Discover how to strategically coordinate text placement in design projects, with specific emphasis on avoiding obstructions and effectively utilizing white space. Learn how to create guides, divide up areas for titles, subtitles, and text, and adjust the visibility and color of text to enhance readability.
Key Insights
- Text placement in design requires a strategic approach to ensure readability and aesthetic appeal. This includes creating guides to establish boundaries and accurately divide up areas for different text elements such as title, subtitle, and main text.
- Avoiding obstructions, such as design elements or graphics, is crucial. The text should be placed in a manner that it doesn't fall under or above such obstructions, enhancing the overall look and readability of the design.
- Adjustments to the visibility and color of text can greatly enhance its readability. These aspects should ideally be altered as per the design requirements and to suit the background against which the text is placed.
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In this video we're going to begin strategizing how we coordinate our text in this bottom area. So let's begin by first assessing what we have.
We have our City's Hustle title, the We Keep Up subtitle, and then we have some text that we can place at the bottom. In addition, we're going to want to avoid the triangle on the left-hand side, so we'll want to strategically place our text so that it's not under or above the triangle. So let's start by creating a few guides.
To do this, we're going to drag from the left and create guides two inches from the right and left edges of our artboard. Since our artboard is 36 inches long, we'll hold Shift and drop a guide right at 34 inches. Next, we'll create another guide right at two inches.
And finally, let's create a guide for the bottom, so we don't run all of our text into the bottom, and we'll create it one inch from the bottom, keeping it at 71 inches. Now let's begin strategizing how we're going to divide up this area for our title, our subtitle, and our text. Sometimes I find it's easiest to look outside of the text and change the visibility so we can work with the white space instead of the text.
Looking at this now, the goal is to have our title, our subtitle, and then have all of the text centered. So let's begin creating guides to do this. If we zoom in, we can create a guide that we place right at 50 inches at the bottom of our second lower bar, and now we have this space to work with, from 50 inches all the way to 71 inches.
So let's simply start creating guides. The first guide we'll want is some space from the lower bar down to where our title will start, and let's give ourselves three inches of room here. We'll set it to 53 inches.
Next, let's create another guide for the bottom of our title. We'll give ourselves two inches for our title here. We'll set it to 55 inches.
We'll then give ourselves some space now for the subtitle, and we'll leave about an inch and a half. Remember, none of these are necessarily set in stone, but it gives us a good idea of how these will look. And next, let's create a guide for the bottom of our subtitle.
In this case, we'll give ourselves about an inch and a half, since it won't be quite as big. We now have some space, our title area, and our subtitle area. Let’s begin creating text layers for each.
I'll toggle the visibility of the text, and let's now move the text off into the right of our artboard. In addition, let's change the color of the text to white so we can read it. We'll double-click, go to our fill color in the options bar, and change it to white, then click OK.
Now we can see it and begin creating text layers of it. We'll then, within Artboard 1, go to the horizontal type tool, and we'll have our first text layer for our title be right aligned within this space. We'll create a text layer and type out City's Hustle.
As we can see, the text is still white, since it's copying the characteristics of this other text. So I'll hit CTRL+A, and let's change the fill color down to black, and click OK. Here we can see we now have our title within the title space.
Let's now create a subtitle. We'll go back to our horizontal type tool and create another text box within these guides. We'll type out 'We Keep Up.'
Even though we haven't stylized these yet, this helps give us an idea of what it will look like. Finally, let’s create one more text layer at the bottom. Since our subtitle is an inch and a half, let’s create another guide, giving ourselves an inch and a half of space, and here's where we can create the bottom text layer.
We'll drag from the bottom corner to the top, and right now it's filled with lorem ipsum. However, we can go back to our other text layer, highlight it all, hit CTRL+C to copy, and then within our new text layer, hit CTRL+A to select all, and hit CTRL+V to paste. Remember the text is white, so let's hit CTRL+A one more time and change the fill color using the options bar.
We'll change it to black and click OK, and even though we can't see all of the text here because it's cut off, once we start adjusting our sizes, we'll adjust the size accordingly. Let's now zoom out, and we can toggle the visibility of the text layer outside the artboard since we no longer need it. This looks great.
In the next video, we'll be stylizing our text. See you there!