Gain insights into how to effectively stylize text and images when designing cards, specifically examining techniques such as aligning text, adjusting font sizes and weights, creating lines, and manipulating images. Learn how to use various tools to ensure your design is proportionate and visually appealing.
Key Insights
- The article provides thorough step-by-step instructions on how to adjust and align text and images for card designing. This includes strategies such as dragging text to fit within margins, changing text weight for visual impact, and centering paragraphs for balance.
- It details the method of creating lines with the Line tool for additional design elements, ensuring they are horizontal and proportionally adjusted to the text frame.
- Instructions on manipulating images are also explored, such as adjusting an image's size and position to align with other elements of the design, ensuring a consistent and aesthetically pleasing result.
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're going to begin stylizing our text. So hitting W on the keyboard, we'll go back into normal mode, and we're going to now work with our text here, starting at the top.
We zoom in here, we'll drag up, and for this top text frame, we want to line it up so that it's in line with our margins. Once it's in line with our margins, let's triple click the text, and for our styling here, we're going to have Chivo black, but let's increase the size just a little bit. We'll put it right at 14 points.
Next, we're going to work with May 20th as our text. Before doing so, as we're continuing to work with different text elements, let's make sure to lock our shapes and images layer so we don't accidentally click on them and work with them or move them. Working now with May 20th, let's have large letters for our text May, and then we're going to create 20th on the side.
To do this, we actually need to create two different text elements. So for now, let's simply delete 20th, hit in backspace, and we're going to work with May. We'll change the font, highlighting it, and let's maintain Chivo black.
However, let's increase the text size from 12, double clicking, to 64, and hit ENTER. We now need to expand our text frame, so we utilize our selection tool, and we'll just make a slightly larger text frame. In addition, I think we want the A and Y to also be capitalized, so let's triple click the text, and we'll select all caps from our properties panel.
From here also, the letters A and Y appear to have an extra large space, and so it looks like it has the letters MA as one word and Y as a separate word. This can sometimes happen with combinations of AY and other letter combinations. To fix this, we can change this with tracking.
So, if we highlight the letter A, we're going to reduce the tracking or the space before the next letter. We'll do this within our character and properties panel, and within tracking, let's simply click down. I think it looks good right at a negative 150, and it now looks like it's all one word.
In addition, for this text, it's stretching out over most of this black rectangle behind, so we need to reduce the overall size of it from left to right and increase the size from bottom to top. We can also do this within our character panel, and we're going to just stretch it out a little bit. First, we'll increase the vertical scale, and we can click up or double click, and let's type in 120 and hit ENTER, and if we utilize our selection tool, we can drag it below.
However, we still need a little more space on the right-hand side, so let's triple click again, and now let's stretch it out left to right. In order to reduce this space, let's click down, stretching it horizontally, and let's leave ourselves enough space to fit 20th right here on the right-hand side, so we'll leave it at 80 percent. Finally, we'll utilize our selection tool again, and we can either center it this way, or utilizing our text frame here, we'll drag it so it's the same height as our rectangle behind, and we'll have it centered here.
Okay, so I'll move it down just a bit, dragging the text frame up, and this now is centered within the black. In addition, we can drag our text frame from the right-hand side over to the left, and using the arrow keys on the keyboard, I'm going to just inch it to the left, so it's snug against the margin. Now we're ready to create our 20th.
To do this, we could utilize the type tool, and create another type frame, or we can hold ALT, and drag Mae below, double clicking, and typing 20th. As we can see, it doesn't quite fit within the text frame, so let's hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect the text frame, and then utilizing our selection tool, we'll click on it, and drag it out. For this text now, we want to change it back to normal, without being stretched, so let's triple click the text, and for stretching, we'll type 100%, and double clicking, type 100% again.
In addition, we'll have to go back to our selection tool, and drag it out, and now for the th, we'll select it, and let's actually make it superscript, so it rests right above. Finally, we'll utilize the selection tool, and dragging it above, we now want to rotate it 90 degrees, so we'll go to the bottom right-hand side, and when we see the arrows, we'll rotate, while holding shift, until it's 90 degrees across. In addition, we need to reduce the size, so let's double click, and hit CTRL + A to select all, and for the size of our font, let's change this from 64, double clicking, and we'll go all the way down to 30, and hit ENTER.
Now, hitting CTRL + ALT + C on the keyboard, we'll shrink our text frame size, and utilizing the selection tool, we'll click, and drag it over. While I think this looks good overall, I think one final change is we want to triple click this text, and rather than it being Chivo black, let's actually make it Chivo, and clicking the drop-down, we'll select light. Here, the May stands out a little bit more, and the 20th is off to the right-hand side.
Finally, we'll line it up here, so that's centered, and I think this looks good. Let's hit W on the keyboard to see our work, and I like that these follow on the left-hand margin. If we want to inch this just a bit to the right, we can do so.
Right now, it feels like it's a little bit tall, so let's hit W again, and let's highlight the th, so that rather than being capitalized, it's lowercase. We'll select all caps, and this actually helps it line up a little bit better, with the h being at the same height as the top of the y. We'll utilize our selection tool, hit W again to preview, make any final adjustments, launch it a bit back to the left, and I like the look of this. Let's hit CTRL + S to save our work, and in the next video, we'll be working on stylizing the remainder of our text.
See you there!