Discover how to format text in a postcard design using Adobe Illustrator, including creating guides, adjusting text size and positioning, changing letter cases, and applying font styles. Uncover ways to ensure text fits specific spaces, manipulate bounding boxes, and copy font characteristics across different text elements.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on formatting text within a postcard design in Adobe Illustrator. Starting with creating guides to place the text, the tutorial goes on to explain how to adjust the size of the text to fit specific spaces, and how to manipulate the bounding box of the text to contain it within the guides.
- Further techniques include changing the case of the letters to uppercase using the character settings within the properties panel, in addition to centering the text. An insightful tip shared is the ability to copy the characteristics of one text element to another using the eyedropper tool, ensuring consistency across different text elements in the design.
- Lastly, the article explains how to bold certain words for emphasis, unhyphenate words, and adjust the font size for different sections of the text. These techniques allow for more control over the visual impact and readability of the text in the postcard design.
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In this video we'll begin stylizing and formatting our text within our postcard. So let's begin by changing the visibility of our guides.
In this case we have an entire layer with our guides so let's toggle the visibility on it and next let's add a couple more guides. The first guide we'll be adding is for the left side of all of our text. We'll drag from our ruler and we'll release this guide right at half an inch.
Next we'll create an additional guide dragging from the ruler and let's leave the second guide half an inch from the middle holding shift and releasing right at two and a half inches. Between these two guides we'll contain all of our text. So let's start with the top.
We'll hit V on the keyboard for our selection tool and let's start by moving our title Friday to the top. Next we'd like to stretch out this word so that it fills the entire distance between our two guides for our text. To do this we could click and drag the edge holding shift and changing our bounding box to this area.
We now have a large Friday. Let's hit CTRL Z to undo and undo or the white circle on the right hand side of our bounding box for our text if we double click it we can now adjust the bounding box leaving the text as is. We'll do this dragging our box from the left and right hand side leaving all of our text in the bounding box between.
Now we can adjust the size of our text and it will only be contained within this bounding box. So let's start by centering the text going to our control bar and selecting align center and now let's change this to all capital letters. We could go in and double click it and begin typing it out all in capital letters while holding shift or with it as lowercase we can simply highlight the text by double clicking on it and if we go to our character settings within the properties panel we can click on the more options below and we'll see we have many additional options for our character.
These include all caps, small caps, we can add superscript or subscript. We'll undo that and in this case we want to select all caps. Now our text is large in all caps.
Let's now increase the size until our text fits the center. We'll go to the top and change our font size increasing it and in this case we'll simply increase it until it doesn't fit. We'll go back down to 36 points for our font.
We can then hit escape on our keyboard and we have our first text fitting up top. Next let's do the same thing with our 3 p.m to 5 p.m. We'll drag it up a little bit we'll click on the circle to the right hand side and double click and now we can change the size of our bounding box. We'll drag it over to the left and up slightly.
We'll then center our text using the paragraph characteristics and let's go back to our character panel where we can change additional options and in this case we'll select all caps. We can then increase the font size and control bar and we'll leave it right at 19 points since this fits within our bounding box. Finally we'll do this with our last title May 20th.
We'll double click the circle drag to the edges and center our text. However rather than going through the additional steps like we did before we can actually use a new tool the
eyedropper tool to copy the font characteristics of additional text from Friday. To do this we can use the eyedropper tool or I on the keyboard and with the text selected we'll simply click the text we would like to copy the characteristics of.
We'll click and we'll see that the font doesn't fit so we'll simply drop it down a little bit and see that at 34 points our font now fits the exact same characteristics of all caps and it will follow the same characteristics of the font family the style size paragraph and character settings as well. Next let's drag the three of these titles together up top hitting v on the keyboard and we'll simply move them up so they're close together and here we have our title. Let's now move on to our text below we'll select our paragraphs and we'll drag it in so that it's within our guides and we'll select the right guide as well and let's make the top of this text bounding box match the top of our address line.
This will add some consistency within our postcard and guides and lines. Next because we need to add construction icons below we need to give ourselves a little more space so let's decrease the size of our font. To do this we'll click on the font go to our control bar or go to our character characteristics and we can decrease the font size in this case let's leave it at nine points.
Additionally if we look at our text we can see that environmentally focused has a hyphen in the middle. Adobe Illustrator automatically hyphenates text when you paste it from outside so to change this we can click on the text scroll down in the properties panel and go to paragraph more options and uncheck hyphenate we'll see that environmentally is now on one line together. As one additional change to this paragraph text let's bold the words as displayed on our preview pdf.
To do this we'll double click on the text and we'll double click experienced going to our font family and then our font style and we'll be changing the font style from light to bold. We'll then do the same highlighting environmentally focused going to our font style selecting bold and finally safety minded we'll highlight and change the font style to bold. These three bold words will correlate to our three icons that we'll be adding.
We'll hit escape on the keyboard to preview our work and this looks good. Let's now hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video we'll be adding our icon circles. See you there!