How to get text to follow a line or circle in Photoshop
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, trying to be clever here. It's text following the path. We even do this where it kind of goes around the top and around the bottom. Let's learn how to do that now in Photoshop.
To get started we are going to do the squiggly line first, then we'll do that kind of bag shape. So the technique is called Type on a Path, so we need a path to start with. There's a few ways of making it, we're going to use the Pen Tool. If you click and hold down the Pen Tool for a while, hold, hold, hold. We're going to use the Freeform Pen Tool. If you are a Jedi master with the Pen Tool or the Curvature Pen Tool you can go and use those, but if you're a mere mortal grab the 'Freeform', it is just as it sounds, you can just draw things.
To make your drawings a little bit nicer there's a sneaky trick, see this little cog in here? Click on that. What you can do is, where it says Curve Fit you can crank it up a little bit to say something like-- it goes up to 10, but 10 is probably too much, go up to something like 5. What it allows you to do is, when you draw - I'm going to draw like a little wiggly line there - it just makes your lines look a little smoother. Turn it down to 0, and it will follow your mouse perfectly. It's up to you what you want to do. That's basically it.
Paths are weird, they don't appear in your Layers Panel. They appear in this Paths Panel, which we're not going to really look at. All we need to do is go to 'Layers', grab the 'Type Tool'. You don't need to change anything. You just grab the regular old Type Tool, and watch my cursor here. It will zoom in. You can see my cursor has got the box around it, watch this when it changes. Can you see? A line through it, that means it's kind of following this path. So be careful where you click on this line because that's where the text is going to start.
So I'm going to click once, kind of towards this end here, and voila. I start typing. So it's going to follow the line around. If you're finding yours is not working it's probably because-- I'm going to undo, I'm going to go back to the beginning here. They say it's not working, I'm going to hit 'Esc' on my keyboard, that's the "I didn't mean it" button. Get out of that. Before you go and click on here, is to pick a font size. So you can do it at the top here. If you've got a font size of, something really big, it just doesn't work to fit on this line. It feels like it's not working, it is, just, your font's huge. So pick something really small, start with 5pts, or something. I've got it 10pts, and it work fine. Click once and start typing here. You'll notice I'm a terrible speller, lots of deleting.
So once you've got it here you can do some adjustments. To do the adjustments, you can select the text. I'm now going to make a bold text here. I'm going to pick a color that you can actually see. Dark green. Say we want to adjust a few things. Say we want to adjust the start point or the ending point. Actually before we do that you can just say 'Center', and it will put it kind of in the middle of the beginning and the end, but let's say we want to leave it left aligned and we want to just move this along. To do that, it's this tool here. It's underneath the Type tool. It's called the Path Selection Tool. You might have to click and hold down, you want the top one here.
With it selected, there's two main things, there is this dotted end and there's this little cross at the beginning. You can kind of see, that icon changed, see the little arrow that appears either side. It's beginning and the end, so I can click, hold, and drag it to say that's the beginning, or I can drag it all the way to the end here and make sure it's the beginning. Now I'm very specific about where I'm drawing because I know if I click, hold, and drag this, and I drag it down, everyone's on the other side, and everyone's lost. It can be a little weird to get used to. If you do get it on the other side find the beginning again, that little cross, then try and flip it over. Can get weird, even I find it a little bit troubling.
So I'm going to flip it over again. So, the crosses, sorry that cross at the beginning, and this I leave it in here because-- I'm going to show you, it's a little bit hard. So the cross is the beginning, this guy here can be a little problem, he's the end of the line. Not there, it's wherever this dot is, because what can happen is this. We don't do that either, flip back across, there's a little dot. If I drag it up here, can you see, that word disappears, there's just not enough room for that word to appear with this dot so far up, so you can drag it back down. Be careful not to drag it on the other side.
To move this whole thing around, just go back to your Move Tool and you can click and drag it. To go and start editing again, make sure you have that line selected and you need to grab the Type Tool to adjust the text or this Path Selection Tool. We're going to start working on this circle because what we want to do is this, where it goes top and bottom. So there is not a like a magical way of doing it. It's basically what we did up here, but using a circle. So I'm going to go over here. I am going to grab my tools over here. My Shape tools, we looked at these earlier. I'm going to use Ellipse, but what I'm going to do in this case is, instead of using the shape which draws my shapes like earlier I'm going to switch it to Path. The big thing to remember though is, later on in this course it remembers Paths.
When I draw things, they don't appear as layers, they appear in here, it's a bit of a weird thing. So later on in this course, when you're trying to draw a circle and it's not appearing, you can email me of course, but it's probably because you haven't switched it back to Shape. Just show you that, switch it back to Shape when you're finished, it causes less problems, but I want in this case to be a Path. And I'm going to draw a circle, I'm going to hold 'Shift'. Going to draw it roughly the right size. I'm going to grab my-- I'm going to move it around using this tool here, the Path Selection Tool. I'm going to grab it, so it's kind of there. I'm going to transform it using my 'Control T' and I'm going to get it so it's kind of sitting inside here.
We need to adjust the circle later on, hit 'Return' when you're finished. Now all we need to do is grab my 'Type Tool'. Just be careful when you are clicking on this line to not get this version which has got a circle around it, or the square around it. This version here with a line through it, you can see, a little tree. I'm going to click there at the top and I'm going to say, this is 'Scott Shoes'. I want to do a few things, I want to rotate it around.
