- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to
apply special Fill and Stroke attributes
from the Appearance panel to live editable text.
Although it works really well
as we're seeing here on screen,
the approach is far from intuitive,
even by Illustrator standards,
so I'm going to start things off in the usual way
by going up to the File menu
and choosing New from Template,
and then I'll go ahead and double-click
on my RGB with center guides document
in order to create this new file.
Now I'll just go ahead and zoom out a little bit
so that we can see the bleed,
and I want to draw a rectangle as a backdrop
that snaps to that bleed, and so I'll go up
to the View menu and make sure that my
Smart Guides are turned on.
In my case they aren't, so I'll choose the command,
or you can press Control + U,
or Command + U on the Mac,
and I will be taking advantage of that shortcut
because Smart Guides have kind of a strange effect on type.
Next, I'll select the Rectangle Tool
which of course you can get by pressing the M key,
and I'll drag from one corner of that red bleed boundary
to the other, and now I'll go up to
the control panel, click on the second swatch,
and change it to None, and that gets rid of the Stroke.
Then I'll click on this first swatch
and change it to this dark shade of purple
in order to adjust the Fill.
Now, I'll press the V key to switch back
to the black arrow tool, and I'll click off
the rectangle to deselect it,
and then I'll zoom back in.
All right I don't need these guides
so I'll just go ahead and turn off the guides layer
here inside the Layers panel,
and next I'll select my Type Tool
which you can get by pressing the T key.
Now I want to setup some formatting attributes in advance,
so I'll click on the word Character
up here in the control panel.
I'll make sure that the default font,
Myriad Pro, is selected,
and then I'll set the type size to 336 points,
and I'll press the Tab key to advance
to the leading value, and I'll change it to 306 points.
Next you want to change this kerning value
right here from Auto to Optical,
and then I'll click on the All Caps icon.
All right now I want to center the text,
and I'll do that by clicking
on this Align Center icon up here in the control panel.
I also want my text to appear white,
so I'll change this Fill swatch to white, like so.
Then, I'll just go ahead and click
somewhere in my document window.
Now if you're working along with me,
you'll probably see some lorem ipsum
placeholder type, very large on screen,
which is a new feature inside the software,
and the good thing about it, if nothing else,
is that at least it lets you know
that you have indeed created a new text object.
Now I'll just go ahead and replace those letters
by typing in from the keyboard,
Deep Type, like so, with the two words
separated by a carriage return,
and then I'll press the Escape key
in order to accept that change.
Now, for some reason every formatting attribute
except the color took, and so I'll just go ahead
and click on that first color swatch
up here in the control panel once again
and change it for once and for all to white.
Now let's say I want to apply a very thick
Stroke to my text.
I'll go ahead and change the Stroke color
to black for starters, and then I'll select
this line weight value, and I'll crank it up
to let's say 50 points,
and I end up turning my letters entirely black,
and that's because the Stroke is in front of the Fill,
and it's centered around the characters as well.
Let's say I want to move the Stroke
in back of the Fill.
Then I'd bring up the Appearance panel,
which you can get by choosing the Appearance command
from the Fill menu.
At which point I'm not even seeing
the Fill and Stroke attributes.
Now notice right here that we're seeing the word Type.
That tells us that the Type object is selected.
If we want to select the characters instead,
then you just go ahead and double-click
on the word Characters, and that will
switch you back to the Type tool
as we're seeing right here.
It goes ahead and selects all of those characters,
and it reveals the Fill and Stroke attributes.
So you might imagine that moving the Stroke
in back of the Fill is a simple matter
of dragging it and dropping it below
the Fill like so, but notice as soon as I drop,
Illustrator just flat out ignores me,
and it doesn't matter how many times
you drag and drop that Stroke,
or whether you drag the Fill above the Stroke instead,
it's just not going to happen.
