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Formatting Text

Lesson 17 from: Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud: Essentials for Creating Projects

Brian Wood

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Lesson Info

17. Formatting Text

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

01:23
2

What is Adobe Illustrator?

06:24
3

Explore the Interface

11:45
4

Create and Save New Documents

07:03
5

Zoom and Navigate

07:23
6

Working with Artboards

18:11
7

Introduction to Layers

18:53
8

Rulers and Guides

09:05
9

Shapes and Drawing

45:27
10

Aligning and Combining Shapes

15:31
11

Pen Tool

30:59
12

Manipulating Stroke and Fill

14:39
13

Creating and Editing with Color

17:36
14

Painting with Gradients

10:36
15

Getting Started with Patterns

08:11
16

Adding Text To Your Document

08:43
17

Formatting Text

11:35
18

Strokes and Variable Strokes in Adobe Illustrator

16:55
19

Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator

08:42
20

Effects and the Appearance Panel in Adobe Illustrator

10:58
21

Adding Photo Images in Adobe Illustrator

12:43
22

Working with Linked Content in Adobe Illustrator

10:14
23

Packaging your Project for Handoff in Adobe Illustrator

04:28
24

Best Formats to Save Your Files

14:35
25

Select Like a Pro: Layers, Groups, & Other Unique Tools

33:57
26

Edit Paths Like a Pro in Adobe Illustrator

08:41
27

Editing Paths: Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator

03:31
28

Creating & Applying Brushes to Artwork in Adobe Illustrator

18:21
29

Editing Paths: Knife & Scissor Tool in Adobe Illustrator

03:09
30

Editing Paths: Join Tool in Adobe Illustrator

10:46
31

Editing Paths: Isolation Mode in Adobe® Illustrator®

02:11
32

Pen Tool Shortcuts in Adobe Illustrator

16:44
33

Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator

07:05
34

Transforming Techniques in Adobe Illustrator

05:35
35

Shortcut to Reflecting Artwork in Adobe Illustrator

02:19
36

Get to Know Your Appearance Panel in Adobe Illustrator

17:42
37

Exploring Effects in Adobe Illustrator

10:01
38

Work Smarter with Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator

04:50
39

Color Inspiration in Adobe Illustrator

09:34
40

Type Effects in Adobe Illustrator

11:18
41

Masking Your Artwork in Adobe Illustrator

13:40
42

Using Creative® Cloud® Libraries in Adobe® Illustrator®

15:47
43

Capture Artwork with Creative Cloud Apps & Adobe Illustrator

12:21
44

Tracing Raster Images in Adobe Illustrator

13:40
45

Blending Artwork in Adobe Illustrator

12:47
46

Using Symbols in Adobe Illustrator

10:47
47

Using a Perspective Grid in Adobe Illustrator

09:05
48

Crash Recovery in Adobe Illustrator

08:45
49

GPU Performance in Adobe Illustrator

03:51
50

Curvature Tool in Adobe Illustrator

06:49
51

App Integration in Adobe Illustrator

11:52
52

Creative Cloud Libraries in Adobe Illustrator App

04:42
53

Shaper Tool in Adobe Illustrator

06:06
54

Smart Guides in Adobe Illustrator

01:31
55

Text Enhancements in Adobe Illustrator

02:11
56

SVG Export in Adobe Illustrator

06:50

Lesson Info

Formatting Text

Now what I want to do is I want to start to do some formatting. Okay, so we're going to get in here, we're going to make this bigger, got to do what we want it to do. So what I'd like you to do is we're going to select all the text in this box. Now, when you have a text box selected or area type like this, you can just start from just about anywhere and kind of swing across the text to select it. You can click like 1,000 times inside the box to select the text, however you feel like doing it. You can select it. So go ahead and select it. And this program has a fair amount of type features. And it just gets better every time, all the time, as we go. If you look at top you're gonna see that, we have in the Control Panel two different panels very similar to InDesign called Character and Paragraph. So if you look up there, does everybody see the font up there? Do you see like Myriad Pro or something like that? Why don't you click on the arrow to the right to the far right of Myriad Pro the...

