From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

684 Introducing Trajan Color Concept

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

684 Introducing Trajan Color Concept

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now this week, we're going to take a look at some newish font technology that you might not know about. Specifically this guy right here, Trajan Color Concept. This is Adobe's first full color font. It came out in November of 2016, so about a year and a half ago, and it's part of the OpenType-SVG standard. Now the original Trajan was designed by Carol Twombly and Richard Slimbach, some very old names, very young people, but very old names at Adobe. This card version of the font is from Sergio Martins, and this is something we've just never had before. You could assign color to a font. You could even assign a gradient to a font. This font has its own color and carving information built into it, which is extremely cool. Now here's the thing. The reason I've waited until now to tell you about it is because we've had some compatibility issues. In order to take advantage of this font, you had to be working in the most recent version of Photoshop or Illustrator CC. So Photoshop CC 2017 or later, or Illustrator CC 2018 or later. In which case, great news. You don't have to download the font, it's already built into the software. The other caveat goes to that word concept in the font name Trajan Color Concept. That tells us that it's not a commercial font. Now, it is not a conceptual font either. It does exist, but it's an experiment in progress, and so we have a limited character set. And where this font is concerned we have uppercase characters. That's a Trajan thing, Trajan doesn't have lowercase characters, and we've got numbers, but we have very, very little in the way of punctuation. We've got hyphens as you're seeing here along the top and the bottom of the artwork. That's our only dash. We have helpful things like periods and commas, but we don't have parentheses or quotation marks. You do have an apostrophe, so you can hunt around and decide if it's going to work for you. In the meantime, here, let me show you exactly how it works in Photoshop CC. All right here's the final design inside Photoshop. I'm going to switch over to the starter file which contains a background photo from the Dreamstime image library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. All right I'm going to press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of this URL layer here inside the Layers panel. And then I'll turn on this layer, which is called axiom 28, and I'll go ahead and click on it to select it. And you can tell it's a layer of editable type because we're seeing a capital T here for the thumbnail. All right so I'll go ahead and switch over to the Type Tool, which you can get by pressing the T key. At which point you'll see up here in the options bar that the font is currently set to Myriad Pro Regular, and I've sized the text to 180 points in advance. Now to switch over to Trajan Color Concept, which for now is actually installed directly inside Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC, you just need to click inside the Font option here, and dial in Trajan, and in addition to the old school Trajan Pro Regular, and Trajan Pro Bold which have been available to us for years, we now have Trajan Color Concept. And if you select it, you'll see not only do you change your text to gold, but Photoshop also automatically brings up the Glyphs panel. Now I want you to notice here in the glyphs that Trajan Color Concept, just like the other Trajan fonts, is exclusively all caps. Also notice if I scroll down the list here, that we have a handful of unusual ligatures including NN, TT, and AX by the way. Which is used in the word axiom, and so if I were to try to select either the A or the X, I will end up selecting them both. At which point you'll probably see a list of alternatives down here, and we'll be discussing how those work next week. But for now I just want you to notice that this is a fairly unusual font. Notice too that XX is a ligature, which is not a character combination that you find very often. Neither is YY. I'm assuming that these ligatures are available for say company names and other unusual words. For now I'll just go ahead and press the Escape key in order to exit the text edit mode, and I'm going to hide the Glyphs panel as well, just so I can better see what I'm doing on screen. Now to my eye the letters look like they're spaced a little bit too far from each other, especially this triple I right here. And so I'm going to bring up my Character panel by going up here to the options bar and clicking on this little panel icon. And then I'll go ahead and change this kerning value right here from Metrics to Optical. So you click on that down pointing arrowhead and choose Optical, and you'll notice, especially if I hide the Character panel, that we have different spacing. So this is before and this is after. Notice that things tighten up overall, but they really tighten up where the triple I is concerned. Now the spacing around the V looks a little bit too generous, so I'm going to click between the V and the I. Once again with my Type Tool, and I'll press Alt + Left Arrow, that's going to be Option + Left Arrow twice in a row in order to kern those letters closer together. And then I'll click between the X and the V and repeat that operation. So here on the PC I'll press Alt + Left Arrow. On the Mac, I'll press Option + Left Arrow twice in a row, and then I will accept my change by once again pressing the Escape key. All right now I want to create this kind of dashed border above and below the letters, and I did that using standard hyphen characters. The thing about Trajan Color and the other concept fonts is that they offer a very limited set of punctuation. So notice, if I go ahead and turn on this layer right here, which is just a bunch of dashes, and I click on it to make it active, then I click on the Font option up here and dial in this time, concept, that we see an awful lot of concept fonts. These are variable fonts that were introduced inside Photoshop CC 2018, and if you want to learn more about them by the way, then you can check out my course, Photoshop CC 2018 New Features, and then take a look at this movie right here, Introducing Variable Fonts. All right I'll go ahead and switch back to Photoshop, and this time I'll dial in simply the word color. At which point you can see that we've got Emoji Color, Emoji Color Regular, and then we have Trajan Color Concept. So I'll go ahead and choose that font. That is going to