- [Voiceover] So at this point,
you can see that the bottoms of these two "J's"
here are slanted at exactly the right angle,
in order to ultimately create the star logo.
The tops however, are not.
Now, we could solve this problem
using "minus-back", or "minus-front",
just as we did in the previous movie.
But I want to show you a different way to work.
I want to show you how you can slant shapes,
or if you prefer, "skew" them, using a tool
available from the "Scale Tool" fly out menu,
known as the "Shear" tool.
Now, my only problem with this tool, I'm gonna tell
you upfront, really great tool.
I do have a problem with it's name.
It's been named the "Shear" tool
since the beginning of Illustrator,
even though, and I just have to make this point here,
you'll have to forgive me, the word "shear",
under no circumstances, means "skew".
I'm looking at Merriam-Webster, which is absolutely
the foremost online dictionary out there,
and we are seeing that of course it means to clip,
as in wool, away from a sheep.
It can mean to cut something sharp.
It can me to cleave something,
as in the case of "shear force".
So for example you "shear the wing off a plane".
But even the intransitive definition of this verb
has nothing to do with "skewing".
And while it may seem like I'm just off on a rant,
or I'm Adobe bashing, or whatever.
I'm doing this for a reason.
Often times, the engineers at Adobe will watch
these movies, and I just want to go on record as saying,
that as high-time the name of this tool,
was changed to something that makes sense, for people.
Because a lot of folks, in my experience,
get confused because this tool
just absolutely has the wrong name.
You never think to yourself, "Gosh,
I would like to shear something.".
Anyway, having said that, the "Shear" tool,
is a really great tool, and it provides a
function that you simply can't accomplish
using a dynamic transform effect.
And so, to demonstrate how it works,
I've created this text right here,
and I've gone ahead and converted the text
to "outlines", because I imagine
you don't have the same fonts.
And, just to get a sense of what's going on,
I'll go ahead and switch back to my black arrow tool,
and I'll drag this guy down here so you
can see that there are two different
styles associated with this font.
There's the solid style, that appears light-blue.
And then there is the inline style, that appears dark-blue.
Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and undo that move,
and I want you to know by the way, that the name
of this font is indeed, "Industria",
in case you are interested.
And it's one of those fonts that just
doesn't have an italic, or oblique style.
But let's say I want to create
a kind of a, italic variation.
Then, I'll just go ahead and marque the type, like so,
so that I'm selecting both objects.
And I'll press "Control-H", or "Command-H" on a Mac.
In order to hide the anchor points so
I can better see what I am doing.
And then I will go ahead and select the "Shear" tool,
and I'll press the "Enter" key,
or the "Return" key on a Mac, to bring up
the "Shear" dialogue box.
Now notice that the "Axis" is set to horizontal, by default.
Make sure your preview check box is turned on,
and then just enter an angle.
For example, I might enter "15" degrees,
in order to skew those letters forward,
as we are seeing right here.
And just in case this is the kind
of thing you're really interested in
doing at some point, you should know that
a standard oblique angle runs anywhere
from five degrees to pretty much as high as seven.
But unless you really wanna indicate some sort of movement,
or something along those lines, you probably don't
want to go up as high as 15.
Alright, so I'm just going to enter "7", lets say,
and now lets take a look at how "Axis" works.
Right now, we're skewing along a horizontal axis,
so the text is actually skewing horizontally.
If you'd rather it skew up and down,
then you can switch this guy from vertical,
and notice the angle value changes as well.
If you select "Horizontal", the angle is "0" degrees.
If you select "Vertical", the angle is "90" degrees,
which is pretty darn predictable, I think.
It's pretty easy to understand
"Horizontal" versus "Vertical" skews.
What gets interesting and a little harder,
you may never take advantage of this, is when
you change the angle of the "Axis".
So lets say I select angle, and then I change
it to "45" degrees, well initially,
notice that just kind of pitches
the letters forward, and down, which makes
a certain amount of sense, I think.
But it makes even more sense, I'll just
show you this trick here.
I'll go ahead and set the angle to "0" degrees again,
and then I'll click inside the angle value,
and watch what happens on screen.
I'm gonna press "Shift, Up-Arrow", in order to
increase this value in 10 percent increments.
And you can actually see it shifting on the fly,
from horizontal, ultimately to vertical.
And you can go farther than that if you want to.
You can change this to "135" degrees or what have you.
Feel free to experiment with that.
But, because I'm working with text,
I wanna keep the text on horizontal baseline,
I'm going to change the "Axis" to "Horizontal",
and click "Ok".
Alright, another great use for the "Shear" tool,
is to pitch text the other direction.
So lets say I start with a script font,
such as "Monoline" right here.
And I wanna make the letters a little more upright,
to achieve a custom effect.
But first, notice that I've got a problem here,
as soon as I convert it the text to "outlines",
and I gave the letters a stroke, you can see
a division between each one of the letters.
And this gives me an opportunity
to go off topic for just a moment,
and show you another really great use
for the "Unite PathFinder" function.
And so, I'm going to press the "V" key,
to switch back to my black arrow tool.
And I'll click on this type to select it,
and its not looking like its selected,
'cause I hid the anchor points,
so I will press "Control-H", or "Command-H"
again, in order to bring those guys back.
Now lets say the first thing I want to do,
is move the strokes behind the fills.
Then, I would go up to the "Window" menu,
and choose appearance.
But notice because the group is active,
we are not actually seeing the "fill-in-stroke" attributes.
To see them, I need to double-click
on "Contents", right there.
And that will take me to the contents of the group,
like so, at which point, I can grab the stroke,
and move it below the fill.
So that's not a problem, and of course it looks
a lot better, but we still have these
divisions between the letters, which I do not want,
and to make that more obvious I'll press
"Control-H", or "Command-H" again,
to get rid of my anchor points.
Notice these lines between each one of the letters.
To get rid of them, bring back the "PathFinder" panel.
And then I'll click on "Unite".
But I just wanna make this point here.
There reason I often find "PathFinder"
operations to be a lot easier to work with,
than say the "Shape Builder" tool,
which definitely has it's merits,
is that instead of having to drag through
each and every one of these letters,
all I have to do is select them and then click
on the "Unite" icon, which of course
is the first icon, in the first row,
and everything is taken care of.
Now, the only problem is that I'm still
looking at a group, as we can see in the "Appearance Panel",
for an effect like this, where we are sharing the same
"Fill-In" stroke attributes, we're better off working
with a "Compound" path.
So I'll just go up to the "Object" menu,
choose "Compound Path", and choose "Make".
Or I've got that keyboard shortcut of "Control-8",
or "Command-8" on a Mac.
And now you can see here in the "Appearance Panel",
we have a "Compound Path", and the "Fill-In Stroke",
attributes are conveniently accessible.
Alright, now lets say I want to pitch these
letters backward a little bit.
I'll go ahead and select the "Shear" tool.
And then I'll once again press the "Enter" key,
or the "Return" key on a Mac, that's gonna repeat
my last queue, as you can see here.
And so all I'm gonna do is change the "Positive 7" degree,
to "Negative 7", like so, in order to create this
absolutely custom effect here.
And of course, you can click in the value
and press the "Up" arrow key, in order
to increase that shear angle.
Or you can press the "Down" arrow key, in order
to reduce the value, and thereby pitch the letters backward.
And I'm thinking "Negative 8" degrees looks great,
so I'll just go ahead and click the "Ok" button,
in order to accept that change.
And that friends, is my introduction to the badly named,
but extremely useful "Shear" tool, here inside Illustrator.