Adjusting Size, Style, and Spacing

Quick reference

• 00:04 The next tool that I'm gonna show you guys is the type tool.
• 00:07 I know we haven't really done anything with text so far, so
• 00:10 now I'm gonna be showing you guys how this tool works.
• 00:13 Let's start with some of the basics.
• 00:14 So I'm just going to click here on my canvas and you'll see by default,
• 00:17 it just types Lorem Ipsum,
• 00:19 which is basically just another word for dummy copy, or dummy type.
• 00:23 But as soon as I type that in here, the first thing that you guys are going to
• 00:26 want to do is to bring up your character palette.
• 00:28 And you can get that by coming up to the Window menu and
• 00:32 then coming down here to Type and choosing Character.
• 00:36 Now, if this wasn't already in your palette, or over here in your panels,
• 00:40 you can actually dock it there by just dragging it and dropping it to the side.
• 00:44 And, that way, you can be sure that it'll stay there for any time that you need it.
• 00:49 So now that we have this panel here,
• 00:50 it's showing us a few properties about our type.
• 00:52 And the first thing is that it's showing us what font we're using.
• 00:57 Now this is the type face or the font that we're currently using.
• 01:00 It's called Navy Queen.
• 01:02 And now I'm kind of switching it around a little bit.
• 01:05 Just to change it up and kinda scroll through.
• 01:08 So the things is, you can use the up and down arrows to scroll through and
• 01:11 take a little look at your different type faces.
• 01:15 And for now, let's just go with this one called Newton.
• 01:20 So this is the typeface and below that you'll see another menu, and this is where
• 01:25 you have other options like extra light, regular light, italic bold, or extra bold.
• 01:32 So that is called the style.
• 01:34 So the first box here is the font family,
• 01:36 and the second one is to set the font style.
• 01:40 Now below that, you also have the option to choose the font size.
• 01:45 So I can click here and I can select from any of these sizes, or
• 01:48 I can manually type in a size.
• 01:49 Say I wanted to put it to 100, I can just type in 100 and press Enter.
• 01:54 And then, I can press Command-Shift-A to deselect.
• 01:57 And now, I can just grab my type and move it around with the selection tool.
• 02:03 Another way that I can change the size of the type,
• 02:05 though, is by using the keyboard shortcut Cmd or Ctrl plus Shift and
• 02:10 the left caret to make it smaller, or the right caret to make it larger.
• 02:17 Okay, so that's the shortcut.
• 02:17 And you can see as I do that the size is actually changing in our character panel.
• 02:24 But again I can come over here to set the font family, and I can use the up and
• 02:29 down arrows to change it up, and try some of these other ones out, okay?
• 02:34 So this one's pretty nice.
• 02:36 Some fonts actually don't have as many styles.
• 02:38 Some fonts only have a regular style.
• 02:41 It may only have a light or a bold or a medium, but no matter what font you
• 02:45 choose, the shortcut for changing the size will be the same.
• 02:48 If you don't have this option over here on your panel,
• 02:52 come up to the Window menu, come down to Type, and
• 02:55 you can select it from here, or by pressing Cmd, or Ctrl + T on the keyboard.
• 03:01 And then, once you have it, you can place it here and dock it with you other panels.
• 03:04 So that's the basic idea.
• 03:07 That's how you can quickly just create some text in here,
• 03:10 how to change the style, the font family, and the size of your text.
• 03:15 So once you have some text like this in your document,
• 03:17 there's a lot of things that you can do with it.
• 03:19 But one of the basic things that I wanna show you guys really quickly is
• 03:22 just how to control the spacing.
• 03:25 So if I double click on my text,
• 03:26 you'll see that it highlights the whole thing here.
• 03:29 And I can bring my character panel back up.
• 03:31 And there's another setting in here that I wanted to show you guys
• 03:34 to set the tracking for the characters.
• 03:37 And what the tracking is, is the space in between our letters.
• 03:41 So if I click on that menu and you can see I changed it to 100,
• 03:44 it's going to space our letters out quite a bit.
• 03:46 But if I double-click again to highlight them and then set it to say negative 100,
• 03:51 it's going to press them very closely together like that.
• 03:55 Okay so by default, this will usually be set to zero.
• 03:59 But if I wanted to manually come in and change the tracking in between letters,
• 04:03 well I can move my cursor anywhere in the text box here that I want,
• 04:07 just by using my left and right arrows.
• 04:10 So I can move it in between two letters that I want to adjust the spacing on.
• 04:14 And then, I can hold down the Alt option key and
• 04:16 press my right arrow to increase the spacing.
• 04:19 Or I can press the left arrow to decrease the spacing in between two characters.
• 04:23 And that is how you manually kerb, okay?
• 04:26 So that is a quick way to kind of come in here and adjust the spacing.
• 04:31 Another thing that you could do is to highlight this whole box,
• 04:34 or even just two of these characters.
• 04:36 And then, do the same thing where you hold down the Alt option key and use the right
• 04:40 arrow to add more space, or the left arrow to decrease the amount of space.
• 04:44 So there's a few ways you can do it there,
• 04:47 you can use the menu over here in the Character panel, or you can do it manually
• 04:51 yourself by moving the cursor in between the letters you want to adjust,
• 04:56 and using that shortcut, Alt+Option and left and right arrows.

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