Text over Busy Backgrounds in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunchâ„¢ Class | Helen Bradley | Skillshare
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Text over Busy Backgrounds in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunchâ„¢ Class

teacher avatar Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunchâ„¢

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Place Text Over a Busy Background in Illustrator Introduction

      0:51

    • 2.

      Pt 1 Choose a Good Font

      3:15

    • 3.

      Pt 2 Choose a Contrasting Color of Type

      1:21

    • 4.

      Pt 3 Change the Scale

      1:44

    • 5.

      Pt 4 Add a Drop Shadow

      3:33

    • 6.

      Pt 5 Add One or More Strokes

      4:35

    • 7.

      Pt 6 Layer Multiple Copies of the Text

      4:43

    • 8.

      Pt 7 Use a Semi Transparent Overlay

      4:28

    • 9.

      Pt 8 Create a Knockout Text Effect

      3:29

    • 10.

      Pt 9 Working with Photos

      6:49

    • 11.

      Project and Wrapup

      1:19

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About This Class

In this course you will learn a range of techniques for placing text over busy backgrounds in Illustrator. These include basics like choosing the right font to use and harnessing the power of contrast to make the text visible. We'll also look at other techniques such as drop shadows, knockouts, offset text, and more. Each method is explored in detail so you can follow along. Along the way you will learn to use some important features of the Appearance panel and Illustrator tools and techniques you can use everyday in Illustrator - after all, this is a Graphic Design for Lunch™ class!

In the class I mention my recent class on making knockouts - Knockouts in Illustrator - Holes in Shapes - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

If you liked this class then you may enjoy these other classes of mine:

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Meet Your Teacher

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Helen Bradley

Graphic Design for Lunchâ„¢

Top Teacher

Helen teaches the popular Graphic Design for Lunch™ courses which focus on teaching Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Illustrator®, Procreate®, and other graphic design and photo editing applications. Each course is short enough to take over a lunch break and is packed with useful and fun techniques. Class projects reinforce what is taught so they too can be easily completed over a lunch hour or two.

