Transcript:
In this video, I’m going to be going over some really easy ways to add effects to your type or pretty much Any other object inside Adobe Illustrator. So for this video, we’re going to be using type in this case. It’s live type, so you can still make changes to it after you apply these effects, but if you want to use it on shapes or something similar, it works exactly the same on those and then at the very end. I’ll also show how to apply this to multiple objects that are kind of stacked on top of each other. So in this case, we have a black rectangle with the type in the middle, a very common thing to do if you’re doing a banner or something similar to that, so be sure to stick around for that part. If that is something that interests you, but first up, we’re gonna start with this type, so feel free to type up. Whatever you want, you don’t have to rasterize it or create outlines. It works totally fine on live type. The only important thing make sure you have it selected before we go to this next step, so next up once your type or object is selected, we want to go to the top menu and then go to effect, which is near select on the top menu and from effect. We’re gonna want to go about halfway down until we get to the warp option in all of these warp options are what we’re going to be applying to our type, but we’re going to start with the arc and then just work our way down, showing what the various options do so first up here is the arc option under the various warp options and as you make changes. Make sure you check this preview box. If it isn’t already checked, otherwise, you’re not going to be able to see what you’re up to, so the bend at the top. And for almost all these, the very top option is the one that matters the most at least for making things that look somewhat normal, the distortion options. Well, as it says, it distorts stuff, so some of that can look really funky and perhaps not as usable, but they are powerful effects. If you want to use them, so I can just go ahead and change this. Bend slider in order to create some different effects here. So as it goes into the negative, it creates a negative or downward shaped. Bend and if it goes into positive, it creates a normal arc shaped. Bend that rises to the top. So as you can see if you go way to the extremes here, these tend to look a little bit strange, so I find it to be most useful to use. You know, relatively small amounts of these various warp options so that the type still looks fairly natural so once again here, if the bend is a positive percent, it’s going to go up, and if it’s a negative percent, it’s going to go down, but there’s also these distortion options if you want to use those so horizontal. If I move that over here, you can tell that it on the right-hand side sort of increases the scale towards the right, which has almost like, got an interesting cascading effect as you go down here, and if I make that negative, it’s gonna push it down to the right side, just like this, so I’m gonna go ahead and zero this out, so we can check out the vertical one, so under vertical as I move this to a positive, it sort of rotates the entire type on an axis, which is a little bit interesting, so as I go a lot further here, it becomes almost flat and starts kind of splaying out in a really weird manner, and if I turn the vertical to a negative, it actually does a fairly interesting thing where it starts to really splayed this type out where the top corners just continue being pulled off to the side and doing this sort of an effect, so not super legible, but certainly in effect. If that’s what you’re looking for, and of course, you can do both of these things at the same time. If you want to to create some even more crazy effects, It’s really up to you. How you want to combine this stuff so now in this drop down, and what’s helpful with this warp options Panel is all in a drop-down, so it’s very fast to go from one option to another. I’m gonna select Arc lower so arc lower. I’m gonna just zero out my previous settings because it’s gonna remember those and make things look really crazy. The top option once again is the one that you probably want to use for most stuff, so in this case, a negative. Bend is going to kind of pinch the type create an arch shape on the bottom. This is actually a really cool effect for a lot of reasons. You’ll you’ve probably seen a lot of different type. Marks or various logo is using a similar effect on the type. And then if you go into the positive here, it’s going to go ahead and make a lower arch on the bottom here, so it’s called Arc Lower and that’s. Why, but what you might not expect is when you go into the negative numbers. It does this kind of a pinch move, which I think is actually a very usable thing to have when you’re applying it to various things. Once again, there are other distortion options. I’ll just kind of move through these pretty quick. So you can see what’s happening here. This one’s, especially usable in my opinion, moving horizontal, just creating a simple effect where the type gets larger linear path, so that’s very readable, still very usable. I could see actual use cases for wanting to do something like that. And then the vertical one as we go into the positive, is calling out the bottom parts of the type. And if you move that into the negatives, it pulls out the top parts of the type, so I do think this is usable too, but I would probably keep it relatively in a small number, like this is at 8% negative or 6% positive. You have to be kind of careful as you do this stuff, so things don’t just look totally crazy and not readable, especially if you’re using it for a more professional reason, but I’m gonna switch this up to Arc Upper, which is basically the opposite of Arc lower as you might expect. So if I move bend into positive, it creates that arc on the top portion of the type. And if you move it into the negative, it goes ahead and