Lessons

Lesson Info

Formatting Text in Adobe Illustrator

Now what I wanna do is I wanna start to do some formatting, okay? So we're gonna get in here, we're gonna make this bigger, gotta do what we wanna do. So what I'd like you to do is, we're gonna select all the text in this box. When you have a text box selected, or, you know, area type like this, you can just start from just about anywhere and kinda swing across the text to select it. You can click like a thousand 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 up 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 you will see, does everybody see the font up there? Do you see like Myriad Pro, or something like that? Okay. Once you click on the arrow to the right, the far right of Myriad Pr...

o there, 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. Does anybody use Typekit fonts before? Okay. So if you are 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 them 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, okay? 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, okay? 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 open up Typekit. It's gonna log you in with your Creative Cloud ID, okay? 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 PDFs files out of your artwork, they're 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, okay? 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 fonts. You can sort them if you want by Serif, San Serif, all kinds of things if you wanna do that. There's a lot of different types of sorting options here. Or you could just go in and look. Just start, you know, looking at what you want. What I wanna do, I'm just gonna pick one here. This is the thing, you're not only gonna see the same list every time, it's gonna change because they keep adding fonts. Does everybody see, what's interesting here? Everybody see Karmina? Do you guys see that one? Okay. 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 wanna grab, and it'll sort for it. I wanna 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 what do you wanna grab? There's tons of different italics, bolds, font styles, 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 shows up that says, hey, you just got this font, you can use it now. Once you're done here, we're done. Okay? 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? Okay. So what you're gonna do is you can just select it, you can also click on the arrow to the left and you can pick something different, regular, Italic, bold, whatever you feel like you wanna do. I'm just gonna do regular. And we've got it applied. For this font right here, this one is something that we've just synced with our machine. You're gonna find that font in every, 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 wanna use a font like this, I can use it in my print work, my whatever I'm doing basically, I'll just download a bunch of them, I'll have them 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've had like, I don't know, 400 downloaded. You can actually go, 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 can manage them, you can get rid of them, add more, do different things. But it's within the Creative Cloud desktop application. Alright. We've got the font applied, that looks fine. Now what we're gonna do is do a little font sizing, kinda 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, right? So we gotta make the box a little bit bigger. Actually I do need to mention something. If you have a screen, 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, okay? So that's another way to access that if you don't see that there. Alright, so my text looks like it kinda 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 here and come to the side point if you want, you can just drag it to the right, make it a little bit bigger. It's kinda cool because it previews it for us, which is great. There we go, not too bad. That looks pretty good. Alright, so go ahead and select the text again We need to go back to our type tools, 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 some times, and let's take a look at some of the formatting we can do. We're not gonna go crazy here, we've got a little bit of time just to kinda look at a few things, but a lot of this, if you've worked in other programs, a lot of it's gonna be very similar, okay? InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, they all work kinda 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 ever worked with leading, kerning, tracking, all these different things to go in and kinda change the look and appearance of your text, it's all right here. So we can go in and kinda change the different things we have, just quickly you're gonna see there's font size right there, we actually have leading, which is the distance between the lines of text, essentially, and does everybody know that that right there is the international symbol for leading. No? Just kidding. I do that all the time, I don't know why I do that, because it's kinda, it's not smart, because it's a V, it should be that, but anyway. We also have kerning, which is the distance between two letter pairs or two characters, and we have tracking, which is a whole bunch of letters you can kinda 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 wanna do some things, like maybe we wanna change the distance between paragraphs, you wanna align it differently, do things like that, then we're gonna go to the paragraph panel. Let's 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 panel show up, like be out there? Okay. There's two ways you can do this. This right here is just, it's hidden, you can click and show. If you really wanna 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 wanna have these out there all the time, all this formatting, you can do that, and these will be sitting out there for you, okay? So that's something you can do too. Alright 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. You know, 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 straightforward. A lot of programs will let you do this. I just kinda wanna 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 styles, 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 kinda bring it right down here. And take this text right up here, and we're gonna drag that right above it. Now, does anyone have it where it's kinda stretched still? Okay, mine looks kinda ridiculous. So I could 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 kinda type, that text, if I go up under character right here, you're gonna see that by stretching it, you were actually changing the horizontal and vertical scale, and you just fix it here by going to 100 percent for each, okay? So that's the quick fix for that instead of retyping it, you could do that. So I'll go back to 100 percent here. Alright, that looks a little bit better. Alright, so we've got a little bit of text out there, not too bad. If we wanna go in and we wanna add color to our text, it's the same thing as before. Any object, anything you have selected, you're gonna go to any one 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 didn't even have to select the text, you can select the box that it's in, come over the 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. If you wanna pick different, you know, within the text box, you wanna add different colors to different words, even, you can just select them with the type tool, and then go change the color fill, color stroke fill.