Learn how to refine the visual appeal of your text efficiently in this article. Discover valuable insights into the use of tools such as the eyedropper tool, the selection tool, and the align tool within a text frame and how they can enhance your design.
Key Insights
- The article provides clear instructions on how to use the eyedropper tool to replicate text styles, improving consistency in your design. This simplifies the task of manually matching a particular text style, saving time and effort.
- It also elaborates on the proper usage of the selection tool, demonstrating how it helps in adjusting the positioning of the text within a frame. This tool aids in achieving a well-aligned and balanced layout in your design.
- The article underscores the importance of the align tool when working with text inside a frame. The guide shows how to align the text to the center or to the right, and how to adjust the space before or after the text, providing valuable tips for creating a neat and professional presentation.
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 continue stylizing our text. Before we continue on to page 2, let's first start by adding this URL placeholder and triple-clicking this line and hitting CTRL + C so that we can copy this placeholder text and add it to the bottom.
We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and if we hit W we can go back to normal view mode. Let's simply click and drag a text frame and hit CTRL + V to paste our text here. From here, we'll triple-click and align our paragraph to center.
Then we'll hit CTRL + ALT + C so that we can minimize our text frame around the text. We'll then utilize our Selection tool. Let's simply click and drag it up so it's in line with the center, and the center line will turn pink when we're in line and right above the margin.
If we hit W we can see that we've added our URL placeholder. Let's now move on to page 2 and we can begin stylizing our text here. The first text that we'll be stylizing is "Your dream home, our pleasure, " and for this text we can actually copy the same text that we have above in our "Design begins and ends with your lifestyle."
Therefore with this text frame selected, let's hit I on the keyboard, short for our Eyedropper tool, and if we scroll up and click on the text right here of our "Design begins and ends with your lifestyle, " we'll click, and we'll see that our Eyedropper tool is now filled. This means that it contains the style so we can simply click and drag over the text and we'll see that it matches the text above. Now, however, we will need to re-stylize this, so let's utilize our Selection tool and first work with our text frame.
Just like before, we'll hold ALT as we drag in so that it's centered within our rectangle and with our text frame selected, let's go to the top and we'll align our text to the center. Be careful that you don't have an extra space in here because if you have one extra line, it'll throw off the centering. Finally, we're going to highlight all of this text and let's change it from black and we'll go to the top of our control bar and we'll select Paper.
We'll then hit CTRL + Shift + A and see how this looks. I think in this case we need to drop our "pleasure" to the next line, so we'll hit ENTER and as a final change, let's actually slant our text to the right-hand side so it looks italicized. Normally we could go to the top and select Italic, however in this case we only have Bold as an option.
Instead, we'll need to change it ourselves. To do this we can go down to our Character characteristics within the Properties panel and we can actually slant it ourselves. We'll go to Skew and let's simply click up until it looks italicized.
In this case, it's at 10 degrees. I think that looks good so let's hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and I like how that looks. It brings a little attention to the word "hour."
Let's add a period right at the end of "pleasure" and there we go, we've finished stylizing this section. For our next section here, let's first start by hitting CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and we'll utilize our Selection tool. Selecting the text frame and just like before, we'll hold ALT to drag it inside so it's inside our margins and now clicking inside, let's hit CTRL + A to select all the text and let's bring the font size down to 10 points.
However, for our title, we'll triple-click and we do want to move that up to 12 points. Additionally, we have these hyphens here and InDesign will automatically add hyphens to make sure that things stretch across the size of the text frame. However, we can undo these by going to the right-hand side within our Paragraph characteristics and unchecking the word Hyphenate.
If we hit CTRL + A we can select all the text and undo the hyphenation of all of these bullet points. Finally, we'll hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect and if we utilize our Selection tool we'll select this text and again align center. As one final change, let's add a little more separation between our top line by again going to our Paragraph options and adding just a little more space at 0.0625. We have a little more space between our title and the bullet points.
We'll hit CTRL + Shift + A again to deselect and we now have our last text to edit. We'll go down in here within this text frame and the first thing I want to do is hit ENTER to add Becky Stafford onto another line. One thing we can do here is we can actually take this name and we can align just one line of the paragraph.
In this case, we're going to align it to the right-hand side. So here, even though the text above within the same frame is aligned to the left, this new paragraph here is aligned to the right. Next, let's utilize our Selection tool and we want to place this text frame within the margins.
However, we don't just want it to go inside on the bottom and right-hand side but also on the top and left-hand side. So with it clicked and dragged in without releasing, we can hold ALT. We'll release and see that it also comes in on the left and top as well.
From here, let's select this bottom text, Becky Stafford, and instead of adding space after, let's go to the left-hand side. We're going to add space before just to drop it down a little bit below the text above. We'll just click up once to 0.0625 and going back into our text here, let's add quotation marks to the end and quotation marks to the top.
From here, let's now save our work hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save and in the next video we'll finalize this card. See you there!