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Adding Text To Your Document in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson 15 from: Adobe Illustrator CC for Beginners

Brian Wood

Adding Text To Your Document in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson 15 from: Adobe Illustrator CC for Beginners

Brian Wood

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Lesson Info

15. Adding Text To Your Document in Adobe Illustrator

Lesson Info

Adding Text To Your Document in Adobe Illustrator

Now we're gonna get to text 'cause text in here is huge, there's a lot we can do. 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 the big things you're gonna do is you're gonna lock objects so you don't mess with them temporarily. 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 out of 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. Now we're gonna put a little text on her...

e. Text, like I said, it's got a lot goin' on here. The thing about text that I wanna start with is I wanna start with how to create it because there are two types of text objects in here that threw me when I first started. Has anybody ever worked with text in InDesign before? If you do that, in InDesign, 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. 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 lets us create just 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 each letter and make it bigger, scale it, move it, do whatever you want to it. It's actually really amazing. We're gonna try and touch it tomorrow. But we're gonna just focus on the type tool today. So make sure you have the type tool selected. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna make two different kinds of type areas or type objects out here. First what I want you to do is just come somewhere in the artboard and just click and let go. And then we're gonna just type in the word welcome. You just created one kind of type. I'll explain this in a second. What I want you to do now to stop typing is we're gonna deselect that. So what you could do if you wanted to is come up to select and just choose deselect. This is kind of a nerd thing but I want to point it out. Every time I'm working in 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. 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. When you come into Illustrator and you click and drag to make a box like the second one we did, that box, you could resize it, you can do whatever you want, move it around, whatever. The text inside won't change. 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 it. So what I want you to do is come to any of the points on the corner and just click and drag away from the center. Look what you're doin'. This is called point type. Point type is great for headlines, maybe a button, you want to put the word home on the button, that kind of 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 because people will go in, they'll say, 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. 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, let's say the 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. Go narrower than the text and look what happens to the text. If you work in InDesign, this is more what you're used to. This is called area type. You're typing in a box, basically. We can switch between the two. Sometimes you need to have the first one, the welcome, the point type because you just wanna stretch and do things to the type, make it look cool, whatever. Sometimes you don't. Come to the corner, and I want you to drag it to the right until you see all of the text, 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 hangin' 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 text boxes and connect them together. It's called threading. InDesign does the same type of thing. We can actually take a big bunch of text and over different artboards or over the same artboard in different areas, you can actually have the text flow from one box to the next. We're not gonna go there right now. But come to the right over here and I wanna 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. 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. If you do that, go to edit, undo. It's a little dangerous. So what I wanna do is I wanna switch back because we wanna have a whole bunch of text out here. I wanna have this flow. So double-click on that little widget to the right there, whatever that thing's called. And now we're gonna make the box a teeny bit bigger. If you don't zoom in to your text, you're gonna trip over all these little boxes and widgets. 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. 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. And I wanna show you another feature that's actually only been in this for 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 box bigger. What we're gonna do 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 and it switches you to your type tool. 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 or enter, and we can start typing. The party, notice what's happening in 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.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Adobe Illustrator CC Project files - Part 1
Adobe Illustrator CC Project files - Part 2

Ratings and Reviews

Colleen
 

I've been trying to learn Illustrator on and off for years. This is the best instruction I've had! Brian is a great instructor. Finally feeling comfortable with it. It does use an older version but I just adapt.

Bill Neill
 

Great content and a good instructor. Not his fault the world marches on and doesn't stay in 2015. Any reasonably intelligent person will be able to figure out the changes since 2015 and how they relate to this course. It is early 2019, and I'm not having any trouble, but then I am reasonably intelligent and not to lazy to do some thinking.

MikeD
 

This is a great beginner course. Of course, it is older and still uses Illustrator CC (2015.3), but it's real easy to figure out the differences. However, anyone who has Creative Cloud can still install the older version (located in the "Other Versions" tab and take the class using that version and then delete it when done. The knowledge transfers easily. Brian is an incredibly knowledgeable instructor, teaches in detail and doesn't patronize his audience.

Student Work

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