Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

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CREATING AND FORMATTING TEXT

THE ART OF TYPE

is a very nuanced thing. If you’ve seen

one typeface, you’ve seen them all, right? Why not just enter the

text, print it, and be done with it. After all, your artwork is what

really shines in Illustrator—so why should you worry about the

text formatting?

Even given my predilection for typeface geekery, I have to admit

that the differences between one typeface and another are at times

incredibly subtle. Consider Figure 4-1, borrowed from Adobe InDe-

sign CS4 One-on-One. There are seven uppercase O’s from seven

different sans serif fonts. (To learn more about serif and sans serif

typefaces, see the sidebar “The Look

of Type” on page 114.) A type nerd like

me could wax poetic, explaining how

remarkably diverse these letters are,

hailing from three distinct sans serif

traditions. But to the untrained (or

less fanatical) eye, the letters are just

a bunch of ovals. Some look like

rings; others look more like donuts.

But in the end, they’re all still ovals.

The overwhelming majority of your

readers can’t tell a Grotesque O from

a Humanist O, and furthermore they

probably don’t care. It makes you

wonder why Max Miedinger put so

much care into creating his ubiqui-

tous typeface Haas-Grotesk (renamed

Helvetica in 1960)—and why in the

world I know that he did.

Figure 4-1.

Several O’s from different sans serif fonts

Myriad Regular

Antique Olive Roman

Rotis Sans Serif 55

Futura Light

Cronos Regular

News Gothic Medium

Helvetica Medium

ABOUT THIS LESSON

you’ve downloaded the lesson fi les from

www.oreilly.com/go/Deke-IllustratorCS5,

as directed in Step 2 on page xiv of the

Preface. This should result in a folder called

Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1 on your desktop.

We’ll be working with the fi les inside the

Lesson 04 subfolder.

It’s time to put Illustrator’s type tools to work, including the point

type, area type, and type on a path tools. In this lesson, you’ll learn

how to:

• Place and edit text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 112

• Change the formatting and appearance of type . . . page 117

• Edit blocks of type (known as area type) . . . . . . page 122

• Place type on a path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 127

• Work with advanced formatting, ligatures,

glyphs, and other special characters . . . . . . . . . page 129

Video Lesson 4: Working with Type

Illustrator does an excellent job of letting you create text-

based elements inside your artwork. In this video lesson,

I’ll demonstrate three different ways you can create type

inside Illustrator: affi xed to a single point inside your il-

lustration, fi lling the area inside a path outline, or fl owing

along the contours of a path.

To see how to place type into your illustrations, visit

www.oreilly.com/go/deke-IllustratorCS5. Click the Watch

button to view the lesson online or click the Download

button to save it to your computer. During the video,

you’ll learn these shortcuts:

Operation Windows shortcut Macintosh shortcut

Select the type tool Press the T key Press the T key

Create a new document Ctrl+N -N

Advance from one fi eld to another Press the Tab key Press the Tab key

Select the rectangle or ellipse tool Press the M or L key Press the M or L key

Align anything to the artboard

Choose

in the control panel Choose in the control panel

Display the Move dialog box Double-click the black arrow tool Double-click the black arrow tool

Create and name a layer Alt-click

in the Layers panel Option-click in the Layers panel

Accept your text edits Press Esc or Ctrl+Enter Press Esc or -Return

Show or hide the bounding box Ctrl+Shift+B -Shift-B

Align type to the outline of a closed path Alt-click with type tool Option-click with type tool

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Lesson 4: Creating and Formatting Text