Class Project 08 - How to curve type around a badge using Adobe Illustrator CC (Design a badge logo)

Hey there, in this tutorial we are going to make text follow a path, like this curvy one here. We'll also do a badge, where we do the text along the top and the bottom. Let's get into it now using Adobe Illustrator.

So what we'll do is we'll work on the side here instead of on the page we're working, what's called the Paste Area, or the Paste Board. This area here is just a good place to work, and do your design and then move in to the page when you're ready. To get started we're going to use the Pencil Tool. Now your tool might be set to the Shaper Tool. So click and hold, hold, hold down the Shaper Tool until you get the Pencil Tool. Also know that I've double clicked the 'Pencil Tool' and cranked up the Smoothing to full vast. Why? Because it just makes my lines look nicer. I'm going to have a Fill of 'none', and a Stroke of 'black'. And I'm just going to click, hold, and drag and you'll notice that, because I got the Smoothing up, it looks quite nice. I'm going to grab the 'Type Tool'.

To do Type in a Path, all you need to do is, with the Type Tool, hover above the line, you can see the icon changes for the cursor, and just click wherever you want the text to start. Goes through and puts in some Lorem Ipsum, some Place Holder text. Now the one thing that might happen to you is, it's kind of remembered the last font that I've used, and the color, and the size, if you use a really large font you might not see anything. It might just be way too big. So you might have to go through and just kind of lower your font size over here to make it more usable.

I'm going to go back to say, I'll use '14'. The other thing is that my-- the last time I used the Type Tool I was using center. So yours is probably going to be Left Align, so it might be down the center. Let's type in some-- let's type in 'You are awesome.' Three exclamation marks !!! So I'm going to select all the Text, pick a Fill color. Some of the adjustments you might want to do are, with the Black Arrow-- grab the 'Black Arrow'. This Type Line here, there is a, there's kind of three red lines. There's also these white boxes. Ignore the white boxes. They do weird stuff, where they start linking text boxes. It's not what we want in this case. Black Arrow, click off in the background. I'm going to click back on it, and these red sticks are quite useful.

So this is the beginning, if I click and drag it now you're avoiding the white square, you're looking for that cursor. It's like a flat black line with an arrow poking out of it. If I click it, you can change the start position. Same with the end, in this case it doesn't really matter because I don’t have enough Type to get to the end. And this guy here is the center. This center option is a lot more important when you are centering the paragraph. Means you can drag it left and right. As long as there's room at the ends here to move along. So those are some of the adjustments you might make.

One of the things I want to do is, actually I want to undo. Actually I'm going to copy this. Undo. Till I get to have my black line, because what you'll notice is there's no line there anymore. Remember the black line that I drew? So say you want to use that as part of your design. So I'm undoing way back here. I'm going to paste this, so I've got both versions. So you might want to copy and paste that before you start adjusting the Type. Now I'm going to add it so it looks like it's kind of flowing along that Type. I might make the font a lot bigger. I'm going to extend that out.

How good is this going to look? I'm just going to add more text, actually. ‘You are awesome because you are you.’ Lovely, Dan. Couldn't think of anything. I might need a little bit more space. I'm going to have to make my font size tiny bit smaller. There we go. So what I want to do is I want to get this line. I want to make the Stroke white. Kind of like a, I don't know, a Dodges kind of look. Swooshy thing underneath. I made my Type quite thin, I made it white. I'm using my Width Tool. Give me a Width Tool. Where are you? This one here. I'm just going to click and drag, maybe that big. Come on, Width Tool. Here we go. Slightly long here. We've used the Width Tool in our previous tutorial. That's the kind of thing I'm trying to do here. Terrible. Next thing we're going to do though is an icon like this where we're going Type on a Path, it's kind of similar. Well, pretty similar.

So we're going to rebuild that, and afterwards, I'm going to rebuild this because I don’t like it, but anyway. The way this works is, actually this has to be two - I'm going to ungroup it. - this actually has to be two separate circles. You can't actually draw on the top, then hit a return and draw along the bottom. They're actually just two circles that we line up on top of each other to make it look like kind of one unit. So that's the first trick. So let's start with an Ellipse. You might need to hold down the Rectangle Tool to get the Ellipse Tool. I'm going to hold the 'Shift' key while I'm dragging it out to get a perfect circle. Doesn't matter what Stroke it has, or what Line it has, or Fill it has, because when we click it with the tool, like the one down here, it's all going to disappear.

So what we'll do is, actually we'll copy and paste it so we've got two of them to use. This one here, I'm going to grab the 'Type Tool'. Now, this Type Tool can't be used the same sort of way. Remember, we could go in the edge. You have to actually use the official Type on a Path Tool. So hold down the 'Type Tool', grab the 'Type on a Path Tool', and let's click once in the middle. It kind of does what we want to do, does it kind of reverse. So if I type in now, 'Prevention of'. Depending on this, you might have to select the center line. It's kind of down the bottom, or what you can do to get started is-- I'm undoing. I'll just start at the bottom, it's up to you. So if I click down the bottom here it kind of does a little bit of more of what I want. 'Prevention of… That's all I want. You can move it around with the Black Arrow.

We looked at it with this line down the bottom here, remember the center point? That's this red line here, I can decide to stick it down the bottom. It's a little bit fiddly, you can see it jumps around a little bit but you can drag it around. Depending on how you want it. The other thing you can do is, you can see, I can drag it up and below. It means that it goes on the other side of the Text Box. It's really fiddly, don't worry. I'll show you a more manual way of doing this in a second but I want mine to be there, and it's perfect. I'm going to use a Font, I'm going to use that League, one I had before. Not under Script, 'All Classes'. 'League Gothic', I'm going to use 'white'. And let's have a look at doing the bottom part.

