Master the use of type tools and learn how to add text to a logo with ease and professionalism. This article guides you through the process of adjusting the artboard, selecting the appropriate type tool, adding and customizing text, including selecting font size and typeface, and aligning text to enhance your designs.
Key Insights
- This guide provides detailed steps on using type tools to add text to a logo. It starts with adjusting the artboard to create space for the text and selecting the appropriate type tool for horizontal text typing.
- The article emphasizes the customization of the text, including changing the text size, selecting a suitable font or typeface from Adobe Cloud's library of fonts, Typekit, and the ability to preview different font options.
- Additional customizations such as text alignment, color adjustment, capitalization, height and width adjustment, and spacing are also discussed. The guide ends with tips on repositioning the text for a perfect fit.
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In this video, we'll be going over Type Tools as well as adding text to our logo. Let's begin.
The first thing we'll want to do is add a little more space to our Artboard to add text. This is as easy as clicking Artboard and going to Properties above, where we'll add to the height of our Artboard. We can double-click the height and type 2400 to give us 400 additional pixels.
There, we can see we now have room to add text to our image. Next, let's go over some of the Type Tools. If we go to our Tools Bar, we can select the first Type Tool, which is the Horizontal Type Tool.
With this Type Tool, we can use it simply by clicking on our Artboard and typing. In this case, we'll type “Phase 10 Construction.” We'll see that as we type, the Type Tool continues typing horizontally for our text.
Let's select this layer and delete it for now, and click Yes. In addition, we can use this tool by clicking and dragging our bounding box—or the box that our type will be contained in.
If we click and drag a box, we can type again, and we also have the ability to change the size of our bounding box by adjusting the corners or sides. In this case, I'll drag it to both ends, and when we go to our Properties, we can now center this text. We'll click outside Layer 1 to view what we have.
We'll obviously need to do a little work customizing this text for our logo, so let's get started adjusting it. We'll select “Phase 10 Construction” again, and next, we'll want to edit this specific text. We can do this by double-clicking the text and then hitting CTRL+A on our keyboard to select all of it.
The first thing we'll change is the text size. If we go to our Options Bar, we can adjust the size by clicking the drop-down. We'll adjust it to 24 points.
Next, we can adjust our font or typeface. If we click the drop-down, we'll see that we have many different font options available to us. As we hover over each of them, we'll see previews appear directly on our Artboard.
In addition to these fonts, we have access to additional fonts through Typekit. Typekit is Adobe Creative Cloud’s font library, which we can activate or deactivate with a Creative Cloud membership. If we click the Typekit icon found on the top-right corner of the window, an internet browser will open showing us the Typekit library.
With this browser open, we can view different fonts. In addition, we can set filters and priorities based on the type of font we're looking for. On the right-hand side, we’ll see that we can activate these fonts for use in Adobe Creative Cloud applications. So let’s find a font for “Phase 10 Construction.”
The first thing we'll do is double-click our sample text and type “Phase 10 Construction.” Next, we can add a couple of filters for the type of font we're looking for. I'll select Mono and choose something with a bit heavier weight.
Feel free to set your own filters and find a font that works for you. As we scroll through and preview some of these fonts, we can evaluate what best fits our logo. I like the look of this one, Furo Mono, so I'll click “Activate Font” and click OK.
This font will now be active in Photoshop. We’ll close the browser window, and now—with “Phase 10 Construction” still highlighted—we can go to our font list in the Options Bar. When we scroll up to Furo Mono, we'll see that it's available with the Typekit icon next to it, indicating that it's a Typekit font. Let's go through a few other options to customize our font.
If we go to our Options Bar, we’ll see different settings for the size and weight of our font. We can also change alignment, and here we can change the color of our font. Let's also select our Character and Paragraph panels, which will appear on the right with many more options.
For example, if I want to capitalize the entire title, I can click the All Caps icon. In addition, we have other options: we can adjust height, change width, and modify spacing.
If we click the icon with two arrows pointing left and right, we can drag to adjust spacing. I like the increased spacing, so I’ll change it to 180. Next, let’s drop “Construction” down to the next line.
I’ll hit Backspace and then ENTER, so we have “Phase 10” on top and “Construction” below. The final thing I want to do is increase the size a little and space it so that “Phase 10” and “Construction” both take up roughly the same width across our guides. Let’s first highlight “Phase 10” and increase the size to 36.
We’ll drop it down slightly to 35. This looks pretty close to our guides. Next, let’s highlight “Construction” and increase it to 30.
That’s too large, so we’ll drop it to 26—and that looks pretty close. We can now see that “Phase 10” and “Construction” take up roughly the same amount of space below. Let’s move it a little higher so it’s just below the logo.
Click on the “Phase 10 Construction” text layer, hit CTRL+T to transform it, and then use the arrow keys to move it to an appropriate location. Click outside of “Phase 10 Construction, ” and here we can see we’ve added our title and completed the logo. Nicely done.
Let’s save our work by hitting CTRL+S on the keyboard. In the next videos, we’ll begin creating marketing materials. See you there!