Learn the intricacies of text stylization, including font size and style modifications, as well as the manipulation of kerning, font height, and letter spacing. This article details the step-by-step process of text editing to create more engaging and visually appealing content.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to use a horizontal type tool to adjust the text in the center, with specific focus on increasing the size of the text and the bounding box.
- It explains how to select and apply different fonts, adjust the size, and give certain sections of the text more emphasis through bolding and tracking adjustments.
- The article further discusses how to manipulate components like font size, kerning, font height, and font width scale to make a piece more appealing, along with techniques to add space and make text pop against the background.
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 be stylizing our text. To do this, let's use our Horizontal Type Tool and click on the text in the center.
We now have our center text selected, and the first thing we're going to do is select all the text using CTRL+A on the keyboard. Let's now center it in the Options bar by choosing center text. Next, we're going to want to increase the size of this text. In order to do so, let's also increase the size of our bounding box by dragging it to the top and bottom of the box behind it.
We'll first change the font by clicking on the font in our Options bar, and let's see what Nevis looks like since we've used it below. It looks okay; however, let's try another font. Let's use Chivo, another downloaded font that's consistent with the branding. As we scroll over each of these options, we can see what they look like.
Let's use Regular and simply select that. We now have Chivo Regular in the center, so let's increase the size of this font. We can do this in our Options bar. Let's increase it to 150pt and hit ENTER. This seems like a good size.
Maybe let's increase it a little bit more to 155pt and hit ENTER. This feels like it's a good size. The next thing I want to do, looking at this, is make “Phase 10” really stand out. One way to do this is to give it its own line.
We can do that by removing the space between “10” and “is, ” then hitting Enter. We also have a space here between “Phase 10” and “that, ” so we'll remove that space and again hit ENTER. We now have “Phase 10” on its own line, so we can double-click and hold Shift and highlight all of “Phase 10.” Now let's go to the top in our Options bar and select the Character and Paragraph panels, where we can make more manipulations. The first and easiest way to make it stand out more is to make it bold—so we'll change from Regular to Bold, and that helps it pop out more and draw more attention.
Next, we have various options to manipulate this including the font size, the kerning (which is the space between characters), the font height, as well as the font width scale. Let's make a couple of changes to this. First, let's change the Tracking.
We can do this by typing in 30 and hitting Enter. We'll see that there's now more space between each of our characters so they look more spread out. In addition to spreading out the characters this way, let's also stretch them out so they're a little bit wider. We can do this just below, under Horizontal Scale.
Let's scale it to 120 and hit ENTER. I think we can go a little bit further. Let's go to 130 and hit ENTER, and I think this looks good. It attracts our attention a little bit more.
Finally, let's add just a little more space and adjust the leading between the words above it and below it. So with “Phase 10” highlighted, we can go from Auto and, hovering over the Leading, we can simply drag it up or down. In this case, I'm going to change it to 200 and hit ENTER. We're also going to change the leading for the line below, because that will also give us a little more space.
We'll highlight the line below and here in the Leading, we'll type 200 as well. This allows “Phase 10” to stand out a little bit more from the other words. Let's now shrink our text box just a little bit using ALT, and I think this looks like a good width.
We'll do the same thing—change the size from top to bottom holding ALT—until it's centered, and there we have the text centered. Let's click outside in the Layers panel and we can see what it looks like. I think this looks good, with the exception being that I think we want to make the white box behind a little higher in opacity.
We're going to select the center square. It's currently set at 75%; we're simply going to change that to 85% and hit ENTER. This still allows us to see the photo behind it, but it helps the black letters pop out. Let's now save our work using CTRL+S on the keyboard, and in the next video, we're going to be making some final touches.
See you there!