Creating type on a path

The final step is to create the ornamental borders, that is these white ornaments with black drop shadows that surround each and every one of the Artboards and believe it or not this is actually text on a path. So each one of these ornaments is a character of text, it's assigned to a path outline, but before I could show you how to make these borders, because they're a little bit intricate, I'd like the first introduce you to type on a path here inside of Illustrator. So I'm going to switch to this document, it's called Type on path demo.ai, found inside the 08_type folder, and notice that we have a line of type and then two lines, one red, one blue, each of which are fundamentally identical.

However, the red line goes from left to right, and the blue line goes from right to left, and you wouldn't know to look at them, but it's going to affect how the type aligns to the path. Now, inside of another program we would select the type and the path and then we would join them together by, let's say going to the Object menu and choosing the Path command and then choosing Join, but that's dimmed currently, because you create type on a path directly inside of Illustrator, that is you click on the line with the Type tool and you start typing away. If you want to assign some type that you created in advance you need to cut it and then paste it into place and that's what we'll be doing.

So click off of the text in order to deselect everything. Select the text using the black arrow tool for example, that's just fine. Then go up to the Object menu and choose the Cut command or press Ctrl+X, Command+X on the Mac, that cuts the text to the clipboard. Now we're ready to assign it to either one of the paths, I'm going to start with the red path because it's a little more predictable. By going over here to the Type tool, now I could click and hold on the Type tool and specifically select the Type on a Path tool, don't need to do that though. The Type tool's going to work just fine for our purposes.

So, whenever you hover the Type tool over an open path, notice its cursor is going to change to the type on a path cursor. So instead of getting the standard I-beam cursor with a dotted square around it, I get an I-beam with a dotted curve flowing through it, then I will click on this first point in the path like so and notice that gives me a blinking insertion marker perpendicular to the angle of the path, so it's attached to the path outline. Also notice that the Stroke disappeared from the path automatically, because Illustrator is just assuming that you don't want to Stroke anymore, you just want to see the text flowing along the curve, nothing else.

Then you go up to the Edit menu and you choose the Paste command or you press Ctrl+V, Command+V on a Mac and that goes ahead and pastes the text onto the path like so and that's all there is to it. Now you switch back your black arrow tool and notice now that you'll see these tall vertical lines right here, along the edges of the path outline. So right at the beginning of the path and right at the end of the path, and these allow you to determine where the text starts and where it ends. So, if I drag this left-hand bar for example, notice that I'm moving the text over to the right, and if I drag it too far, notice the word author is going to fall off the end and then the word and is going to fall off and so on and I'll end up with some overflow text as indicated by this little red cross.

Now that's not what I want, so I'll going ahead and press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac to undo that modification. You can also by the way, change the alignment of your text, so if I bring up my Paragraph panel, I can change the Alignment to Center if I so desire, I'll go ahead and move my page up a little bit, so I can see what I'm doing. And notice that I've centered the text along the path outline, I can also align it to the right, if I so desire, and if I want to fill the entire path outline here with my text, then I would switch over here to Justify all lines and Illustrator will automatically space the text accordingly.

That's one way to work. I'm going to go ahead and switch back to the Align left option, hide the Paragraph panel, let's see what happens when the path outline is going in an unexpected direction. So I'll switch over to the Type tool once again, and I'll click at the beginning of this blue path, the exact same point, I'm clicking at the beginning, I'm saying to Illustrator I want to start it here. Click at that location, you will notice that the blue Stroke goes away, but you may not notice that the blinking insertion marker is over here this time, on the right hand side of the path and upside down, that's very easy to miss. Then I'd go up to the Edit menu, choose the Paste command or press Ctrl+V, Command+V on the Mac and the text comes in upside down.

What the heck is going on there? Well, Illustrator is respecting the direction of the path outline, not that you would ever know what that direction is, but it happens in this case to go from right to left. Go figure, so what in the world do you do about it? Well, you switch back to your black arrow tool, which you can do once again by pressing the Escape key and then notice in addition to this end marker right there and the beginning marker, you also have this middle marker. Well, what it allows you to do is flip the type. So if you drag this mid marker to the other side of the path outline, then you flip your type in the opposite direction. There's another way to work, if you want more control by the way, you go up to the Type menu, you select Type of a Path and then you choose Type on a Path Options, and that brings up this dialog box right there, which includes a Flip checkbox.

So first I'll turn on the Preview checkbox so I can see what I'm doing, then I'll turn on Flip, that allows you to flip the text to the other side. Alright, I'll go ahead and turn Flip off, because I performed a manual flip; I don't need the Flip checkbox on. Also notice that we have a bunch of Alignment options, notice that I can switch the way in which the text is aligned to the Path from Baselines, so in other words, currently the Baseline of my text is anchored to the path outline. I could switch it to Ascender, so the text is going to drop down so that it's very tippy topmost Ascenders are touching the path outline, according that is to the terms of the font definition is something important to bear in mind there.

You can also work from the Descender, so that's going to send the text way up there, or you can switch to Center if you like, and that should more or less center the text between the Baseline and the visible Ascenders, you never know though this is all subject to the font definition. If you need more control then you can work with Baseline shift as we'll see in the future exercise. In my case I'm just going to switch this back to Baseline. You can also switch the Effect, that is how the text blaze when it is wrapped along the path outline.

So in other words you can Skew the text like so, notice how every letter is skewed at a consistent angle, in this case which I think looks pretty bad. 90% of the time you are going to stick with Rainbow, but you do have other options. We've got Skew as you can see, we've got 3D Ribbon, whatever, and you've got Stair Step, which gives you this effect right there, you can fool around with these, and finally you've got Gravity. I have to say, I've never used any of these in an actual project. I've always stuck with Rainbow, but there are these other options available to you and then finally you have the Spacing options.

If you find that your text is getting bunched up in the concave areas of the path, and spread out in the convex areas, then you can experiment with these Spacing options to see if you can get better results. So for example, negative 36 is going to end up scrunching the concave areas that much more, whereas positive 36 is going to space apart those concave areas, and this is a fairly intelligent Spacing options. So once again it affects the concave areas and the convex areas independently. Alright, so you can experiment with those to your hearts' content, that's the basics of working with type on the path outline inside of Illustrator.

In the next exercise, I'll show you how to create those ornamental borders.