re to open up the menu so we can see it? Now one thing I do want to talk a little bit about here just briefly is there are TypeKit fonts. Has anybody used Typekit fonts before? So if you are a Creative Cloud subscriber, if you have access to Illustrator as a standalone product, you have access to what's called the Typekit library of fonts. You can use these in your designs in any program. You can use 'em in Word, InDesign, whatever. It doesn't matter. You can use them on a website if you want to. You can use them in your print work. To access them, to get them, you have to download them. Now you can download them one at a time or you can grab a whole bunch. From within Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop, if you come to the menu here, you're gonna see a button similar to this, Add Fonts from Typekit. We're gonna try this. So what's gonna happen here is it's gonna require that we go out to the internet. It's gonna open a browser. And it's gonna up Typekit. It's gonna log you in with your Creative Cloud ID. So why don't you go ahead and click on Add Fonts from Typekit right there? Now these fonts, like I said, are available. You can use them to print with. If you make PDF files out of your artwork, they are embedded in the PDF file. So they will print. They will work that way. If somebody else doesn't have the font on their machine, they didn't download it, if you give them this Illustrator file and they try and open it up, it's gonna say, "Let's go download or sync the font. "Let's go grab it," assuming they're a Creative Cloud subscriber. That's the catch or the kicker. Once you're up here in the Typekit library, there's tons of ways to view the font. You can sort them if you want by serif, sans serif, all kinds of things if you want to do that. There's a lot of different types of sorting options here. Or you can just go in and look, just start looking at what you want. What I want to do, I'm just gonna pick one here. And this is the thing, you're not all gonna see the same list every time. It's gonna chance 'cause they keep adding fonts. What's interesting here? Everybody see Karmina? You guys see that one? You can pick any font. It doesn't really matter. You can also if you want to search, there's a search box up here. You can type in the font you want to grab. And it'll sort for it. (coughing) I want to choose a font. I'll choose Karmina here. All you do is you hover over it, and you click Use fonts. So it's gonna say, "Let's use these fonts." It's gonna say, "Okay, what do you want to grab?" There's tons of different... Italics, bold, font style, things like that. A lot of times there's more than they list here that you can download. Just click Sync selected fonts. What it's gonna do right now, hopefully it does it for all of us pretty quickly here. Actually, you guys, if you look in the upper right up here, hopefully it'll show it, the Creative Cloud Desktop Application is actually working. It just downloaded it. Sometimes there will be a message up here that show us that says, "Hey, you just got this font. "You can use it now." Once you're done here, we're done. What I want you to do is you can go back over to Illustrator right now. So go back over to Illustrator. Come back up to the Font menu up here, and it should be there now. So if you click on the arrow, here's a quick way to find it instead of sorting through all your fonts. There's a little button right here, which allows you to show just your Typekit fonts. So if you click on that Filter button right there, it should show you your fonts. Karmina, there it is. Does everybody see it in there? You get to select it. You can also click on the arrow to the left, and you could pick something different, regular, italic, bold, whatever you feel like you want to do. I'm just gonna do regular. And we've got it applied. So this font right here, this one is something that we've just sync with our machine. You're gonna find that font in, well, most Adobe applications now. You can access that font, which is pretty neat. A lot of times what I'm doing is if I want to use a font like this, I can use it in my print work, whatever I'm doing basically, I'll just download a bunch of 'em. I'll have 'em available. And they're on your machine now. You don't have to have internet access to get them. They're there. They're on your machine. As a matter of fact, if you wanted to clean some up, I get a little heavy handed with these. And I had like, I don't know, 400 downloaded. I'll just show you this. You can go to the Creative Cloud Desktop application and go to Assets. And you're gonna find all of the fonts that you have downloaded listed here. And this is where you could manage them, get rid of them, add more, do different things. But it's within the Creative Cloud Desktop Application. All right, we've got the font applied. That looks fine. Now what we're gonna do is do a little font sizing, kind of get in a little further, do a little bit more with formatting. So why don't you come up top? And you can see that we've got the font right there. We've got the font size. Let's make this a little bit bigger. I'm gonna go with maybe something like 18 point for instance. So go ahead and choose a different font size up there. And now you're gonna notice that the font is actually going to wrap within the box. So we've got to make the box a little bit bigger. Actually, I do need to mention something. If your screen resolution is smaller, you might not see the options for font size and font family itself. You might just see the word character. If I click on character, it's gonna open up the entire panel with all that stuff in it. So that's another way to access that if you don't see it out there. All