Transcript:
[MUSIC] Hey, guys, it’s! Kerry Hawkins, with another Vector made tutorial today, is gonna be the third video in my tool bar series for Adobe Illustrator. We’re gonna go over the text type tools over here. I’m going to click on these and I’m gonna drag this out to create a sub menu so you can see everything we’re gonna talk about. If you didn’t see my previous two episodes, we went over selection tools and the pinned tools. So go ahead and check those out when you get a chance and then come back to this one. Maybe because we’re probably going to reference a few of these things today. Maybe not the pin tools, but definitely we’ll do some selection tool stuff, so you need to know how those work in order to get through today’s tutorial, so let’s go ahead and jump in and get started. The first tool is the type tool hotkey T and you can either click, and it will start some lorem ipsum, which is just some Latin filler text or you can click and drag and it will fill in whatever space you just created. Now as as you release the click, it’s going to have the all the text highlighted just showing you that. Hey, it will fill in with this. Lorem ipsum. If you don’t start typing, so if I click away, it’s got the lorem ipsum now, right, but if I let’s do this again and delete these come back in and click. And if I start typing, that goes away, right so same thing if I click and drag and if I just type in one letter number or something, boom, it no longer fills in that entire space, So just know that you’re gonna get that filler text. If you don’t start typing in your own text, the second tool in this type, a sub menu is the area type tool and I will go ahead and create real quickly with the pen tool, a shape. I’m using a solo graphic here. Just something I grabbed offline, lets. Just grab here and here and make a little point. Maybe over here, do something like this, and if you’re not familiar how to use the pen tool, my last video discussed, you know how you make shapes, so go ahead and go back to that one and take a look. You want to get familiar with how you do this because I don’t want to. Just explain everything that I’m doing here. My last video did all that really. Well, so now that. I’ve got this shape as you can see. I’ll kind of toggle it the back and forth here on the stroke and fill just so you can see the shape. We are going to grab this tool right here. Area type tool. Click on the edge. If you click on the center, you’ll get this error message, so make sure that you’re clicking on the edge and it should auto populate with some text now. I’m gonna just select away so that I can see what I’ve made. That’s what it does just gonna give you some warm if some filler text, and maybe we just say. Solo Star Wars story. Something like that. And then we’ll have some little warm. If some underneath something along those lines, let’s bump the size of this up, just a little bit just so you can see what it does as you’re making changes. It does something like that right, but all of this text is gonna fit within this space. It’s not gonna go beyond this barrier right here, And if it’s too big like the solo can’t fit above here without splitting, so it’s gonna just push it automatically down, right, so that’s how this works if I made this smaller Solo would bump up here into these higher spots as it gets smaller, it can fit higher and higher up. See so, and it’s not perfect as you can see. It kind of jumps down and then jumps back up. Sometimes you just have to mess with things That’s part of living in Illustrator, but what’s really cool about this shape now is that I can go and change it, so you can use some of your tools that we discussed here last time, like the direct selection tool or some of the pen tools to change this shape to get the text to wrap differently, So let’s say. I want to come in here And with direct selection tool, grab this Anchor Point and move it up. It’s going to change how this shape curves here, and then the tech fills it in a little bit differently. Right, so lets maybe move this one. If I move that up. Then solo can fit higher. A Star Wars story can fit higher and my text below. It is bumped up as well lets. Just bring this and see what that looks like. If it’s more condensed, you see you get the idea now. That looks terrible because you know, Solo is over the Millennium Falcon here. And I really wouldn’t want that, but just so you can see. These are the options that you have. You can change the shape of this thing. You can add a curve to this, just like we talked about last time, and that was kind of interesting. Cecil, it comes over here now, So there’s all sorts of manipulation You can do to these shapes once you’ve created them and you’ve got your text in there very handy tool. The third tool is the type on a path tool, so let’s just use the pen tool real quick to create a simple arc and just do that, and then we’ll grab that tool type on path, You know, click somewhere over here. Wherever you want your path of text to start and it will create your lorem Ipsum text. So I’m just gonna type in some sort of a title text tools, something like that. Now, if I click off using the selection tool, you’ll get these little handles. This is going to be