How to put Text Inside a Letter or Shape in Illustrator

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Course contents
SECTION: 4
Keyboard Shortcuts 14:06

Questions

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Course info

104 lessons / 10 hours 33 quiz questions 31 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hey there, I'm Dan Scott, an Adobe Certified Instructor with over 16 years of design experience under my belt, I'm part of the Adobe Expert program, and my online and in-person classes have been attended by more than a million people, just like you! Join me as we dive into the exciting world of Adobe Illustrator Advanced! In this course, you're not just leveling up in Illustrator, you're transforming into an Illustrator SuperHero!

In this course you will work on a bespoke brief designed to ignite your imagination, coupled with immersive course videos, you'll be crafting jaw-dropping graphics in no time. Throughout our journey together, you'll flex your creative muscles and construct projects that will elevate your portfolio to new heights. So, let's dive in and unleash your creativity!

You’ll learn:

  • - How to use artificial intelligence to boost your creativity in ideation. 
  • - The quick way to take hand-drawn sketches and vectorize and color them. 
  • - The building blocks needed to set you loose on a huge variety of beautiful effects and techniques.
  • - To make beautiful charts and graphs for your documents. 
  • - Color mastery to make quick color adjustments, Pantones, and blend it all together beautifully.
  • - How to master images inside of your illustrator workflow. 
  • - To harness all the secret gems that'll help you level up your typography skills. 
  • - All the tricks of the trade for drawing complex shapes easily. 
  • - To double your creativity with the Transform and Distort section. 
  • - To speed up your personal workflow to get the most out of your creative day.

Explore the full course outline for a comprehensive list of topics that will expand your Illustrator prowess beyond imagination.

If you're already comfortable navigating the basics but want to  unlock the true potential of Illustrator, then this Illustrator Advanced course is your ticket to becoming a master of Illustrator! So join me and the ranks of design superheroes and let's embark on this thrilling journey together.

Requirements:

- All you need is a copy of Adobe Illustrator, you can get a free trial from Adobe here to get started.
- A basic knowledge of Illustrator is required. I recommend watching my Illustrator Essentials course prior to embarking on this epic adventure.

Who this course is for:

- Creative adventurers who already have a basic understanding of Illustrator.
- Self-taught Illustrator enthusiasts yearning for structured guidance.
- Graduates of my Illustrator Essentials Course, hungry for more knowledge and skills.
- Visionaries who have developed their own unique Illustrator approach but crave exploration of the vast universe of tools, updates, and time-saving techniques.

What you'll learn:

- How to use Text to Vector Ai
- How to use Text to Pattern Ai
- How to use Generative Recolor
- When to use the Scissor Tool, Eraser Tool & Knife Tool
- Advanced Shape Builder Uses
- The differences between the Pathfinder Vs Shape Builder
- How to use the Join tool & Joining Path Ends
- Advanced Pen Tool Tricks
- Width Tool Advanced Techniques
- The Curvature Tool
- How to master corners with corner widget effects
- How to work with Compound Paths
- The difference between Expand & Expand Appearance
- How to create Graphic Styles
- How to make Symbols
- How to use the Smooth Tool
- Advanced use of Simplify Path
- What Live Shape Effects are for
- How to make Repeating Grids & Concentric Circles
- How to make Random Objects
- Advanced Keyboard Shortcuts in Illustrator
- How to add a Gradient on a Stroke
- How to add a Gradient in Text
- How to use the Freeform Gradient tool
- How to use Advanced Color Swatches
- How to use Global Color Swatches
- What is the difference between RGB vs CMYK color modes?
- How to proof colors
- How to use Pantone Spot Colors
- Recolor Artwork & Changing all colors at once
- How to use Blending Modes
- How to work with Images & Blending Modes
- How to make Black & White Images
- Learn Advanced Workflow Tricks
- All the Super Selection Mastery
- How to use the History Panel
- Advanced Fonts Tricks & Tips
- Use Retype to know what Font is being used
- How to put Text Inside a Letter or Shape
- How to use the Touch Type Tool
- How to add a Connected Stroke Around Multiple Shapes
- How to Offset a Stroke with Text
- How to make a Bar Chart in Illustrator
- How to make a Pie Chart in Illustrator
- Layer Power Moves
- Advanced Artboard & Pages Tricks
- How to Unlink vs Embedded Images
- How to Crop Images Rather than Mask
- How to Mask Inside Text & Multiple Shapes
- How to you use the Puppet Warp Tool
- How to use the Distort Envelope Shape & Type
- How to use the Envelope Mesh
- How to blend lines together
- How to make a Linocut Effect
- How to make 3D Gradient Lettering Blends
- How to spin text into a ring
- How to turn text into a 3D donut shape
- How to make a Duotone image effect
- How to make a Roughen Stamp Vector Effect
- How to make a Neon Sign Glow Effect
- How to use a Halftone Effect using Plugins
- Advanced Exporting Assets Tricks in Illustrator
- How to use the Dimension Tool

So what're you waiting for? Let's start the course now!
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

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Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hello. Hey, have you ever wanted to put text inside  of text while you're in the right video? Okay, we're gonna do it this way with just the cool gritty  of the background and then we'll do this. Look, it is text inside of text  and there's actually an image  inside of text, inside of text. It's very inception but it looks really cool, right? Let's jump in and I'll show you how to do it.