right, so my text looks like it kind of got wrapped a little bit. So let's make the box a little bit bigger. So go ahead and select your Selection Tool. Come out there, and come to this side point if you want. You can just drag it to the right. Make it a little bit bigger. It's kind of cool because it previews it for us, which is great. So there we go, not too bad. That looks pretty good. (clears throat) All right, so go ahead and select the text again. We need to go back to our Type Tool. I said before that you can select the Type Tool and then select the text. You can also double click on the text to switch and then drag across or click sometimes. And let's take a look at some of the formatting we can do. We're not gonna go crazy here. We got a little bit of time just to kind of look at a few things. But a lot of this, if you worked in other programs, a lot of it's gonna be very similar. Okay, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, they all work kind of the same way. Word even has a lot of these too. Come up to your Control Panel up top. And why don't you come to the word Character? And go ahead and click on the word Character right there. This is a Character Panel, which is very similar to the InDesign Character Panel. It's got a lot of stuff in here. If you've every worked leading, kerning, tracking, all these different things to go in and kind of change the look and appearance of your text, it's all right here. So we can go in and kind of change the different things we have. Just quickly, you're gonna see their font size right there. We actually have leading, which is the distance between the lines of text essentially. Does everybody know that that right there is the international symbol for leading? Yeah? Yeah (Laughing). No, I'm just kidding. I do that all the time. I don't know why I do that. It's not smart 'cause it's a V. It should do that, but anyway. We also have kerning, which is distance between two letter pairs or two characters. And we have tracking, which is a whole bunch of letters you can kind of space them out. There's a lot of things in here you can explore. Just take a look. There's so many things we can do. Now if we have text out here that we want to do some things like maybe we want to change the distance between paragraphs, you want to align it differently, do things like that. Then we're gonna go to the Paragraph Panel. Why don't you come up here to the Paragraph Panel? And go ahead and click on the link right there to open up the panel. Do you like clicking on links to open panels up here or would you rather have the panels show up like be out there? Okay, there's two way you can do this. This right here, it's hidden. You can click and show. If you want to really want to show them out there, you can actually come under the Window menu. And all the way down here, you're gonna see you can open up under Type the Character Panel and the Paragraph Panel. So if you want to have these out there all the time, all this formatting, you can do that. And these will be sitting out there for you. So that's something you can do too. All right, so if I have that text selected and I go into my Paragraph Panel right here, you can see these are where we have all of our alignments, center, left, right. You have indents if you want. We also have space before and space after. There aren't quite as many options here as InDesign. They keep adding things. And there's more things we can do there. But this is where we can go to do a lot of this type of formatting. So pretty simple, pretty straight forward. A lot of programs will let you do this. I just want to kind of reposition things and get it set where we want it. So why don't you go ahead and select the selection tool? Tomorrow we're gonna talk a little bit more about type and maybe create some style so we can save some of the formatting we have to make it a little bit easier for us. Why don't you go ahead and drag the text? Just kind of bring it right down here. And take this text right up here. And we're gonna drag that right above it. Now is anyone have it where it's kind of stretched still? Mine looks kind of ridiculous. So I can either draw a box and retype it. You can fix it if you want to. As a matter of fact, if I select this text, if you ever stretch text by accident 'cause you made that kind of type, that text, if I go up under Character right here, you're gonna see that by stretching it, you're actually changing the horizontal and vertical scale. And you can just fix it here by going 100% for each. So that's the quick fix for that. Instead of retyping it, you could do that. All right, so I'll go back to 100% here. All right, that look a little bit better. All right, so we got a little bit of text out there, not too bad. If we want to go in and we want to add color to our text, it's the same thing as before. Any object, anything you have selected, you're gonna go to anyone of the options for color that I showed you. Make sure the fill is selected and pick a color. So if I look over here at the Swatches Panel for instance, I have that welcome box. You don't even have to select the text. You can select the box that's it's in. Come over to the Swatches Panel. If I have the fill selected, I can just come and choose a different color for instance, and we're there. Pretty much the same thing. Within the text box you want to have different colors for different words even, you could just select them with the Type Tool, and then go change the color fill, color strokes.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Project Files Part 1
Project Files Part 2

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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