Text Tool Basics in After Effects

Getting started with After Effects? Then you'll need to learn how the Text tool works! Learn the basics in this tutorial from Noble Desktop!

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Getting Started

1. Find the Text tool, located in the topmost toolbar. It’s the icon with the letter “T” on it.
2. By clicking and holding, a dropdown menu will appear. Choose the Horizontal Type tool for this tutorial. The Vertical Type tool operates the same way but types downwards.
3. Click and drag out a box in the Composition Window to create Area Text. Area Text automatically breaks to the following line once it hits the borders of its text box.
4. The other method is to click and start typing, which creates Point Text. Point Text does not break its lines.
5. Type out some words in the Area Text box.

Adjusting Text

1. To adjust the text box, click and drag on the corners of the text box shape.
2. To change the font, go to the Character Panel and click on the top left dropdown menu. This menu displays all the fonts available.
3. To change the color, click on the colored box on the right of the Character Panel, and use the color slider that appears to select a new color.
4. To add a Stroke, enter a number into the small Stroke Width box located right under the Font Options box in the Character Panel. The Stroke color can be altered using the other color box behind the Fill Color box (used in step 3).
5. Leading, kerning, and tracking can all be adjusted by clicking and dragging on the values located under the font option dropdown menu.

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone. As the title suggests, I'm going to teach you how to use a tape tool in Adobe after effects the tape or text tool. So we're going to be using the tape tool to write a few words and I'm going to be showing you how to adjust the size of the text box, the size of the text itself, color, font, etc..

And this is important to learn because there's going to be a ton of projects you're doing as a motion graphics designer that involve text. So this tool is a must know for any beginner in after effects, but it's also really straightforward. So don't worry too much. I know the interface can be kind of intimidating, but we're just focusing on one two almost tutorial on one by one.

You know, you can learn you can learn enough tools to really get a handle on this program. So the first thing is let's find out where the textual is and you'll find it here on toolbar it is this T and there's a there's two options over here. There is the if I click and hold, there's the horizontal type tool and the vertical type tool we're going to be focusing on the horizontal type tool right here.

As you can see, I got a couple of panels popping up as I activated that tool. So the character box over here that controls like the size of the font, the font itself, that's over here, my paragraph tool. Pop that over here. I prefer it that way. But if you don't see here either, click this arrow and navigate over to the paragraph tool.

If you don't see it there either, head over to window and just find it over here under paragraph. You know. And the same goes for the character tool. So a note before I start typing text, there's two ways to create textures. Click and start typing and that creates point text and the other ways to click and drag to create a text area.

This is called area text. It works the same in Photoshop in Adobe Illustrator. The main difference is that with area text, the text will automatically break to the next line. I'll show you what I mean. So here I'm just going to click. It's made a text layer over here down on the timeline and I'm going to type the word move to prevent myself from pressing any more keys to keep writing.

I'm just going to hit the selection tool over here and I'm going to drag this guy over here. But yeah, that's pretty much it. That's how you get the basics of text down. Now, if I want to add if I want to show you area, area text, I'm going to click and drag. And I'm honest, I'm going to type gibberish here, just so you see what I mean.

So you see that I keep typing in here, we typing, but there is more text than this text box can hold. So if I grab the corner of this text box and I expand that out, you can see more and more and more of the characters start to appear. I've given them more room to appear and since this is area text, by the way, if I'm using point text, which is again just the click and start typing one, that's going to all be on one line.

But here the text keeps breaking and breaking and breaking to form many lines because it is confined by this box. It notices the edge of the box and goes, Oh, we can't keep going. Let's head over to the next line. In the next line, the next one tool is no more room until you click and drag it out and you provide more room for it to appear.

I'm going to be deleting this gibberish. So let's head over back here to our first text over here. Now, if I want to resize the text size over here and character, I can hit the this is the symbol for the text size, the font size. I'm going to make it 165 like that if I want. I can also change the font and the font type.

I'm going to change it to just book over here and if I want, I can also change the font itself to something else. It sounds pro, you know, gourmand, whatever you like here. I like I like the as it was originally. By the way, there's a way to link an adobe library of fonts, which is if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription or otherwise, they'll provide you with a couple of fonts, kind of like on the house, and there's a way to link it to your programs that gives you access to all these different fonts.

But I can get into that with a later tutorial if anybody would like. Now, as for the text color, you just click the spots over here and I could change it. You can see it's already updating in the project window. I personally liked it. I was, I'm going to cancel. But over here, by the way, you can also give it a stroke, which is an outline color, and you can see that it's turning red over there.

And I can set the stroke with with this toggle over here. I'm just clicking, dragging it from left to right to change that size. But I liked it as it was, so I'm going to keep it as it was. There are also letting in kerning tools on the text panel for those not familiar with typography, letting and kerning basically refer to the space in between the individual characters and the space between different lines.

I don't have a paragraph here, so it's been hard to show that, but I can show that in a moment. But here you can change the tracking, automatic tracking left and right. That's the symbol over here. You can change the letting. That's the space between different lines. In fact, I'm going to you a little bit more text. So you see what I mean?

So I can change the letting. So I've selected my text and if I change the lighting over here, it moves them closer together like this, you know, less letting right on top of each other, more letting further away. These guys are the scaling. So vertical scale stretches up and down, horizontal scale left and right. You can see that I have my text selected at this point and this is where you really get into, you know, the nitty gritty.

These are kind of like specialty tools. I don't I'm not as familiar with these, but for the most part, you're going to be really working with the top bunch. And here are some quick tools to, you know, change small caps, camel case. It's not necessarily it doesn't go for every single kind of font, but you can activate these if you're looking for a specific look, a subscript superscript camel case, that kind of thing as your paragraph paragraph, you can do left aligned, right aligned, middle aligned.

You can indent the left margins, you can indent the right margins. You know, you can put more space after and after certain lines. It's a little harder to tell. Those are only have two words, but if you have paragraphs, this is what moves an entire chunk of text away from each other rather than just the single word. These are also words, but yeah, that's about it.

That's the texture. So it's definitely an after effect staple. You're going to be getting really familiar with that over time. Try different France font sizes and remember you can add effects on top too. So yeah, this has been surprising for a noble desktop.