Adobe Illustrator Lecture 5
Type Tool Breakdown in Adobe Illustrator
Found in the left-hand toolbar, the Type Tool (T) is inarguably one of the most important tools within Adobe Illustrator. With it, you can type out lines of horizontal text or align text to follow a vector path, to name just a few functions.
Once activated, click and drag a text box to act as a boundary for your text. If you prefer not to have a text box, you can click on your document to act as the starting place for your lines of text. Type away to your heart’s content, but watch out for type that lies outside the text box.
You’ll notice a small box with a red plus sign to alert you of outside text. Simply decrease your font size with Shift + Command + to ensure all type is displayed properly. If needed, you can expand your text box by clicking and dragging the bounding box with the Selection Tool (V).
The Type on a Path Tool allows for text to be displayed on a curve, an angle, and even upside down, if that suits your fancy. This tool is ideal for editing sample text that follows an incline or is oriented in a circular fashion.
Altering Horizontal Lines of Text
When downloading a sales promotion or design in a vector format, there will be areas of filler or sample text to display how the vector art can be used. Maybe your business isn’t offering 75% off like it mentions on the sample design, or perhaps the promotion code doesn’t match. How do you edit those pieces of text?
Illustrator’s versatile tools allow you to easily alter lines of text to fit the needs of your campaign. By utilizing the handy Type Tool, the Selection Tool (V), and the Character palette, you can drastically change the look of the design in just a few steps.
Begin by denoting guides to ensure proper typographic alignment in your design. Bring up the rulers with Cmd + R, then click and drag the light blue lines to the baselines of the original sample text and specify the beginning and ends of the text. Setting up precise rulers to guide your text results in a symmetrical and successful design.
solate the sample text by ungrouping all vector elements with Shift + Cmd + G, then delete the text you’d like to replace with the Delete key.
With the Type Tool (T), click and drag along the guides to create your text box. This box allows text to only be visible within the boundaries. If you’re not keen on creating a text box, simply click within the artboard and start typing out your phrase.
Move your text box around as needed with the Selection Tool (V) or simply expand the size of the text box by clicking and dragging the white squares located on the perimeter of the text box.
Editing Text on an Angle
In addition to editing horizontally oriented sample text, you can also easily alter text that’s oriented on an angle.