Now what we can do is, you can play around with the, I guess Center Alignment, Right Alignment to try and get it, or what I like to do is just rotate it. So what I'm going to do, is I'm going to click on my 'Move Tool' because I'm halfway through my typing so some of my shortcuts don't work. If I try and type 'Command T' now it doesn't work because I'm halfway through typing. So what I'm going to do is go back to my 'Move Tool'. I'm going to 'Edit', 'Transform', and I'm going to use 'Rotate'.
Now I hope you're okay for a little bit of a shortcut I'm using 'Command T'. We've used this a few times in the course for resizing, right? We hold 'Shift', and we hold down 'Option' on a Mac, or 'Alt' on the PC, so 'Shift Option' and I can shrink this thing in and out. It's kind of half what I want, but I want to rotate it as well. The cool thing about using that shortcut, which is 'Command T' on a Mac, 'Control T' on a PC, is that, watch this, if I grab the corner, it's scale but if I hovered just out here I'm not doing anything, just moving my mouse out here. Can you see, it turns into like a little rotation arrow. So now I can click, hold, and drag it. Just kind of rotate it around, move it here. Kind of get it to where I need it to be. 'Enter' on my keyboard just to commit that. I'm going to pick a font, I'm going to use white. Font size, it's going to be a lot smaller, 6pt. It's moving around the line again, so I'm going to have to rotate it again. 'Command T', and just drag it around, 'Scott Shoes'. Scale it up a bit.
Another little thing that's happening there is I'm trying to drag, and it's kind of snapping to things which is kind of cool but sometimes you're just like, "Go where I want you to go, instead of jumping around." You can go to 'View' and turn 'off' Smart Guides, but what I like to do is, on my keyboard, we just use the arrow keys so look down your keyboard, just the up, down, left, right. You can tap things around, it's kind of handy. Hit 'Return' when you're ready, that is going to be the top part of my circle.
Now what you assume is you can type along the bottom of that same circle, that's not possible. What you need to do is just have a second Ellipse, make sure it's set to 'Path' and draw out another Ellipse. Don't worry too much about the size because you're going to have to resize it to suit the circle and the font you pick. To move it around go back to the 'Direct Selection Tool' get it roughly in the right position. Grab the 'Type Tool', click once down here, and I'm going to say 'Established', we totally missed it; 'Esc' key. I'm going to go to 'Edit', 'Step Backward'. Remember, you got to look out for that perfect icon. I got it flashing in the right place now. 'Est. 2019'. So it's doing what the top one did, which is the outside.
Now remember, when we were doing this, and we flipped it over by accident, we want to do it on purpose now, so grab the 'Direct Selection Tool'. What we'll do is click, hold, and drag it and you want to drag it so it's on that other side. It's a bit fiddly I know, just click, hold, drag it until it flips on to the other side. Now I'm going to use my-- back to my 'Move Tool' using 'Command T', or 'Control T' on a PC. Rotate it around to get it to kind of where I want to go. Turn on my keyboard, it's looking okay. Now if you are thinking, "That seemed kind of painful, Dan," it is kind of painful in Photoshop. It does it fine, Illustrator does it better, as well as InDesign. They do this kind of like Type on a Path thing a lot nicer, there's a little bit more sophisticated tools, but Photoshop does it fine.
You can leave now, I'm going to go and play with my fonts. I am going to grab my 'Type Tool', and say, you are the Lite version. I want it all to be Lite. I'm going to play around with the Tracking as well. Hit 'Esc', I'm going to undo. And here's your Lite version. I want you to be this superhero version. You can see, it kind of adjusts the lines, there's a lot of rotating to get everything to look nice. Same with 'Estd', I'm actually going to drop down the font size to something smaller. The same thing here. I'm going to make you the big heavy one. And I'm going to make you--
If you're finding it hard to select on, I am finding it hard too. Back to my 'Move Tool', transform it around a little bit. Actually what I might do before I rotate it around, with this layer selected, this one here, we haven't really looked at-- it's called Tracking or Kerning. It's the space between letters, I'm going to drag it up or down. So I'm going to say, I want it to be about 50. Because it's on the inside of the circle, they're kind of starting to touch.
With Scott Shoes, I want it to maybe tuck it in a little bit because it's expanded out, so maybe '-50'. Now there's a lot of rotating and resizing. So we're nearly at the end, or we're at the end. What I'm going to do is add that kind of S in the middle here and set you a little project. So I've called mine Scott Shoes, you give yours your own name, Pick your own fonts. See if you can get the type to bend round, make it look nicer than my version. And we're going to pick a big kind of like-- we're picking a logo type, and I'm just going to cheat by going to the 'Type Tool', clicking once out here. I'm going to type out capital S, I'm going to go through my fonts. I've already gone through my fonts. Lying, the one that I want is--
So it's not a logo I've designed, I've cheated. Just used the font. What is it called? It's called Hobo? Hobus? Not sure. I'm going to grab my font size and just make it nice and big. You probably don't have that font so go through and find a font that you like. Use a nice big kind of logo type. I want to see what you make. So you might have a really long name, give it your name, pick some fonts, circles, colors. I'd love to see a screenshot of what you make for your brand. Doesn't even have to be shoes, just be your name. Just wanted you to prove to me you can do Type on a Path.
When you're posting it give me, out of 10, how painful it was. I still find it painful, and I'm pretty good at this. You might find it even more painful, so out of 10-- 10 being mind-blowingly brain-melting painful, and 1 being super, super easy. I don't know what you're going on about, Dan. So send it to me on social media, Instagram, I'm bringyourownlaptop. On Twitter I'm danlovesadobe,
or just post it here on this page. Thanks for tuning in, one of the longer ones. I will see you in the very next video.