Using the Touch Type tool

- [Instructor] In the previous movie, we installed a font into the system for our type kit and used it here to add to our ongoing Lila logo. In this movie I just want to show you the touch type tool, which can actually do a great number of things. In fact, with my selection tool actually, if I alt drag a copy of this text, I'll give you an idea of what it can do. If I hold down shift and tap T, that gets me the touch type tool. It actually lives down at the bottom of the type tools here in the toolbox.

Okay, but if I click on an individual character, I get this box around the side of it and I can scale this proportionally using this corner at the top. I can scale its width, which again, if you recall, is a type crime so I'm not going to do that. I can move it, so shift its baseline with this corner handle just here, and I can scale it disproportionately, again vertically there, if I want to. Again, another type crime, so just remember avoid the top left and the bottom right hand corners.

I can also rotate characters around here, right so dragging them into place and I can make things that are really fun. What I like using it for, apart from that, is to actually kern things, especially when I've got big text, because if you click on a character, you can use the arrow keys to move it and it's actually changing the kerning values between that and the neighboring character. So there's a couple of small things here I'd like to pay attention to with our logo, so if I click on this A here for example, I do just want to bring that in just a shade, just to get it a bit closer there.

That's just a shade too far. I want to bring this L in just a little bit also as well, and the I in just a bit too. Perfect, I'm not going by the sketch, by the way. I am actually looking at the spacing in between the characters here. I'm happy enough with that, so what I'm going to do is delete this example text at the top here. We're here with this text, because I don't actually want it to be text, it's part of a logo type, I'm going to outline it. You do that with shift, command or shift, control O and it turns that into outline, so no longer text at all.

You can do that via the type menu as well. You'll find create outlines in it down here somewhere. There you go, just there. It's grayed out because I've already done it. What I do want to do here is this dot is going to form a replacement, okay, for the tittle over the I. If you remember from the typography, that's what that one is called. We're going to get the direct selection tool here and then click just on that tittle, okay? In fact, I think it's getting me the whole lot, so there's another way of doing this actually. If I double click on that I, it takes me into the character.

If I double click again, I can then get into that small group, 'cause that's what it is, a succession of smaller groups, double click outside. Let's turn the background off for that. In fact, we're done with it now so we can actually delete that background layer. Let me just say yes to that. There we go, I think that pretty much works. I might just need to move that just a tiny shade to the side. Okay, there we go, I think that's going to work pretty well. So all we need to do now is prep this for delivery, and there's a couple of different ways we can do it.

We're going to explore those in the very next movie.