spring open the Glyphs panel once again. At which point I want you to notice, if I switch from Entire Font to Punctuation, I'll just go ahead and scroll up to the top of the list so we can see the gold characters with these little squares in their bottom right corners, we have very little in the way of punctuation. We could seriously count them on a couple of hands here. We've got ampersand, period, comma, colon, semicolon, apostrophe, hyphen, which is what I used here, exclamation point, question mark, and bullet. And in case you're wondering how to enter a bullet character, I'll just go ahead and click after these dashes, and I will press and hold the Alt key here on the PC and type in zero one four nine on the numerical keypad. So that's how you get a bullet on the PC. On the Mac you just press Option + Eight. But in either case your bullet is going to look like this. Now, let's say you decide to enter some other character. I'll just backspace here and I'll enter a parentheses. In that case it's not going to match at all because Photoshop is going to switch you automatically to the default font which is Myriad Pro. Obviously that's not what I want, but that is going to happen, and the same thing is going to happen if you try to enter an underscore. It's not going to work, and so I'm just backspacing until I know I have a character that's Trajan Color Concept, and then I'll type in a bunch of additional hyphens until I reach that vertical center guide. And then I'll press the Escape key to accept my change. All right, I'm going to hide the Glyphs panel once again, and now what I want to do is flip a copy of these hyphens, and you can do that by pressing Control + Alt + T. That's Command + Option + T on the Mac. The T being for Transform, and now I'm going to Alt + Click or Option + Click at this point right here inside the transformation boundary just so I can gain access to this target, which represents the center of the transformation. And I'll go ahead and drag it over to this location right here. Notice that I'm slightly to the right of the guideline so that I can see the X value. I don't care about the Y value. The X value is 1,450 pixels, which is the halfway mark for this particular image. Because it is 2,900 pixels wide. And now I'll just right-click any old place inside the image window, and choose Flip Horizontal in order to flip a copy of those characters like so. And then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. All right now what we want to do is bend the characters as we're seeing right here, and anytime you want to warp live editable type, you have to first convert it to a smart object here inside Photoshop. And so I'll go ahead and Shift + Click on the other layer of dashes right there, and then I'll switch to the Rectangular Marquee Tool which you can get by pressing the M key, and I will right-click inside the image window and choose Convert to Smart Object. That's the easiest way to make it happen. And then I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + T or Command + T on the Mac. And that'll take me into the Transformation mode once again. I want to warp these characters, so I'm going to click on this warp icon right there, up here in the options bar, and then I'll change the warp type to Arch, and I came up with a bend value right here of 15 degrees. At which point I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac a couple of times to accept that change. All right now we want to flip a copy vertically so we have some hyphens down here underneath the Roman numerals. Now you can't use that keyboard shortcut of Control + Alt + T or Command + Option + T on a smart object. It just doesn't happen to work. So instead I'll jump a copy of the layer by pressing Control + J, or Command + J on the Mac, and then I'll click on the lower of the two, just because I think that makes the most sense, and I'll once again go up to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform, or press Control + T or Command + T on the Mac. I'll Alt + Click right about there to move the target very close to that horizontal guideline, and now I'm going to go ahead and zoom into 100% and I'll drag this guy down until the Y value, that's the one we care about this time around, is 984. Which happens to be half the height of this graphic. And now I'll press Control + Zero or Command + Zero on the Mac to zoom out, and I'll right-click any old place inside the image window, and choose Flip Vertical. So I'll go ahead and choose that command and we end up with this effect here. At which point I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now we no longer need the guidelines, and so you can choose to either hide them or I'm just going to get rid of them. By going to the View menu and choosing Clear Guides, like so. And now I want to add a drop shadow to all of my text layers, and so I'm going to click on the axiom layer and Shift + Click on the top layer here inside the Layers panel. Then I'll click on the fly-out menu icon in the top right corner of the panel, and choose New Group From Layers, and that'll bring up a dialog box so that I can name my group, and I'm just going to call it type, and then click OK. And then I'll drop down to the FX icon and choose Drop Shadow, and that way I can add a drop shadow to all of my text layers at once, and these are the values I came up with. Notice the color is black, the blend mode is Multiply, the opacity is 100%. The angle is set to 90 degrees. I came up with a distance value of eight pixels. The spread is zero percent, and the size is 16 pixels. At which point I'll click OK to accept that change. And that is how you work with a little known full color font, Trajan Color Concept, inside Photoshop CC 2017, 2018, and I imagine well into the future. All right now if you're a member of lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning, then I have a followup movie in which I show you how to take advantage of Trajan Color Concept in Illustrator CC 2018 or later. And so drop shadows work a little differently and you want to make sure to save your file in the Illustrator CC format, because otherwise things will go awry. If you're looking forward to next week, I'm going to show you how to switch between stylistic sets. There is a new one. And so in Photoshop, we're going to switch between gold and this very light turquoise. In Illustrator we're going to switch between gold, which is the default, and this very dark green. But you can do either in either program, and there's a total of I believe 21 stylistic sets in all. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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