Adding Text To Your Document

Lesson 16 from: Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud: Essentials for Creating Projects

Brian Wood

art & design

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16. Adding Text To Your Document

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Adding Text To Your Document

Now we're gonna get to text, 'cause text in here is huge. There's a lot we can do, Now with text... Here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna put some text right on top of this box. Now this is gonna be really annoying, but when you start working with text, you're gonna have to do a lot of dragging and selecting. And if you have any artwork behind the text, you're gonna move it by accident. In Illustrator, one of big things you're gonna do is you're gonna lock objects so you don't mess with them temporarily, okay? With that object selected, what I want you to do is come under object, and you're gonna see there's two options you're gonna use a lot in Illustrator. Tomorrow, we're gonna talk more about these. You're gonna see Lock and Hide. Hide is just quick temporary, let's get it outta the way, let me focus on something else and then I'll show it again. Lock is show it, but just lock it in place. So, go ahead and choose Lock, Selection, and you basically can't touch it, okay? Now we're g...

onna put a little text on here, okay? Now text, like I said, it's got a lot going on here, but the thing about text that I want to start with, is I wanna start with how to create it because there are two types of text objects in here that I think just throw, they threw me when I first started. Has anybody ever worked with text in InDesign before? Okay, if you do that in In Design for instance, you'll go draw a box, type the text inside of it, right? You can do that in Illustrator, but that's not the only way, okay? Tell you what, come to the Type tool over here on the left. Go ahead and select it. Now the Type tool, just to give you an idea, it let's us create just, you know, typical text. But, if I click and hold down right there, there are about a billion ways to create type in here. You can have type running around the outside of a circle, for instance, or inside the circle. You can actually take text that you create, there's a tool in here called the Touch Type Tool. You can grab the each letter and make it bigger, scale it, move it, do whatever you want to it. It's actually really, it's amazing. We're gonna try and touch it tomorrow, but we're gonna just focus on the Type Tool today, so make you sure you got the Type Tool selected. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna make two different kinda of type areas or type objects out here, okay? What first what I want you to do is just come somewhere in the art board and just click and let go. Click and let go. And then we're gonna type in Welcome. Just type in the word Welcome. Okay? Alright, you just created one kind of type. I'll explain this in a second, okay? What I want you to do now to stop typing is we're gonna deselect that, okay, so what you could do if you wanted to is come up to Select, and just choose Deselect, okay? Okay, this is kind of a nerd thing, okay, but I wanna point it out. Every time I'm working here, I look at the pointer. Look at the pointer right now, you're gonna see a box around the I-beam thingy right there. That means you're about to create new text, okay? What I want you to do now is instead of just clicking, we're gonna click and drag to make a box. So just click and drag to make a box and let go. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna say, We're having a party. The two different kinds of type we just created are called Area Type and Point Type. You do not have to remember that, you just have to remember what they are and how they work, okay? When you come into Illustrator and you click and drag to make a box like the second one we did, that box, you can resize it, you can do whatever you want, move it around, whatever, the text inside won't change, okay? This one up here, Welcome, totally different animal. Here's what I want you to do, go to the Selection Tool. Click on the Selection Tool. Click on the word Welcome to select it. You're gonna see the points around it. This is how we can resize, okay, so what I want you to do is come to any of the points on a corner and just click and drag away from the center. Look what you're doing. This is called Point Type, okay? Point Type is great for headlines, you know, maybe a button, you wanna put like, Home on the word Home on the button, that kinda thing. It's awesome for it, but it's not actually in a box, it's just a piece of type that you can stretch and do whatever you want to. This screws people up all the time, 'cause people will go in, they'll say, "Oh, I'm just gonna make this bigger." And then they stretch it and squish it and Illustrator doesn't care, it'll make it tall and squished and stretched, so you have to be careful what kind of type you make in here, alright? If you come to the box right here, the text right here, why don't you click on that text right there? We're having a party. And you'll see this completely different look out here. Come to one of the points, like let's say, that I don't know, lower right corner, and click and drag. The very lower right corner, click and drag, and you're gonna see what happens. Go a little smaller than the text, why don't you go just like narrower than the text and look what happens to the text. If you work in InDesign, this is more what you're used to. Okay, this is called Area Type, so you're typing in a box basically, okay? Now we can switch between the two. Sometimes you need to have the first one, the Welcome, the Point Type, 'cause you just wanna stretch and do things to the type, make it look cool, whatever. Sometimes you don't, what, do this. Come to the corner and I want you to drag it to the right until you see all of the text, okay, just make it big enough. And you're gonna see a couple of things out here, let me zoom in. You're actually gonna see that we have this widget right here, this thing hanging out here. You're gonna see that we have this widget down here, and you're gonna see that we actually have two extra boxes here, these big ones here and right there. These boxes right here, we're not gonna go through this today, but this is how you guys can take maybe two of these kinda text boxes and connect them together, it's called threading. So, InDesign does the same type of thing. We can actually take a big bunch of text and over, different art boards or over the same art board and different areas, you can actually have the text flow from one box to the next. Yeah, like I said, we're not gonna go there right now, but come to the right over here and I want to show you this one, this one's important. This is how you convert from Point Type to Area Type and back, go ahead and double click on that little widget to the right there, the circle. Now if you come to one of the corner points now and you make this bigger or smaller, it's gonna squish and stretch the text. You gotta be careful, okay, if you do that, go to Edit, Undo. Okay, Edit, Undo. This is really, it's a little dangerous, so what I wanna do is I wanna switch back, 'cause we wanna have a whole bunch of text out here I wanna have just flow, okay, so double click on that little widget to the right there, the, whatever that thing's called, okay? And now what we're gonna is we're gonna make the box a teeny bit bigger, you guys, if you don't zoom into your text, you're gonna trip over all these little boxes and widgets, you are. I, every time I work with text in here, I get it closer. I use the Zoom Tool and zoom in or however I need to, so what I want you to do is come to the lower right corner here and make it just a teeny bit bigger, so you can see all the text. Now we're gonna type in a little bit more text here, okay? And I wanna show you another feature that's, actually, it's only been in two versions, I think, of Illustrator, pretty awesome. You can make it so that as you type text, the box just gets bigger, it automatically expands. This widget right here, this thing right here is the auto resize, go ahead and double click on that little auto resize widget right there. And it's kinda weird, but it kinda shrink wraps it around the text, now if we go type, it's gonna keep growing the type box bigger. What we're gonna is we're gonna put our cursor back in there after the exclamation. If you want to, a fast way to do this is just double click in the text, just double click and it switches you to your Type Tool, okay? You can also just go right to the Type Tool and click inside. What I'd like you to do is, hit Return on your keyboard, just hit Return or Enter. And we can start typing. The party, notice what's happening to the box here, is located at... 321 Pine Street... So, if you have that auto resize turned on, it'll just keep growing bigger for you. Otherwise, if we didn't have that on, the text would not fit in the box. You'd have to make the box bigger to fit it all. You'd have to resize it, okay?

