Lessons

Lesson Info

Add Type on a Path

Let's talk about adding type on a path. This is another fun thing that people often ask about is, "How could I add text in a different shape?" Maybe we want type to run along the edge of this saucer right here. Well it's pretty easy to do. The first thing that we need to do is give it a path to work on. So in this case I'm gonna grab the elliptical shape right here. And I'm just gonna click and drag to draw out a circle. If I hold my Shift key down I can make a perfect circle. So if I really cared that this is a perfect curve I can just do that. So when I drag that out I'm gonna let go and it's gonna fill with purple. And that's okay because we're actually gonna end up hiding this anyway. So it's just temporarily here so we can use it for the type that we're gonna place. So I'm gonna grab my type tool and I'm gonna get a color that we could see. Like we'll just go with black. That makes it easy. And if I hover my cursor over this edge of the circle you'll see that I go from a cursor wi...

th a box around it. And here I get a cursor with a circle around it. And if I hover on the edge I get a cursor with a little wave through it. And what that's gonna allow me do do is click and put text on this circle. So I can start typing and it's gonna go around like this. So let's type something like, "A LITTLE PICK ME UP". And, I'm gonna change this typeface to, I'll go back to the Bonjour. And I wanna make sure I don't have my cap lock on in this case. And I'm gonna scale this down. So we have "A little pick me up". I'll go ahead and commit that. And we can hide that shape if we don't wanna see it there. And then that's really all we have to do. We can move this around a little bit. If I wanted to scale it and tuck it into, be more on the saucer, then I can just transform it, like we've been doing, Command or Control-T. And not holding Shift of course. And that will tuck it in. And you can just treat it, otherwise pretty like we're used to doing. One thing too, I think it's gonna let us do this. Yeah, if I want to flip the text over so, oops,4 let me cancel that. The text right now is running along the outside edge of this circle. If I wanna flip the type so that it's actually on the inside edge, what I need to do is with that type-ware active I'm gonna go back over here to my shape selection tool and grab this black arrow that we see here. This is a special tool specifically for selecting and working with shapes. And once you put text on a path like this you can edit it using this arrow. So if you look really closely, I don't think you get, you really don't get a better view even if I zoom in. But it makes me feel better to zoom in I guess. If you look closely there's a little black, like a node right here. And when I have this selection tool, this shape selection tool active, I can come in here and grab that little node. And you'll notice that the cursor now has a little arrow pointing to the left or the right depending on where I move my cursor. So all I have to do if I wanna flip this text over to make it run on the inside of this path is click and pull to place it inside. I'm gonna repeat that 'cause this gets a little bit boggery. So I'm gonna click and just flip to pull that inside. If I pulled downwards I might be cutting off the text, so it's sort of like when you have text on a path I think of it like bookends. And like having a bunch of books on a shelf the letters would be like the books, and then you have an endpoint here, like a bookend, and another bookend over here. And if you just, if you're not careful about where you drag you end up smashing your bookends together, and then you don't have room for the text. So if I undo that and do it again, if I drag it just, it's hard to really show you, but if I don't drag just right I may make the text disappear. And if that happens to you then you wanna just grab that little node and try spinning it around the circle. So you've got your start point and your endpoint and you can just move the type around the circle by dragging one of those bookends. So it does get a little bit boogery. You'll notice if I drag the start point here, next to the letter A, so that's the beginning. That's where the text will start basically. If I drag this way and I cross it over the end point then it's gonna reverse out this side. So you just have to play with it but whenever you need to make those adjustments that's gonna be with this shape selection tool down here. So once I'm happy with that I'll switch over to the move tool to set it basically. And maybe I want to rotate the whole thing, I'll just press Command-T. And spin. So I kinda want it to just run over here. And it doesn't show me that until I press Enter. For whatever reason it never makes that preview, it's just kind of a funny thing. Maybe we'll scale this a little bit by pressing, again, Command or Control-T. And I'm gonna just hold Alt or Option to just enlarge it a little bit and do something about, like this. Now it would be fun, I think, to add a little bit of a gradient to this, to the text itself. And we can create that gradient from right here in this image by just sampling these coffee beans. So remember yesterday in the capital in the cloud image we painted a gradient across the sky? Here we're gonna paint a gradient across these letters just to help them fit a little bit more and just add some interest that's very subtle. So to do that I am gonna first pick my foreground and background color by grabbing the eye dropper, or color picker tool it's technically called. I call it the eye dropper. And guess why? Because the keyword shortcut is I, the letter I. When you have this tool, incidentally, you can change the size of your samples by clicking one of these buttons. So the first one just gives you a point sample. Sometimes that's not enough to accurately represent the color that you're trying to sample. So if I want to sample this dark color on the bean, for example, it's actually really just measuring a single pixel. And that pixel by itself might not really represent the way we see this brown. So it can be helpful oftentimes to increase the size of your sample. Five by five pixels, I think, is maybe too big, so usually when I am sampling colors I like to usually keep it on the three by three average. So then it's gonna sample a three by three area and average it together to give you a color. And I think you end up getting more of the results that you expect when you do it that way. So that's what I'm gonna do. And I'm gonna come over here and sample the dark brown from the bean. Then I'm going to hold down Alt or Option and sample a lighter color. And that will sample that color straight to my background swatch. So clicking