What you need to do is apply the Fill and Stroke attributes
to the entire text object, as opposed
to the individual characters,
and the best way to pull that off
is to press the Escape key in order to
switch back to the Type object.
Notice now that we're no longer seeing
the Fill and Stroke attributes
here inside the Appearance panel.
Then, for the most flexible results,
get rid of the Fill and Stroke entirely
by going up here to the control panel,
clicking on the first swatch,
changing it to None, and then clicking
on the second swatch and setting it to None as well.
At which point your text will be entirely invisible.
That's not a problem.
Now what you want to do is make sure
that the Type is selected here inside the Appearance panel,
and then let's add our Fill and Stroke attributes
by clicking on either of these two icons
down here in the bottom left corner of the panel.
I'll just go ahead and click on Add New Fill,
and I'll change it from this weak black
that we're seeing currently on screen
by clicking on the Fill swatch
and changing it to white like so,
and then I'll go ahead and change the Stroke
once again to black, and I'll go ahead
and crank it up to 50 points let's say,
and press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac.
At which point we get the same results we had before,
but now you can grab that Stroke
and drag it and drop it below the Fill
and it actually works.
All right now if you take a look
at the final result right here,
you'll notice that all the characters are rounded,
and there it is, that's what happens
when you have Smart Guides on
when you hover your cursor over an editable text object.
So notice when the cursor is away,
we see the characters as they actually appear,
but when you hover over, you see a preview
of the base type objects in the color assigned to the layer.
I don't really like that kind of flickering,
especially in video, so I'll go ahead
and turn off the Smart Guides by pressing
Control + U or Command + U on the Mac,
and now we can see more cleanly
that we have rounded characters of type
and that this black edge here is nudged down
and to the right.
To make that happen, I'll go ahead and switch back
to my illustration in progress,
and I'll click on the word Stroke right here,
and I'll change my Corner setting to Round Join,
which goes ahead and rounds off those characters.
I really want to round off the white characters as well,
so I'll make a new Stroke by dropping down
to this Add New Stroke icon,
and clicking on it, or you can just
press that keyboard shortcut of Control + Alt + Slash
or Command + Option + Slash on the Mac,
and I'll go ahead and change this Stroke right here,
the top one, to white this time around.
Notice that it still has those round corners
and I'll change that line weight value right there
to 30 points and that delivers the round characters of type.
So in other words, we're changing Myriad Pro Regular
into a special extra bold rounded style.
All right that ends up packing the characters
together way too tightly, so I'll click on
the word Character up here in the control panel,
and I'll change this tracking value to 100
and press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac.
Now let's offset that black Stroke
by selecting it here inside the Appearance panel,
and then I'll click on the fx icon down here
at the bottom of the panel, choose Distort & Transform,
and choose the Transform command,
and then so I can see what I'm doing,
I'll turn on the Preview checkbox
and I'll change both the Horizontal and Vertical
Move values to five points as well,
which is going to nudge that Stroke down
and to the right.
After which point I'll click OK.
All right now I want to center my type
inside the artboard, and so I'll click
on the word Align up here,
and then change the Align to setting to
Align to Artboard, and then I'll click on
each of the Center icons.
Horizontal Align Center, and then Vertical Align Center.
That scoots the type a little bit too high,
so I'll press Shift + Down Arrow
a couple of times to nudge those letters down,
and now I'll twirl open this black Stroke right here
so that you can see our Transform effect.
I want to add a drop shadow as well,
so I'll make sure that Stroke is selected,
then I'll click on the fx icon,
choose Stylize, and choose Drop Shadow.
The default settings work just fine,
and if you want to see how fine they work,
then just go ahead and turn on the Preview checkbox
and click OK, and then I'll deselect my type
by pressing Control + Shift + A,
or Command + Shift + A on the Mac.
So the morale of the story is,
the next time you want to apply specialty
Fill and Stroke attributes to live editable type,
do so not from the control panel
but rather from the Appearance panel instead.