Type Tips Weekly

- [Nigel] Welcome to Type Tips, I'm Nigel French. I recently saw an article on the CreativeBloq website about this new identity for Canadian tourism and I thought the shaping of the text into a heart was very effective. It would have been so easy to do this in an amateurish or tacky way, but the designers here have made this look contemporary and classy while at the same time evoking a heart symbol and all of its positive connotations. I thought it would be interesting to try something similar. Now, I'm not going to do it for Canada, but for California. And this is going to make things harder because I'll be working with a 10 letter word on two lines. So I have my text typed out and I have it on top of a heart symbol. The heart symbol will ultimately be removed, it's just there for my own visual guidance. Now, you may be thinking why not just use an envelope distortion here. Well, here's why. If I do this, and I'll move to the next art walk before I do it because I need to have the heart shape in front of the type. I'll select the two elements, come to the Object menu, Envelope Distort, Make With Top Object. And you can see this is the kind of result that we would get. And while something like that may be great in other situations, it's really not what I'm after here. If we just remind ourselves of the original, this is achieved by varying the vertical scale and the baselines. And to do that, I'll be using the Touch Type tool. So I'll press Command or Control + T to bring up my character panel. Now I have these two pieces of type as separate type objects. I'm keeping them as editable type and using the Touch Type tool. In certain instances, you may think, well, wouldn't it be easier just to convert them to outlines, and you might be right, but then I wouldn't get the chance to talk about the Touch Type tool, which is one of my favorite tools in Illustrator. So I'm going to begin with the C, not surprisingly. I'll double click on it, and I can now move it down and then I'm going to vertically scale it. To vertically scale it I need to do it from the top of the bounding box. I'll drag down a couple of guides to mark the top and bottom of the C, 'cause I want the R to go down to the same position and then be scaled up to the same position. So we start by moving the letter down and then we scale it up. Now there is going to be quite a lot of back and forth here, and it can become a little frustrating because every change that you make is going to effect all of the pieces of type that are part of the same type object to the right of that letter. So a lot of back and forth with the Touch Type tool. Now when I have something like this, then I'm ready to move on to the next step. I'm going to move to my next art board where I have more or less the same result. And here, what I need to do is convert the type to outlines. So I'll select the two type objects and then come to the Type Menu and choose Create Outlines. And having done that, I can now adjust the vertical stems as necessary. So let's pull that one down and this one up. And then having done that, we can remove the heart, we no longer need that. I'll select all of the text and now let's apply a color to it. I'm going to go with this radial gradient. When I apply this radial gradient, we see that it is applied to each letter individually. I want it to be applied to the whole composition. With everything selected, press Command or Control + 8 to make it into a compound path. Now in addition, I'm going to come to my Appearance panel where I'll apply a stroke color. I'll increase the weight of that stroke and I'll drag that stroke beneath the fill. And there's my finished result. It needs some finessing, nowhere as good as the original that inspired this exercise, but I hope you can see that the Touch Type tool is a very flexible one that allows you to rearrange your letters in this very freeform way.