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Place Text Over a Busy Background in Illustrator Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Placing Text Over Busy Backgrounds in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this course, I'll show you techniques for making text more easily seen when placed over a busy pattern or a photograph. As we work through these techniques, you'll learn tricks such as adding multiple appearances to type, using drop shadows, gradients and knockouts, and how to choose legible typefaces. These techniques will extend your skills when working in Illustrator every day. Enough from me, if you're ready, let's get started placing text successfully over busy images in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Choose a Good Font: The first thing that we're going to look at in terms of making your type legible over a busy background is your actual choice of font. Now, I've got a series of fonts here. Let's just run down and identify what we've got and what are the potential problems with them. This one is actually probably your best choice. It is what's called a San-serif font. It has no little fate on the end of the characters, and the characters are all sort of even thickness. You'll see that there are no thicks or thins in the sans-serif font. This font is Myriad Pro and it's installed typically with the Adobe applications. This is a font that is called Sofia. It's also a san-serif. It has no real fate on the end of the characters. It is less good to use because of the thick-thin transitions. You would find that on a busy background, the thinner areas are likely to disappear, because they are much smaller than the other letters. This is a font which deserves better treatment than I just gave to it. It's called Arizonia. The problem with this font is it should never be set in uppercase ever. The letter forms here are designed to be used with a capital letter and lower case letters. This is just practically illegible on any sort of background. This is what it should look like and set correctly, you have a better chance of rating it, but again, the thick-thin transitions in this typeface are going to make it less appropriate for adding over the top of a busy background. Here too, this is actually a Serif typeface that's gotten it or fate on the end of the characters. It's called CongaLineNF, but because the thin transitions are so thin, relative to the other areas of the type. Again, this is not going to be a good typeface to set on a busy background. This is an example of a pretty standard serif font has got little fate. You would find something similar if you were looking at things like Times New Roman, for example. Again, it's going to have some problems on a really busy background because of these very thin transitions and the thinner areas here. They're likely to disappear into a busy background. Quite simply, your best choices are going to be a San-serif font that is fairly blocky, that's got characters that are nice, even width. It's going to be ideal for being able to read that text on a background is going to give you a good starting point. Now I have this font and this font at a smaller size. Let me just turn those on for you. Here they are. This one is the san-serif, and this one is a serif font. As I'm looking at it, this one looks a little bit grayer, even though they're set in the exact same color, because these characters are, even with, the text looks a little bit blacker. It's a little bit more legible. Even though in terms of point size, this is only 30 points and I had to crank this one up to 48 points to get it to be the same physical size. It's also just a little bit gray. Again, it's losing something on a busy background. The very first thing that you want to do is make a good choice of font. Give yourself the best possible chance of your type being legible on your background. 3. Pt 2 Choose a Contrasting Color of Type: The second thing that you'll want to look at when you're trying to get text away from the background is building in some contrast between the text and the background. Here I've got some text that is colored the exact same pink as I've sampled from the background pattern and the text is lost in this image. This is got a lighter color sample it's a little bit more legible, but basically it's lost too. The white is just pure white and it's standing out quite well against the background because it contrasts against it. This is sort of Pinky's sort of musty colors and the white is so crisp that it's standing out. The black is really contrasty. It's at the other end of the spectrum. It's really, really dark against a lighter sort of background. By choosing contrasty colors, you can make sure that your type is more easily seen over a background. But we're going to look at these colors here because there are ways that you could make colors like this separate from the background. We're going to see how to do that in the later videos. But if you want a really quick and dirty solution, then choosing high contrast colors, like in this case black and white will certainly give you type that can be easily read over a background such as this one. 4. Pt 3 Change the Scale: Another option you have when you're trying to make Type B more recognizable over a busy background, is to change the scale of the type. These much larger letters are a little bit easier to see than the smaller versions, particularly in this lighter color. But let's see what too, we can do with the background, I've actually created a second rectangle filled with a smaller version of the pattern. If we reduce the size of the pattern, then the text starts to lift off the background, so changing the scale of what you're working with, for example, reducing the size of a pattern or increasing the size of the text, or doing both, can give you an effect that is more easily read. Now, obviously to scale your text, you're just going to select on your text with the selection tool and then just drag on it's corner handles. If you hold the Shift key as you do this, you'll constrained the texts so you're not sort of skewing it out of proportion. It's not going to do this, and it's not going to do this. To change the scale of a pattern filled object, you'll select the pattern filled object here in the last panel, you can say that I've got this pattern filled last selected. Choose Object, Transform and then Scale. You're going to disable Transform Objects, because you don't want to change the size of the object. You just want to change the size of the pattern within the object. In this case, I'm going to increase it. Let's just take it up, to say 200. So you can just