, okay, file, new command in for short or Ctrl, and if you’re on a PC, Windows 1920 by 1080 will just create something like that. Okay, so here’s our little artboard. We need to create some text, so lets. Grab the type tool over here in our tool bar. It’s the T shortcut. Key is T. I’m gonna click anywhere on my canvas and let’s let’s go ahead and typed curved text or something like that. I’m gonna use all caps, so I’m just holding shift curved text. Okay, real small. We’re gonna just go back to that selection tool. I’ve got this selected. I can go ahead and up the font size to like something. We can read 80 something like that. And let’s do just like a bold font. I’ve got this good, good headline. Font, it’s literally called good headline font. I’m gonna do the black version, so it’s nice and bold, and I’m gonna adjust the spacing, just a touch, so you guys can follow along if you want or not, but that’s okay. We just need some text on the screen like that there. It is, there’s our curved text. I’m gonna increase the size to 100 so we’re a little bit larger. Okay, so the first way. I’m going to show you is type on a path. So what we need is a path, right, So if I want to make an arc shape, I need a path. That’s sort of in an arc shape. Easy way to get there is to select the ellipse tool. The shortcut key for that is L. I like to click and drag. And now you’re kind of skewing this thing. I want a perfect circle, so I’m gonna hold shift. I’m also gonna hold option or Alt, and it’s gonna scale out from the center if you can see that now I want a pretty pretty sort of shallow arc, so I’m gonna make a very big circle like that. I’m going to zoom out a little bit. That’s command or control -, and we have this big circle. Currently it’s got a fill. I’m gonna change the appearance to have no fill. This doesn’t matter. This is more for like the visual of it. I’m going to change the stroke to have one point, so I can just see that path. We’re gonna bring this down right here. Good enough and what I’m just gonna do is split it and I can split it really anywhere, but if I want to make sure I’m splitting it In the same exact spot, I could actually find the two edges of the circle. Here notice how the circle is made up of four anchor points if I hit C. That is my little little scissors tool over here. That’s like the cut to what I like to think of cut because of C is the shortcut and I can just hover over this anchor. Click hover over this anchor. Click with this circle selected, and now if I go back to the selection tool, I have two pieces of the circle, so I have like two arcs. I can just delete the lower one. You could use it if you’re doing something above and below and then. I’m just going to bring this guy down here and what I can actually do is probably not even use this curve to text piece here because what you can do. This is called type on a path, and if you go up to the type tool and click and hold, you’ll see a bunch of options and one of those options is type on a path we actually don’t have to click that you can just select. The type tool. Illustrator is smart enough to know that when you hover over a path, it’s gonna say, hey, you probably want to type on that path since you have. The type tool opened up, so I can just click on this path and I’m glad this actually made it upside down because I can show you a little bit more, but it’s allowing us to type on that path now and we could just type out that same structure. They’re curved text, but this is nowhere near like what the finished product is right, so there’s a couple things we want to do to get this situated correctly. The first thing we want to do is flip this to the top, so I’m going to click on this path and actually go up to type, and if you look, there’s a type on path segment where there’s some options and we can go to type on a path options. That’s gonna pop up a little window and I’m gonna go ahead and check Mark preview. See, then we can checkmark. This guy called flip and that’s gonna flip it. To the other side of the path and text always is going from left to right, so it’s going left to right, and then we can align it to different parts of our text. Whether we want it aligned on the center. See now. The text is in the center of the path. I kind of like this one. It’s easier for for placement. I think you know you can. You can adjust the space, and if you want, you can adjust the effect and let’s go ahead and look at that effect after we. Center this piece out. So in order to Center our text, it’s the same as if we were centering text normally, So we find our paragraph options. If you don’t see them, go up to window down to type. And then there’s paragraph right there, and it’ll pull out the paragraph panel. I’m gonna dock this over here, but our paragraph options, remember? I just need to align Center to Center. That up doesn’t look like it’s centered it up, and here’s why you see when you have this selected. There’s two big white squares one here and one over here to the left. These squares are your start and your end points. So in order for this text to be centered up here. I need this to start at this anchor and end this anchor. So if I just kind of hover over this with my selection tool, there’s a little line here, and if I find it, I’m gonna see a little icon pop up that has an aligned with an arrow underneath my pointer. If I click and drag, I can move this endpoint all the way over to this anchor and I can make sure over here that the start point is exactly on this anchor, and now I know this text is centered perfectly on that, so the other thing that you might consider doing is clicking on this again going up to type type on a path. Pull up those options hit preview. So you see what’s going on And the effect you might change that you might change it to skew, which is gonna adjust how the type on a path warps the letters a little bit 3d ribbon, which is just like. I don’t know, these are all just funky little things you can see. If if it works for you. Stair-step means it’s not gonna like rotate the letters. It’s just gonna stair step them above each other gravity will that it sort of pulls it down to the center, but a lot of times you’re looking at Rainbow If you’re looking at like a