Creating and formatting text - Illustrator Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll introduce you to the basics of working with text inside Illustrator. And so we'll create some text inside a frame. And then we'll apply some basic formatting attributes. I'm going to start by selecting the type tool, which looks like a capital letter T. And then, I'll go ahead and draw an empty text frame just by dragging like so. And as you can see, that not only creates a rectangular text frame, but it fills it with placeholder text as well. All right, I'm going to zoom in on that text frame by pressing control plus, or command plus on a Mac, and now I can either type in some text from the keyboard, or because I've created some text in advance that I've copied to the clipboard, I'll go up to the edit menu and choose the paste command, which has a very standard keyboard shortcut of control V here in a PC, or command V on a Mac. And right away, we have a couple of problems. First of all, the text isn't necessarily set in the font I want to use, and secondly, it's exceeding the boundaries of the text frame. And I can tell that's the case by the appearance of this faint little plus sign, this red plus inside of a red square in the bottom right corner of the text frame, which tells me that I have so-called overflow text. All right. So the first thing I want to do is choose a different font. And so, I'm going to assign that font to all of the text, whether we can see it or not, by clicking inside the text frame with my type tool. And that's going to give me this blinking insertion marker right here. And then I'll select all of the text by going up to the select menu and choosing the all command. Or you have a very handy shortcut of control A here on a PC, or command A on the Mac. And that goes ahead and highlights all the text like so. All right, now I'll go over to the properties panel. And notice that the text is currently set in Myriad Pro. I'm going to click this down-pointing arrowhead, and that will give me a list of every font installed on this system. And of course, your options are going to be different than mine. But if you want to scroll down the list and you can just use the scroll wheel on your mouse, and you'll begin to see the various fonts in your system listed in alphabetical order. And so I could go ahead and select any one of these guys, such as Elephant, let's say. May or may not be available on your system. Another option is to click inside the font name and press the down arrow key to advance to the next font in alphabetical order, or you can press the up arrow key to advance to previous fonts, again in alphabetical order, based on the fonts that are installed in your particular system. However, I have a specific font in mind, one that will definitely be installed on your system, so I'll just go ahead and type in M Y R, and that's going to highlight the first instance of a font called Myriad Variable Concept. And so I'll just go ahead and choose any one of these guys, it doesn't matter which one. Now I need to make the text fit inside of its frame, and one way to do that is to go over to this type size option right here, and then you could click its down-pointing arrowhead and choose a smaller font if you like. And as you can see, at 10 points, everything's fitting just fine. That's not what I want, however. I want 12-point type. And so I'm going to click this little up arrow icon in order to reset a value of 12 points. And I'm going to accept my changes by pressing the escape key. And notice that goes ahead and applies my changes, deselects the text, and returns me to the black arrow selection tool up here at the top of the toolbox. All right, now I need to resize this text frame. And you can do that by dragging one of the handles. The problem is, in my case, I've turned off the bounding box. And so dragging a corner handle just moves the text around. To bring back the bounding box, I'll go up to the view menu and choose show bounding box. If your command reads hide bounding box, then it's already turned on. All right, now you can drag one of these corner handles if you like, or notice this little widget right here. If you double click on it, then Illustrator will automatically expand that text frame in order to contain all the text. I want it to be slightly bigger still, however, so I'll go ahead and drag this corner handle until we've got lots of extra room. Also notice this little square down here no longer appears as a red plus sign, which tells us that we no longer have overflow text. All right. And I want you to see something. Currently we're only seeing a handful of formatting attributes. These are the so-called character level attributes which affect just those selected characters at a time. When you have an entire text frame selected with a black arrow tool, you're going to affect all of the text. Now you can find still more options by clicking on this little dot dot dot icon, which is going to bring up the full character panel. And notice that we have a few icons down here such as all caps and small caps, as well as underline and strikethrough, but we don't have bold and italic the way you see in other software. And that's because Illustrator only lets you select from the designer styles. So in other words, those styles that have been assigned to this particular font family. Now some fonts only have one style and that's it. Other fonts, such as Myriad Variable Concept, have tons and tons of styles. And so I'm just going to go ahead and set the text in regular. And now, let's say I want to make the phone number bold. Well in that case, I'm going to have to select the phone number. There's a few different ways to work. First of all, if you double click inside the type, you're going to do two things. First of all, you're going to automatically switch back to the type tool. And then secondly, you're going to position the blinking insertion marker. All right. So you can select text just by dragging. If you want to select an entire word, then double click on it. If you want to select multiple words, then double click and drag on that second click like so. Now I want to select an entire line, so I'm going to triple click. And you don't have to do so very fast. You can just click, click, click like so, and that'll go ahead and select that entire line. And now, to make it bold, I'll go ahead and bring up the list of styles available to this particular font. And I'll select bold, but you've got all kinds of other ones. You have black if you want a super heavy phone number, or you have semibold if you want something lighter. I'm going to go with bold, however. All right, now I want to add a little bit of space above this address line right here. And so I'm just going to click on the word main or street, doesn't really matter where. And then, notice these paragraph options down here. These are formatting attributes that affect entire paragraphs at a time. Now I'm looking for paragraph spacing, so I'm going to click on this dot dot dot icon to bring up this panel right here. And I'll drop down to this option, space before paragraph, and I'll increase that value to three points by clicking that up arrow icon. Now, I'll add some more paragraph spacing before this email address, and so I'll go ahead and click in it, you don't have to select the entire line, just click in it. Because after all, you're affecting the entire paragraph at a time, no matter what's selected. Then, click on that dot dot dot icon and increase that value, once again, to three points. So again, I'm working with the space before paragraph value. All right, now I want to format these lines as if they're hotlinks. So I'll go ahead and triple click on this first line and then drag down on the third click in order to select both of them. And then I'll click on this dot dot dot icon for the character options right here, in order to bring up this pop-up panel, and I'll click on this underline icon right there. And now, I want to change the color of the text to blue. Well color is technically a character-level formatting attribute, but you don't find it inside this panel. Rather, I'll go ahead and press the enter key to dismiss the panel. What you want to do is change the fill color right there. So I'll go ahead and click on the fill swatch, and then I'll change it, let's say, to this shade of blue right here, that begins R=0, G=113, and B=188. And now I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to accept that change. And I'll press the escape key in order to accept all those modifications and return control to the blank arrow selection tool. And that is how you create text inside of a frame, and apply some basic formatting attributes, here inside Illustrator.