Typography Tips in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: O 2. Typography In Illustrator Demo: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining me. You can do a lot with text in Adobe Illustrator. But we're going to start out super simple with the Type tool. So select the type tool here in your toolbar, or the keyboard shortcut for that is T, and simply click anywhere on your workspace and start typing. We have some handy panels for editing text called the Character paragraph and Glyphs panels. You can access character and paragraph via the control bar here at the top, or if you have it open in a panel already like I do, you can open these panels via the window menu. I have mine situated over here in the panels minibar. So in order for character and paragraph to show up in your control bar, you need to be selected on text. So if I activate my selection tool, oh, whoops, I hit the keyboard shortcut for it, which is V and just typed a V because I forgot that I was still in the text. So when you're using any of the type tools and you want to switch to another tool, you have to click the tool in the tool bar in order to activate it. Keyboard shortcuts don't work because you'll just type them. So anyway. So now that I don't have the text tool or the actual text on my artboard selected, the control bar looks different. It changes based on what tool you're using. So it's contextual, just like the Aptal named contextual task bar, which is sort of like a mini portable control bar. So that's also in Window. So see, it just has fewer options and you can move it around. I'll turn that off for this demo. Okay, so if I switch back to the text tool and click inside my text, I can now access character. Here is where you can do a bunch of useful things like changing the font size. Changing the spacing between lines when you have paragraphs, changing the kerning or spacing between all of the letters, et cetera. Glyphs isn't in the control bar, so I'll go over to my panels to show it to you. This is where you can access symbols and alternate versions of letters. Some fancy script fonts have multiple different versions of the same letter or fun embellishments. So, you know, this is where you would access those. We'll go over paragraph in a minute. You can also scale and rotate your text with the scale and rotate tools. Next is the area type tool. Use the rectangle tool to draw a rectangle. The long press on the type tool in the tool bar to select the Area Type tool and simply click the rectangle to fill it with text. You can thread the text to another shape as well. So click the black arrow selection tool first. See these little white boxes in the upper left and bottom right corners. Click on the one you need, and this little symbol on the cursor shows up. It's basically showing you what it does. So move your cursor over and click and drag to make another shape. Now when you tap T to activate text again, you can click and type it threads over into the second shape automatically. Nido, huh? You can move these around and change the scale. And if you want to edit them simultaneously, just make sure you've selected both boxes. Next is type on a path. If I use the pencil tool to draw a path, I can now select Type on a path and click on the path. If I make a circle, use the scissor tool to cut it in half. And click on it with the type on a path tool. You can use these little handles on the path to move the text or flip it down. And then for more control, go to Type Type on a Path. Type on a path options to change the text alignment. Make sure preview is checked so that you can see the changes. Center puts it right in the center, and so on and so forth. Flipped can be pretty helpful as well. You can thread text from most of the text tools, including this one. So here's the little box. I've clicked on it, so the Thread text symbol shows up, and there you have it. There are vertical type variations for all of these. They function the exact same way, only, you know, in vertical. Next up is one of my favorites, the touch type tool. So I'll just type my name. Select the touch type tool or use the keyboard shortcut Shift T, and click on a letter. From here, you can actually individually edit the positioning and rotation of each individual letter. And as you can see, it affects everything else automatically. The really cool thing about this is that you can still edit the text. Previously, the only way to do that would have been to outline the text, which turns it into filled vector shapes that are no longer editable with the text tools. So I'll just demonstrate that really quick. With this selected, go to type create outlines. And now, these are shapes that I can edit with anchor points, but which are not technically text anymore. So that makes the touch type tool really useful. Outlining your text can still be pretty useful at times, though, too, so that's a good thing to know how to do. Next up is text wrap. I'll move over to my second artboard. You can quickly switch artboards via this little button down here at the bottom. Just a fun fact. This is an intro page and or promotional flyer that I made for my next fabric collection. I want to add some text here about the collection theme and story, and I want it to wrap around the floral motifs. I need to make sure all of the objects or motifs that I want the text to wrap around are grouped together. I'll select all of these. And I think I'll try it with the B two and group them. Just like with clipping masks, you want the thing that dictates the shape you're constraining, or in this case, wrapping the other thing too. In this case, the text. You want that to be on top. In other words, because I want the text to wrap around the flowers, I need to bring the flowers to the front. The object on the top dictates the shape of the wrap or the shape of the clip. Right click on the motifs, go to a range and bring to front. Or you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift command or control right bracket. Now select both the motifs and the text and go to Object Text Wrap, M. Click Okay, and boom. Yeah. Isn't that cool? I don't like how close this is to the flowers, so to edit the space between your text and the objects, go to Object, extra Text Wrap options, and change the offset. I think I like eight points. Yeah, that's nice. Click Okay. You can still select the text and edit it. So if I go to the paragraph panel, which, again, is always in the control bar when you have text selected, I can change the paragraph alignment. I can indent the whole paragraph or just the top left line. I can uncheck hyphenate, so none of the words are hyphenated, et cetera. There's a couple more quick things I want to show you. I don't like the spacing or kerning in between some of these letters, but most of them are fine. You can edit the individual kerning between two letters at a time instead of the entire text. So if you click in between two letters, hold down Option or Alt and use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to adjust. There you go. That is super, super useful. And last but not least, I want to very briefly touch on optical illusion in design, specifically in typography. I have margin guides up, and as you can see, I've got the F in fabric lined up perfectly with the margin, but wildflower meadow is not. If I were to line it up like so, and hide my margins. Optically, it doesn't look like it lines up, right? I'll undo that. And if I select both of these and go to type, optical margin alignment, I have it checked. I'll uncheck it and it moves over slightly. I'll go back up to type and recheck optical margin alignment, and it looks a lot better. The stem of letters. So this part here and here, and here they should line up with the margins, not the serifs in serif fonts or the embellishments in script fonts. It's kind of hard to see in a script font like this, so I'll show you in a more traditional serif font. Okay, so when the serif is lined up with the margin like this, it appears not to line up nicely with the bottom text. The line weight distribution looks off, even though these are technically lined up perfectly. If I turn my guides back on and line it up so that the margin touches the stems and the serifs overlap it, it looks much better. If I change this to a P and move it over so that the stem lines up with the margin and hide my guides again, that looks better. If I select all of these and go back up to type optical margin alignment, that budget over just the tiniest bit. There are a lot of spacing optical illusions like this in design, and knowing how to spot them and fix them can make a huge difference. Don't doubt yourself if something looks optically off to you. It might be an optical illusion, but if you feel that it looks better, even though it's technically not lined up, I would go with your gut on that because I think most of the time, what you're seeing visually is looking better to you for a reason. Alright, those are my typography tips in Adobe Illustrator. Be sure to download the Practice Illustrator file I provided titled Typography Practice, which has all of the steps typed out for you in the documents so that you hopefully don't have to go back and forth between this video and Illustrator when you go to practice. All downloadables can be found at the bottom of the Projects and Resources tab. I'd love to see any screen caps of your practice in a class project or even graphic design projects where you've used some of these typography tips. That would be so awesome to see in a class project. Please show me all the cool stuff you make. If you enjoyed this class, please leave a review so that you can help me and your fellow students out. I really cannot express how grateful I am to people who leave reviews. I read all of them and they bring me so much joy. If you want to stay up to date with what I'm posting here, like if you want to know when my next class is coming or when I post updates to old classes or do membership giveaways, don't forget to hit the follow button. You can also follow me at Melissa Lee Design on Instagram or sign up for my monthly newsletter on my website, Melissa esign.com. Thanks again, and take care.