10 in 10 - 10 Adobe Illustrator Type Tips in 10 minutes - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch 10 in 10 tips Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley, welcome to this episode of graphic design for lunch. Today it's 10 Adobe Illustrator type tips in 10 minutes or less. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes, everyone of which teaches a small range of tips. Today it's Adobe Illustrator type tips. As you're working through this video, you may see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help other students to identify this as a class that they too may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now without delay, let's get started on our 10 type tips in 10 minutes or less. 2. Graphic Design for Lunch 10 type tips in 10 tips: Filling text with a gradient. When you create a text item in Illustrator just using the standard text tool and try to apply a gradient to it. While it looks as if the gradient has been applied to the fill, it's not actually filled with a gradient. Whatever gradient you select, nothing's going to happen at this point. If you want to fill text with a gradient, you'll need to go to the appearance panel, select your text, and in the appearance panel, just click here to add a new fill. As soon as you add a new field, you can click the drop-down here and go and select a gradient to apply to your text. Copying text formats. When you have one piece of text, such as this piece of text here, already formatted the way you want your text to look, it's very easy to copy that format and apply it to other pieces of text in an Illustrator document. Use a selection tool and select the text that you want to apply the format to. Then click on the eyedropper tool. Click over the text whose formatting you want to sample, and it will be immediately applied to your selected text. Working with dingbat fonts. When you're using fonts that are dingbat fonts or fonts that contain interesting characters, it can be difficult to ascertain exactly what those characters are that you want to use. I have a font here that is a dingbat font, it's KG flavor and frames six. I don't know what the characters look like, so I would just have to press random keys on the keyboard to see what's in that font, unless I use this tip. I'm going to choose Window and then Type, and I'm going to open the Glyphs panel here. With the Glyphs panel open, it's possible to see all the characters in this font, so it's very easy to identify a character that you may want to use. If you wish, you can enlarge the characters to see them even more clearly. Once you find the one you want to use, just double-click on it and it will be added to your document. Rounding corners of your text. You can get interesting effects from text fonts by rounding the corners of your text. Use the selection tool to select over your text, and then choose effect, stylize and then round corners. If you click on the preview, you'll be able to see the default round corners setting, which is 10 pixels, but you can increase or decrease this by just adjusting the radius. Now this may distort your font somewhat, but it may also be an interesting effect to use in your illustrations. Round corners are alive effects, at anytime you can re-select over your text, click the "Appearance Panel" click "Round Corners" and make an adjustment to the radius value. If desired, you can also remove the round corners effect by dragging and dropping it onto the trash can. Typing text on a path. You can type text on a path very easily in Illustrator, either a path you draw with the pencil tool or the pen tool or any other drawing tool. Click the "Type tool, " hover over the path and you'll see an I-beam pointer with a little wiggle through it, click once and start typing your text. The text is fully editable, so you can just click and correct a mistake. Select the selection tool and hover over any of the bars here on the type. When you do look out for a little indicator that appears under the mouse pointer until you see it, don't do anything. But once you see it, you can drag the text into a different position. Locate the same point here, wait for the indicator to appear and you can drag it back. This is the starting and ending point of the type. Again, you can hover over these points, wait for that little indicator to appear, the bar with the pointing arrow, and you can move your text along the line. Resize text and adjust text tracking with key strokes. There are a couple of shortcut keys that it really helps to learn in Illustrator for working with text. The first one is for resizing text. I've typed this text, now I'm going to use Control or Command Shift. The chevron case, either the left pointing chevron to reduce the size of the text or the right pointing chevron to increase the text size. You can also adjust tracking with some keystrokes. Use Alt or Option with the right arrow to increase the tracking, or spacing between letters and Alt or Option and the left arrow to reduce it. Moving and rotating characters in Illustrator. In Illustrator CC and later, but not in earlier versions of Illustrator, you have a new tool for moving text. I have just typed this word, magic in regular text, I've selected it. I'm going to choose the touch-type tool here, which shares the toolbar position with the type tool. With the touch-type tool, I can click on any character and then adjust it. It can be adjusted in terms of its width and height, you can move its placement relative to the other characters. Here is the height selector and each of the characters in this word can be adjusted independently of each other. This one lets me move the character this way. Now the beauty of using this touch-type tool is that unlike what we could do in earlier versions of Illustrator, is that this text remains fully editable. Once you've made your changes, you can still edit your text. I'm going back to the regular type tool here. I'm going to select this letter i, and make it an uppercase, I. You can see that the text remains fully editable in this process. Bending texts with envelope distort. For this image, I've got a stem and a basic leaf shape, and I've kept a duplicate of the leaf shape too. That's pretty important. I have my text of the word leaf. What's important here is that the leaf shape that we're using is above the text in the layers panel. Doesn't matter where the word is placed, but these two need to be in this order. You're going to select the shape you want to distort to, and the text that you want to distort. Then choose object, envelope distort, make with top object. The word leaf is now distorted to that leaf shape. In the process, we've lost the green filled leaf shape. That's why I kept a duplicate of the leaf so that I could turn it on, and now we have a mini image with our text distorted to our leaf shape. Create a cut out text effect. To create a cut out text effect like this one here, start with a word typed in uppercase letters in a very thick font. Use the Alt left arrow, shortcut key that we learned earlier to squeeze up the letters so they overlap. Select the selection tool and choose type, create outlines. Add a stroke to your text, you want it in a light color that is easy to see. I'm increasing mine to three points, and then click the stroke panel here and select this middle option, Align stroke to inside. Double-check to see that the stroke is wide enough. I think I need mine at four pixels. With the text still selected, open the pathfinder palette and click "Divide." Then choose object, expand appearance, and then object ungroup. Continue to ungroup the objects until ungroup is no longer an option. You can now open the last pallet. In the last pallet, you'll see that there are a number of items, the color that you set your stroke to be. Select the first of them and choose, "Select," "Same," "Fill color," then press "Delete." You'll have some odd little bits in your font that you need to remove. You can zoom in and just tidy those up. There you have your cut out text effect. Larger size font preview. When you're previewing fonts to use in Illustrator, you may find that these font previews are a little small. You can increase their size by choosing on a Windows machine, "Edit" and then "Preferences," and then "Type." On a Mac, you'll choose "Illustrator" and then "Preferences" and "Type." Here you have the font preview option, so you can set the size instead of small or medium to large. When you do so, your font preview is going to increase in size, making it a little bit easier to identify a font that you may want to use. Your project for this class is really, really simple. I just like you to go to the project area, and tell me the one tip that really struck a chord with you. I'm going to use the information that you give me through the your class project, when I'm developing further 10 for 10 tips in future. I hope that you've enjoyed this course. I hope that you've learned lots about working with type in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course, when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this is a class that they too may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Hellen Bradley, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.