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 creating the line that separates the left and right side of our postcard. To do this, let's first start by creating a new layer.
We'll click the Create New Layer icon on the bottom right-hand side of our Layers Panel, and we'll double-click the layer, titling it front working. We'll then hit ENTER. Next, let's start by drawing our line.
To do this, we can use either the Pen Tool to draw a segment from the top to bottom, or we can click and hold the Rectangle Tool, selecting the Line Segment Tool. For this instance, I'll use the Pen Tool. So I'll simply click the Pen Tool (P) on the keyboard, and I'll click at one intersection point and drag down, clicking at the next intersection point.
As we'll see, the Pen Tool now continues drawing lines. To stop this from happening, we'll simply hit Escape on the keyboard, and we've now completed our line. Next, let's work on the stroke of this line.
In the past, we've worked with the default of one pixel wide with black. However, let's stylize this line a bit more. To stylize our line, let's now go over to the Stroke within our Properties Panel.
Typically, it's been one point; however, let's increase our stroke a little bit more—all the way up to three points. In addition, let's hide our guides so that we can see the line in its full form. To do this, we could use the Selection Tool (V), hit (P) on the keyboard, and click on our artboard, then right-click and select Hide Guides.
Or, since we've made an entire layer of front guides, we can simply change the visibility of it. Now, let's continue stylizing our line. We'll select it using the Selection Tool (V) on the keyboard, and we'll go over to Stroke.
If we click on Stroke, we can see that we have many options for our line. The first option is the Cap. Our cap refers to the end point of our line and how it's capped off.
If we zoom in using CTRL + Plus (+) on the keyboard and scroll up, we'll see this more clearly. We'll go to Stroke, and we can play with the different cap options to see the differences. In this case, let's leave it at a Round Cap.
Corner refers to different ways that we can adjust our corners. However, in this case, we simply have a line, so the corners aren't applicable. And finally, Align Stroke refers to how the stroke is aligned within a shape.
Again, this isn't applicable to the line; however, we will be using it in the future. Next, let's check Dashed Line. Automatically, we'll see our dashed line.
If we zoom out using CTRL + Minus (-) on the keyboard, we'll see an example of this dashed line. We'll then click Stroke again to see that we have a 12-point dash with gaps in between. We can adjust this line by filling in our own dash and gap.
Let's do this by typing a number in for Gap. You can choose whatever number you prefer. I'll type in four and then click Dash.
As we can see now, we only have a four-point gap between our 12-point dash. We can continue this trend by typing in different numbers for dashes and gaps to create our own custom line. For example, I'll now type 20 and 10, and 5 and 6. And we'll see that we have our own custom line.
We have many different ways to customize this. Let's go back to our default dashed line by double-clicking the first dash, typing zero, and simply deleting the remainder. We now don't have a dashed line.
However, if we want to make circles for a line as shown in the PDF, we can see that we have circles starting from the bottom and gradually growing to the middle and again decreasing towards the edges. In order to accomplish this, we can go to Stroke, and we're going to want our dash to be as minimal as possible. So for our dash, let's delete zero and we'll type 0.1.
We click outside; we'll see that we don't have much of a change; however, we can now specify a gap between our 0.1 dash. Let's type in 10 for our gap and see where this leaves us. We can now see that we have circles.
This is because the dash itself is so small that it appears to be a circle with a rounded cap, and then we have a 10-point gap between them. In addition to our dashed line, we can also adjust the width. Going into our profile, we can select different profiles, and this first profile, where it's skinny on the end and wide in the middle, matches that of our example.
While I'll stick to this example, feel free to choose your own profile and adjust yours accordingly to what you prefer. I'll leave mine at the Width Profile One and click outside to see an example. Well done, we've now created our center line.
Let's now move this line into a new layer, clicking the New Layer icon, and we'll title this layer front final and hit ENTER. We can then select our line, and rather than clicking from the drop-down, we can just simply click and drag the red square into front final. Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work thus far, and in the next video, we'll be adding the address lines to the right.
See you there.