type in the uniform box here, a value to increase or decrease the size of the pattern within that box. 5. Pt 4 Add a Drop Shadow: One simple way to visually separate your texts from the background is to give it a drop shadow. I'm going to select this word pink, I'm going to the Effect menu and choose stylize and then drop shadow. Just note that there's true stylize options here on this menu just to add confusion to the situation, it's the one at the top that you want to be using and choose drop shadow. Now the default drop shadow is going to look something like this. It's going to be set to Multiply blend mode, which is a darkening blend mode. The color is a black sort of color, the opacity will be around 75 percent and the x and y offset and blur will be seven pixels and five pixels. But that might differ depending on whether you've been using this dialogue or not. Now if you wanted it to blend in a little bit better rather than being as stark as it is, there are few things that you could do. You could dial down the opacity to, for example something like 50 percent, and it will blend in a little bit better. You could also increase the blue and that will soften the effect a little bit. Let me just put it back up to 75 percent because you can also use a color other than black. Let's go and click here. I've already sampled the colors from my artworks, so I'm going to color swatches, and I'm going to select the color that we're using in this artwork, so it's this pink color and click "Okay". Because we're using Multiply blend mode here, it's actually acting as a drop shadow. We can take that even up to a 100 percent, and we would get a slightly darker effect. If you want this color, but a little bit darker, click on it and go down here to the Bay value, that's the brightness value. If we drop that from what it is right now, which is 78 down to, for example, 60, we're going to get a darker version of the pink color. We're still going to get a pink drop shadow, but it's going to be a little bit darker than it was. You can play around with the options here in the drop shadow dialog. Now, in addition to a pink drop shadow, you could also use a lighter one. Let me just grab a duplicate of this pink color. Let me go and remove the drop shadow. I do that by selecting all my type and going to the appearance panel. You can get to that by choosing window and then appearance. What I'm going to do is select this drop shadow layer and I'm just going to trash it. Now let's go and put a lighter drop shadow on this type. With it selected, we'll go back to Effect and stylize and drop shadow. We're going to set the blend mode instead of multiply to screen, because screen is a lightening blend mode and you can already see the effect that this dark pink color has had on the pattern filled object underneath. It's a lightening effect. So you could, for example, bring down the blur radius to tighten it up a little bit. You could also use an even lighter colors, so let's go back to our color swatches. I've got another color that is from this document, this color here. I could use that as a drop shadow. Again, that's very intense, so I might drop that back down to say 75 percent. You can use drop shadows as either darkening effects or lightning affects. Just make sure that if you want a dark drop shadow that you're using multipliers, the blend mode. If you want a light drop shadow, then you're going to use screen as your blend mode for the shadow. 6. Pt 5 Add One or More Strokes: Another option that you have for lifting your type above a basic background is to add a border around it, a stroke in effect. I have my type selected here. I've got the stroke selected. I'm going to click to add a stroke and I'm sampling and using one of the colors from the artwork here I'm going to show you in just a second, how I got those colors. Just going to increase the stroke weight here. Now I can also place it on the outside of the letters here with Align Stroke to outside so that just makes sure that the stroke is on the outside of the letters. Now we can go one step further and add multiple strokes. But to do that, we're going to need to use a slightly different process. Before we do that, let's see how I got the colors from the artwork into my swatches panel. What I did was I selected the object that actually had the colors in it that I wanted so that's this background here. I've targeted and selected it. I've gone to the Swatches panel and clicked here on New Color Group. When I click that, I get the option here of what I want to get my colors from, and I want it from selected artwork and I want these two options checked, and I'll click Okay. That just gives me the colors from my artwork which are this bones taupe color, a pink and then there's this rich blue. Having done that, I'm going to lock my background away. Again now I don't need two sets of this color, so let me just go and get rid of this set, but that's how you get the colors from your image. Now let's have a look at this pace of type, because what I want to do is to add multiple strokes to it. Will go to the appearance panel. You can see it doesn't even have a fill here if I double-click on characters, this is where we say the fill. At this point what we need to do is to turn the fill off. I'm going to remove the fill entirely and then go back up here to where it says Type No Appearance and click ones. The type has disappeared. It's supposed to disappear at this point. Now we're going to click down here and add a new filter to the type. Now the fill is coming in as black, that's fine. I've sampled my color, so here is the color I want to use. I want to make the fill the pink that we're using. I want the stroke to be the same colors we're using up here so I'm going to target it, select it, and let's just increase the stroke weight a little bit. Now at this point we're able to add a second stroke something that we couldn't do with this text. What we'll do is come down here and click Add New Stroke. Now this strike is exactly the same size and color as the other ones, so we're not seeing it at all. I'm going to make it a darker version of this pink. Let me go and get my pink first of all, then I'll come over here to the stroke and double-click on it to open the dialogue. I'm going to the brightness and I'm just going to reduce that to 60 percent because that will give me a darker version of my paint. I'll click Okay. We still can't see it because it's behind everything. What we have to do is offset. We have to push it away from this stroke here. With this stroke selected, the dark one that we want to push, I'll choose Effect and then Path and Offset path. The default offset path