In Illustrator the Type tool is a very important tool to be familiar with
because whether you're creating a logo with some letters or an infographic or
some other kind of illustration, vector art you're often using type or some kind of
typography in it. So go ahead and open up a new file and in this lesson you're
going to learn about the Type tool as well as what some of these other tools are and
best practices when you're using the Type tool. So go ahead and select the Type tool and
you'll notice if you click and drag, it drags out an area that you can type in, right. So if I
just type in some letters here. It acts like a text frame almost like in
InDesign. It just has this floating frame here and if I click and drag the
corner then the text flows to the next line. If I make it get skinnier and then it
comes up to the first line, if I make it wider and so on but if you notice, if I
select the Type tool again and just click and let go somewhere, and I'll just type in
a word here. Let's say we're creating a logo, and you'll notice now instead of changing
the flow of the text when I click and drag the corner it actually resizes the
type for me and it is distorting it vertically or horizontally so I can hold
SHIFT to maintain the original proportion and you look up here.
We've got one point, actually 162.87 points. So I didn't have to guess, I can actually just
click and drag the corner holding SHIFT if we want and then we can make it as
large as we want. So what's the difference between those two?
Well, basically that is the Type tool or the Area Type tool. So if you click and drag
with the Type tool, it will basically create an area to put the type in. If you use the
Area Type tool you will have to insert some type into a shape.
So I'll show you what I mean.
So let's go ahead and click and hold onto the Type tool and go to Area Type tool.
Now if I click anywhere it gives me an error. "You must click on non compound, non masking
path to create text inside a path". So what we need to do is,
you can create some kind of shape, like, say a circle or an Ellipse and then go to the Area Type tool.
And then if I click inside it, it lets me type inside this shape.
What's pretty neat though is you can also do custom shapes.
So I can use the Pen tool here and I can use the Area Type tool and you
have to click right on the path here. So if I click inside, it won't work.
You have to click right on the path and there we go.
Then it types it in there and you can also use the Direct Selection tool
and edit the the corner after the fact.
So I can click and drag that around and change the shape and then I can double
click inside there and insert some more text. Obviously it doesn't say anything, it's just
some filler text I'm putting in there so you can move it around. It's kind of like a
text frame but it's just a custom shape text frame that we have. So if you go back to
the Type tool, click and let go, I can type something out and then
click and drag the corner to resize it. If I click and drag an area out like this,
it creates an area to type in so I can still resize this though. So just
like as if I had created a new shape, I'm going to take the white Direct Selection
and I'm going to click and drag the corner. You'll notice now it's sort of a custom shape.
It's not just a rectangle that I had originally. So what if you have the Type tool and you
click and let go and type something in here, make it larger and you know what,
I actually want to have a text frame here. How do I do that? Well what you
can do is if you look over to the right here if you hover over that, it turns into a
little symbol. If I click once, it will tell me, "double-click to convert to area type".
So what you can do is double click and now it's an area type so I can move
around and resize the area where this text is going to be. So I can move it like that.
It's almost like InDesign. It's like a text frame, right. You even have a little red
plus sign meaning you have more text to place. Now what if I wanted to resize this and
without having to select the type and then changing the font up here like so?
I'm going to Edit, Undo. What you can do, you can actually convert it back to normal type.
So if you double click over here again and now it's normal type again, alright.
And you can repeat the process by double clicking it and now it's a text frame and you can
still edit this.
and more. Now of course you can change the font so you can click and drag over
this and change the font up top to whatever we want. You can change the
style of it. You can manually change the size here, and you can also left align it,
center it, right align and so on. And down here on the bottom of the Tools panel,
you can see the Fill and the STroke. So if I double-click Fill, you can change the
color and you can also change the Stroke or the border. Let's make it a little bit larger so you
can really notice it. That's a little bit too much but you see how it works.
Now some of these other tools like Vertical Type tool, Vertical Area Type tool, these are
basically the same thing as the Type tool and also the Area Type tool except that
it's vertical orientation. I'll show you what I mean. So if go to Vertical Type tool, click and drag.
Notice that it's a sideways cursor anyway and then I type in, may make it smaller.
Press CTRL A on the PC or Command A on the MAC and it selects all the copy in there and
then I can resize it. It's a quick shortcut so long as you have a cursor blinking
in a text area, you can press CTRL or Command A and it will select it all. And then we can
change it. So if I just type it in, you can see it's top to bottom instead of
left to right. You can also do the same thing but with a Vertical Area Type tool
if you have a shape that we have drawn out. Vertical Area Type tool and you click
on the path here and it does the same thing. Now what if you want to toggle back
and forth between those. You can between that normal Type tool. So if I had the Type
tool selected, if you hold SHIFT, it toggles to the Vertical Type tool and
likewise if you have the Area Type tool, hold SHIFT and it will toggle to the Vertical Area Type tool.
And if you have those two selected, it will shift back to the regular way and then
if you go to vertical it'll shift back, it'll toggle back to the
Area Type tool just by holding SHIFT and in the next lecture I'm going to cover Type on a Path tool
and there's also the Vertical Type on a Path tool, same kind of thing but it's vertically
oriented instead of horizontal and it's a pretty useful tool specially when
you're designing editorial layouts or posters but really quick, before we go to
the next lecture I do want to cover this really quickly,
the Touch Type tool. So if you click and hold on to the Type tool and go down to the
Touch Type tool. What is that? Well, it says click on a character to select.
If I click a character, I can actually click and drag it up and move it around and then
I can click this next one over here and actually resize it. I can click on
this one and I can click up at the top there and rotate it and then click this next one
so you can resize, rotate or reposition type and it's not outlining it and we're
going to go over outlining in a separate lecture. But this is just repositioning
it and it's' still editable as far as being type. So if I click and drag over
it, it will change the letter. So we can still replace these letters with new
letters even after moving them around. So you can customize the placement, the rotation,
the size of individual letters even though they're in the same text frame
and the same group here. So next, I'll go over type on a path. We'll also get to why you'd
want to outline text. If you're sending an Illustrator file to someone they don't
have the same font as you wanted, outline text and also we can customize it a little bit more
when we outline it as well. So I will see you in the next lecture. Thanks.