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Lesson Info

How to Get Text to Follow a Line or Circle in Photoshop

Hi there in this video. Trying to be clever here it's text following the path. We even do this where it kind of goes around the top and around the bottom. Let's learn how to do that now in Photoshop Alright to get started. We are going to do the squiggly line first, then we'll do that kind of bad shape. So the technique is called type on a path. So we need a path to start with and there's a few ways of making it and we're going to use the pen tool if you click and hold down the pen tool for awhile hold hold hold and we're gonna use the freeform pen tool. If you are a Jedi Master with the pen tool or the curvature to pen tool you can go and use those but if you're a mere mortal grab the free form, it is just as it sounds, you can just draw things now um to make your drawings a little bit nicer. There's a sneaky trick. See this little cog here, click on that. Okay. What you can do is says where it says curve fit. You can crank it up a little bit to say something like it goes up to 10 but...

10 is probably too much to go up to something like five. Okay and what it allows you to do is when you draw, I'm gonna draw like a little wiggly line there, it just makes your lines look a little smoother. Turn it down to zero and it will follow your mouse perfectly. It's up to you what you wanted to so that's basically it. Okay, paths are weird. They don't appear in your layers panel. Okay? They appear in this paths panel, which we're not going to really look at all we need to do is go to layers, grab the type tool, you don't need to change anything. Okay, just grab the regular type tool and watch my cursor here. Okay, we'll zoom in so you can see my curse has got the box around it. Watch this when it changes. Can you see little line through it? That means it's going to follow this path. So be careful where you click on this line because that's where the text is going to start. So I'm going to click once kind of towards this end here. And voila, um I'm start typing, start typing and so it's going to follow the line around. If you're finding yours is not working, it's probably because I'm going to undo, I'm going to go back to the beginning. Him they say it's not working, I'm going to hit escape on my keyboard, that was that, I didn't mean it button. Okay, and get out of that. And before you go and click on here is to pick a font size so you can do it at the top here. If you've got a font size of, you know, something really big. It just doesn't work to fit on this line. So it just it feels like it's not working. It is just your fonts huge to pick something really small. Start with five points or something, I've got 10 point and it worked fine, click once you start typing here. Okay, notice I'm a terrible speller. What's it deleting? Okay, so once you've got it here you can do some adjustments to do the adjustments. You can select the text and I'm going to make a bold text here. I'm going to pick a color that you can actually see degree. Cool. And say we want to just a few things and say we want to just the start point or the ending point Actually before we do that you can just say center and it will put it kind of in the middle of the beginning and end. But let's say we want to leave it left aligned and we want to just move this along. Okay. To do that. It's this tool here, it's underneath the type tool. It's called the path selection tool. Okay. You might have to click and hold down. You want the top one here with it selected. There's two main things. Okay, there are there is this dot at the end. Okay. And there's this little cross at the beginning, you can kind of see that Micron change, see the little arrow that appears either side. It's beginning and the end so I can click hold and drag it to say that's the beginning or I can drag it all the way to the end here. Okay and make sure it's at the beginning. Now I'm very like specific about where I'm drawing because I know if I click hold and drag this and I drag it down on the other side and everything was lost. So it can be a little weird to get used to. Okay, if you do get it on the other side, find the beginning again, the little cross and then try and flip it over and man you can get weird even I find it a little bit troubling so I'm gonna flip it over again. So the crosshairs the little sorry little crosses the beginning and this. I leave it in here because I'm going to show you it's so it's a little bit hard. So the cross is the beginning. This guy here can be a little problem. He's the end of the line. Not there, it's wherever this dot is. Because what can happen is this Oh don't do that either, flip it back across. There's a little dot. If I drag it up here, can you see that other word disappears? There's just not enough room. Okay for that word to appear where there's dot so far up. So you can drag it back down. Be careful not to drag it on the other side to move this whole thing around. Just go back to your move tool and you can click and drag it to go and start editing again. Make sure you have that line selected and either grab the type tool to adjust the text or this path selection tool and we're going to start working on the circle because what we want to do is this where it goes top and bottom. So there is not like a magical way of doing it. It's basically what we did up here. But using a circle. So I'm going to go over here. I'm going to grab my tools over here. Okay, my shape tools, we looked at these earlier. I'm gonna use the lips. But what I'm going to do in this case is instead of using the shape, which draws my shapes like earlier. Okay, I'm going to switch it to path. The big thing to remember though is later on in this course it remembers past when I draw things. Remember they don't appear as layers that appear in here. It's a bit of a weird thing. So later on in this course we're trying to draw a circle and it's not appearing and you can email me of course. Okay. But it's probably because you haven't switched it back to shape and just show you that switch it back to shape when you're finished causes less problems. But I wanted this case to be a path. Okay. And I'm gonna draw a circle. I'm gonna hold shift, I'm gonna draw it roughly the right size. Okay, I'm gonna grab my I'm gonna move it around using the this tool here. Okay, The path selection tool. I'm going to grab it so it's kind of there transform it using my control T. And I'm going to get it. So it's kind of sitting inside here. We need to adjust the circle later on. Get return when you're finished. Now, all we need to do is grab my type tool and just be careful when you are clicking on this line to not get this version, which has got a circle around it or the square around it. This version here with a line through it, you can see it's a little tricky click there at the top and I'm going to say this is scott shoes, Okay, I want to do a few things. I want to rotate it around now. What we can do is you can play around with the the I guess, center alignment, right alignment. To try and get it or what I like to do is just rotate it. