Locked lesson.
About this lesson
How to format and justify copy.
Quick reference
Justified
How to format and justify copy.
When to use
Anytime you are dealing with body copy, or copy that is more than one or two lines, you will want to know how to format your text.
Instructions
- Begin by creating a new Illustrator document or using the same document from our previous lesson.
- Select your Type Tool (T) and click and drag a text box on your artboard to create some text.
- If your box doesn't automatically fill itself with text, type in a few words, double click to select them, and then copy it by pressing Command/Ctrl+C on the keyboard.
- If your text is too large, you can resize it first by highlighting the copy and then choosing a new point size from the Character Panel or inputting a size manually. I would recommend using around 12-14 pt size.
- Press Command/Ctrl+V to paste your text until it spans around 18-20 lines or so in the text box.
- Select your Character Panel and choose the tab that says 'Paragraph' to switch over to the Paragraph Panel.
- In the top row of options in the Paragraph Panel you will have different formatting options to try out.
- Click inside of your text box and highlight all of the text.
- Try the various formatting options such as flush left ragged right, centered, flush right ragged left, justified left, right, and center.
Hints
- When you are formatting text it's important to be mindful of the linespacing or space between each line. If you want to add more space you can use the Character Panel or the keyboard shortcut by highlighting your text and then pressing Alt/Option and the up or down arrows to decrease or increase spacing accordingly.
- You can also control the size of the text with the same shortcut we used on the headline (Command/Ctrl+Shift+< or > to decrease or increase the point size.
- Using the shortcut Alt/Option and the left and right arrows will modify the tracking within your body of text.
- 00:04 Now that we've covered some of the basics of the type tool,
- 00:07 I've kind of shown you guys a few things.
- 00:08 One is how you can change the font, the font style, the size,
- 00:12 and also control the spacing, like the curning and the tracking.
- 00:16 And this is great and everything is good, but it applies to basically a headline, or
- 00:21 one line of copy.
- 00:22 So what we would do if we have more text than this that we need to deal with?
- 00:26 Well, for this, I'd like to show you guys some of the formatting options.
- 00:30 So let me grab my text tool again, and this time I'm going to click,
- 00:33 and drag a box about this big.
- 00:35 And you'll see that it automatically just kind of fills it
- 00:38 with copy from our previous type phase that we're using here, which is muffler.
- 00:43 But for this, I'm actually going to change it to a basic Arial font,
- 00:47 just something like that.
- 00:50 And now I'm going to change the size, so instead of 116 points,
- 00:54 let's just make it about 14.
- 00:56 And from here, what I'm going to do is select the copy, press Cmd+C.
- 00:59 And I'm just going to paste it a bunch of times just by pressing Cmd + V,
- 01:04 so that I can fill up this box, okay?
- 01:07 But the idea here is that you want to imagine that you have a paragraph, or
- 01:11 a couple of paragraphs of text.
- 01:13 So once you have this, if you notice over here where your character panel is,
- 01:17 there is another tab here called Paragraph.
- 01:20 If I open up the Paragraph tab,
- 01:22 you'll see along the top row that we have some different Alignment options.
- 01:27 So by default, right here everything is flush left and ragged right.
- 01:32 And if I deselect my type you'll see why, because everything on the left is nice and
- 01:35 lined up and flush.
- 01:36 And everything on the right is just kind of,
- 01:39 wherever the letters fall is where they fall.
- 01:41 All right, but
- 01:42 the second option here is the option to align everything center, okay?
- 01:46 And then, of course, you have flush right, ragged left.
- 01:50 But then you have these options, which are called justified, and
- 01:54 that means that both sides are going to be flush.
- 01:57 But when you do this, you have a justified left, for example, like here,
- 02:01 the last line will be aligned on the left.
- 02:04 If you justify in the center, then everything will be lined up, and
- 02:08 the last line will be justified in the center.
- 02:11 And then, as you may have guessed, if you justify the copy to the right,
- 02:15 everything will be lined up.
- 02:16 And the last line of copy will be justified to the right.
- 02:21 And then at the very end, you have justify all lines, and
- 02:23 that makes sure that everything is lined up.
- 02:25 But this is something that you guys want to be aware of, is that when you're
- 02:29 justifying your text, you're likely to get what are called rivers.
- 02:32 And rivers are basically just these kind of wide gaps that will happen in
- 02:36 between certain words whenever you're justifying the type.
- 02:39 It's very important to also take into consideration the line height or
- 02:43 the amount of space between the lines.
- 02:46 So if I select my text box, and I hold down alt + option,
- 02:49 I can press the up arrow.
- 02:50 And that's going to move the lines all pretty close together.
- 02:54 And that's actually a little bit hard to read, I think you can read it.
- 02:57 But anything less than that is gonna become really hard for the eye to process.
- 03:04 So in this case, I would select it, and I would go the opposite way,
- 03:07 where I hold down the alt + option key, and press down.
- 03:09 And that's going to increase the amount of space between each of our lines.
- 03:14 And as you can see by having that extra room there,
- 03:16 it actually makes the text quite a bit easier to read.
- 03:19 So these are just some of the basic things that you can do when you're
- 03:23 formatting copy.
- 03:25 These are some of the ways that you can justify and align large bodies of text.
- 03:30 Okay, but everything that we did before still applies.
- 03:33 So if I select all of these copies just by clicking inside and pressing cmd+ A.
- 03:37 I can still control the size using the short cut cmd+ shift in the left carat or
- 03:41 the right carat to make it larger.
- 03:44 I could also increase or decrease the letter spacing or
- 03:47 the tracking by pressing alt option and using the right and left arrows.
- 03:52 So you have all of these options when you're dealing with text.
- 03:55 Any time where you're dealing with several paragraphs of copy, it's important to know
- 04:00 what your options are as far as the layout and the way that you can handle the text.
- 04:05 Cuz ultimately you want people to be able to read it and
- 04:08 you want it to be designed and just as thought out as the rest of your work.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.