Alright? Uh, you can open up the file called text in shape,  not text vector, text in shape oh one. Um, I've just gotta call it background. You don't really need anything. You can create your own. Um, we're gonna start with the giant letter.

So I'm gonna grab the type tool, um,  hitting the tiki click once. I'm gonna use the initials from my company. Um, do it with me because the D causes us problems. If you have a, a letter that doesn't have this  compound shape, that kind of like hole cut in the middle  of it, like an R or a a, you know, let's see  that hole in the middle and  that will give you extra trouble. One knock 'cause we'll work it out. And I'm holding shift and grabbing the corners just  to make a ginormous font.

And I'm gonna pick something that is um, got a really big,  um, got a big weight  so the text can actually fit inside of it. So this one called active grotesque, you'll be able to find  that on Adobe font if you want it. Okay, so we're gonna start with this one. What we'll do is we always uh, have a duplicate  of it just in case we need to go back. And this is very destructive. You can't put a text inside  of editable text at the moment at least.

Okay? So what we're gonna do is outline it. It's a command shift O or control shift O on a PC  or type create outlines. Okay? Now it's a shape. So although this is text inside of a text,  you could draw anything now, okay?

'cause this is just a shape. So the rest continues. If you want to put it inside of a star  or a rectangle, actually a rectangle wouldn't be useful. That's a text box. So what we wanna do now  as well is these things are grouped  so I need to ungroup them. Command shift G or control shift G on a PC  or right click it and ungroup it.

So I've got two shapes. Let's do  with the G first 'cause it's slightly easier. Um, it's kinda weird though, right? If I grab my type tool, I'm looking for area type tool. That's the magic that does the magic. Okay?

And what if I click on it and watch this? If I click on here it says, Hey,  you can't do it to compound shape. And you're like, it's not a compound shape that is,  this isn't, I don't know why, but that's what happens. It's a compound shape. Okay,  I'm gonna release the compound um, shape. Okay?

A compound path, nothing happens  'cause it's not a compound shape. But hey it works now. Okay, now if I can click in here and actually  because it is no longer a compound shape, which says go  to the regular type tool, see the icon changes goes  beep beep. That little circle version, a drone sound effects  because it's the um, yeah, it just kind of guesses it goes,  Hey, do you mean the text area type? And you're like, yeah, I did. So now what we're gonna have  to do is pick a font that fits something small.

So I'm gonna go, first of all,  I'm gonna pick like robot something easy and small  and I'm gonna make a small size kind of  that looks like it'll fit pretty good  and my placeholder text will kind of run out of it, right? So I'm just gonna click in there and go type  and go to fill the placeholder text  and we'll just top it up. So you might have to do that a few times. There is just some issues. Can you see with a sentence or the line ends  and there's this kind of like if I go stick off in the  background, it is close but it's like, is that a C? Is that a G?

Okay, what you can do is you can mess around  with the font size, get it smaller and smaller. It will fill in a lot more of the cracks. What you can do as well under paragraph we're just using  left and line use one of these ones either justify, okay,  which tries to justify the text, kind  of squeezes it into the whole line. Um, and the only problem  with this one is I think this is called the last line  or is it justify with last line a land left. Okay, the alternative is this one here. This one is justify all lines.

It just goes, I'm gonna smush even, you know,  I'm just gonna smushes across even though  there's huge gaps in here. And there are just times where there's rivers running. They call 'em rivers where this one's got some extreme,  mostly not too bad. Um, you can kind of see gaps starting to appear in places. This is for a fact. It's not meant to be legible.

So I'm gonna ignore those. I'm gonna go back to maybe just left a  line, kind of does enough of it. I'm gonna pick uh, white font. I'm gonna actually go to the slightly bolder version medium  and I'm going to pick white  'cause it looks cool against the ingredient. So that kind of works until you get to this one. Okay?

This one has this hole in the middle. So what we're gonna do is again, we're gonna right click  and say release compound path 'cause that's part of it. I've got this chunk in the middle here, okay? I'm going to copy it  and maybe just move a version over there. I'm gonna paste it in again in a sec. And what I'm gonna do is ignore it.