Actually instead of using this, I'm going to copy and paste this one. And this one's going to say 'Cruelty to Designers'. So, what we want to do is, with it selected, with the 'Black Arrow' there's an option in here, under 'Type', there's one called 'Type in a Path'. And there's this one called 'Type on a Path Options', click on him. Turn Preview 'on', because you want to see what you're doing. 'Flip' is one of them. So it's going to go down to the bottom, that's basically what we want. I'm going to click 'OK', and we're going to rotate it around. We could grab the center point, rotate it around. We could just rotate it normally. Up to you.

One of the things we might need to change though, is that this guy here kind of sits on the baseline. That will be considered the baseline, wherever the letter sits. This one here though is on the inside whereas this is on the outside. So, they're going to look slightly different. So what we'll do is we'll line them up. And let's kind of adjust both of them actually. So I've got this bottom one selected, and let's go to 'Type'. 'Type on a Path'. 'Type on a Path Options', and Preview 'on'. What you can look for is where it aligns to the path. Baseline is where it sits. We're going to go 'Center'. If we do center for both of them, it's going to run straight to the line. Same with this one here, 'Type in a Path', 'Type in a Path Options'. And we'll do center for you as well. Where are you? 'Baseline', 'Center'.

These other ones-- Baseline is the default. Ascender and Descender is just when we've got, say a Type here, and we've got this, then they're referred as Ascender and Descender. The Ascender is everything that appears above. See this thing here, this is called the X-height, just so you know. Where all the lower case letters line up along the top here. Anything above that is called the Ascender. So that is an Ascender, this little dot is an Ascender. Descenders is things that appear below the baseline, they descend. So that is basic topography. Basically you didn't want to know that, right? You just wanted to know how to make this. We've basically made it. So you're aligning center, you're aligning center. If yours aren't snapping, they should just snap easily. If they're not, go to 'View', and make sure Smart Guides has got this tick on. If it doesn't, click on it. And now we're just going to build the center part.

Actually let's look at one last thing. I'm going to click both of them. I'm going to go to 'Type'. Can you do both at the same time? You can. So Type in a Path Options, make sure Preview's on. Now 'Effect', there's kind of two you'll probably use, Rainbow or Skew. Basically, a Skew will kind of, I don't know, it depends what you're trying to do. I feel this is like a football American Football cup launch thing. I don't really like it for what we're doing, you might love it. So, it's that one, Rainbow, Skew Gravity might be what you want to use. Gravity's a little bit different. It means it's going to time up the font. So it's going to be skinnier at the bottom, than at the top, whereas Rainbow, they're going to be the same size, either side, the top, and the bottom, and just kind of get closer down the bottom. It's up to you what you want to do. You might not see very much difference, don't worry about it.

These other ones, Rainbow, Skew, yet to use. You might like it, Rainbow, Ribbon, or Stair Step. I'm yet to use those ones either. I'm going to go back to 'Rainbow' and just play around with my 'Spacing'. I'm going to go up a little bit? Well, not that high. I don't know how I got that high. Let's go to '0'. It's pretty cool though, I have no idea how they do that. You can see, if I crank it up, it kind of expands the Spacing. You might have to do these separately because it's kind of affecting both of these differently. So, you… Let's say I want 10 point for the bottom one, that's what I'm looking at. And this top one here needs something different, 'Type'. 'Type on a Path'. And this one looks like it needs-- Turn Preview 'on'. That tightens it up. So what we want to do is '-10'. Awesome! So I got both of these guys, let's line them up. Centers. Center's there.

I'm just going to draw this bit in the center now. So now you can probably move on to the next tutorial, because I'm just going to draw first of all, on Type. 'Certified'. I'm going to use the 'Tracking'. That will open it up a little bit. Might pick a different font for this, Font size, sorry. There you go, 'Certified'. You… Fill color, 'white'. Line around the outside. I'm going to use the 'Rectangle Tool', it's going to have 'no' Fill and it's going to have a 'Stroke'. One thing we haven't done yet is-- so I'm going to have nothing selected. Rectangle Tool is there. I've got a Fill and a Stroke. They're in the wrong position, right? You can use this double arrow here to say, I want the white to be in the Stroke, and I want the No Fill to be in the Fill. Does that make sense? Watch this. Just kind of switched them around. So now, that should work.

I'm going to grab them all, and center them. So I'll use my 'Black Arrow'. This probably needs to come up a little bit. Now I'm happy enough with it. I'm not. There needs to be more Spacing in this top part. But anyway, we get the feel for this thing now. So what I'd like you to do is to practice. You might have practiced with this one, and followed along, but I would like you to go through-- I've got for you some text to create your own kind of icon certification stamp type thing. It's in your 'Exercise Files', there's one called 'Type on a Path exercise'. You think it was a mock association but there is an association for pet obesity prevention. If you are a perverse organization… I'm not mocking, just seems like a fun thing to do. If you're interested in it, here's the website but basically I just want you to use that. Turn it into a round-all, kind of lock-up like this, using Type on the Path. You can do whatever you like. Just like to see it. So, as a project, I'd like you do it, and then post a project in the comments of the Project section. I'd love to see what you come out with.

So that's us for Type on the Path. We are going to move on to the next video. All right, see you over there.