Discover how to enhance your design skills by learning how to add a text box to a postcard in Illustrator. This article walks through the process of creating a rectangle, adjusting the color, and adding and resizing text appropriately.
Key Insights
- The process begins by creating a rectangular box using the rectangle tool in Illustrator and selecting the color of choice for the box.
- Text is then added to the box either by utilizing the type tool or copying existing text from another part of the design and resizing it to fit the box.
- The color of the text can also be altered as needed and it’s crucial to appropriately name and organize each element in the layers panel for ease of navigation and control while designing.
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In this video, we'll be adding a box to the right with the details for our job fair. If we look at our PDF example, we'll see that it reads May 20th, 3 p.m. To 5 p.m., similar to the text that we had on the front of our postcard.
So, let's go into Illustrator, and let's start by creating the box. For this, we'll use the rectangle tool, and we'll simply click and drag a box. For the color of our box, feel free to choose any of the remaining colors that we have.
In this case, I'll hit I on the keyboard for the Eyedropper Tool, and with this rectangle selected, I'll select our first color. Next, it's time to add text to this box. I'll hit V on the keyboard, and while I could use the Type Tool to create additional text for this box, I can also go back into our first artboard, the front of our postcard, and gather the text needed.
To do this, I'll hold CTRL on the keyboard and scroll up with the mouse. I want to gather "May 20th" and "3 p.m. To 5 p.m." If I click, I'll notice these layers are locked, so I'll go back into our Layers panel, and I'll unlock Front Working since this is where these layers are. I'll highlight both "3 p.m. To 5 p.m." and, holding Shift, also select "May 20th." I'll then hit CTRL + C on the keyboard to copy this, and while we're here, why don't we move these layers into Front Final?
We'll highlight all of them and simply drag them into Front Final. Before doing so, we'll have to unlock Front Final. We'll click and drag them over.
We can now lock both of these layers again, and let's change our perspective, going back to the back of our postcard. I'll hold CTRL as I scroll down with the mouse, and we're now ready to paste the layers that we've copied. To do this, I'll make sure I'm in the Front Banners layer, and let's also add this rectangle to the Front Banners layer by clicking and dragging it up.
Next, within the Front Banners layer, I'll hit CTRL + V to paste the two text elements. I'll then drag them to the right and resize them. While these are both currently a matched width to each other, they're a little bit too big for the front of this postcard.
So, to change these, we'll click and drag the dimensions. We'll have to double-click on the circle to the right of the bounding boxes. If we do so, we can now adjust the size while holding Shift to maintain proportions. We'll then line it up with the left side of our box, holding Shift, and the right side of our box, holding Shift, and then holding ALT and Shift, we'll simply reduce it so it's not all the way to the edge and release.
We now have our text, however, we need to change the color of our text. To do this, with both layers still selected, we'll go to our fill color, double-click, and drag up and to the left with our color picker. We'll then hit OK.
And we now have our white text as well as our box. Let's go back in Front Banners and name some of our elements. We'll click the drop-down, and the first thing we'll rename is our rectangle.
Double-clicking and typing "Details Box" and hitting Enter. Going down to our triangle, let's add both the triangle and our bottom banner as one object. To do this, we can select them from our Layers panel, clicking to the right, and then, holding Shift, we'll also select the rectangle.
With both of these selected, we'll right-click and select "Group." Now, we can rename our group by double-clicking and typing "Bottom Banner" and hitting Enter. And finally, let's rename this bottom path, which, if we select, we'll see is our top banner.
We'll rename this by double-clicking and typing "Top Banner" and hitting Enter. As we can see within our Layers panel, it's important to give each element a title and organize it so that our Layers panel doesn't get too out of control, and we can quickly find what we're looking for. With this now organized, let's collapse our Front Banners layer as well as our Back Background layer, and let's now save our work.
We'll hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll add a drop shadow to each of our elements. See you there!