with the eye dropper sample to get to the foreground swatch, and Alt or Option clicking is gonna give you the background swatch. So I think those two colors will work nicely. And, again, I'm gonna grab the gradient tool. And we wanna make sure if you've been messing around with your gradient tool you may be in some sort of other gradient collection. So what we want for this example is to be in the default gradient. And remember that these two gradients are dynamic. So, they will always reflect what you have in your foreground and background swatches. So I want this, this is the foreground to background gradient. So I'm gonna double-click that. And down here again we have our options for the style of gradient that we wanna add. And I'm gonna use this regular gradient over here. And then I'm just gonna go ahead and click about here. How do we wanna do this? Maybe we'll do this at an angle like this. I'm gonna click and drag and it's telling me that this type layer must be simplified. Remember that that is another word for rasterize, and it will no longer be editable. Do we wanna do this? No, actually, we're gonna hit Cancel, 'cause we're not trying to replace the type. What we want is to put a gradient on top of the type and Photoshop is ever so lovingly reminding us that what we should do is make a blank layer. So thank you Photoshop. It's always got your back, in most cases. So we've created that blank layer, now we'll go ahead and do this. Drag it across. And of course it covers our whole image because we haven't yet clipped it to the type layer. So again to clip it we just hold down Alt or Option and hover in the space between the two layers that we want to clip together. And when I click we see that it now exists only where we have type. And when I look at this I think, "Ooh, I think that's a little too far, the gradient." I feel like this should be darker and maybe this should be lighter. So I'm gonna try it again and instead of dragging from way out here I'm just gonna drag from here and see if that, maybe I should just have darker colors? Let's darken that a little bit more. So I'm just clicking the same, my actual swatches. So I can start with that, the current color that I have selected. And then I'm just gonna pick a darker one. And, I guess we can probably leave that one where it is. So we'll click OK. And let's try this again. There we are, I like that a little better. So we have a little greater gradation happening. A bigger range, I should say, of tones. And then if we wanted to try something else to tie this whole image together we could do another gradient map, 'cause those are just so fun. Let's go back to our adjustment layers and we'll do a gradient map. And, we could keep what we have here or we could choose a different gradient. And I think I actually picked one already that I wanted to use and it is from the pastel collection. And it is the green, pink, and yellow. I just have a real soft spot for these, apparently. So I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna reverse it, because remember that the gradient, in a gradient map, they actually map to the tonal images of your image, tonal values. So right now the highlights are green which is darker than the yellow over here which is the shadow. So it's basically like a negative and that's, you can do that if you want, but I, it looks a little trippy to me. So I'm gonna reverse that and then I'll come over and we can close that panel. And in the layers panel I'm gonna change the blend mode to something like, not Linear Dodge. I think I meant Linear Burn, there we go. And I'm gonna reduced the opacity. And it just gives it a little bit of flavor. And if I really knew a lot about coffee I could make a joke about that but, but I dunno, I just drink whatever coffee is being served up. So I'm not that fancy. And I think that looks cool. So that was type on a path which, you know, if you look at your shapes, let's go back to our shapes here. Let's look at these custom shapes. And remember that we can come up here to All Shapes, and I can even make this little panel bigger by dragging from this corner. If we look at all these shapes and think about what we can do with type on these shapes, I mean that can be pretty fun. So there are, you know, some of these fruit shapes, or there's a heart in here someplace. You could put type around the edge, you could put type on the inside. So here's a heart. If I double-click this, let's just get black here. We can put that up there and we could put type then in the box. Oh, let's change the color so it's black. So we could actually put type in, in the frame of the shape. And you can imagine all the fun that you could have with that. So there's a lot of unique things you can do with the shape tools combined with type. And if you are wondering like, "Where would I get good fonts?" You probably have a lot on your system already but in case you need some more sources I'll just go ahead and tell you about them and type them out here on the screen as I do so in case you can't understand what I'm saying. A good source for free fonts is dafont .com. And they are great, they've got a lot of free stuff, but you always have to make sure when you're using free fonts that you are taking time to really look to see what kind of usage restrictions you're gonna get with those free fonts. 'Cause it may be free but it may say, "Free for personal use." And you wanna also remember that some human created these fonts, this is their art form. So that needs to be respected, they're their copyrights, and their choice whether they wanna let you use it for personal use or for anything. So always check on that. So dafont is one good source. Another one for free fonts that are supposedly commercially usable is fontsquirrel.com. Fontsquirrel. They say that their fonts are free to use and they're just, that's it, they're just available. So, hopefully that's really gonna be the case. Oop. But, again, I would always check. Sometimes I've read their fine print and I find out they say that it's free because they've just never been able to figure out who made the font or where it came from. So I guess you can use that at your own risk. But one of my favorite places to get fonts is creativemarket.com. And that's where the font that I'm typing in right now, and I think most of the ones I've been using here, that's where they come from. And I have links to them in the resource guide that comes with the course. So those are some of my favorite sources for fonts. You want to keep in mind that, the usage rights, but also having a thousand fonts on your system can be a little bit of a tax on your memory and everything. So choose your fonts carefully and just be mindful of how many you're getting.