Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating & Setting Type in Photoshop

there are two ways to put type into your document. One way is called point type, and to do that, you simply take your cursor and click any place that you want to insert your text. So just a single click, and then I can type something, something really clever, Um, and you'll notice that it's running off the page a little bit. Here. The cursor is still blinking at me so you might be tempted. Teoh hit return. But that's going to give you a line break, because now we're in type mode, right? So once you get your type out on the page and you want to set your type, you have two options. You can travel on up to the options bar over here and click this check mark that will set the type meaning the flashing cursor goes away and it just sort of gets committed. Or, if I get active again the other way that you can do it. If you want to use your keyboard, which is what I usually dio you press or hold command commander control on your keyboard, press and hold it and then press enter could be just ent...

er. You'll get the line break. So, commander Control Enter will set the type instead of the line break. I should also point out while I'm in the point type that we created again by just clicking So he didn't draw a text box, We just clicked. If I keep typing, it just runs on and on into infinity. It doesn't wrap itself on to the next line, because where would it rap? There's no boundary, there's no box. So this text and in this format is best utilised if you are gonna just be placing, you know, a word or a couple words or something that you know that you want to fit on. One line came and then again, like I said, once you're done typing, you commit up here or command control. Enter. Now I need to move this over, obviously. So, as you might guess, you would just grab the move tool, drag it over and position it wherever you need to. Um, we'll talk in a minute about sizing this. We'll leave that for now. Let's take a look at the other way to put type on your page, so I'm gonna press t to grab the type tool again. But this time I'm gonna click and drag a box so that we have a boundary for this type to exist in. We can see the cursor flashing, and I can see that it's in the center, which tells me that the current alignment is set to center. So before I even start typing, I'm just going to come up here in the options bar and change that by clicking the left align button. So these are your options. I'm sure you guys have picked up on the fact that whatever tool you have active these air, the options that corresponds that tool. So with the type to active, this is where we find the alignment. The font. Over here, we can change the font. We can change the size on a number of other things up here in the options bar. So if your alignment is not what you want, you can change it. Here. The cursor is flashing, so that's good. It means things are looking good. It's waiting for us to type a bunch of stuff. If you ever click and draw out a box and don't see the cursor flashing, which happens a lot. It means that your your fun is currently set to a size that's either too large so the cursor doesn't even fit in the box. So you're not gonna see it, or it's actually so tiny that you're probably missing it. Because why I dragged the super tiny Can you see it? It's all move my mouth out of the way. But it's inside the top left box, and it's like a dot, so you really would miss that is very easy to miss. So if you're at home and you're like, I don't see my cursor look up here and if your number is huge or really small, you probably need to make an adjustment. So just think, Goldie Locks. So I'm gonna bring the size back up a little bit so we can see our cursor Now. I could just start. I could type a bunch of stuff in here, or I could another neat feature. If I can just fill it with placeholder type, sometimes you might be doing a design piece, and you don't have the copy that you want to use yet rather than being like oh, I'm going to change this later this text is not permanent, it's just a placeholder. You can just fill it with Laure MIPs. Um, it's called and I just click paste warm up some and it just paced in some text. Now it's all formatting kind of goofy because apparently I had some goofy settings going on doing this so we can adjust that in a minute. But I want to point out a couple of things. One we see that this wraps right. So unlike the point text that was just created with the click. When we click and drag to draw a box, the text will wrap. So I call this body copy Texter Paragraph text, I think, is that is what it's called paragraph text s. So that means that it's going to wrap as a paragraph would, and you don't have to manually create your line breaks. So that's really nice. Sometimes if you ever get another document from someone else with a lot of text in it, sometimes people don't they don't format or do their text in a very user friendly manner, and sometimes I get text. So that's the paragraph. But it's all done with separate point text lines and editing. It is a total nightmare, so don't do that. If you're going to make a paragraph, use the paragraph type and click and drag to draw a box. Let's talk about the fact that we still have to set this. So just like the point text when we see the box on our screen or we see the flashing cursor Photoshopped pleading for us to keep typing. So if if in your mind you're thinking I'm done with this and you try toe press the key stroke to switch to a tool or something, you're not going to get the tool. You're going to get the key stroke. So I do this a lot in divine actually, and I press V for the move to all the time, and I get these all over my text. So you have to be aware that that's what's happening. Um, delete some of us so we can see the end. Okay, so here's my flashing cursor. So same thing