Master the use of the type tool in Adobe Illustrator with this comprehensive guide. Learn how to create, resize and stylize text, adjust font color and opacity, align paragraphs, and manipulate bounding boxes to improve your design projects.
Key Insights
- The type tool in Adobe Illustrator allows you to create text by simply clicking on your workspace or by drawing a bounding box. You can type your desired text and adjust its size by clicking and dragging the corners of the bounding box while holding shift to maintain proportions.
- Customization options include changing the font color and stroke, adjusting the opacity, selecting a font from those installed on your computer, and selecting a font style such as regular or italic. You can also adjust the font size, alignment, and spacing options such as leading, kerning, and tracking.
- When using paragraph and alignment options, a key distinction to remember is whether you clicked and typed (which aligns the text to the anchor point) or drew a bounding box (which aligns the text within the bounding box). These options can greatly enhance the layout and readability of your text.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video we'll be going over the type tool. Let's begin by selecting our front working layer and dragging it to the top of our layers panel so it's stacked on top.
Next let's go over and use the type tool about halfway down in our toolbar. With the type tool we can type by simply clicking. Automatically we'll see that illustrator adds lorem ipsum or a placeholder text.
However with it highlighted we can simply begin typing the text we prefer. In this case let's type the word Friday and then hit escape on our keyboard to exit the type tool. With this text we have a bounding box that automatically comes around the text.
While your font may currently look different from mine we'll customize this in a little bit. To change the size of it we can drag any of these corners and while holding shift we'll scale it proportionally. Let's leave it about this size and move it towards the top of our artboard.
Next let's type the next two pieces of our title. We'll go back to our type tool or hit T on the keyboard and then hit escape and we'll see that we have our bounding box. Finally let's type the third part.
We'll hit T on the keyboard as a shortcut and we'll type May 20 and hit escape. We can then scale up May 20 by clicking and dragging one of the corners and remembering to hold shift so that we scale proportionally. We'll leave it about there and we can move it by clicking and dragging it below.
Finally let's add our paragraphs of text below. First we'll copy it by opening up our pdf and we'll highlight the text right beneath. Clicking and dragging we'll then hit CTRL C on our keyboard to copy this text and we'll go back into our illustrator file and now we can paste it.
To do this we'll again use the type tool T however instead of clicking and typing we're going to draw our bounding box previous to pasting the text. Therefore we'll click and drag and from here we'll see that the entire box fills with lorem ipsum. To replace this with the text we've copied we'll hit CTRL V. In addition the only change we'll make here is we'll click right before job fair and hit ENTER so we have a space between during the job fair and our next paragraph.
If you've created a bounding box that doesn't quite fit all of the text simply hit escape and you can change the dimensions of the bounding box so that it fits all of the text. Next let's go over how to stylize our text. Let's select Friday to go through this process.
We'll click on it and if we go into our control bar we see we have options. Our first option relates to the font color and the stroke. Currently it's set to black with no stroke.
Next we'll see that we have opacity which relates to how transparent our text is. At this point we want it to be 100 percent. Next we have our font family.
From here we'll have different fonts consistent with what's uploaded to your font files for your computer. While mine may look slightly different than yours ultimately we can choose
based on what our computer knows. Therefore I'm going to select one of the fonts that my computer provides.
I'll select Franklin Gothic Medium however you can select whichever one you'd prefer. And to the right of this we'll see that we have different font styles. While some fonts contain multiple styles others may only contain one.
In the case of Franklin Gothic Medium we'll see we have the option of italic and regular. We choose italic we'll see that our font changes to italic. To the right of this we can adjust the font size by clicking up or down or by double clicking and typing a number in and hitting enter.
To the right of our character options we'll see that we have paragraph options. Our paragraph allows us to align it left to the center or to the right. However in the case of this text since we clicked and typed we'll see that it responds to this anchor point or where we clicked.
When is a left aligned it'll be left aligned to this anchor point. When it's centered will be centered to the anchor point and right aligned to the anchor point. In this case I'll leave it as a line left.
If we go down to the paragraph or we drew the bounding box when we adjust how it's centered we'll see that it changes within the bounding box and the center left or right of the bounding box. This is an important distinction for how we center text. If we move on to our properties panel we'll see that we have where the text is on our artboard and different options for that.
Below we also have options for our fill stroke and opacity and we'll also see that we have additional character and paragraph options for our text. We'll see the font family, the font style, the size, as well as we can also adjust the leading which is the space between lines. We adjust the kerning and the tracking which are other spacing options.
Below on the right we'll also see that we have additional options such as increasing the length and width of our font as well as adjusting it to all caps, small caps, super and subscript and many other options. Below we'll also have an expansion of our paragraph options from the control bar and if we click to the bottom right we'll see we have additional options as well for spacing our paragraph. For now let's save our work hitting CTRL S on the keyboard and in the next video we'll begin uploading custom fonts to our computer for our postcard.
See you there!