Learn to take your cover designs to the next level by understanding how to make your text stand out more. This article provides a step-by-step guide to utilizing shape tools, altering font types and sizes, and working with alignments and baseline options to create a visually appealing cover.
Key Insights
- The article guides the reader on how to use shape tools, specifically the rectangle and ellipse tool, to make text stand out more effectively on a page.
- Text can be edited to stand out more by changing the font, size, and alignment. The article specifically mentions using Chivo Black and adjusting the size to the user's preference.
- The baseline options for text alignment can be adjusted when using Chivo to make the text perfectly centered within the text frame. The article also suggests experimenting with the shapes and design to create a unique cover layout.
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In this video, we're going to continue stylizing our cover. So let's begin first by looking at the top, and we have this text, but we need this text to stand out a bit more.
So to make this happen, we're going to go and utilize our Shape Tools using our Rectangle, and let's just draw a rectangle all the way from the edge of the page in, right around to this guide. We'll release, and again, feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer. For me, I'm going to again use Color 1, and we now need to send this back behind our text.
To do this, we'll use CTRL + [ and we'll move it back behind our text. Now we need to edit our text so it stands out a bit more in front of Color 1. We'll triple-click our text, and let's change up the font. We're going to be utilizing Chivo, and let's use Chivo Black. Next, let's bump up the size a bit.
We'll double-click and we'll type 30 and hit ENTER. Here we go—it's now starting to stand out a bit more. Let's next do a little stylizing.
Right-aligning it, and I'm going to drop “Construction” down to the next line, and let's hit CTRL + A again to select all. Let's change it from black to Paper, selecting Paper for our color, and I think this is starting to look good.
We can probably make it a little bit bigger. We'll double-click and type 40 and hit ENTER. There we go—this is starting to stand out now.
Next, let's align this text so it's in the center of the Text Frame. We can do this at the top by going to Align Center. And remember that when we're using Chivo, we also want to right-click, go to our Text Frame Options so we can adjust our Baseline Options. We'll go to our Offset, and remember for Chivo we want to use Cap Height.
And click OK. From here, if we now adjust this Text Frame to the top of the rectangle, we'll see that it's perfectly centered here. This looks good. We can adjust the size of our rectangle just a little bit, holding ALT and bringing it down.
We'll do the same thing with our Text Frame here, holding ALT and bringing it in. If we want to make this a little more unique, let's add a circle on the end. We'll go to our left-hand side and hold the Rectangle Tool, selecting our Ellipse Tool.
From here, we can draw a circle. And remember, if we hold Shift, we'll draw a full circle. We could use this color here and move it to the back by hitting CTRL + [. And if we hit W on our keyboard, we can see what this looks like. This doesn't look bad. We can also select it, and if we hit I on the keyboard and click our rectangle here, we'll match the same color. Again, hitting W to see what this looks like. And we can also see that we have a Stroke here, so let's remove this Stroke. Selecting both the rectangle and, holding Shift, we'll select the circle, and for our Stroke, we're simply going to click down to zero. From here, feel free to play around with these shapes and make a design that you're happy with.
I think for me, I'm going to put it right on the end here and drag it down so it's the same size as the rectangle here, and here we'll see it kind of forms one shape. Additionally, I can move it in a bit, holding Shift to move it to the right. And now if I move the rectangle to the right, I'm
Going to line it up with that circle, and we have a nice-looking shape here. We zoom in, we can make sure this works correctly. I'm just going to move our Text Frame a little bit over so that I can adjust this appropriately. And once it's lined up with the center of that circle, we can see that there—I can move the Text Frame back.
If we hit W on the keyboard, we can see our work, and I like the look of this. Moving down below, let's now begin working with our “Department of Public Works Proposal.” We'll hit W, and if we triple-click this text here, let's copy the same styling as the text above.
We'll utilize our Eyedropper Tool and click on this text. And we'll see that it's white, so let's first change that from white. And we'll go into our CC Libraries, and feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer. I'm going to choose Color 2. And this seems a little bit big right now. We zoom out here, so let's reduce the size of this. Hitting CTRL + A on the keyboard to select all, and let's drop it down to 30 and hit ENTER.
I think this is a much more appropriate size. Next, let's separate these lines. We'll have it say “Department of Public Works, ” and we'll put “Proposal” on the last line. I think this looks pretty good.
However, as a last change, let's triple-click and hit CTRL + A, and we're going to make this All Caps. We can do this by going to the top and selecting All Caps from our Control Bar. There—I think this looks much better.
We can resize it a bit, and we're now ready to work on the text on the left-hand side. For this text, we're going to hit CTRL + A to select all. Let's again change it to Chivo, and we'll just use Chivo Regular.
However, for the “Submitted To, ” let's change this to Bold so it distinguishes it a little bit. And now we're just going to do a little bit of formatting to this text, and we'll also highlight this section right here—“Submitted By”—and utilizing the Eyedropper Tool, we're going to copy the same styling as “Submitted To.” And with our Eyedropper filled, now we can also highlight Line 8 and change the styling that way. Next, we'll utilize our Selection Tool, highlighting all of the text, hitting CTRL + A, and let's bump up the size from 12 to 13 just so it's a little bit bigger.
From here, let's hit W on the keyboard to see our work, and I think we're almost there. Let's save our work for now, hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll continue working on our cover.
See you there!