value is 10 pixels, so it's pushing it too far for my needs. I'm just going to click here and press the down arrow to bring the stroke back in closer to the text. Now it doesn't have to sit right on the other stroke. You could put a space between it that might add to the effect. You need to just make a call yourself. I'm going to make it sit just a little bit beyond the original stroke. There we have the result of adding just a single stroke around our text and using a double stroke again basically in the same colors, as the object underneath. We're just starting to lift the type of the background. This effect can be combined with for example our drop shadow. Let me just go and get this one. Let's go to Effect, Stylize and then Drop shadow. I'm going to use a multiply drop shadow. I'm going to use my pink color. It's really handy to have saved as a color swatch because it makes it so accessible. Set it to Multiply blend mode. I think that'll be just fine. I'll just click Okay. Adding strokes around your type will help differentiate it from the background, and you can combine that with a drop shadow. 7. Pt 6 Layer Multiple Copies of the Text: Let's have a look now at another option for working with our type, and it's going to look a little bit different on the word pink that we've been using in this Myriad Pro font, and something that isn't a script fonts. I'm going to start working in my script font. First of all, it's a font called Creampuff. I've got my two elected, it's this pink color. We're going to the appearance panel and we're going to remove the fill and the stroke so it has no fill, nor stroke, and I'm going to type itself and I'm going to add here a new fill, and it comes in filled with black. In fact, I want it to be the pink color we're working with. I'm going to make a duplicate of this fill, so with it selected, I'm just going to click here on the plus icon. This one, I'm going to make black and I want to move it. Right now the fill is immediately behind the existing pink text. I want to move it across and down, so we use our Transform Tool for that. With that selected, we'll choose effect, distort and transform, and then transform. This is the way that we can move type rather than offsetting the path. What I'm going to do is move it horizontally and vertical, ten horizontal and ten vertical and click okay. Now I could use a darker pink or I could just settle for black. I'm quite liking the black effect, so I'm going to make another duplicate of this by clicking on the black one. I'm going to fill it with this lighter color that we sampled from image, so that's this color here. But again, because it was a duplicate of the black, it's sitting immediately behind the black. I want to use the transform tool on it, but I've already got the transformation here, it's just is not in the right direction, so I'm going to click on the transform. Let me just show you what I did, I went to this fill here, and I clicked on transform, and I'm going to take it back minus ten, and minus ten. It sits up and to the left of the original type, so that's the effect I'm looking at creating here, and again, it's starting to pull the type away from the background. It just does not work as well on a font like this Myriad Pro. I'm going to show you the solution for that. With the type selected, let's go back to what we're doing, we're going to turn off the fill and stroke, we're going back to the type itself, we're going to click here to add a new fill and stroke. We're going to set this fill to the same colors we've been using, we'll make a duplicate of it. This one that's underneath because we want it to be underneath the main type. We're going to make black and we're going to push it, but this time we're just going to push it horizontally, not vertically, so we'll choose effect, distort, and transform, and then transform. I'm just going to pull it 10 horizontally. Let's have a look at 10 vertical and see why I don't like that effect. You can see it's getting cut off here. I think it's a stronger effect if we just use the horizontal movement and not the vertical movement, and then to make a duplicate of this, just click on the plus sign here, fill it with this lighter color that we're using here, and change its transformation. We're going to push it back the opposite direction, so I'll click on the transform, and instead of positive 10 pixels, I'll just make that negative 10 pixels. Again, it's being pushed across. I think it's better than using the minus 10 minus 10, which gets lost again here and here on these angled letters. If your letters don't have angles on them, then you might be able to use the effect as we did it here, but where they've got their strong angles, I think that you are losing the impact of the effect if you use a vertical movement. There we have our pink text plus some black text, and plus this other foreign colored text. They are pushed away from each other. The black is coming 10 pixels to the right, the lighter color version is going 10 pixels to the left. Here it's going 10 pixels to the right, and ten down, and this lighter one is going minus 10 to the left and minus 10 up. Of course, one of the benefits of this effect is that it's fully editable and even though we've got three layers of type here, it's just one type effect. If I come in here and change this to punk, then you'll say that all three of these layers of type, the black, the lighter color, the pink have all altered sorts. Just one object to edit, not multiple object, and I think that makes it a more robust effect. 8. Pt 7 Use a Semi Transparent Overlay: So far the options that we've been looking at for our text involve changing the text in some way. Let's look now at how we could change the background in some way to lift the text above it. I'm going to add a new rectangle to the document that is the size of the document. I'm just going to square it up on the document here. I have aligned to art board already selected. Now I am going to place it behind the texts. Let me just go to the last panel will be easier to see it here. Let's just drag and drop it behind the text objects. Because it's the exact same color as the text, we're not seeing it and because it's a solid color, we're not seeing the pattern through it. We could adjust down the Opacity of the object and that will kill some of the color in the pattern underneath. It's just not helping the texts because it's the same color as the text. What if we were to make this white, for example? Now we can see the text very clearly and we can also see the pattern too. But we may want to see some of the pattern in its original form, but just cover up the pattern over here