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Brian Wood

<span style="color: rgb(80, 0, 80);">Brian Wood is a web developer, the author of 14 books, including Adobe Muse CC Classroom in a Book and Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 Classroom in a Book. The author of numerous training titles including Muse, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator and more</span>.

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Ratings and Reviews

KATIE Y

I am a pretty computer literate person but an Ai beginner i.e. I am completely new to the Creative Cloud/Adobe Illustrator. (This is also the first time I've used CreativeLive.) I think this course it is fantastic. The pace is good as is the content which progressed logically and covers all the basics you'd hope it would. The course is 2 full days' worth of material but it is broken down into segments so you can revisit or skip through as you need to. The presenter is really personable and easy to watch (even for me, a Londoner!). I would also say I think it is pretty good value for money -- I am currently enrolled on a part time course, basically doing the same sort of stuff, and I have to say this is better and a bit cheaper! I definitely recommend it to you!

jackflash

A brilliantly designed course. it's almost magic. It's everything you hope for in a follow-along software class. Brian Wood has engineered it so that you start on a project that just needs basics, and then you move on to more & more complicated projects, and almost without realizing it you've learned Illustrator. This doesn't just happen -- Wood has clearly put a LOT of effort into creating this course. Here's one trivial example: he doesn't overload you with a lot of keyboard shortcuts right at the beginning -- you start with the actions themselves, using the (admittedly tedious but easy) pulldown menus, and then after you're comfortable with what you're doing, he'll throw in the shortcut. It may seem obvious, but so many instructors feel they have to give you an extensive foundation of definitions, shortcuts, interfaces, etc., before you ever do anything. Good stuff to know, but you'll never remember it. Wood has you up and working almost immediately. And he's a joy to listen to, at a perfect pace. Highly recommended.

Philippe LIENARD

Top course. Very well explained, clear, good examples, pleasant teacher. I like it and recommend it. One suggestion, it would be nice to have a detailed table of content of the course in the material. For instance, it took me quite a while to find back the part of the course where how to make a gear was explained.

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Adding Text To Your Document

Adding Text To Your Document

Lesson Info

16. Adding Text To Your Document

Lessons

Class Introduction

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Explore the Interface

Create and Save New Documents

Zoom and Navigate

Working with Artboards

Introduction to Layers

Rulers and Guides

Shapes and Drawing

Aligning and Combining Shapes

Pen Tool

Manipulating Stroke and Fill

Creating and Editing with Color

Painting with Gradients

Getting Started with Patterns