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Working with Text Part 3

Lesson 10 from: Adobe InDesign Creative Cloud Starter Kit & Wedding Albums

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

10. Working with Text Part 3

Lesson Info

Working with Text Part 3

So we're going to talk about gl ifs and I get really excited for cliff because, well, let me just show you were going to make this and the whole thing is type fonts that's it there's nothing in this design that is not a font, so everything from the pattern in the background too of course the the letters that are obviously a text even that even those little sparkle fairy dust things and even that little label thing that's behind it on I get really excited because glitz and funds are such a great and inexpensive way that you can create a lot of really cool artwork on dh not have to like be able to draw or anything like that um and so you can find a lot of them within funds and in design has something called the cliffs panel that makes it really easy to find them. So for example, if you've ever used a dingbat font um in something like photo shop and then you're trying to find a certain ding bat, what do you do type out the alphabet? Yeah, I've done it tio you're like a bcd, then you try i...

t with cabs when you try a like punctuation and you can't find anything so in in design, you want to use your glitz panel to do all of that so let's take a look okay, so first thing I'm going to do is draw out a text box and I'm just going to, like, make a pretty big one because we're going toe make some stuff, okay? Now we need our fonts and we need to see what we're doing. The glitz panel is like the one panel that I don't know why it doesn't live under the window menu, so you will not find it here. Bliss is a text thing, so it lives under the type menu, which I don't understand but that's where it is, so we're going to go to type oh, in my line cliffs here it is. I know, I told you like it's like blind zone up here sometimes type cliffs. All right, so here's, the glitz panel and I'm gonna actually drag it over here because I use it all the time, so it should belong here now I'm going to extend it so we can see a little bit. So what is the glitz panel? Will the glitz panel lets you look at fun so, like here's, a font called ride my bike pro and it's got all these letters and characters in it and you know you can get and a by pressing a, but what you may not realize is that some fonts have multiple versions of a's what? Get outta tune jaw drop I know right? So like, this is a really fancy a there's like a regular and then there's like alternative aids so that's really cool so you can find them all here in the glass panel so if I just type in a and let me make this big so you can c on g ive got everything on underlying for some reason lately okay, so we have a over here but maybe I want this a so I just double click it and now I have this, eh? So your glitz panels like a little storage palate for amazing artwork that's hidden in your text that you wouldn't be able to access really any other way so that's kind of neat. Well, guess what? There is a font called pian ee p any patterns and it's a freebie from different dot com free for like, even for just anything even commercial use. So there's a link to that in the resource guide two different but there is a pattern in here if we scroll through the characters there's this little pattern right here to me looks like like the bark of an aspen tree or something I don't know, but if I want to insert this into the document and I'm going to double click and I get I get it right here so awesome so I'm going to put it in a few times so it's just repeating and I have a whole line of p any pattern bark, whatever that is so I'm going to command a to select all command see to copy and then I'm just going to keep pasting it, okay? So we have like hopefully here there we go I'm extending my type box so now there's all this pea any trees, pini pattern trees but there's all this space between them ray and I want to tuck them up so they look like tree trunks just all the way down, so I'm going to put my cursor in here I'm goingto command or control ada select everything I'm going to just the leading, which is the space between by pressing command option or control all and then pressing the up arrow and honestly, those keyboard shortcuts I feel like they're overwhelming when you try to learn the ones that go like in the text, but just press buttons until you get what you want and then you'll get used to it. But another way to do it is to actually just come up in here and this right here is you're letting control so you can adjust upper down with this, so what I'm looking for here is I want to get rid of the gaps between the lines but I don't want the trees like on top of each other so just enough I just wanted enough like that actually looks pretty good and then you'll notice when you zoom out sometimes it makes like here you can see these lines on it you see what I'm talking about there's like white lines right here they're not really there it's just rendering at certain viewing percentage is so if I zoom in I can see they're actually gone so I'm going to zoom out and I'm going to scale this whole thing just tow finish filling it so I'm going to hold down look man, I'm shift and dragged from a corner and I'm actually an ad option or all to that too so that it goes from the center out see that look at that we've got crews let's change the color so I'm gonna put my curse there and there and select it all and go to swatches and I don't remember what color I had here but it looked nice that okay? And then I think what I did was I faded it a little possibly in the background like that so something like this right? It's not often we just made a pattern out of text I think that's really exciting okay, but we're not done yet next in order to make it easier toe work on the stuff we're going to do next I'm gonna lock this object because as you can see it's really easy to click on and move and wiggle around and that's hard because I need to be ableto work and not be clicking on that so I'm going to click to select it and then I'm gonna lock it by pressing commander control l toe lock it which means now it's as if it's not there so it just makes life a little bit easier toe unlock it I would come up to object and you can choose unlock all on spread or a compress option command l or halt control so anyway it's fine locked so I'm going to kind of forget about it for now now we're going to create this little background cool banner thing which was pretty rad okay so again what z about here I'm going to grab my type tool click drag out like kind of a generous sized box because sometimes these little