where the text is over the top of it. To do that, I'm actually going to wind this back up to a 100 percent opacity. Instead of white, I'm going to fill this shape with a gradient. I'm just going to fill it with the default black to white gradient. I'm going to reverse the gradients, so blacks over this side, whites over this side. I'm going to make it white to white gradient. I'm going to double-click here, and I'm going to make this white. Essentially, we've got exactly the same thing as we had before. It's a solid white filled object, but it's filled with a gradient, so that gives us a few more options. Here this stop on the gradient controls this side of the document and it's a 100 percent opacity. This stop over here controls this side of the document. It's also a 100 percent opacity. Let's see what happens if we make it zero. When we make it zero, we see the pattern over here and this is the transition point. This transitions is between this stop, which is a 100 percent white and this stop which is zero percent opacity, but still white color. I can bring this over a little bit closer to bring the transition point over, and this doesn't have to be a 100 percent. I can double-click on it and bring the stops opacity down to, for example, say 60 percent. The text is lifting off the background because it has a gradient underneath it, and the gradient is transitioning from 60 percent white all the way across to zero percent white. We can still see our pattern it's not exactly as it was previously, but we can also see our text. You combine that with an effect such as a stroke around your text or a drop shadow and you might have the solution there that you're looking for. Now before we finish up, let me put a stroke around this type because it's not going to work exactly the way we expect it to. When I add a stroke to this type, you'll see that the stroke is on the individual letter forms, and so it's giving this weird look to the type. But we already know enough about Illustrator that we can fix this with our type selected lets go and remove the stroke and the fill. Let's go back to the top here, click on it and add a new stroke and fill. We're going to give them the exact colors as we were using previously and we're going to have the same result as what happened previously. But there's a stacking order here. When we apply our stroke and fill using the type option rather than the character option, then we can adjust the placement of the stroke and the fill. At the moment the stroke is on top of the fill, let's just move it underneath. I'm going to drag it underneath the fill and that hides those overlapping areas. All I need to do is go make the stroke a little bit wider. This type is not going to have the exact same problems because the letter forms don't overlap. We would be able to add a white stroke to this particular type and get the result that we were looking for. But with the joined up text, we need to do something to stop the letter forms from being individually outlined with that stroke. 9. Pt 8 Create a Knockout Text Effect: Another effect that we can use here to pull our type away from the background, but in this case, even used the background as our type is to create a knockout effect. What I'm going to do is go to the rectangle tool and I'm going to use a different color zone targeting the fill color, and I'm going to use one of the other colors from the pattern, which is this sort of dark blues, because I want some contrast here. I'm going to drag out a rectangle that's pretty much going to cover up the text. It's 1920 by about 350 pixels tall. It's going from one side of the document to the other, and I'm going to place it behind the text. Let me just place it directly underneath the text, we can say the text and banner. I have a whole course on knockout effect. If you liked this effect, you may want to go and look at my course on knockout effects because I take it a lot more slowly than this. We look at a whole lot of different knockout effects. What we'll do is we'll select the type first of all, and we're going to set it's fill to 0 opacity. We'll go to the appearance panel, will target it's fill here and it has an opacity on its fill and that's all we want to select. I'm going to set it to 0 opacity, it should disappear. Then we're going to select the type and the sort of background [inaudible] or the background rectangle. I'm clicking on one and shift clicking on the other. They both selected, I'm going to put them in a group. The reason for this is that when you have a group of objects, you can decide to illustrate it. The thing that I just made fully transparent with 0 opacity. I want you to use that to punch a hole in what's underneath here. In other words, in this rectangle. I'm going back to the appearance panel for the group. You can say that group is here and we're going to the opacity here, and just click on "Knockout Group". What that does is it pokes a hole in the blue rectangle, the exact shape of the type that we just set to 0 opacity. Now we can move them around the inner group they can go anywhere. You've got this effect where we've got a blue rectangle across the document and the type is still quite legible. It's punched through the blue rectangle as a hole, and through that we're seeing the pattern underneath. To quickly recap on that, what you're going to do is take your type and you're going to set it's fill to 0 opacity, then you're going to group the type with the rectangle. That's really important. When you've got them in a group, go to the appearance panel locate opacity here, and set this Knockout Group to check. It comes in, it has just a little dash in that you're going to click it once to check it. That punches this hole in the rectangle underneath. This is editable. If we go to the last panel, you can say this is our group here, we've got the type here and the rectangle, we could select the type and we can move that around and just adjust its positioning if you wish to do so. But as I said, if you like that knockout effect, if you're interested in knockout effects and look out for my class on knockout effects and it'll be linked in the description below. 