where the text starts. This is going to be where the text ends now currently. I have mine! Center justified if I’m left justified, which is most likely your default. It’s going to come over here to this line right here. If it’s right justified, it’s gonna come over to this line right here. Now that matters for like when you’re changing the size, it will expand out from based on wherever the line. It’s justified, right, so if it’s justified, right, it’s gonna as I get smaller. It’s gonna get closer to the right side. If it’s centered, it’s just gonna stay in the middle, but as you can see, the center line is here and the center of my shape is really here, so it’s a little bit off. That’s because this is not perfectly flush with the bottom, whereas this side is so what you can do is hover over that and get this little indicator underneath your cursor that you you can click and drag and then move where that text start line is. So we come all the way down here, and now it is actually perfectly centered and lets. Just make that a little bit bigger, so you can kind of see what it does. Boom boom boom, right and I’ll spread it out. Maybe just a little bit something like that. Cool now! What’s neat, what’s you have? Your text typed on a path like this? You can come over to your type on a path tool. Double click, and it will bring up some options. Now go ahead and hit preview so you can see the changes you’re gonna make the effects is gonna be like. How does the text respond to the shape you just created and rainbows, usually what I’m gonna use, but I’ll show you what the rest do skew. It’s going to keep everything up and down vertically, but then as it curves, it’s gonna skew that text, so here’s the difference Rainbow. They’re kind of fanned out like a rainbow skew. They’re gonna be straight up and down But sort of skewed as they come around the edges here, 3d ribbon. I never use this one. I just find it’s not very pleasing to the eye, but there may be. Somebody’s got an example of time that they’ve used this, and it worked out really well. I find it’s just kind of annoying looking. Same with stair-step. I don’t like that. That’s just not changing the text in any way other than its vertical location. So it’s there all flat as if you were to type these individually. I just don’t like that. Look again! There might be a need for that in certain applications, but just most of the time I can’t think of one, and then the last one’s gonna be gravity where it’s like. There’s a center point here that pulling the text to it, so I that could have some applications as well, but most the time I want to be in rainbow every now, and then I’ll do something is in skew, but rainbow is usually the one that I want aligned a path. This is going to be baseline, so the baseline. Is this line that you see? Everything sucks into that baseline. If you do a cinder, it’s going to go beyond that baseline. If you go, descender’s go to the other side. And if you do center line, it’s going to go right on the middle of that line. I’m either a cinder or base line on most of these and Ill. Show you in just a sec spacing. I don’t ever mess with because you can always change your kerning and tracking within your character menu and we’ll go over that a little later and flip changes the text to be on the other side of the the path that you created, so why that’s important? I’ll show you here in just a sec. Let’s hit, okay. I’m going to use my selection tool to click and drag. I’m holding shift and Alt at the same time to create a copy. And I’m gonna take my selection tool out here to this bounding box edge, where it turns into this curve with two arrows on it. Now, if I click and drag here, it’s going to give me a rotation option for this object. It’s a path with text now. I want to hold shift so that it will rotate perfectly around and I want. I want a 180 degree. Copy, all right, so I release my click. I’ve got a copy here now. I’m gonna do the same thing where I double. Click on my type on a path tool. Bring this up! Go ahead and click preview hit flip and now the text reads the right way, but it’s on the baseline and it’s above, whereas this one’s above, but it looks like it’s on a different path, right so it. I don’t like the way this is situated. What you’re going to want to do is hit a cinder and then hit. OK, now what you’ll notice is if I have both of these selected. This is right on the baseline and this one is off of the baseline a little bit, So what I would do is just come into your character menu and down here is the set baseline shift, and you’re gonna bump that up a little bit until it gets to that line so about there. That looks really good, so this is really helpful. If you’re gonna do just like circles or something, if you got a logo and the little here, maybe you got, you know, let’s just put in a quick shape, something like that. And your logo was found in hearing. You need text on above and below it well. You might do something like that. That’s that’s how you use this tool. Most effectively, the next three icons are the same as the first three They’re just for vertical type instead of normal horizontal. So if we click here, it’ll create some lorem ipsum. And if I click and drag, it will do