dingbats require more room than you think okay, I'm gonna go back to my glitz panel now these little border things are from a font called skitch borders phil I think yes ok, now these this is not a free fun I bought this from my farm stock come which is a great I love their funds I probably buy it almost all the fines I buyer from there okay, so what are we looking for in this panel? We have all these little bits and they they look goofy when you look at him it's like what is that? I don't even know what and it is it's kind of it is kind of goofy these little triangles at the bottom here will in large or reduce the size of these little icons so you can see what you're doing but what I'm looking for is this guy right here so I have a left edge and a right edge and then we have the bits in between so we're going to start with the left edge so I'm going to double click and I don't know why everything in my life has an underlying on it right now because I'm I'm here so my computer is like also you all right? So we'll turn the underlying off so I've clicked here dad this left bit now I need a bit of space like we need just like a solid chunk so I think if I squirrel up I think the chunk is up here somewhere it is hard to see that this yes okay, next chunk then so you could really custom build your own banner however you want it then I'm gonna add this piece right here so it double click chunky piece now I'm gonna add one more little or little filler chunk great so we'll come over here and I'll go back to that peace is at this yep, and then we need the right bit, I think that's right? Okay, well, we're going to go with it. So what's neat about these fonts that contain these little border things is, you know, if you buy, like, cute graphics that you just about, like a bunch of labels or something, they're going to be a set aspect ratio like they may be really long and skinny or really short and tall or whatever, and it may not fit the text that you're trying to put with it. So the nice thing about having a font like this where you can build your own little border thing is you can really make it as long as you want or tall or like, you can build it exactly how you want and if we look at these different icons, there's all kinds of different shapes and edges and like ways to do it, so that's kind of fun. All right, so now this is type, so I'm going to select all this will go to swatches will change it, teo, whatever that color wass brown, I don't know something like this, all right? And, um, let's scale it up, so I'm going to select it and use the whole left side of my keyboard and those greater than arrow keys, and now we have this cool border on dh you'll notice the text box around it appears to not fit it it's just a funny thing that happens sometimes with these uh, ups with these glyphs so that's okay don't let it throw you um the other thing that we can dio is I believe if we want to add a border to this let's go to our swatches panel and let's put a stroke around the outside and we'll make it this dark brown color and we'll go to the stroke panel and thicken it up okay now we're getting funny business watch what happens when we thicken it up we get these funny spikes and or if I wanted it to be dashed I can't so what we're going to do instead is convert this to outlines which means it's not going to be text anymore so but that's ok we're going to merge it all instead of like six different text characters or however five it was it was an edge of filler a middle of filler and an edge that's five instead we're going to just merge it altogether and then we can do whatever we want for a stroke so to do that I'm going to go teo type and we're going to create outlines so it's no longer text now it's just vector shape but still if I go to spill it or if I go to stroke it I think we're still gonna have a problem because yes you see the different pieces are now being stroked so that's not good we need to release the compound paths oh my gosh so much so it will go up to the object menu will come down to pass and we're going to say release compound path okay now we have all these different bits for almost there we'll go to the pathfinder and we're going to merge it teo now how did I figure this all out trialling there experiment click things undo them click other things figured out and then you know it works so don't feel like you have to be a path with because I am not I aspire to be a path with and to be an illustrator guru but I'm not there yet so I'm going to watch erica tomorrow and may we all learned something about that but in the meantime I just want to making path er and converting things to outline I just click on stuff and I'm like go to the pathfinder and I'm like click click oh that's not working let's see what this button does boom right so you just have to fool around anyway once you figure it out then we can go to stroke oh now we can add like this fun little um boerner let's change the color like this dark brown how cute and now instead of five individual text characters we've like merged them all into one big shape but now it reads all those edges so to do that it was three steps we had to convert to outlines then we had to release the compound path and then we had teo add the whole thing together but it's pretty cool, right? Okay, so we're almost there the last bit we're going to do is add the text be in front of this so maybe we'll lock this to just to make life easy and then I'm going to hit the type tool and I'm going to drab drag out a box and I'll just type raoul and we're going to go into the font up here right now raul is written in pini patterns I can't read that okay, so we'll come up here and we'll we'll go to ride my bike pro, which is a really great um font also from my fonts dot com so raoul that's looking good, but guess what? Let's make it a little bigger and um within this font this particular fund one of the reasons that I bought it it has all these neat little bonus features and these are things you don't get in every fund so you've got to choose your funds carefully, but if we go to the glitz panel and I scrolled down through the gl ifs for this fund, there are some oh my gosh where is it? There are some special combinations of letters that give us some extra awesome informations are options. Okay, so for example here there is a normal r and in a or look at this there's a special gl if that combines the r with the a so that the is actually tucked into it so what I'm going to dio is highlight this and then I'll scroll down and try to find that again right here and when I double click I can replace it with that so cool right? And what if I want an ak sent over the u there's a keyboard way to do that but I can never remember how to make all those