Transcript:
So in this video? I’m going to be going over the type on a path tool, a surprisingly easy to use tool that’s also extremely useful to know how to use, so the most common example is probably using type on a path on a circular shape like this. You can also use it on a wavy or an arch shape or pretty much any shape at all. All that matters is that you have a path to put the type on. So the first thing we want to do because of that is to create a path to put the type on, so go ahead and draw a shape that you want to put the type on in this case. I’m just going to use the shape tool and go down to the ellipse tool by clicking and holding on what is typically the rectangle over here because that is an easy way to draw a circle, so I’m gonna hold shift as I use the ellipse tool to draw a perfect circle and this will become the shape that we put the type on so next up, you’re going to want to go over to the type tool, and when you go to the type tool, you want to make sure you click and hold on that and select type on a path tool if you just use the type tool and go on the edge of the path of a shape, it’ll just fill that shape with text, which I guess is kind of a neat feature if you want to make the interior of a circle filled with text or some other shape, but that’s not what we’re trying to do here, so I’m going to go back to the type tool. Click and hold on that and then use type on a path and then you just want to move your cursor to the edge of the path that you want to add the type on and click once so in this particular version of Illustrator, it automatically fills this in with some lorem Ipsum type, but you can go ahead and just double Click in here and type whatever you want. Not all illustrator versions will necessarily do this pre-made filler type, but I’ll just go ahead and write type on a path a few times and this will allow us to make some changes, so we can make sure we fill out everything that we need to fill out so. I’ll make this too long on purpose, so I can then show some ways to go ahead and shrink this up, so the easiest way to make change is once you have. Your basic type. Set up here is to go to window and then type and then character, so you can go ahead and have the character panel open with a bunch of different options for adjusting the type, and also you’ll see these bars on the shape itself. This is essentially the start and the end point of where the type on the path will be. If I make this bar, go to the left. More, it’ll shrink the type up to a point where it cuts off at that particular bar. And if I move it to the right more, I can kind of move these two bars together to have as much type on here as possible. This tiny little red plus sign just means that there’s type overflowing. There’s too much type on it. So lets me know that. I need to shrink this type down or reduce the amount of text in here, so I’m gonna go ahead and just reduce the font size itself by going to the character window going to the set the font size option. Just click on this down arrow until we get this to a point where all the different characters are in here and apparently. I type this wrong, so I’ll just go ahead and change that zero to a dash mark and make sure and have another space after it, and then I can go ahead and select this once again. Make it one point bigger, and this is roughly the size that we want to make this so another way you can handle filling this in a little bit better for whatever your shape is is if I were to have perhaps this entire section just be gone, so I’d have not nearly enough type to fill up this particular shape. I could then go to the character panel and go to the tracking and just set this to be a much larger number. Basically, the bigger the number of tracking the more space between every letter and space will be added to it, so I can go ahead and make this something like 200 or in this case, even much bigger like 300 which will give us a ton of space between these letters to help it Fill up, alternatively. I can remove this tracking back to zero and just increase the font size once again until it fills up this entire path to a point, or I think it looks pretty good, but sometimes you might want to do a combination of both adjust the font size adjust the tracking a little bit until it really lines up the way you want it to line up and that’s pretty much the basics of the type tool, but there are more options that you can go ahead and do with the type tool. Someone move this character window down a little bit and then go to type at the top tool bar here and then from type there will be an option called type on a path a little bit down and from that we want to go to type on a path options, so lets we’ll bring up a window with the type on a path options that have some different effects and also different ways of aligning the text. Also make sure that you click this preview button so that you can see the changes in real time as you do them, so there’s different effects and by default, it’s rainbow, but there’s skew, which kind of does is wonky, skew effect, depending on the shape that you’re using. There’s three ribbon, which is kind of wild and this is what it looks like on a circle. These will all look different on different shapes. I can go through with a squiggly line on the right side and a little bit here. There’s stair-step, which has the type stepping down kind of like staircase. It’s all vertical, and then there’s gravity, which doesn’t look any different on a circle, but it looks crazy different on different types of shapes, so rainbow will probably work for you most the time, but there’s different options there. If you want a different appearance, also, flip will just flip the type. So in this case, it flips it on the inside of the path that we have so. If you want your type to be on the inside like this, just hit that flip button. There’s a line to path options, which is where the type aligns based on the path by default. It’s on the baseline of the type itself, but you can do it by the A sender of the type, so it’s gonna shove that inside, just like this. You can use the D sender of the type, which will kick it out even further, and you can also use the center of the type, which will make it be on the roughly the center of the path that you’ve selected depending on where the center of the actual type is there, but I’d say baseline is probably what you’re going to use most of the time, so these are also options that are available but to show some of these other options as well. I’m going to draw another line just like I did here. You can use the pen tool. You can use the brush tool it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that there’s a path, so I’ll quickly draw another line, just like I did above roughly the same. Go back to my type tool, go to type on a path and then create a type on a path on this line that I just drew, so that’ll fill this in with some filler type. So now if I go back and I go to type and then type on a path and then type on a path options, this will actually start to look quite a bit different here and also make sure that your type is selected before you try to select the type on a path tool if it’s not selected, it won’t even let you do this, so with these options here now as I go down the different effects, you’re going to see some much different looking effects based on this, being a normal line as opposed to a circle and also don’t. Forget to check the preview button before you get going. Otherwise, you’ll go through these options and it will all look the same, so there’s skew, which just changes this up a little bit as you can see, it doesn’t have quite as natural a flow. It’s a bit more vertical. There’s 3d ribbon, which kind of looks funky as it goes up here, not really a fan of that. Personally, There’s stair-step once again, everything’s vertical stepping up and down on that vertical path, but gravity is gonna look far different because it treats the really low ends of a path kind of crazy as if it was a really high gravity field here where it is flattens, everything out some of these options. I find it kind of hard to figure out what the actual use case is where you’d want anything to ever look like this. I’m not so sure, but those are available. If you want to do that, but that pretty much sums up the type on a path options, hopefully all that makes sense. And, of course you can use your character when we’re here to adjust the tracking. If you want to do that to move your type out more and also on any path that you make with type, you can use the direct selection tool, which is a on your keyboard. It’s the white arrow to select individual points on a path and adjust them and really fine-tune stuff. If you want to do that, it’s helpful if you drew this freehand like I did and things kind of have these weird points where they don’t line up like. You think they should, for example, this? M looks a little bit harsh. Where if I were to balance this out piece by piece a little bit more things can start to look slightly more natural, but as you can tell, it is a time intensive process, and this isn’t helping me at all to select this. There we go, but, of course, that’s an option and also you can just select the type using the black arrow or the selection tool, hold Alt on a PC or option on a Mac and then click hold and drag this down to do a copy. Then you can right-click it. You can create outlines and then right-click it and ungroup it so you could individually move letters around after you did that. If you want a lot more flexibility than the actual path might give you, but be mindful once you do this. It’s no longer Editable text where I could go ahead and change this to say something different very easily if I wanted to. So as soon as you outline it, you can’t do that anymore. Which is why? I suggest you duplicate it, but that’s really it. This video a pretty straightforward when it comes to the type on a path tool, I personally find it to be an extremely helpful tool and I hope you found this to be helpful as well. So if you did find it helpful. Please leave a thumbs up to let me know. And if you want to see more stuff like this, please subscribe. I do my best to keep creating new videos just like this. Thank you so much for watching [Music].