if I want to set this, I come come up here and click to set it, or I can do Commander Control enter to set it. Whoa, What did I just dio said it that way s so how do we get back into it now? Once you've said it, if you need to get back into it and fix the typo or change a word or something like that, it's really easy. You just position your cursor somewhere on the text and click. So in this case, I just put it here and I click and I bring the box back up and then I can swoop in. And you know, if I need to change this and highlighted and change the size or something, then I can do that. If you're not careful. And you think, Oh, I'm just going to swoop in and highlight this word because I need to make it bold or something and you come and you're just kind of busy and floppy. And you, you do this. But anybody know what I just did? You just created another bounding box for a new new text entry. Yes, exactly on. It's easy to see in this case because of the box. If I had just been sloppy and clicked, we would just see a little flashing cursor and this happens all the time. I still do this like every day. It's an everyday occurrence because I'm just busy and you've got so many layers and things happening. So when this happens to you, not if, but when this happens to you, all you have to do to get out of it is press the escape key and then it's gone time. Um, so let's talk about getting in here. Then, for example, this type up here is too big to fit on a single line across the whole thing. So there's several ways I can change this, First of all, in the layers panel, let's point out what's happening. I have a bunch of layers here that we're not seeing right now because I've hidden them to be revealed as we go. We're not seeing those. Just ignore those for the moment. Let's just look at these two right here. When we create type and put type in our document, Photoshopped automatically creates a type player to contain the type so it's not mixed or meshed in with the pixels from our background. It is always on its own layer, and um, we see that in the layers panel because we have the letter T right here so that lets us know that this is a type layer. We can target the contents of that layer by just selecting that layer in the layers panel. So if I want to do something to this type, if I want to change the font if I want to change the size, I want to change the color. Oh, are remove it. I don't have Teoh select the type like Microsoft Word would have you dio I can just make sure that that type player is active. And if I change the font to like this, it will change and I didn't have to highlight it. Now that will change the whole layer. So if I only wanted one word to change versus the entire layer, then I would have to highlight it came, um so that's handy. Another thing that's handy is we can, um, highlight all of the text on a layer by double clicking the layer thumbnail. So earlier I had more text than was actually fitting in this frame. So if I needed to highlight all of it, including what I couldn't quite reach instead of coming and trying to scroll and get all that I could just come over here and double click the tea and the type player. I'll take this off. They're probably Madam you back there. Um, if I double click that tea, then we see that it highlights all over the text for me, and then I can proceed. Teoh edit it as I need to. Okay, so that's a couple of things about this that can be great. If we want to change the size, we can come up here. There's a drop down menu with some preset sizes of just nice common sizes. But of course, you can type anything that you want into this box. You can also this of what I like to do. You can also scrub it, which I wish that every application had this feature because it's very convenient. But you'll notice if I hover my cursor over the tease right here, it becomes this double headed arrow, and it lets me click. And then I can just drag. And when I let go, it has changed size, so you don't get to preview it in this case because it's not highlighted. But you can see how that's I don't know. I think it's easier than typing in a number or trying to find something here that may not be OK. So it's easy to change your size, your font, and this is where you would also change the color. So if we wanted to change this whole layer, then I could come in and make it blue, for example. So it's not down here, which is what you might think, because this is where you do everything else. So is a little mind warp. Ito have to look up here, but that's what that is for some additional formatting that we can change that. This is just driving me a little bonkers. So I want to fix this now because I can't stand looking at the line. Spacing is horrible, right? There's way too much space between each of these lines of text. So to fix that, I could just leave this layer selected, and then I could adjust the leading. But as we saw with the type size up here, if I don't have it highlighted, I don't see the change until after I make it, and I prefer to actually see it as I'm doing it so I don't have to be Goldilocks and go back and forth too much. So I am actually going to highlight this text. So I'm going to click to insert my cursor and then I'll press commander Control aide Teoh, select all of it and then I'm gonna click this button right up here. This is a short cut to your character and paragraph panels. You might already have them open. You can also reach them by coming up to window and coming down Teoh, paragraph or character. But when you have the type tool active, there's a little shortcut but in here, because they're really handy. So this is where we can control the leading, which is right here where we see the icon that has the to eighth stacked on top of each other. If I click in here and I drag, I can adjust the lines facing and it was really I must have done I don't know what that I had