I'm going to grab my tug tool  and I should be able to click in there. It's remember the last font I've done except it's black. So I'm gonna slip it all and I'm gonna  grab the eyedropper tool. The shortcut key for the eyedropper tool is clearly I,  which you can't do when you're in the type tool. Let's go to the eyedropper tool, click in here. We will steal the font and the color and the size.

But we've got that thing. Where did my middle of my D go? That's all we're gonna do is just hit paste. So command or control, uh, V. Okay, actually we're gonna use the paste in place. Anybody remember that from earlier?

Edit it's command, it's command F or control F. Okay? It gets it back to where you copied it from rather than  just the middle of the screen. That's what paste does right in the middle  of the screen wherever you are. Paste, okay? So command F gets it back, um, wherever it got it.

So what I wanna do is this,  we're gonna add a lot of magic to it. So the magic is okay under it should be under type. I always hunt for it under type, it's actually under object. And if you go down to here called text wrap  and hey make, ooh, look at this,  it's got this like visible force feel on it. Watch, you can move it around and design people  are like, yeah, whatever. We're doing that for ages.

But if this is new, I dunno, it's exciting. Um, it's got this kind of like,  can you see the invisible line around the outside? You can get rid of that by going back into object down  to text wrap and go to the text wrap options. Just turn it down from uh, six down to  or whatever the default was on yours, turn it to zero. So it's still working, it's just not got a little  force word around it. Okay?

We can't get rid of this, but we kind of can, right? We can say you have no um, no fill, no stroke. So remember X toggles this over here, okay? So it has no stroke already. I'm gonna toggle it. So the fills up front and then I'm gonna use  that forward slash key on my keyboard's down the bottom next  to the question mark.

Remember that? Okay, that is the have no fill. There you go. Kinda x. We're gonna go even further like we saw earlier on. We're gonna put an image inside of it.

It gets even weirder only  because uh, when I first did this course, um,  people were like, oh, how do I do images? And they went off and tried to do it and it's really weird. So we'll do the weirdness together. So I just copied and pasted that. What I wanna do now is bring in an image,  it's a command shift P or control shift P on a pc, okay? And we're gonna bring in from your exercise files,  there is something called text shape O2, just an image  that we made in the essentials course.

So I'm gonna get it so it's nice  and big kind of covering everything  and I'm gonna move it to the back. So I'm gonna be a command shift in the first square bracket  because I just wanna kind of get the hints of it in here. Now it's easier just to outline all the text. That's what I've found. Okay? The compound path and this text rep stuff just doesn't work.

So what we're gonna do is select both of them  and we're gonna say, you know, we've got a copy  of it that is editable. So we can change the text that is  inside of here in terms of the white stuff. But we're gonna have to go, um, remembers the shortcut,  command shift o control shift O and a PC  or under type create outlines. Okay? Because now it's just, yeah,  it's a bit destructive but it's okay. We're doing it for an effect rather than editable text.

What we're gonna do now is we're gonna group them together. 'cause we can mask these. If I grab the G in this background one, okay,  and I go command seven on a Mac to mask  or control seven on a pc,  it's gonna say, Hey, it's very complex. I'm gonna say yes, okay. And it kind of doesn't work. That reminds me why it doesn't work.

Okay, why it doesn't work is  for some reason this works great. My machine is struggling a little bit. Okay? If your machine is struggling, it will. It's such a big complex mask to make it work. I'm gonna select both of them and I am going  to turn it into a compound path.

Don't know why. Okay? So command or control eight. It is now a compound path. We haven't cut a hole in anything yet,  but it is a compound path. It allows us now though, as long as this is on the top,  gonna hold shift, grab the image in the background  and then go command seven.

Control seven. It's gonna say very complex  and you're gonna say, I'm willing to take the risk  'cause look how cool that is. Love it. Obviously you'd be using not Lauren Ipsum. Potentially there'd be some sort of text  that's relevant to your business. It might be, I don't know, chat, GBT AI generated  Or it might be poem quotes, your annual report.

Something in there that maybe is a bit more, I dunno,  maybe a description of what you guys do. Maybe your menu for some reason it just looks really cool,  especially when there's depth in the image. Okay, I dunno comes a really good,  the big takeaway from doing images inside of it is  that stick 'em all together, make it a compound path  and then do the masking. The big thing to remember in this one here, uh, remember  that when you outline this first shape, okay? And try and protect and it says hey can't be a compound  path, and you're like, it's,  or it's not a compound path, but it kind of is. Illustrator has created a compound path.

You gotta release the compound path  and then you should be able to put text in it. Then for things that actually have um,  a compound path in it, like uh, a or a D or an RK  or an O, you need to put the shape back in okay? And put text wrap around it. And at this stage, if it remains editable text  to go the image way, we have to outline the text  as well inside of it. You were watching, you were taking notes. I know, you know.

Anyway, that is it. We put text inside, text  and then image inside, text inside text. It's very inception, but very cool. Alright, I'll see you in the next video.
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