Adobe Illustrator CC - Advanced Training

How to distort bend shapes & type in Adobe Illustrator CC

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to look at distorting, pulling, and pushing using Illustrator's Envelope Distort. We're going to turn our Gradient into some kind of weird looking fish. And we'll even combine the bottom two graphics to turn them into the love heart. All right, let's go do that now in Adobe Illustrator. Oh yes, a little side note. At the beginning of this tutorial I forgot to tell you to open up the file called 'Envelope Distort.ai', it's in your Exercise Files. Do that first. All right, see you in there. 

So to make our Envelope Distortions we're going to start with this guy at the top here. You can use anything. It has to be vector though, can't be a picture, that's a Photoshop job. So with all of this selected, I'm going to go to 'Object' and I'm going to go down to 'Envelope Distort'. We're going to look at all of these. We're going to look at this first one called Make with Warp. Now Warp is kind of like, just some basic pre-defined style, so 'Arc', make sure your Preview's 'on'. 'Arc', I'm not going to go through every single one of them, except my favorite, where is he? Fish. And there is some adjustments you can do with these guys, deciding on what you want to do. It's just like, if I were to draw that with the Pen Tool, it does the same. So there's some cool uses of this fish, maybe not, but there's some cool stuff in here. So that's how to do that. 

One thing that will happen though is if I click out, and click back in, like, how do I get in there? You can go over here, to 'Warp Options', which is the newer version of Illustrator, otherwise you can click on it, and at the top here it's going to spread out along here, where you can say, actually I'd like to go back to my favorite, fish. Vertical fish, and all the options along the top there. 

The next one I want to show you is using a shape to distort it. I'm going to grab some Type. Click once, and I'm going to type "I Love You." These are heart, and stuff, you know. I'm going to use this font here called Hubro. I can't even spell it, is that Hubrus? I can't spell it, or say that, anyway, it's a cool font, it's on TypeKit, free to use, it's commercial, but it's free as part of your Creative Cloud license. I'm going to use this because it looks kind of cool. I'm going to use my shortcuts to play with the Leading. Now the best bet is to play around with your Tracking, Leading, everything before it gets into the heart because it's going to be problematic. 

I'm holding down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac and just using my other, to play with the Leading, or the Line Spacing. I'm happy with that. Now I'm going to get it kind of roughly to the right shape. Don't worry about it too much because the first thing that needs to happen is that the shape that you want to use to bend the Text needs to be at the front. Select both of them, and go to 'Object' 'Envelope Distort'. And that's why it needs to be on top, 'Make with Top Object'. Kind of bins it in there. 

What I might do before I do that is copy and paste it, or copy it at least. Do the 'Envelope Distort'. Then I get to paste. 'Command F' to put it straight where I got it from, or 'Control F' on a PC. I want to send that to the back. And I might do something with it just to kind of-- I feel like it's been lost a little bit in there. You can do with any shape on top. The more complex it is, the more kind of chance of it going a bit crazy, but yes, give it a go. 

We're going to look at that last one in the next video, which was Make with Mesh. We'll do that in the next video because it's a little bit longer, and a little bit more detailed. All right, let's check it out in the next video.