Stylizing and Formatting Text in Postcard Design: A Step-by-Step Guide

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 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 by dragging from the ruler. 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 the 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, or use the white circle on the right-hand side of our bounding box for the text. If we double-click it, we can now adjust the bounding box, leaving the text as is.

We'll do this by dragging our box from the left and right-hand side, leaving all of our text within the bounding box.

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.' 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 in 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. We'll see we have many additional options for our character.

These include All Caps, Small Caps, and 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 in the center.

We'll go to the top and change our font size, increasing it. 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, click on the circle to the right-hand side, 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 settings, and let's go back to our character panel where we can change additional options. In this case, we'll select 'All Caps.'

We can then increase the font size in the control bar, and we'll leave it 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 'Friday.'

To do this, we can use the Eyedropper Tool (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, style, size, paragraph, and character settings as well.

Next, let's drag all three of these titles together up top, hitting V on the keyboard. 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 drag it in so that it's within our guides. 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, 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 to our character settings, 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. To change this, we can click on the text, scroll down in the properties panel, go to 'Paragraph' > 'More Options, ' and uncheck 'Hyphenate.' We'll see that 'environmentally' is now on one line.

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, double-click 'experienced, ' go to our font family, then our font style, and we'll change 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 with 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!