In this lesson you'll learn about character and paragraph properties of text in
Illustrator. So go ahead and open up a new document and if you click and drag out
and I've got Character and Paragraph panels up. If you want to get to those, just go to Window,
I have to actually have to pull this up a little bit.
Window and then Type, you can barely see at the bottom, and then Character. Alright so
then, so once you're in the Character panel, you can also add the Paragraph panel here.
That's all under Type. So Window, Type and then Character, Paragraph.
And so there are not as many options here compared to Adobe InDesign which is, of
course, more for flowing text compared to Illustrator. And then Paragraph, we have a
couple of the same options but not as many. So once you have your type typed in here,
you can change some basic things like the font up at the top, up on the Control panel,
of course the stylizing of it. You can do the same exact thing right here.
It's the same effect, just a different area to add that effect. There's also Size and then
the Leading is basically the vertical space. So if I select that and then go 36, and you
can see there's little bit extra space there. If you go to Auto, that's the Auto,
it correlates with the font size, so for 21 point Size, for this example it's
25.2 point for the vertical space basically. Now the ones below there, we do need
to know this especially for logo design. There's Kerning and then there's Tracking.
So the one on the left it's got this VA and then a little line and an arrow.
Kerning is the space between two letters and so Tracking is a space
between all letters whether it's in a word, a paragraph, sentence, entire page.
It just depends on what you have highlighted. So if I change this here,
say to 100, you can see now there's extra space between all the texts.
And if I set it to -100, it's more jumbled together, and then if I set
it to 0, that's the Default. So where Kerning comes into play, it's really important in logo
design, so I'm going to click and type in the word, "design" here,
and I'm going to make this larger, and if for some reason you didn't like the
spacing in between some of these individual letters, we could adjust that with Kerning.
So we want to take the Type tool and just insert it in so it's blinking wherever
you want adjust and then right here, where says 4 , I can change that to, say
-50 or + 75. You can see it affects it. You can type in manually a number.
so you can see it affected. The problem arises in logo design when we
have one letter and it's just too close or too far away from another letter.
So sometimes it's,
say the word, "story"
and the S is often a little bit closer. This one looks fine but see that
R and the Y. That R and Y are pretty close compared to the O and the R and the T
and the O and the S and the T. I did not edit this yet. I just just typed it in. Now I'll
show you right here if I click on it, it's all 0 for Kerning so that R, if this was a logo,
I would suggest increasing the Kerning between the R and the Y. So you put the cursor
in there, in between the two and then you bump it up little by little until it
looks right. So we want to increase that quite a bit actually for this example.
We could even go to say 50 or so. Now see how that looks a lot more consistent
with the spacing in between. You could even pull Guides out and measure it if we wanted
to have a consistent spacing but that looks a lot better than the Default which
the Y is just way too close to the R there. That's Kerning and Tracking.
On the Paragraph panel, if you click on that, there are a couple more settings here.
So I'm going to select this text. I just click once, double click and then click again
really quickly and it highlights it all or you can click and drag over it or press
CTRL or Command A if a cursor is blinking in there So it's Left Aligned, you can Center,
you can write just like in a word processing program or Adobe InDesign and you can
Justify with last line aligned left. What that means is it looks like the
magazine straight column look. It stretches or compresses so it has a
flush left and right hand side, it's not ragged but the last line is justified
left or center or right or they're all justified.
You have Left Indent. It'll just indent the left hand side and Right Indent or the
first line of a paragraph. Usually, we're not dealing with large paragraphs of text
in Adobe Illustrator. Usually we're creating illustrations or creating
logos so we're creating short, small phrases or words in Illustrator but it
does have this option. When we float text, we're referring to InDesign of course but
it still has an option in there if you have a paragraph in Illustrator
And Space before paragraph and after, it would add extra space before or after a
paragraph. So that's how you edit Character settings and Paragraph Settings
in Illustrator. It's not as in depth as InDesign because it's not really meant
for advanced text flowing and editorial design, promotional design and
advertisements and things like that. As far as text goes it's more for creating
illustrations, vector art, infographics and in the context of text, logos in
short stylized text. I will see in the next lesson.