logo with text on the top and bottom, you’re looking at like a rainbow effect. Okay, so that is that is like type on a path how to curved text there. We are gonna use this piece up here and let’s just kind of pull this guy, and we’re gonna bring him over there and maybe right down here, so we don’t accidentally click on him. So this little text here. Let’s let’s show you how to curve this guy and like warp him to get the same effect. We’re gonna select him. We’re gonna go up to object down to envelope. Distort, there’s a couple of options here. I’ll show you these two just for fun, but this one is make with warp. We click on it and look, it already warped our text a little bit, probably with whatever my last parameters were. If I click on style, There’s tons of different styles, so you can arc just the upper portion of the text notice that it warps the text. The bottom stays even and the top has a little arc to it. Lots of different options here bulge, just kind of bulges out from the center. You can adjust how much that? Bend is on that bulge. You can adjust the distortion from a horizontal standpoint, or a vertical standpoint. You can adjust all of this stuff right in here, and it’s just warping your text. So if we go back to that arc, you can adjust the arc. You know how much it is one thing? I noticed with this is. It does warp and skew your text. More than type on a path type on a path will really keep your text intact, but this definitely breaks out of the integrity of them and it’s starting to skew letters, depending on how much you really warp it. If you keep it minimal, it’s not gonna be as noticeable. You know, if you keep it with just like a little arc, you’re not gonna really notice that, and this is kind of a really easy way to architects, it very quickly without dealing with a bunch of paths, overlapping and and such. I didn’t want to say and such, but I just did anyway. We can click. OK, and there’s our curved text very similar to the one down here. You’ll notice some slight differences because it does warp that text a little bit. Alright, let me show you one more sort of fun saying, actually. No, before we get to that rumor you can double click on these guys and adjust their type, So the difference here is that if I start to adjust this and let’s say I’m typing pixel notice how when I just have one letter? It doesn’t really know to keep the integrity of that letter, so it’s gonna stretch it over the whole segment, So if I’m doing pixel, now, it’s kind of stretched out, and as I type like and bracket, it’s skewing it more and more in there. So now I have some really skinny letters, so it’s. Whatever you start with is gonna look the best. You can edit the type, but it does. It does sort of skew it a little bit more and more based on the first set of letters you had, whereas this type on a path down here that’s just gonna type on that path, so if I do the same thing, Pixel & Bracket notice how it really keeps the the proper spacing and sizing of those letters, however, it is harder to change the angle of your path. Now if this was wrapping around too much and you wanted to bring it down a little bit, It’s easier on the warp side of things to adjust the arc. Alright, enough enough blabbering on about that! I hope I gave you enough information. There, there’s another cool thing here. I’m gonna do curved text the little bubble thing. I showed you. It’s actually really cool. You might be able to do like different shapes. So like if you wanted if you wanted a car shape and you wanted to text this a car in the shape of a car. This is how you would do that. I’m just going to show you with like a an oval, so we’re gonna grab this ellipse tool here. I’m just gonna make like an oval shape that covers up the text and we’re gonna kind of slide them on top of the text there. I’m gonna drag and select both the text underneath and the shape on top. Go up to object down to. I think it’s envelope to store again and we’re gonna do make with top object. This is pretty cool. Look at this, it curves The text around that circle shape. And what’s even cooler is? I can go in here and edit the text to be like Ill type in circle and notice how it it like. Live previews the shape in it and it goes ahead and spreads out the letters so that they’re all in that circle shape and type. Hello, you can type anything here, and and it’s gonna do that for you. So lets type in Pixel & Bracket Same thing now. Obviously it just takes that circle shape, and so it’s kind of squished in there, but it’s kind of a kind of a neat way to to do text into this like warp shape and still have it editable, you know? I like my non-destructive stuff last one. I’m going to show you since we just skipped over the option. Curved text. Maybe any of these will help any of you in any way. I don’t issue a perform right, Go up to object down to envelope the store again, make with mesh and you can adjust how much mesh there is, And if you click preview can see all the mesh. This is kind of like puppet warp or distort a little bit, so I’m just having four by four, so four rows, four columns and I can click on this and you see? I have all these little points if I select the direct selection tool, which is the White Arrow shortcut. Key is a I can click on one of these points and adjust it. And that’s gonna start to curve my text and I’ve got this like mesh warp here. Where if I start to adjust these? It’s gonna start to adjust how that text warps and meshes together, so now I have like this little bubbly effect in the middle of my curved text, pretty cool, pretty, pretty interesting way of adjusting text. They’re very manually Almost like a puppet warp. Alright, you guys! I just went through a bunch of stuff. Probably the first ones what people really want is just that arc on a path type of text. I would say this one. The the warp is also pretty useful. And then these are very specific. But if you’re looking for something like that, something fun, there you go. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Hope you learned something. If you have any questions or comments, make sure you post them below, subscribe for more tips and tutorials. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time [Music]!