In this tutorial video you will learn the difference between point type and
area type in Adobe Illustrator and when you should use them. The first one will
cover is the point type, if we click on the type tool to create point type you
simply have to click once on a empty area of your art board and then type
your text. Notice that as you continue typing it's gonna continue in a straight
line unless you manually force it to break by hitting enter or return on your
keyboard, so you can technically create multi-line text with the point type
feature, but it's probably not the best use of this what you want to use the point
type feature for is for things like titles, or short phrases, headings or
anything you want to appear on one line the reason why is because what we can do
once we grab the selection tool we can actually transform this text and we can
resize it and move on the fly. So if I grab I can resize this text and move it
wherever I needed to be now one thing I want to point out about this is when
you're resizing the text using this method, you should definitely hold the
"shift" key to constrain the proportion so that you're not getting a skewed font
that sort of reduces the integrity of that font style, so once we've got our
title way we want it we actually wanna do is create a sub-title so I'm gonna go
ahead and use all capitals and type history of, and I want it to tuck it into the
space right here so this is another benefit of using point type because this
is on one line and because I used point type I can now rearrange these two
types of text like puzzle pieces, so I can go ahead and take this one up here
and I can resize as needed
remembering to hold "shift" so that I don't skew or squash it and right now I'm just gonna
leave it like that because that's not exactly the font that I wanted to use
for this and I'll go back and redesign it a little bit later but right now I
have used point type to create a pretty cool layout with me a text. Now area type
is different it's not meant for one line text it's meant for paragraphs so if you
have a multiple line text
situation, what you need to do is take that text and I'm gonna go ahead and just
copy this working text right here and move back over to my design and we're
still gonna use the type tool its a little confusing because you have an area type tool
this is really meant for a if you already have a shape like a circle or a heart or
whatever it may be
if you click on it will fill in that shape with your text, but the area type
option when using the type tool is a little bit different
what you do with this is your just gonna click and drag out a shape that you
want your text to appear in, and its gonna constrain itself to the boundaries
of that shape so I were to just type notice that as I type and it hits the
edge it automatically wraps so this is really great for multi-line text. I'll go
ahead and delete this and paste in the text that I took from over here and notice
that its constraining itself to the boundaries of the box that I drew I can
grab the selection tool and move it up and position it the way I want it, and that
looks pretty good. Now the thing you need to know about this is when you go to transform
the bounding box you're actually transforming the shape that the text
conforms to but you're not resizing it as you did with a point type, so to resize
attacks with this year either have to click the entire text box and resize it
that way or you would come in here and highlight an area and resize that
particular area
manually. So let's go ahead and undo those couple of changes and talk about one
more feature that has to do with area type, notice that when I have my
type in here it's not nearly what I had actually copied if you look over here we
have this little red plus sign in the bottom right hand corner and this is
over set text what that means is that there's more text in this textbox but we
can't see it because the text box is not big enough. So what you can do it this is
you can actually create columns using threaded text to do that with the
selection tool on, I'm just going to click on this plus sign
and click one more time until you get a loaded cursor and you can tell it's loaded
because it kinda how's that little fake text icon whatever next to it that tells
you that it's loaded with all that extra text from here. So I can drop my next
column and it's a little to big but right now we can see the thread going
from the first to the second so this is actually the out port in this is the
in port and notice it still has over set tax or you can create another column If
I wanted to but for right now I need to actually resize these because they're
getting a little bit too crowded. So I can move this over make sure to create
nice good space between them, and I think that looks pretty good so again you want
to use point type for titles or headings and you want to use area type
or area type options so to speak when you have multi-line text. The last thing
we just need to do is change the actual styling of these so that it looks pretty
good, so I'm gonna do color palette of grey and red, so I'm going to keep both of
these Helvetica so that we have some consistency I'll just make this one
Helvetica Bold, and then this text since it's our big heading we can do something a
little bit fancier has a little bit more style this would be really hard to
read for body text like this, so we're going to use this to be our standout
piece and we're going to coordinate with the rest of the illustration by using a
red color palette and notice I can move each one of these like little puzzle
pieces because I used that point type. So I can stretch it out and align it on the
right and left and there we go we have a final finished piece.