the same thing within the bounds of the box. I just created if I click on my vertical area type tool and I already created this shape with the pen tool. It will fill in that text with vertical text within that shape that I just created and then the same thing for the vertical type on a path tool. If I click on the path, it will make some text that goes along this way, so all the same stuff. Just vertical text instead. Okay, for this last tool, we’re going to talk about this touch type tool, which is hotkey shift. T and really to do this. I want you to go ahead and pull up your character menu. So if you go under window and then to type and then character or hit ctrl T. It should pop up depending on where you have it. I like to have mine over here on the side, so you might have yours floating around somewhere located elsewhere, But just I’ll pull it out for now so we can take a look at it. You’ll also see the touch type tool over here first. I’m going to kind of talk about all these things in here and then we’re going to talk about the touch type tool, So this is gonna have everything that relates to your font in laid out here. So like this is the font family you’re using. This is gonna be the font style, and I’ve got. I’ve already typed this out so that I’ve got two different styles of the same font family in here, so it’s going to show up blank like that. If there if it’s mixed, this is going to be your font size. This is going to be the spacing between each line, call the leading. This is gonna be your kerning, which is the space between your characters, and it’s you’re tracking, so this is gonna be for everything. The space in between then you have vertical scale horizontal scale. This is going to be a shift from the baseline, the higher up. It is your baseline. Is this blue line here? That goes kind of at the bottom of the text for each time. I press up. It goes up every time I first down. It goes down and it makes more sense if there’s variety here, but I’ll show you in a minute and then this is the character rotation, Plus you have all these all caps, small caps, superscript subscript underline and strikethrough so kind of your typical font text choices here, so this one obviously just changes the size of your font, so we can just do 72 This one would change the space between the next line. So maybe we do 60 to make it look cool. There are a couple settings in here sometimes. I go with Auto on some fonts. Sometimes I do optical and then other times I go in and actually change things manually just to give you. Some tips on these optical is good for usually it’s gonna be good for, like standard fonts, your regular sans serif and Serif fonts optical looks pretty good. It just kind of pulls everything in. It makes it look visually more pleasing by just a quick generic. Fix on your type. The time it doesn’t work. Let me see if I can find a good font, But it doesn’t really a script 12 pitch. I think does a pretty good job. Also, let me change that to a lowercase, okay, so with this font on optical, see? I’ve got it set to optical. There are gaps in between these letters where they’re supposed to connect. And so if I go Auto, yeah, we’ll see some of those gaps fixed, so I recommend when you’re using a script. Font of some sort that you probably want to do Auto, and then you’re probably also going to want to come in and manually change some things as you can see. There’s a space here, and this kind of doesn’t look great and there’s a space here, so it’s not perfect, but as a starting point. Auto is usually going to be better for your scripts and optical is usually better for your other regular, just normal fonts that don’t have any funky characters or cursive qualities or anything like that. This other one over here is going to be the tracking, so this will be if you want to spread out all the letters, and I’ll show you. It’s got a range of negative 100 to positive 200 You can go beyond this, but you just have to type it in manually So like, let me see, see, maybe 50 and then maybe we’d select this and do 200 and then. I mean, I’d probably have to bring the size of this down or something like this to make. It look right. Maybe even do a thousand, so you can come in here and type in. You know whatever you want and make it look something like this. You know, that might be something cool to do, right. Just to vary up your fonts. You can do font weight. And then the the tracking as well can be different just to give you some variety for, like, a pretty cool title or something like that so for here and then I don’t normally mess with these too often. The vertical horizontal scales. Just show you what they do. Obviously this is gonna squish your text or blow it up. Same thing here vertically horizontally. Blow it up, blow everything up the problem with that is it just doesn’t look proportionate. You know, you’re going to have skinnier sections here, And then this is gonna be fatter and I just don’t like that. Look, usually if you’re wanting to do that. Just pick your font and do a different style in the fahren. See if you want it skinnier. Use a condensed version of that font, right, because it’s meant to be seen at a condensed size. If you if you blow things up like this, it’s