pinches it down instead of pinching it from the other way if you were using the arc lower, so pretty cool effect here once again. I think this is very usable, especially in these smaller settings where it isn’t too extreme and this type is fully editable. So if you want to change this to be like cats, it’s very quick for you to do that, And the effect will still be applied as you can see here. I’m gonna bring this back to the effects since it works. Just a bit better And also since I closed out that effect window. If you do the same thing, and you want to go back to effect and then warp and then find the thing it’s gonna kick a warning, saying that this is gonna apply a secondary effect on top of this existing one, which will probably not be what you want. It’s gonna be like stacking different effects on top of each other, so instead of doing that what you want to do is go to window and then from window go to appearance and from that, the appearance window will show up here. It is on my screen and as you can see. Make sure your type is selected, too, so you can see the right options. But there is the warp arc upper apply to this through the appearance window. You can hit this eyeball to turn that on and off, so you can very quickly kind of toggle effects that way, but if you click on that, it’ll bring back up the window that you’re probably looking for. Some is going to move this appearance window to the side. Quick, click back on warp arc upper, and then go to the next option here after I zero. This one out. These distortions will be the same as the arc lower, So I’m not going to really worry about those too much. There’s an arch effect, which is a like Ark, except it doesn’t display the type out in the same way, So if you move the bend into a positive as you can see instead of an arc where it makes the left and the right sides of the type splay out with the rest of the type, it feels a bit more natural to me. The arched setting keeps these completely vertical. It keeps each letter completely vertical, so it’s just a different effect, relatively the same thing as an arc, just a little bit different visual flair, so it’s sort of up to personal preference, which one you prefer. I end to use arc instead of arch, but there’s no big deal either way. I’m going to zero that back out and then move over to well. Actually, something I’ve forgotten to do on a few of these is there’s also vertical options, so there’s horizontal by default and then there’s a vertical as well, so if I click on vertical, what it’s going to do is make a crazy effect here where it starts to arch it out almost if there was a line drawn on this type where the middle of that vertical line is where the effect to be applied from. So if I move this Bend over to the negative, it’s going to push it the other direction, so this effect and generally these effects aren’t quite as useful as the horizontal ones, but they are there for you to go ahead and try so also here we can go to bulge which looking at the shapes -. There’s little shapes next to each one of these things that really helps understand what is up -, but it’s gonna move it both sides. So if I move the bend into a positive, it bulges both up and down, and if I move it into the negatives, it’s gonna do a pinch move. Although this is so pinched, you can see it’s almost wrapping around, creating almost a fish type shape, so I tend to be pretty careful about how much of this effect I apply. Otherwise, you can get into some really interesting looks, but for sure. Readability is non-existent as you start to do this stuff, but something fun to play around with for sure as you look at the different options here. And then if I move that to vertical, you can tell that it kind of bulges it out on the sides as opposed to the top and bottom. So perhaps this is a little bit more usable as a vertical option on here, and I’m not gonna worry too much about going over all the distortion options because video would take forever at that point, but feel free to check those out. If they interest you, so for she’ll lower, moving it back to horizontal to see the actual effect are probably going for here. If I move the bend up. It sort of splays out from roughly the midpoint of the tie and the same happens on the opposite side. If you move the bend to a negative number, except in this case, the type actually starts to overlap itself. So you get some really weird effects going on here, and I bet that would not happen if you outlined the type before you started, but personally. I think that leaving the type live leaves a lot of flexibility. If you want to change it in the future, so just be mindful of things like that. If you ever have weird things happen, you can always right-click the type and then click on create outlines and see if that helps with the effect Looking the way you want it to so next up here will be shell upper, so as I move the bend into a positive, it does the same thing just on the top portion, And if I move it negative, this can be exactly the opposite of the previous one. So once again, you have to be really careful as it starts to fold in on itself there, which is kind of a weird thing, but that is an option for you to use. I don’t find the shells to be very useful as an effect, but maybe it’s something that interests you so next up is a very useful one, which is flag so as I move the bend into a positive here, it does sort of a flag waving effect, and if I move the been negative, it just does it in the opposite direction, so actually a super useful effect here, especially for banners or things like that that you want to have a kind of natural waving, look to them. I think it’s extremely helpful to have this. As an effect option, also, there’s an actual wave option, which have a move that you can tell that it’s waving the inner portions of the type while keeping the top and the bottom lines straight so a little bit different way of handling this