How to add a large first letter to my text aka Drop Cap
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI 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.
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Hi there, in this video we're going to look at what a Drop Cap is. It's the name for the giant first letter and a paragraph, used for story books, and in our case, this light little factoidy pull quote thing. Let's go and do that now.
First up, let's bring in our text. So, have nothing selected, go to 'File', 'Place'. In our '04 Long Document', there's one in there called 'Factoid 1'. Click, hold, and drag out, we got our text. Now I'm going to select all this text, I'm going to make it 'Roboto Slab Light'. I'm going to make the font size '20'. And I'm going to make the font color 'Paper', in our case, white. Drag it across, using the 'Black Arrow' just get it to roughly fit, we can fix this up afterwards.
Now to do the Drop Cap, grab your 'Type Tool', select the 'Text'. Actually, you can have your cursor flashing anywhere in the paragraph you want to work with. Doesn't really matter. And what you can do is switch it from 'Character' to 'Paragraph Formatting Options'. And the Drop Cap is this one here. If you hover above it, you can see it there. If you click once, nothing happens. It's a bit disappointing. '2' though, you can start to see what happens down the bottom, '3', you can see, where it's crossing over one line, it's already crossing one line. I'm not sure why it jumps to 1, but you can cross it across 2, or 3. And you probably not, in this instance but you can-- see the one next to it, this is how many across the Drop Cap goes. This can be really handy if you've got—
Say you want to do a Drop Cap, and it's like this, 1 maybe, you've got like a numbering system, and you want to go across, because you want that, or that, or-- they all look pretty horrible. But, if you've got more than one you need-- I'm going to get rid of all of that. The other thing you can do is - I'm going to put mine back to the I. - is I can select it, and you don't have to, but in my case, it's on 'Light', I'm going to move it to 'Bold'. Just to make it look a little nicer.
All right, that's it for Drop Caps. I'm just going to align mine up a little nicer within this box. How's it looking? I'm okay with that. All right, let's get on with the next video.