Transcript:
– Hello and welcome to this Design Cuts video tutorial today. We’re going to have a look at creating perspective text in Illustrator. Now Illustrator has a Perspective Tool here in the tool bar and first of all, you’re going to select the Perspective Grid Tool. And when you click on that tool, you get the perspective grid. Now you possibly already seen this when you’re working in Illustrator, and you’ve possibly struggled to get rid of it. I’m going to show you how to do that in just a minute. But for now, I’m just going to stretch out the grid so it’s a little bit larger. So, I’ve got a little bit more room to put my text in. I’m gonna drag down here to enlarge it in a vertical direction. Now if ever you apply a grid and need to get rid of it, you’ll just go to the View option here, choose Perspective Grid and then Hide Grid, and that just hides it away. But I want to see it, so I’m going to show it. The selector up here allows you to select the panel you’re going to be working on, so right now, this panel is selected. Now this one is selected, and now the other one at the back in the bottom here is selected. We’re just going to be using these two top ones. Now we’re going to create a rectangle directly on the grid and we can do that, so I’m going to the Rectangle Tool. I’m just goint to start dragging inside the grid here and you can see that our rectangle is placed in perspective. If I go to the Perspective Selection Tool, then I can just select this shape, and I can stretch it out again in perspective. Now I need another rectangle over here, so I’m going back to the Rectangle Tool. If I want to draw on this panel, I need to click here to choose this panel as the one I’m going to be drawing on. I’m just going to line it up and put it in here. Now this one, I want to be a lighter shade of grey, so I’m just going straight to the colour swatch panel here. I’m just going to choose my lighter shade of grey. So now I’ve got my rectangles in place, it’s time to add my text. Now you might think that because we could draw shapes on the perspective grid that we can just go ahead and type text on it. Well you can’t, unfortunately. You’re going to have to pre-prepare your text. And what I’ve done is, I’ve already typed the text just so you don’t have to sit here and watch me type. So I have three elements and each one of them is independent of the other, so I can move them and work with them independently. At the moment, they’re behind these rectangles in the layer palette in the stacking order, if you’d like, So what I’m going to do is just move them up to the top by just moving the rectangles underneath them. That will mean that when I add my text to the perspective grid, it’s going to be on top of the rectangle so we can see it. To add my text to the perspective grid, I’m going to select the Perspective Selection Tool, and I’m going to grab my paste of text. I’m going to drag and drop it into the appropriate perspective panel. Well, I haven’t chosen the right one, so I’m just going to press Command Z, or Control Z to undo it. Let’s go and select the right panel before we start. So I’m just placing my text in position. It’s coming quite small. I”m going to hold the Shift key as I drag on the bottom corner handle here, so I can stretch my text out to fill the area that I want it to consume. Now my text is black and so too is the panel behind it. I want to change the colour of my text. You might think that selecting the text with the Perspective Selection Tool would be a good idea. Well, let’s just go and select the colour. Well the white colour hasn’t been applied to the text because you can’t edit the text using the Perspective Selection Tool. Instead, we’re going back to the regular Selection Tool. And I’m going to double-click on my paste of text. And what that does is it opens up in a text editing mode. So you can see the text is already selected and we’re in a sort of isolation mode. So with my text selected, I can now select the colour I want for my text. And all I’ll do then, is to press the Escape key twice to exit out of that isolation mode back into the regular editing mode and now my text has changed colour. So let’s go and get another paste of text again. The Perspective Selection Tool… Again, make sure that you’ve selected the panel you want to put your text in to drag and drop it into the panel. Now this one again is way way too small. So I’m going to hold the Shift Key as I drag on the corner anchor. Now if it doesn’t move far enough, just let go and then go and give it a second pull. I’m just gonna move this up a little bit. It’s probably a little bit too big now. Again, I want to change the colour of this so I’m going back to the regular Selection Tool. I’m going to double-click on my type to go into this sort of perspective text editing mode. Now I’m going to choose the colour type I want and then I’ll press Escape twice to go back to regular editing. Now I just need to put a piece of text in over here. So again, I’m going to the Perspective Selection Tool. I’m going to make sure that I select the panel where I want the text to go, which is this one over here. I’m going to drag and drop it in over here. Again, it’s too small. Hold the Shift key as I stretch it out. Now you don’t have to hold the Shift key, but if you don’t hold the Shift key, you’ll find that you’re distorting your text. I actually just want my text to be bigger. I don’t want it to be distorted. Again, I want to recolor this, so again, back to the Selection Tool, double-click on the text, go and choose the colour I want to use, press Escape twice, and then we’re back into our editing mode. At this point, you can make some fine tuning adjustments if you need to. I think my text is a little bit out of position. I’m just gonna zoom in here with the regular Zoom Tool. Make sure that I’m on the Perspective Selection Tool. Now I can just nudge this text down a little bit. Just dragging on it with the mouse. When I’m happy with the placement, I’ll press Control or Command zero to zoom back out. At this point, we no longer need the perspective grid. So I’ll choose View, and then Perspective Grid, and then Hide Grid. And here is our perspective text. We’ve been able to draw the rectangles directly onto the perspective grid. But for our text, we had to pre-prepare the text and then use the Perspective Selection Tool to drag it into the perspective grid. We’re using the regular Selection Tool to double-click on the text if we need to edit it. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning these Illustrator techniques. Let us know what you think in the comments below, and give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed the tutorial. Until next time, I’m Helen Bradley for Design Cuts.