it set like that from the drop down menu. There's also an auto option for the leading, so letting controls the space between lines of type, and when you're happy with it, you could go ahead and commit it and then it will be set. You can also change your color. Here is well in the character panel because we know Adobe likes Teoh, uh, be redundant with options as faras when where we can find things So it can be handy. I never do it here just because I am so used to doing it up here. But maybe this works really well for you If we wanted to take Let's say we want one word here like Laura. Um, let's say we want this to be a different color, so that would be a case where I have to click in and highlight it because I'm not going to change the whole paragraph. Just this one word. Then I could highlight it and let's come over here and pick like orange. I guess we'll make it orange. And maybe we'll scale this size bigger. So if I click and drag now, we can see it scaling while we're we're working on it. It will do something neat like that. And then what if we want to make this word bold? Bold. You won't see up here. Bold. Is this in the character menu? So that's these little buttons down here. I think if I ever not gonna happen. All right. Well, this is a faux bold and a faux italics. If you're type, faith has a bold option. You will see it here. Sorry. It will show up here or here. You can see it great out in this case, because impact doesn't have at least not in this version of it. It doesn't. It's just regular. It doesn't have bold or italic. So I would be out of luck. Let me change. Let's change this whole layer just for the sake of what do um Helvetica, Uh there we go. Oh, and you can Also, I'll point out when you're changing your fonts, you can click in here. You can click the drop down in scroll, or you can type. If you know the name of the font you want. You can just start typing it so you don't have to scroll through the list. So that's really handing. Um, but I'm going to just dio let's dio century Gothic instead, they're already, like, spiced out All right, But so now we can see that we have regular italic bold and bold italic. So if you want a certain word to be bold, you would highlight it, and then you could come up here and make a bold. So then you may be wondering, Well, then, what is this faux bold and faux italic? And then I would say Good question. That is a good question. Let me explain. Um, it's fake. Just like the name implies faux bold is the fancy way of saying fake. Um and it's generally considered a no, no, it probably shouldn't be here. I guess if we were gonna be, if we were gonna put on our serious type designer hats, we would sort of some our noses that the word I don't know phrase at foa anything because that means that the that those characters were not designed in a way to be bold, for example, So you may be distorting the characters because Photoshopped gonna just fatten him up and call it bold. Of course, most people will not notice or care, but if you were a type designer, that would probably make you lose sleep at night. So don't do that to the type designers of your beautiful funds that you use. But you could. That's what this here is. And if I hover, there's the tag, finally, is going to show up faux bowl and faux italic. So I guess if you if you need these, you want to use a typeface that offers them. So I would to the typeface that has a bold treatment or choose a different type until you find one that does, because this is not considered a good thing. But that said, you could get away with it. I mean, look at that. It didn't start on fire something because we did it. So it is an option. But you've been fully informed now, but that's what it's for. So these other little options over here are for all caps. I could just take that whole layer and turn it into all caps or small cap. We have superscript, subscript, underline and strike through over here. These cool things are not showing up right now because the font that I'm using does not offer them. These are extra little bonus features that allows you to take advantage of some other cool characters that might exist in your front. But it's not as necessary anymore because of something new that adobe thankfully added to voter shop recently that we'll get to in a minute. So I'm going to just basically skip these right now because I think there's a better way to make use of this. Um, all right, let's take a quick look, too. We talked about letting Here was the example that I had for you, but we got ahead of myself. The leading with again was the spacing between various lines of type and again that was over here in three character panel or am I have to be on the right layer and then we can adjust letting over here, and you might want to call it leading but is actually letting its France letting because it gets its name from the old school print days where they actually had the characters lined up on the press. And then they would separate lines of type with strips of lead, so the thickness of the strips would be contributing to the line facing. So we call it letting. So there's little trivia fact for you. Okay, so that's letting this is tracking. Tracking is the space between the characters, not individual characters, but just as a whole. So that's right here. What am I doing? Get on the right. Got to be on the right type player. That's Rule number one. Be on the right layer or nothing is gonna work. So I'm on the tracking layer here and now we can see that this is a pretty high number compared to zero, which would be standard. So tracking, Adjust not this tracking. Adjust the space between the characters themselves. Who knows what this is supposed to say? Turning Kern ing right with an R But it doesn't take earning. It looks like it says Keming, because the Kern ing is actually so poorer in the example that we can tell that