particular effect, Certainly a different look. I think generally speaking, I find the flag more useful than the wave, but maybe there’s a unique use case where this is exactly what you want, and you want to maintain the same tops and bottoms, especially if you’re dealing with something like shapes inside of a rectangle as opposed to type, then these options can perhaps become much more useful, depending on what you’re trying to do with them so next up from wave, we have fish so. I’m going to move this one into the positive, and it kind of creates a fish looking effect, so the top is much more rounded and then it gets skinny, and then it kind of splays out again where the tail of the fish would be and moving that to the negative, exactly the opposite, so certainly in effect. I’m not sure how useful this is depending on what you’re going for, but it exists. And if that’s what you’re trying to do, it’s built in Illustrator for you really easy to use also is rise. So if I move the bend to a positive here, it makes it rise up to the right-hand side of the type, and you’d expect if you go on a negative, it’ll probably rise up to the left, and that is exactly what it does so a fairly useful effect. I think it certainly works for what it’s up to. If this is the kind of stepped effect or kind of like a slide effect that you want rise might be the way to go. I’ll just zero this out once again, so then I can jump over to the bottom four, which are fisheye. So if I move the bend like this, it starts to distort the type from the center of the type, and then it kind of makes a fisheye bubble lens a very exaggerated version of that. And if I move this into a negative, it’s almost like a gravity pulling effect towards the center, which if you’re looking for a gravity pulling style effect, just like this, then fisheye is the way to go for you. I actually think this is pretty cool. It might require a little bit of cleanup to make it more readable as you continue going, but a great starting point. If this is a style you’re trying to achieve, and after that we have inflate. So if I move this out here into the positives, it kind of just inflates everything from the center point, so each side gets ballooned out and it gets bigger that way, and if you move that to the negatives, it does the exact opposite where it pulls it back in. So that is the inflate option Also up here is squeezed so this is probably gonna do what you might think it might do as. I’m moving the positives here. It just squeezes the type together, almost like there was a rope around the type, pulling it in around the sides, and if I move that into a negative one, it does something a little bit different than you might expect, or it kind of pulls stuff away in a part. I actually think this is a neat looking type effect. I’m not sure where I might use it, but kind of like when we talked about, inflate where you’re willing to spend the time to clean stuff up a bit. Maybe this is an effect that could be useful for you. I’ll cheer O this out one last time and then jump to twist. So as I move twists into a positive. Bend it’s hard to wrap around and twist it around the center in a clockwise manner. And if I move that into a negative number, it does the same thing, but in anti-clockwise direction of that twist once again, this might be a cool thing to test on if you have a shape with a bunch of colors inside of it, and you want them to twist around and interact in strange ways so now. I’m gonna jump down to this one to show you how these work. If you have in this case behind the type, we have a black rectangle and in front of that black rectangle. We have the type here, so I’m gonna select both of these. Then go to effect warp and then arc, and I’m just gonna make this a pretty big, positive number, so we can see what’s happening. In this case, the type itself doesn’t follow the path of the shape behind it, which makes us largely not usable because the length of the type is different. Length of the black rectangle is different. The effects are gonna look different on these two different shapes. So you run into some problems there so. I’m going to cancel this, and this is actually extremely easy to solve for. All you have to do is select both of them at the same time, and once you have both of them selected, you can either right, Click and then select group or you can select everything and then hit control. G on a PC or command G on a Mac, which will also group these things together. And when you have them both select it go to effect and then warp. And then you can pick whichever option you want. I’ll just use Arc, Then I’ll go ahead and make this a positive. Bend and as you can see since we grouped these up now. The effect works exactly the same on both of these objects because it’s looking at it as one singular object because they’re grouped up as opposed to two different objects. So this is what you’re going to want to do. If you’re doing a lot of banner styles or similar as you can tell. This looks pretty great, and that was a very easy effect to apply. And as long as you don’t apply the effect to crazily. Do too much stuff to it. It should look pretty natural without a lot of need for further customization and also. I forgot to say at the beginning of the video, but this font is a free font and it’s called candle. I believe it is a font from font squirrel. So I’ll be sure to link that in the description. If that’s something you’re interested in, but that is it for this video. I do hope you found it helpful, and if you did feel free to leave a thumbs up, also feel free to leave comments of any of your favorite effects, or if you have any questions that I didn’t cover. We’ll ask either myself or someone else might well help you, but that’s really it. If you want to see more stuff like this, please subscribe. I do my best! Keep creating new videos just like this one and beyond that, thanks so much for watching [Music].