not meant to be seen this way, and it looks kind of funky the only time. I do use that as if I’m vectorizing something That has some bastardized fonts. So you may need to know how to do it. Just because somebody else has made a poor decision. The all right baseline shift. If I let’s just click on bar and we’ll move it up, Okay, just start clicking up and you’ll see that it shifts from the baseline. You know, sometimes people do something fun for a logo. Maybe they’ll have a letter kind of bump up and then down or something like there’s a bouncing ball, and it jumps over one of the letters or something like that that might be a way to do it, there’s. Some other uses for it too, but you know, the gist of it is just the higher the number the higher it’s gonna go the lower the lower. It’s gonna go that kind of thing, and you can do all sorts of stuff with it so anyway. That’s kind of what that’s for, And then rotation is gonna be like this. If I want to rotate the letters and again, you can do any letter. It doesn’t have to be like we could just say we just want this. Oh, rotated, lets. Just do it click in here and then rotate it to there now. Obviously that looks terrible. You’d have to come in and change the values here. The distance between these two. But that’s the general idea behind this tool is rotating text, right. I don’t use it very often. It’s not a very helpful tool. In my opinion, all caps would be like if you had a font. That was lowercase like this, and you clicked here. They will go all caps for you. If you wanted to do small caps, let me show you what that would look like. If I have some upper and lower case and you do small caps, It’s gonna make your lowercase uppercase, but they’re not gonna be quite the same height See, and then superscript would be like if we had. Let’s just throw in a dollar sign here real quick. You wanted to do superscript. It could be up here and if you had. I don’t know, maybe you wanted to make like a footnote or something. Let’s just do one and there you can do like a footnote like that or something for the subscript then normally. I end up having to change the size of these a little bit too. So like that might be too big. You might have to do 48 and then you may have to mess with this a little bit to get it in the right spot, visually where you want it, but that’s the gist of it. Is this kind of already puts it in an area where it’s more easily worked with than if it was this size of a font underline, it does exactly what it says it does. It underlines the the font and then strike through. Does the same thing strikes through? I don’t use to strike through very often underline on occasion, although I tend to like, you know, make my own underlines with, like a line segment tool or something like that. So anyway, just something to consider now how this touch type tool works. Let’s get into that. This is going to give you the option to move around letters individually and very easily. So you just kind of come in here and grab the letter that you want to move and it will shift the text accordingly and you you can go up down, left right with it, but it’s like a quick way to just adjust the spacing between some letters, you know, so it’s pretty cool as far as that goes, and it shifts everything else that you’re dealing with too, so I as I move this in, Everything’s going to kind of come in together. Proportionately shrink in together. You know, so it’s not just moving one piece. It’s moving all of them in relation to each other, so that’s what that’s used for the problem. I have with this is like you can shift up and down too easily. It’s really nice. If you’re wanting to create a like custom effect here like a lot of moving parts or something, but I usually don’t use this for, like the spacing between letters because you can shift up and down too easily. So what I like to do and this is. This is my little hotkey. Trick is use your type tool and all. I did was double. Click, right. If you’re not in your type tool you can hit. T that’s a hotkey or you can double click on text, and that will get you the type tool as well. So if you want to like, adjust the spacing in here on your own, you can click in these spaces here and adjust it accordingly like this, or you can just kind of click here and hold Alt and go left and right with your left and right keys on the keyboard and then you can app and then when you let go of all, you can then shift freely using left and right arrow keys to move in between letters and then hold Alt again, move left. Alright, hold alt again. Move, right. All you can do just like that and you can do things manually. So that you’re you’re getting exactly the spacing that you want. I find that that’s the best way to do it for most type because the settings in here aren’t always going to be perfect in your and depending on where you got your font. It may not have the perfect spacing in it built in so especially on these cheaper like scripty type fonts. So anyway, that is the full tutorial on all of the type tools. So if you have any questions, leave those down below. I will answer them. Please, like and subscribe. And I look forward to showing you guys. The next video in the tool bar series. Alright, see you later.