this is actually are it looks like an M. It looks like it, says Keming, but it's it's supposed to take earning. So what's happening is that this and is Kern dup too closely to this arm? So Koerting is the spacing between individual letters. Tracking is between the whole line of type. Turning is individual letters, and if you're thinking that's ridiculous, the letters come with their own spacing. Why do I need to adjust it well prepared to have your mind blown? Because if you want you get excited about typography, which I hope I can inspire. You, Teoh want to learn more about typography today if you get excited about it and you want to learn more about it than you start realizing Kern ing is really important. And there's examples of bad turning all over the place, uh, really, all over the place. And now I feel a little guilty because once I show you what turning is, you're going to notice it badly everywhere. And then it becomes one of those horrible things that you can't unsee. So I'm about to ruin you all. I'm so sorry, but I'm going to do it anyway. So Koerting is come back over here. There we go. Koerting is the space between the characters and that's handled right here. So the icon shows a letter V next to a letter. A. And that's a great example, because those are two letters that very commonly have turning problems because when you create type, you basically have to assign sort of an invisible box around each character, right? So they that's how much space they take up side by side. But some characters like a capital V for example, it's really tall and wide at the top, but narrow at the bottom. So if you have an A next to Capital V, it's the inverse of that or really any letter if it's lower case next to that. So if you kept the spacing, I guess instead of talking about it, I can show you right there's an idea. Um, this is current nicely, but not all fonts may be. So if we add spacing or if you have a font that's not Koerting nicely automatically. It may have too big of a box around this V and then whatever letter follow that can't tuck up all nice next to it. I could change the spot to something like Times, Times, New Roman times, new room. And there we go. And if I make this lower case like, let's saying E, um, we still have the same problem. So then what we'd want to dio is Kern that closer? So that we see that this E is actually inside the box. The imaginary box around the letter V right? If we if I were to draw a box like around the V like this, we see that the IV actually crossing over into it, so that would be nice. That's a nice spacing. So a lot of bonds will do that automatically. You don't have to worry about it. Obviously, if you've never heard of the if you've lived your whole life and probably are doing okay without having known it. But if you want to learn about type, then this is a big thing to start being aware of. So if we come back up in here, I'm gonna space this back out and then we can see Oh, it actually says Colonel, my favorite thing that I never bought and I don't think they sell it anymore. There used to be this hooded sweatshirt that you could buy on on a typography site. You know what I'm talking about? And it was a zippy s o a zipper one, right? Had a zipper running up the center. And it was it was a website for type and type people in fonts and whatever. So they had all this cool merged. That was type subject. And so across the hoody, it said Kerney. And then the zipper went up between the our and then I guess so my clover and I never bought it cause I just thought it was pretty pricey. I thought, I'll wait. And now they closed. I know have gone, But it was so great. So I would be wearing it right now if I bought it. So that's Koerting for you. Tracking and letting. So those are the basics we talked about. The two different type layers are type, you know, formats. The point type that's just endless line or the paragraph type where you actually draw the box to put the type in. And we talked about changing color, changing font size, um, turning, letting Oh, of course. We also have superscript or sub script here, so you can highlight a character like, if I need this are to drop down for some reason, I can highlight it and then drag down. Or I could bump it up. So, you know, if your formatting Oh, I don't know. I do this a lot with invitations when I'm saying like, you know so but somebody's fifth birthday, and then you put the little th and then I raise it up and format it like that so you don't have to make a separate type player and put a little t eight and drafted there. You can just do it right in line with your text on. Just adjust the baseline. This is actually called the baseline shift so I can shift it up or down. I'm shifting the baseline for that particular character. So it's setting on a different horizontal line if we move it up and down. So now it's just kind of fun. We have some energy going on in this treatment, so those are the super basics. Okay, um, another neat little thing. All this point out while I'm thinking of it when you click the drop down appear to change your fine, you can see a preview and mine is really large, actually, because I really like to see what I'm doing and what I'm I like to think I have all my fonts memorized, but I don't so I like to see that. And I think we can change that. Yeah, under the type menu. It's not that big by default. So if you also want to increase your preview size, you want to go to the type menu and then choose font preview size and I think this is so funny that the choices are none small, medium, large, extra large or huge. Doesn't just say like, I mean, what would x x l enormous? They could have had so much fun, but it it just says huge. I think that's so funny as a menu item, anyway. Really, really big. So that make the bigger and it's easier to see. So you might. You might benefit from that. I know that I dio.