accents so instead I would just scroll down to me my use they're not right there. All right, well I don't want to look for it all day but you get the idea so you confined if you've got different characters with different accents and different markings for different languages and stuff you confined them oh here's one but those are upper case you confined them here in the glyphs panel as well. So here we are so there's raoul right and then you could keep going and type a little and character I guess we might as well so if we go in here one of the neat things that it has two is in addition to all these funky letters it has combinations of little words and stuff like and right here where it has this little fun swoosh under it so and and then we'll type celia I think I'm out of space now this little red box means too much text so I'm going to use my selection tool and expand the type box like that so now we have raoul and celia and guess what I think c e is also a neat little combo character these names were chosen at random there we go so there's raul and celia and isn't that neat if I want to center the text within this box we haven't talked about that yet right now it's left aligned right so rather than me being like okay, I think that's centered instead why don't I put the box centered between this graphic and then sent her the text within the box so to do that there's a couple of things you can do if I click to highlight the text I can come up in the control panel and click center or what I do more frequently he is clicked the box and then it's commands man shift c and that will center it and command shift l will left aligned it command shift our will write a line in command ship j will justify it so there's all those kinds of options as well so we'll kind of get that in place and we can style this up with some color so um not for the outline though he see what I did the outline is selected no no no I want the phil on I want this color. Okay, so raoul and celia yea okay and then last but not least we're gonna add the sparkles up here, right? So I'm going to make a whole new text frame to hold the sparkles and those happen to come from a font called wed beings get it weddings but being bats wed dings I think that's so brilliant this is also from my fonts dot com and here it is right here these little sparkles so I'm going to double click and it's so small you can't see it so all command aid highlight it and shift option commander shift all control and then the right arrow buttons to make it bigger turn off my underlying that keeps creeping in on dh then let's make this like a fun color I don't know what colors did it be sayin I guess okay, so here we have this right here and maybe what I do at this point is scale it down a little bit so I'm gonna hold command shift and dragged from a corner and if I hover outside one of the corners I can rotate it kind of just put it in position like this then I want to duplicate it and drag it down so I'm going to hold down the option key or altana pc which give me this little double headed arrow and then I can click and drag to make a cop any of it and I'll flip it using the control panel up here flip maybe flip again so it's like totally reversed and look at that maybe we'll make this a little bigger then you just gotta play with it right? So that oh my gosh that's so fun and it's all editable and text and vector and it's all from funds which I think is really exciting so just know that that stuff takes, you know, trial and error and I know I I sit here and show you like, use this wedding and use this this cliff in this whatever but that's because obviously I prepared I would like for you to think I'm making this all up out of my head right now, but I'm not so you just have to budget time when you're making these project's budget time to experiment, you know it takes time to scout knew fonts and to find a better way looking for funds well, I don't know how bad you are bad just like looking through there is so much fun right? So if you are looking for good websites to get funds, I have them in the resource guide, but I always recommend my funds dot com is probably my favorite I buy a lot of my friends they're freebie font sites are different dot com or font squirrel, but you have to be careful with the freebies that you make sure that you've got your commercial rights to them. So, like when I was looking for this it's really hard, I would like to use free fonts when I'm teaching impossible because I know people just want when they want to try it, but if I don't have the commercial rights with the free fun, then I can't use it to teach so I was really excited about the pini patterns because that that's just really great. So yeah, so as a you know, one of our intentions this week is for folks out there to use the resource is that they're not using on they own the creative cloud based on that are using type kid wants it all oh yeah, so creative cloud makes it really easy tio synchronize all of your funds and discover a lot of new funds that way as well. So it's just it's a whole new world out there and it's it's really fighting but you definitely want to manage your funds and you know you want to have a lot of fun, but it always seems like I have my favorites and like I use them a lot, so I have a lot of funds. But I don't want to go too crazy. So I try to keep a set of, like, ten to twenty that I really love and use all the time for different things.

Class Materials

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Practice Files
Resource Guide
Adobeland Wallpaper
Adobe® Creative Apps Starter Kit

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Khara is adorable and teaches with such a simple approach which makes learning fun. Her constant smile and infectious laugh makes learning fun. Thank you Khara and creativeLIVE for offering this awesome class on InDesign.

user 3b7cd3
 

I personally love the way she talks, and I am 57 years old, so it isn't because I'm a teen. I think she is fun, light, and funny, and makes listening and learning a pleasure. I have listened to some classes where I was about to fall asleep and it was hard to keep interested, not due to content but the presenter's demeanor. Having great information and learning is what I'm most concerned about. I guess to each his own, right?

kasmath
 

I love Khara's classes! She is fun and informative and packs so much information in every class! I have learned so much about InDesign and Photography and Wedding Albums from Khara and appreciate how hard she must work to bring these classes to us that give us so many more tools to work with! I would highly recommend all of her classes and look forward to owning more!

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