How to bend & warp shapes & text in Adobe Illustrator CC

Hi there, in this video we take the simple, insignificant lines, with a little bit of Gradient in them, and then do this to them. Some would say, exciting shapes, some would say, crimes against design. It gets worse. We deal with Type too. Let's learn how to turn those lines using the Warp functions in Illustrator.

All right, let's get started. Now you can start with any shape. I've got a file open from 'Exercise Files', called 'Warp Transform'. And what I've done is I've just created three rectangles, and added a Gradient to them. Now for this to work properly, we need to group them but you can use any shape. I'm going to select them all, go to 'Object', and go to 'Group'. Let's look at the 'Effect'. And it is under 'Warp'. So we're going to start with 'Arc'. And yes, it bends it around like a warp. What's cool about it? It's still vector, scalable, it's awesome. You can go through some pre-defined ones. 'Arc'. 'Arc Upper'. I'm going to quickly go through them, just so that you get a sense of them. 'Bulge' is cool, even just like any of these. It's doing some cool stuff with those gradients and those colors. 'Flag', 'Wave'. 'Fish'. I'm going through them quickly so you don't have to. Just to see what's going in there, and you can jump to the one that you love. I'll play around with it. 'Squeeze', cool 'Twist'.

Now all of them have options. I'm going to go back to 'Wave', it's kind of my favorite. Actually no, let's go to 'Flag'. I love this, and you can look. You can exaggerate the bend, you can make it bend the other way. You can make kind of bounce on one side. Maybe up the top there, you can just do some really interesting stuff. Like just really how to deal with the Pen Tool or the Curvature Tool. So just whack it into the 'Effects', 'Wave'. And when you're ready, click 'OK'. Now if you want to go back and edit it, say you kind of like it, but later on you want to go and edit it again; with it selected, on your 'Properties Panel' you can kind of see, there's an Effect that's applied. And it's called Warp Flag, click on it. And I can go in here, and change it to something else. I'm going to go back to my 'Warp Flag'. Man, that was pretty cool. Let's click 'OK'.

The next thing to note is that, if I grab my 'Black Arrow' and have it selected, you can kind of see I still have this line selected, which is weird. It's just the way it is. The line still exists, they're in this kind of like distortion field that kind of makes him do this. But watch what happens, there's an Active Distortion. So if I grab and rotate these corners, look what happens, it's still trying to-- it's not rotating as we'd imagined. It's still trying to affect that Warp. You know, with the Wave, that's going through here. So it's kind of doing some weird stuff to it, you might like it. I'm going to undo it to go back to where it was. There it is there.

Let's say I want to move it around now and stop it kind of reacting. We need to do something called Expand Appearance. So with it selected, go up to 'Object', there's one called 'Expand Appearance'. Watch what happens to the lines. It kind of changes from this straight lines that have been distorted to actually just plain old distorted lines now. There's no effect, you can see, the effect's gone. I can't go back to those lines now. It's kind of a one-way street but now I get to kind of move this thing around a lot nicer. You can do it with Type. I'm going to-- not sure what I'm going to do now. I feel like I created a genius here, I love it.

So I'm going to draw a rectangle in the back. For no reason, because I don't like the white, I'll get it back there. It's blending into it. Not cool. It's going to pick a dark color. "Dan, just get on with the tutorial." I promise I will in one second. Dark gray. What I want to do is with Type, grab the 'Type Tool'. I'm just going to click once. And I type in '80s rule.' Start another pretty 80s. '80s rule.' Can't even see what I'm doing down there. Yes, 80s rule, that's what I've written. So I'm going to pick a font. Of the top of my head, an 80's font. Some of the 80s Lust. Here's you, new kind of look. 80s-ish, okay? I'm going to give it a 'white' Fill. So, the same thing with Type, you don't have to do anything to it. Now I'm going to make mine nice and big. I'm going to go up to 'Effect', go to 'Warp'. And I'm going to play around with it again. Make sure Preview's on, yours might not be on by default. Upper Arc is not working for me. What it's doing as well, it's trying to remember the last thing I did with this. I want to kind of get it back to 0, so I'm going to put you at '0'. You at '0'. And put the bend back this side. And now start playing around with them, normally at '0', '0'. 'Wave'. Wave's not really working. Let's go for 'Fish'.

Now I'm just playing around. You can leave this tutorial now. You've got the idea, right? 'Flag'. Mine's been terrible. So good with the Strokes, then so bad with the Type. The cool thing about the Type though, I guess, before we go, is watch this, with my 'Black Arrow', I can hover above it, I can type on, it's quite hard to do. 80s, let's say it's more a 70s thing. So it's editable type.

So that is going to be it for whooping around Shapes and Type using Adobe Illustrator. All right, I will see you in the next video.