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How to add perspective to your shapes and text.

Quick reference

Putting Things in Perspective

How to add perspective to your shapes and text.

When to use

If you wanted to add some depth or perspective to a shape or text, the Free Transform Tool would be the best tool for the job.

Instructions

  • Begin by opening the Putting Things in Perspective - Exercise.ai file
  • Select your text with the Selection Tool (V) and copy it by pressing Command/Ctrl+C on the keyboard.
  • Paste your text in front by pressing Command/Ctrl+F or by going to the Edit Menu and choosing 'Paste in Front' from the menu.
  • With your new copy selected, go to the Object Menu and choose Transform>Reflect from the menu.
  • Once the dialog box appears, choose the horizontal axis to reflect your text and then apply the changes.
  • After flipping the duplicate copy of your text, select it again and convert it to outlines.
  • Switch over to your Free Transform Tool by grabbing it from the toolbar and grab the Perspective Distort Tool.
  • Grab the lower left or right corner of the text box and move your cursor outwards to add perspective and create the appearance of a shadow on a surface.

Hints

  • The Free Transform Tool can also be used with any of the distort tools to create an even greater variety of transformations.
  • In order for the Perspective Distort Tools to work, you need to first convert your text to outlines.

 

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  • 00:04 Now if we take another look at our free transformed tool, as I showed you guys in
  • 00:08 the previous lesson, you have the ability to constrain the proportions so
  • 00:12 you can resize it, you can rotate it, and you can also kinda stretch it and
  • 00:15 squash it together however you want.
  • 00:18 But there's a couple of other options here,
  • 00:20 just below that, that will allow us to take this effect a little bit further.
  • 00:24 Now if I had my plain text like, it just looks kind of flat and boring.
  • 00:28 But if I press E on the keyboard to get my Free Transform tool,
  • 00:32 there's two options here on the bottom.
  • 00:34 One is called Perspective Distort and one is called Free Distort.
  • 00:37 So if I do perspective distort and I just hover over one of the corners here,
  • 00:42 you can see that I'm able to kind of stretch this out a little bit.
  • 00:47 And as I do that, you'll see that it's not really doing too much to my text.
  • 00:53 Now the reason for that is my text has not been converted to outlines.
  • 00:58 So all that is, if I grab my text here, hold down alt option and
  • 01:02 shift and drag your copy down.
  • 01:04 I can come up to the type menu and then I can choose create out lines or
  • 01:08 you can press command shift alt.
  • 01:11 Now once I do that, it's going to our plain editable type and
  • 01:15 basically convert it into a series of points or shapes.
  • 01:18 So if I select my outline text now, and
  • 01:21 come back to my free transform tool, I'm able to grab my perspective distort, and
  • 01:26 I can manipulate this to actually add perspective.
  • 01:29 So now instead of looking just kind of flat and
  • 01:31 boring, it actually looks like it's receding into space a little bit.
  • 01:34 And this is just kind of a cool way to add some dimension to your text.
  • 01:41 You can also have it go skewed in other directions as well.
  • 01:46 You can have it look like your on the top looking down, or
  • 01:50 like you're beneath it looking up.
  • 01:53 It can actually be pretty cool if you wanted to create kind of a shadow effect
  • 01:57 like this.
  • 02:00 Although it will be flipped the other way, something more like that.
  • 02:06 All right, but that's what the perspective distort tool allows you to do.
  • 02:12 But in order to use it with text, you have to convert your text into outlines.
  • 02:17 Because you will not able to apply it here.
  • 02:20 Okay, and if I were to try this on a shape,
  • 02:24 well it would work because the shape is already kind of a broken up in the points,
  • 02:27 so the same thing kind of applies or I can just distort this however I like.
  • 02:33 Now, the only different really between that in the free distort.
  • 02:37 Is that you'll be able to distort this from any of these points that you really
  • 02:40 want, as opposed to just using two of the four sides or one of the sides at a time.
  • 02:47 So the free distort gives you a little bit more freedom over
  • 02:50 how exactly you want this shape to appear.
  • 02:52 As you can see, I'm able to kinda squish it and stretch it all at the same time.
  • 02:57 Whereas with the regular perspective distort I'm only really dictating how
  • 03:02 much I want that perspective to be coming forward or receding into space.
  • 03:09 Either one of these tools though can be used on text,
  • 03:13 as long as it's outlined, or on a shape.
  • 03:17 And it can be a cool way to just add some dimension as I was saying.
  • 03:21 Because it allows you to have more control over the perspective that you want any
  • 03:25 shapes or text to be in.

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