Week 7: Text Layout and Typography Design (Adobe Illustrator)

This week, we continued on in our quest to master the Adobe Illustrator! The point of this lesson was to learn more about how to create the perfect wordings for our designs. This meant that we had to grasp the skills of text layout and typography design.


Text layout is important in organising the structure of your texts, and directly affects the visual appearance and usability of the text. To start off, use the text tool  to create a new type area on a page, where you will proceed to type in in the future. From there on, after placing your desired text on the page, you can proceed to split up the text into smaller, more manageable columns, and even set how far do you want the distance between the text and the borders of the page to be. Of course, these are just some of the tricks to successful text layout, and all I can say is that I sure am glad to have learned this useful skill.

Setting your options:



Source: http://www.webdesign.org/img_articles/13677/06.jpg


For the other part of the lesson, we learnt about typography design, which has all about to do with the size and font type of your words. Sounds similar to what you would expect in Microsoft Office, and it actually is! However, instead of simply selecting the font you would like, you get to create your very own font! Be it a desired shape, size or texture, typography design allows one to change it all.

Typography is also very important for our upcoming CA, for it can essentially bring out the message behind your slogan or brand design. And as such, the trick to selecting and designing a font that does just that is all under the "Effects tab". Once you click that tab, you will notice alot of different options available to you, some of which include "warping" the text to create arcs, or blurring and distortion of the image. The choices in Adobe Illustrator are many indeed, and is definitely suitable to creating good typography design.

The process of "arcing":



Source: http://files.bnetwork.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Illustrator-tutorial-create-your-typographic-design-9.4.png


In a nutshell, this week had been eye-opening as well, as we were led further down the road of professional usage of Adobe Illustrator. As always, hands-on activities in class really livened up the atmosphere, and made for a great and efficient learning environment. It was a good week indeed.