Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to use character
styles in Adobe Illustrator. All right, let's get started. All right, first I'm going to open a
flyer template that I downloaded from vecteezy to show how character styles work, so I'll open that.
And honestly, I would normally use InDesign to do a flyer like this, because InDesign is made
for this kind of thing, and you have a lot more control over there. Now, if you want to skip the
explanation by why you would want to use character styles, I'll add a link in my description,
so you can just jump to the part where we start creating one. So let's say for whatever reason,
we're doing this in Illustrator. So why would you want to use character styles?
In this document, a few of the words here and there need to have the same properties. So, let's
say you want your number text to be larger like this, or maybe you want it to be a different font,
and let's say purple. And obviously, we don't have many words here that we want to make the same,
so I probably wouldn't actually use character styles with this few instances. But if
you have quite a few words, or maybe several artboards, with a lot of different text on them,
you'll definitely want to make a character style. So normally, to change the text, you would just
highlight it and then make the change...maybe you want to change the color or something like this.
And that's the manual way to do it. It's kind of a big pain, though.
There's also a faster way to do it, and that is highlight the text boxes that you want to change,
hit I on your keyboard to get to your Eyedropper Tool right over here, and then just click on the
one that you want to end up with for the other two. So you see that it changes the color. And
it will also do this for font and that kind of thing. I'm going to undo back to where we were.
The thing about using the Eyedropper Tool is, you still have to do that for every single instance.
With character styles, you can set them up once, and then if you want to change the text, you
can do it all at once. So let's make a character style. I'll hit T to get into my textbox, and I'm
going to highlight this number one. Then I'll open my character styles which are under Window>Type
and >Character Styles. We'll create a new character style, and I'm just going to double
click on the title to rename it 'Numbers'. If you have something already highlighted like we did,
it'll give you a character style with all the properties of the highlighted text. And I like
starting with something like this, like a font, color, size, something like that. If nothing is
highlighted, it'll be like starting from scratch. This normal Character Style up here is the default
one that comes standard with Illustrator. So if you highlight some text now and then choose normal
Character Style,... I'll hit Z to zoom in. You can see that this has changed it to Myriad Pro
12 points, which is the normal font that comes with Illustrator. So I'm going to undo with
command Z or control Z. All right, so we have our numbers set up. I'm going to double click in the
blank area, not on the text, but in the blank area. This will bring up the Character Style
Options. I'll come down here and make sure Preview is checked, and then I'll choose General. This
will tell us all the settings that are involved with this character style. If we come to Basic
Character Formats, we can start changing it. I'm going to change my font to Nimbus Sans, and when I
hit Tab, you'll see it's automatically changed in the document. I want it to be a little bit bigger.
I'll make it 81, and I'm going to change it to the lighter green. Now you might notice that
the only colors you have access to are the ones in your swatches panel. So if you want other colors,
you can set those up and add them to your swatches and then do this. We also have Advanced Character
Formats. We can squeeze the type. We can stretch it a little bit vertically. And we can set up
rotation and Baseline Shift here. And we also have OpenType Features.
So this looks good for now. So I'll say OK. I'm going to go ahead and select my other two numbers,
and I'm going to apply this character style to them. So they all match now. Now let's say the
boss comes over and says OK, well, the client actually wants these to be Arial Bold, and wants
them to be orange. So, like I mentioned before, you'll want to add an orange swatch in first.
So I'm going to come over on my color, double click and come down here to orange.
Now we'll just pick this one, and say OK. And I'll create a new swatch for this. Now we can
double click on our numbers character style, open this back up, go to Basic Character Format, and
type in Arial. For font style, we'll choose Bold. I'm going to decrease the size a little bit. And,
of course, we want the orange color. And we'll say OK. So by just updating the numbers character
style, it has updated all the places that use that character style throughout the document.
And now we can create another character style for the subtext if we want. So I'll click on this,
and you'll see that it's actually highlighted the normal character style, but it has a little plus
button. That means that this text started off as just the Myriad Pro normal. And I overrode that in
a lot of ways. I made it larger, a different font color, and all that. So if we want to see what
this would look like without the little plus, we can come over here to these three little lines and
choose Clear Overrides, and it'll bring it back to what it was before all of the changes I made.
I'm going to undo. Anyway, we'll just go ahead and create a new character style. I'm going to
double click on the name and call this 'Title'. And then I'll click over here in this blank area,
double click to get the Options. And we can make all the changes that we want here. We'll say
OK. Now, another thing you can do with character styles, is you can just highlight a few letters,
and then apply one of these character styles to it. So if we want it to look like the title, we
can just hit this one. If we want it to look like numbers, we can hit that one. Now, you'll notice
that Paragraph Styles is over here too. Paragraph styles are for whole paragraphs. And actually,
when I set up my document, I try to make almost everything a paragraph style first. And then I
use the character styles to override parts of my paragraph, if that makes sense. So I would set
this up as a paragraph style. And then let's say I wanted to make this bold or a different color,
I would use a character style there, and then override that and honestly, I really only use
styles in InDesign. All right, if you liked this video, please click on the 'Like' button.
And I'll see you in a couple of days with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!