Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you four ways to get a
warped text effect in Adobe Illustrator. And the first three ways I'm going to show you are kind
of freeform warps. And then the very last way is a more uniform warped look. Alright, let's
get started. First, we'll use the Warp tool. And with that tool, we're going to be making text that
looks kind of like this. So I'm in Illustrator now, and I'm just going to create a new document,
we'll come up here to Print, then choose Letter. And we'll Create. Now I'm going to hit T on my
keyboard, and I'm just going to type 'collapse' in all caps. I'll get back on my Selection tool,
I'll come over to my Character panel. And if you don't see any of these panels up, you can
come up here to Window and they'll all be under here. Actually, Character is a little bit hidden.
So if you go to Type, it's here under Type. Okay, I'm going to change my font to Montserrat.
You can also just pick kind of a thick, chunky font. So I'll hold SHIFT and pull a corner to
resize to fill the artboard a little more. Now I'm going to start dragging and hold SHIFT and OPTION
or SHIFT and ALT on a PC to make a copy right underneath it. And then we'll hit CMD D or CTRL D,
to make a few copies, maybe delete that one. Now, to get this effect, we have to outline our text.
So I'm going to come up here to Type > Create Outlines. And now with this still selected,
I'm going to hit SHIFT R on my keyboard to get to my warp tool, which is right over here.
Now you might notice that the size of your brush is a lot different from mine. And you can just
hold OPTION or ALT and SHIFT to resize it. If you don't want to hold SHIFT, you can drag to
the right to make it really wide or drag it down to make it skinny like this. But I'm going to hold
SHIFT so I get a perfect circle. And I'll make it just about the size of one of my letters.
Now I'm going to start right in here and just drag across all these letters corner to corner.
And release. And you can see that your work tool has warped all your text in an interesting way.
Now, if you undo and try again, you're not going to get the exact same effect you did the first
time. So this isn't an exact tool. I'm liking this one quite a lot. Now I'm just trying to click and
drag and make a straight line, of course, it's going to be a little bit off. But if you really
wanted to make a straight line, holding SHIFT won't work in this situation. So what you could do
is we can just undo this, and then we can come up to transform, & make sure our width and
height are the same. So I'm going to copy this number up here, make sure this is not checked,
and then highlight the height and paste it in and then hit Return. So now this is a perfect square,
I'm going to CMD minus to zoom out, I'm going to hit V to get my bounding box back. Now if
you don't have your bounding box showing, you can hit SHIFT CMD B or SHIFT CTRL B on Windows.
I'm going to get right over a corner until I get my Rotate tool. And then I'm going to hold
SHIFT. So it snaps right here. I'll hit SHIFT R to get back on my warp. And this time, I can click
start dragging and hold SHIFT and it'll be a perfectly straight line, then I can select all
the text again, get on a corner and rotate it back to straight up and down. Now I'm not sure anyone
would ever notice it's an exact straight line, so it probably doesn't matter that much. But that's
one way you could do it if you want a straight warp. Alright, I'm going to move this off to the
side. And now we'll move on to the second way I like to warp text, which is with the mesh feature.
So here's what we're going to create with this feature, something like this. Alright,
so I'm going to hit T on my keyboard to get to my text tool again. I'll click once and then I'm
going to change my text to say 'mesh.' And I'm making it all caps. I'm going to hold SHIFT and
grab a corner and make it quite a bit bigger. And now I want to change my font to something
kind of tall but also kind of thick. So a good one for that is Compacta. Compacta BT. And this should
work well. Now with this option of doing it, you don't have to outline your text. So let's just
go straight to Object > Envelope Distort and Make with Mesh. When we do this, we get this dialog box
where we can choose how many rows that we want the mesh to be in and also columns.
So I'm just going to do five rows and one column. And we'll say OK. Now I'll hit Z to zoom in.
And I'll use my A tool, which is my Direct Selection tool right up here. I'll just draw a box
around this second line, and then I'm going to use my arrow keys to move this over. Now you'll notice
it's kind of weird, it's not really doing what I'm expecting...like it's not going all the way
out here. And this part isn't lining up either. So to fix that, I'm going to go to Object >
Envelope Distort and Envelope Options. And we're going to push that fidelity all the way to 100.
And now you can see it follows that perfectly. So we'll say OK. I'm going to draw a box around this
third line, and move it a little bit over. And then we'll do the same with the other two lines,
so they look very warped. That's pretty good. This one might be a little too much. Yeah.
We don't want it to be unreadable, of course. Okay, so what if we get this far, and we decided
we want to change our word to something else? Luckily, with Envelope Distort, we can do that.
So we can go back up to Object > Envelope Distort and Edit Contents. And now we can hit T, select
the text, and I'm just going to type 'cool.' I'll get on my Selection tool, and just click off so
you can see what it looks like. And now we can morph it even more, I'm just going to select it,
I'll click on the envelope in my appearance panel. And then I'll come over here to effect
and choose warp. And we'll choose arc. Now this is already set to what I want. I've got a bend
of 20 degrees, I've got a horizontal distortion of 50. If I change these, it'll automatically update.
So you can just kind of mess with these and see what you like best.
We'll say, OK. Alright, now I'm just going to move this one off to the edge also. Now the third
way we can warp text is with Puppet Warp. So I'm going to hit T and click once and type 'puppet.'
I'll get on my Selection tool, hover over a corner, hold SHIFT and make it quite a bit bigger.
I'm going to use the same font, but I wanted to let you know that with the Puppet Warp tool,
the minute you click on your text, it will automatically outline it. So you might want
to make a copy off to the side of the page in case you ever want to know what that font was.
You'll have access right up here. Alright, so I'll hit SHIFT P, which will bring me to the Puppet
Warp tool. It might take a second. And that tool is right here. It's underneath your Free Transform
tool. And you'll notice that once I choose this tool, it's automatically outlined my text and
I do not have that font anymore. It also has put these little nodes and random places on the text.
Let's zoom in a little bit. Now if you click on these little nodes, you can move
that node around. If the letter has two of them, if we click on one, it'll just move that part. If
you want to add one - right now the U doesn't have one - so I'm going to just click and add one. The
rest of the letter will react based on where this pin is. So let's say I want to kind of warp the P,
I need to add a pin to another part of it. And then I can move this one and the other pin will
kind of keep the P locked up there. But you can see it's kind of stretching it around. If we click
in this area out here within the dotted lines, but not in the center, it'll rotate that part around
so we can get some really interesting effects. This is really similar to the Puppet Warp tool
in Adobe Photoshop. So this is a nice way to give your text a more of a hand drawn look.
I don't like this piece here, so I'll just get on my A tool, and I'll just move this back to make
it look more like normal. So that's a quick way to edit your text on the fly to give it a more
organic look. Now the fourth way is the easiest way to warp text in my opinion. So I'll type a
new word. I'll just put 'type,' & make it a little bit bigger. And then I'll come up here to Effect
and Warp. And here we have all these warp presets. And these are really nice. So if we choose Arc,
I'll reset this to zero, and then I'm going to make it bend and you can see that it's warping the
text outward like this, but it's very uniform. We can also kind of scroll through these other work
presets just to see what they do. They even give you a little picture of what is going to be like
and I'll just run through all these so you can kind of see how they work.
So you can get some really crazy results with these.
Alright, if you liked this video, please click on the Like button, and I'll see you in a couple days
with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!