10. Pt 9 Working with Photos: Everything that we've done in this course, pretty much can be used with photos in Illustrator as well. Before we finish up, let's have a look at the special situation of working with photos. I have a document already created 1920 by 1080, yours can be whatever size you like. I'm going to place a photo image. I'll choose" File" and then "Place". I'm going to use an Unsplash image by Markus Spiske. I'm just going to select the image, and click on "Place". Notice that I'm embedding the image, I've got all those options disabled. The image is actually going to be embedded in the document. Now I can place it in my documents. I'm just going to drag to put it in. I want to use as much as this as I can. I've got a landscape document and a portrait image. With the image selected, I'm going to change its width to the width of my document, and the width of my document is 1920. Going to make sure that this is locked so that if I adjust the width, the height is going to be adjusted as well. Let me just scale down my art board so I can see everything. I'm going to move the image roughly into the position that I want it to be, and I'm looking here at the part of the image that I actually want to use. That's pretty well-placed over my art board. Let me just show you what we're looking at here. I'm just going to use that portion of the image. Now the most recent versions of illustrator, there's a crop tool. When you have a bitmap image like a photograph selected, there's an option here called Crop Image. I'm going to click on it, and I'm just going to size it over my art board. It's just snapping into position 1920 by 1080, I'll click "Apply". The image is now cropped to size. Now, if you don't have a version of Illustrator that has the Crop Image tool on it, let me just show you what you're going to do. Let me just get back to where I was. Really large image, very small art board. We're going to place a rectangle over the top of the art board, that is 1920 by 1080 that we want to crop this image to. I'm just going to do that. It doesn't matter what color it is or if it even has a color. I'm just centering it over the art board here. I'm going to select the photograph and that rectangle. I'm going to make a clipping mask. Choose "Object", "Clipping Mask", "Make". That has the exact same effect, except that in this case we've got the image still there and a clipping mask. If you're using the most recent versions of Illustrator, then you're actually going to have crop the excess image away. That's really pretty much the only difference. Let me go and add my text now. I'm going to add my text in black. Let me just sample black which is 000, and the red, green, and blue channels. I'll type the word "Radish". The font I am using is Channel Slanted. It's just a really nice font, and that will work really nicely for this project. The text is not highly legible. We're going to use the option for adding a stroke around the text. In fact, I'm going to add two strokes surround the text. The problem is in sampling the colors here. If I select over this object here, and try to sample the colors in the Swatches pine here, basically nothing happens. I've already been working on this image, so let me just get rid of those swatches. We can build out on set. Now I'm going to add new color group. I don't get any swatches, that's just fine. We can get them ourselves. We'll go to the Eye Dropper tool, and you're going to "Shift", click over a portion of the image that you want to sample a color from. As soon as you see a color bay, you can just click the plus symbol to add it to the Swatches panel. Now, if you have your color group selected, it will actually go into that color group. I'm just selecting colors, looking at what I've got, deciding whether it's something I want to keep, or whether I'd like to try for something a little bit different. It can show that I'm pressing "Shift" as I'm clicking to sample a color tag, the color swatch I wanted to add to, click the "+" sign, and click "OK". I'm going to grab a few colors. You'll find that it's easy to grab colors away from the text if you get too close to the text. Illustrate, thinks that you actually want to sample the black from the text, and that's not typically what you want to do. You can sample all sorts of colors from your image that you can use in this effect. Let's go back to "Type". Let's go back to the Appearance panel. Let's double-click on "Characters". I want to take away the fill and the stroke, because I want to add my own. The top's totally disappeared, not a problem. Let's click "Add New Fill", and it's filled with the black. We back to where we were, except we have a whole lot more flexibility in this area of the Appearance panel. Let's go and add a pink stroke to this. I'm going to use a light pink. I'm going to increase the stroke white. We've got the same problem with this font, as we had with that other font, except the stroke is going around each individual letter form, and we got some untidy things happening here. Well, we already know what to do with that. We're just going to drag this stroke underneath the fill, and that solves the problem. We just need to make the stroke a bit bigger so that we can see it. Now I'm going to add a second stroke. I'm going to take this stroke because it's in the right position. That looks perfect. I'm just going to use it to make a copy. I'll click here on "Duplicate Selected Stroke". Going to go and make this a dark color, the darker color that I sampled. I'm going to offset this path because right now this dark stroke is underneath the light one. It's sitting right there. Well, I want to move it away, so we're going to use the Offset Path. "Effect", "Path", "Offset Path". Just making sure that before you do that, you've got the right stroke selected, because you have to target this one, because it's the one you want to move. It's moved at too far. 10 pixels is the default, and it's a little bit too far here. I'm going to bring it into about six and click "OK". Here is some black text, it's very dark over a very dark image, but we've been able to sample some colors from the photograph, and use those using one of the effects that we learned earlier in this class, to create text that thankfully, lifted above the photograph, and is easily readable. 11. Project and Wrapup: We've now finished the video learning portion of this course so it's over to you for your class project. Your class project will be to take a pattern or to take a photograph and import it into an Illustrator document, place a piece of text on top of it, and then use one of the techniques that you've seen in this class, to make your text stand out above your busy background. When you're finished, post an image of your completed work as your class project. Now, as you're watching these videos, you would have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you did enjoy the class and learned from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class. Secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look out and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen 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.