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click on my move tool because I'm halfway through typing. So some of my shortcuts don't work if I try and type command T. Now, it doesn't work because I'm halfway through typing. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is go back to my move tool, I'm gonna go to edit, transform and I'm going to use rotate and I hope you're okay for a little bit of a shortcut. So I'm using command T. We've used this a few times in the course for re sizing, right? We hold shift okay? And we hold down member option on a Mac or on the Pc, so shift and option. Okay. And I can shrink this thing in and out, that's kind of half what I want, but I want to rotate it as well. The cool thing about using that shortcut, which is command T on a Mac control T on a Pc, is that watch this? I grab the corner, it's scale. But if I hover just out here, I'm not doing anything. I'm just moving my mouse out here. Can you see it turns into like a little rotation arrow so now I can click hold and drag it just kind of rotate it around, move it here. Kind of get it to where I needed to be, enter on my keyboard just to commit that I'm going to pick fonts, I'm gonna use white Font size is going to be a lot smaller. six point. Okay, it's moving around the line again, so I'm gonna have to rotate it again. Command T and just drag it around, It's got shoes, scale it up a bit. Another little thing that's happening there is I'm trying to drag and it's kind of like snapping two things which is kind of cool, but sometimes you just like go where I want you to go instead of jumping around, you can get a view in turn off smart guides. but what I like to do is on my keyboard is just use the arrow keys. So look down your keyboard just the up down left right. You can tap things around. It's kinda handy hit return when you're ready. That is going to be the top part of my circle. Now what you assume is you can type along the bottom of that same circle, that's not possible. What you need to do is just have a second ellipse, make sure it's set to path and draw out another phillips. Don't worry too much about the size because you're gonna have to resize it to suit the circle in the font. You pick okay to move it around, go back to the direct selection tool, get it roughly in the right position, grab the type tool, click once down here and I'm going to say established which totally missed it. Escape key. I'm going to go to edit step backwards. Remember you've got to look out for that perfect icon. Okay so I've got a flashing in the right place now S. T. 2019. So it's doing what the top one did okay which is the outside. Now remember when we were doing this and we flipped it over by accident we want to do it on purpose now so grab the direct selection tool. What we'll do is click hold and drag it and you want to drag it so it's on the other side It's a bit fiddly. I know just click and hold and drag it until it flips onto the other side. Now I'm going to use my back to my move tool using command T or control T on a pc to rotate it around to get it to kind of where I want to go, turn on the keyboard, it's looking okay now if you are thinking that seems kind of painful dan. It is kind of painful in Photoshop does it? Fine illustrated, does it better as well as in design they do this kind of like type on a path thing, a lot nicer and there's a little bit more sophisticated tools but Photoshop does it fine ish now you can leave now I'm going to go and play with my fonts, I'm gonna grab my type tool, I am going to say you the light version, I want it all to be light, I'm gonna play around with the tracking as well, hit escape, I'm going to undo. I want you to be the light version. I want you to be the super heavy version, You can see it kind of adjust the lines, there's a lot of rotating to get everything to look nice. Same with Established, I'm actually gonna drop down the font size to something smaller. That the same thing here. So I'm gonna Make you the big heavy one and I'm going to make you if you're finding it hard to select on. I am finding it hard to, It's my move tool, transform it around a little bit. Actually what I might do is before I rotated around with this layer selected this one here. We haven't really looked at the, it's called tracking or cunning case, the space between letters. I'm going to drag it up or down. So I'm gonna say I want it to be about 50 because because it's on the inside of the circle they're kind of starting to touch. So With Scott Shoes. Okay, I wanted to maybe tuck it in a little bit because it's expanded out so maybe -15. Now there's a lot of rotating and resizing. Okay, cool. So we're nearly at the end or we're at the end. What I'm going to do is add that kind of s in the middle here and set your little project. So I've called mine scott shoes. You give your Zeron name, pick your own fonts, see if you can get the type to bend around, make it look nicer than my version and we're going to pick a big kind of like Hero. We're picking a low type and I'm just gonna cheat by growing the type tool, clicking ones out here. I'm gonna tie back capital s. I'm going to go through my fonts and I've already gone through my fonts lying, it's the one that I want is so it's not a logo I've designed, I've cheated and just use the font, whereas the core is called Hobo Hobos, I'm not sure. And I'm gonna grab my phone size and just make it nice and big. You probably don't have that wants to go through and find a font that you like is a nice big kind of logo type and I want to see what you make. Okay, so you might have a really long name. Okay, so but give it your name, pick some fonts, circles, colors. I'd love to see a screenshot of what you make for your brand. It doesn't even have to be shoes. Just be your name. Just wanted you to prove to me you can do type on a path and add of when you're posting it. Okay. Give me a out of 10 how painful it was. Okay. I still find it painful and I'm, I'm pretty good at this so You might find it even more painful. So out of 10, 10 being mind blowingly brain melting painful and anyone being super super easy. I don't know what you're going on about dan. So send it to me on social media instagram. I'm bring your own laptop on twitter, I'm dan loves adobe or just post it here on this page. Thanks for tuning in one of the longer ones. I will see you in the very next video