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About this lesson
How to distort shapes and type.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Transformers - Instructions.docx59.1 KB Transformers - Exercise.ai
1.5 MB Transformers - Exercise Solution.ai
1.5 MB
Quick reference
Transformers
How to distort shapes and type.
When to use
The Free Transform Tool can be used anytime you want to rotate, stretch, or resize text or shapes.
Instructions
- Begin by opening the Transformers - Exercise.ai file
- Grab your Selection Tool (V) and click and drag around the square, circle, and lorem ipsum text.
- Hold down the Alt/Option+Shift Keys and drag all three of the objects downwards to create a copy, just below the originals.
- Grab the Free Transform Tool from the toolbar to the left side of the interface and use the Free Transform Tool to rotate the square 90 degrees.
- Now select the circle and use the same tool to squish the circle, making it into an ellipse.
- Lastly, select your text and then use the Free Transform Tool to condense the type and to flip it upside down.
Hints
- The Free Transform Tool can be very handy for rotating an object when you don't want to worry about having to hover over the exact corner of a shape as it allows you to rotate from any part of a bounding box.
- 00:04 So now that we've looked at some ways to distort and warp the text or shapes,
- 00:08 there's a couple of other things that we can do to transform it.
- 00:11 Now, I've shown you guys how you can just easily rotate or
- 00:15 flip your text by coming up to the Object menu and
- 00:18 choosing Transform, Rotate, Reflect, Scale, or Shear.
- 00:22 There's actually another tool in our tool bar which will help us to do some
- 00:26 of those things.
- 00:27 So if you come over to the tool bar, you can choose the free transform tool.
- 00:31 And the shortcut for that is E on the keyboard.
- 00:34 And once I do that, you'll see that I kinda have the same arrow
- 00:36 here that allows me to just rotate this.
- 00:39 But the difference is that I don't have to be
- 00:41 hovering my cursor over the corner in order to rotate it.
- 00:44 I can now be in the middle of the word or the shape or pretty much anywhere.
- 00:48 Whereas before, if I'm just using the regular selection tool,
- 00:52 I have to be hovering over one of these corners, okay?
- 00:56 So in order to rotate this,
- 00:58 I can literally be anywhere along the shape or the word.
- 01:02 And the other nice thing about this tool is that it allows you to
- 01:06 really just transform this.
- 01:08 I mean, you can stretch it vertically,
- 01:10 you can stretch it horizontally, however you want.
- 01:14 Now, I wouldn't really recommend stretching and
- 01:17 distorting your type like this because it will make it a little bit hard to read.
- 01:21 It's kind of frowned upon, I guess, in terms of typography.
- 01:26 But that's not to say that there might be an instance where this can come in handy.
- 01:31 Because these free transform tools can be used on shapes as well.
- 01:36 Now, if I were to try this on a shape, let's just make another circle here.
- 01:42 And I grab my transform tool once again,
- 01:45 there's also this other option on top called Constrain.
- 01:47 And you can see right now that it's not checked off, so
- 01:50 I'm able to create pretty much any kind of shape from this ellipse.
- 01:55 But if I check off that constrain option, now any time that I try to resize this,
- 02:00 it's going to make sure that the proportions are constrained so
- 02:03 that it remains a perfect circle.
- 02:05 Okay, so that way, you can easily resize something without worrying about
- 02:09 making it more of an ellipse, or
- 02:10 making it more of a skewed kind of shape, okay, like this, when I uncheck it.
- 02:15 All right, and again, you also have the option to rotate this however you like.
- 02:21 Okay, and if I make a shape that I'm happy with and then I want to constrain it,
- 02:24 you can do that as well to make sure that the shape will remain the same.
- 02:29 So I just wanted to show you a quick way to use the free transform tool for
- 02:32 shapes as well as text
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