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

685 Trajan Color Concept in Illustrator CC

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

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685 Trajan Color Concept in Illustrator CC

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll take a look at how you can use a full color font such as Trajan Color Concept, as we're seeing here, inside Illustrator CC 2018 and later. All right, I'll go ahead and switch over to this document which contains a photograph 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 go ahead and turn off that Dreamstime layer, and notice that the photograph appears on the attic layer, and below it we have a purple radial gradient. I'm going to blend those two layers together, so I'll go ahead and turn the attic layer back on, and target it by clicking on its circular so-called meatball in the right-hand column of the Layers panel. And then I'll go up to the Control panel, click on the word Opacity, and change the blend mode to Multiply. Now in the event you're not seeing this horizontal control panel, then you can go up to the Window menu and choose the Control command. You also have the option in this version of the software to bring up the Properties panel which also offers access to an Opacity option. And notice if I click on it, I can again change the blend mode to Multiply. My problem is that this panel takes up an enormous amount of room, so I'm just going to go ahead and hide it. And then I'll lock down the attic layer by clicking in the second column. Then I'll turn on the the text layer and I will click on the text with my black arrow tool to select it. And now notice that we can see the font up here in the Control panel. You can also see it in the Properties panel if you prefer. At which point, just go ahead and select that font. And notice that we're working with lowercase characters, but as soon as I enter the word Trajan and I hover over, for example, Trajan Pro or Trajan Pro Bold both of which have been around for a very long time now, that the letters switch to capitals. And that's because Trajan offers no lowercase character. However, I'm going to switch to Trajan Color which is installed directly inside Illustrator CC 2018 and presumably later as well. All right, so I'll go ahead and choose that font and notice that it is a full color font that looks as if it's been chiseled. All right, now notice the double T and the double N here. We can swap those out for ligatures by going up to the Window menu and then scrolling down a little bit so that I can see the Type command and the I'll choose Open Type. And notice this first icon in the bottom left corner, Standard Ligatures. If you click on it, then Illustrator will fuse the double T and the double N into single ligature characters as we're seeing right here. All right, now to me the letters look like they're spaced apart too far, so I'm going to go ahead and click on the Character tab in order to bring up the Character panel. And then I will change this kerning option right here from Auto, by clicking the down pointing arrowhead, to Optical, and that'll go ahead and squeeze the characters together just a little bit more. And then I'll select this Tracking value and I'll set it to negative 60 in order to produce this effect here. And then I'll go ahead and hide that panel. All right, now Trajan Color Concept offers a bunch of different color variations which we'll explore next week. But I want you to see that it's a very special font in that you can't change its color in the conventional way. So notice that the fill color assigned to my type is still white. If I were to change it to black or red, nothing whatsoever is going to happen. The same goes if I were to select, let's say, a bright red stroke and then increase the line weight to 16 points or something wacky like that, nothing whatsoever is going to happen. This is even true if you pile a stroke on top of the text. So let's say I go up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command, and then I click on a Type item. So notice if I double click on Characters, that's going to go ahead and select the text and show me that I have a red fill and a red stroke, even though they're not appearing. So what I'm going to do instead is click on the word Type right there so that it's active, and then I'll drop down to the Add New Fill icon and click on it, and I'll change it, let's say, to this bright shade of blue right here and nothing happens. Even though the fill is sitting on top of the characters, which would normally override things, so in other words if this were a standard font, it would now appear blue, but instead we do not see that character, and that's because color fonts are treated differently than standard fonts here inside Illustrator. Now this goes for effects such as drop shadows as well. So notice if I go up to the Effect menu, choose Stylize, and then choose Drop Shadow, and I'm going to set the color not to red, but rather to black, like so, and then I'll click OK. Notice the Opacity is set to 100%, the X Offset is zero points, so that the shadow is going straight down, thanks to this Y Offset value of 10 points, and then we've a Blur of five points. At which point, I'll click OK in order to apply that shadow. And in my case, I've assigned the shadow to the fill. If you don't like that, you could drag it down like so to below the word Characters, so that it's applied to the Type as opposed to these attributes right here. And just to streamline things a little bit, I'm going to click on a Stroke and shift + click on the Fill, and then drop down to the Trash icon in the bottom right corner of the Appearance panel, and click on it to get rid of them. So as you can see here, we just have a drop shadow. But notice if I were to turn off the attic and back layers so that we're seeing a white background, the text is not casting a black shadow. It's casting a shadow that actually mimics the color of the characters themselves. So over here on the I, you can see how it changes from brown over on the right-hand side to yellow on the left-hand side and so it's basically duplicating the characters, offsetting them down 10 pixels, and blurring them to the tune of five pixels which is what we asked when we applied the drop shadow in the first place. But I want you to see, if I switch back to the Appearance panel and click on the word Drop Shadow to edit it, we do have a color that's set to black. But if I were to turn on the Preview checkbox so we can see what we're doing, click on this color Swatch, and change it to anything such as red, just for the sake of demonstration, and click OK, it's not going to make any difference. So when working with color fonts inside Illustrator, the color assigned to the drop shadow doesn't matter. You're always going to be assigning the color of the text itself. At which point, I'll just go ahead and click OK to accept that change and now I'll press ctrl + 0, or cmd + 0 on the Mac, to center my zoom. And I'll go ahead and return to the Layers panel and turn on the attic and the back layers so that we can see the final effect. And that's how you work with full color fonts such as Trajan Color Concept here inside Illustrator CC 2018, and I'm hoping well into the future.

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