The ability to put type on a path allows you to create interesting typography and can be very useful in logo design. Many graphics programs allow you to put type on a path, including Photoshop, but Illustrator has gives you some extra control over how the type appears on the path. If you’re new to Illustrator, or a bit rusty on using type on a path, this should help you get up to speed.

Let’s start by looking at type on an open path.

Open Paths

1. Create a new document in Illustrator and using any of the drawing create an open path.

2. Select the Type tool and move your cursor so that it touches the path. Notice that the icon changes to the Type on a Path tool icon.

3. Click once on the path. When you click on the path, any Stroke attributes are removed from the path. You can put them back later if you want. Now you can type your text.

This action removes any Stroke attributes from the path, but you can apply a Stroke to the path again later if you want to. At this point, you’ll see the blinking text insertion icon and you can enter or copy text onto the path.

4. Switch over to the Selection tool and select the path with the text on it.
Your selection will show some extra bars and two boxes at the start and end of the path.

The two vertical lines that appear at each end define the boundary, or the start and end points, of the text. The line in the center determines the center point between the start and end points and lets you specify which side of the path the type sits on.

The in and out ports allow you to thread text across multiple paths. You can drag the the start and end points to change the area of the path that can contain text.

To flip the text over the path, simply drag the middle line to either side of the path.

Closed Paths

On an open path, you can easily see the start and end points because they are on opposite sides of the path. However, when you are working with a closed path, the point that you click becomes the start and the end point.

1. Select the ellipse tool and drag out a circle. Hold down Shift to make it a perfect circle.

2. Select the Type tool. You’ll notice that this time the cursor looks different when your roll your mouse over the edge of the circle. This is a Type Area cursor and if you click now, it will fill the circle with your type. That’s not what we want.

3. Hold down the Alt/Option key and now you should see the Type on a Path cursor. Click at the top of the circle to create the start point and the end point and add your text.

4. Switch to the Selection tool again. You’ll see the start and end points as before except this time they are right beside each other. You’ll also see the in and out ports and the center point.
Manipulating Type On A Path

The text you see on the circle above is left aligned. If you center your text by clicking on the center alignment icon on the options bar, it aligns to the bottom of the path.

To align text to the top center of a circle, you can either

~ click at the bottom of the circle when you’re creating the Path Type object, or

~ drag the start and end points so that the center of the text rests at the top of the circle

Type On A Path Options

You can take even more control over how your text looks by opening up the Type On A Path Options Palette. Choose Type > Type on a Path > Type on a Path Options.
The following settings are available in the Type on a Path Options dialog:

~ Effect.

The Effect setting controls the orientation of the text relative to the path. Illustrator allows you to choose from Skew, 3D Ribbon, Stair Step, and Gravity.

Align to Path.
The Align to Path setting determines which part of the text actually lines up with and touches the path.
You can choose from Baseline (the default), Ascender, Descender, and Center

~ Spacing.
You can use the Spacing setting to get consistent spacing between characters on curved paths. When you have a path with sharp curves, often the characters will appear at weird angles or look inconsistent. Increasing the number in the Spacing field makes the characters appear closer together.

~ Flip.
This simply lets you set which side of the path the text appears on.

That’s type on a path. Once your type is on there, you can edit it as normal and apply effects and styles as to your heart’s content.

Hey Guys! Welcome to our first Exclusive Illustrator Tutorial!

Today we are delivering a FREE high quality tutorial on how to draw a Vectorial Twitter Bird using Adobe Illustrator simple techniques. Actually we are just going to use 3 tools:
ellipse tool, direct selection and pen tool.

We’re going to take a look at how to make a simple art brush in Illustrator. A tapered line can give a lovely effect on illustrations and they’re easy to make.

1. Create a new Illustrator document.
2. Using the Ellipse tool , draw out a small circle, any colour you like. Make sure that the circle does NOT have a stroke colour. Hold down the Shift key as you drag out to get a perfect circle.

3. Using the Direct Selection tool , click on the bottom anchor point of the circle and drag it down to create a longer tapered shape, like the one you can see below.

Optional Step. If you would like a very pointed, tapered brush, then select the Convert tool (Shift + C), it’s hidden under the pen tool. Click once on the bottom anchor point that you dragged out. This converts the point from being a curve to a straight point, giving you a much sharper point.

4. Open the Brushes Palette (press F5 or choose Window > Brushes).

5. Click on the New Brush icon at the bottom of the palette. This opens up the new Brush dialog box.

Choose New Art Brush and then click OK.

6. The option for you new brush open. There are only a few settings we need to think about here, and then we’re finished.

a) Set the brush direction to up.
b) Set the Colorization Method to Hue Shift. That just means you can make your brush stroke any colour you want when you’re using it.
c) Give your brush a name.

Click OK.

7. You should now see your new brush in your Brushes palette, ready to use.

8. Remember that you can apply brush strokes to any path, not just paths drawn with the brush tool. So you drag out a star shape, scribble with pencil, or draw a curve with the arc tool and then just click on the brush stroke in the Brushes palette and voila!

9. Once you’re happy with your brush, you need to save it. Click on the folder icon at the bottom of the Brushes palette and choose Save Brush Library. (Note: I’m using CS3 here. On previous versions just click on the Arrow icon at the top right of the palette to open the drop down menu, and choose Save Brush Library).

Give it a name and choose Save.

The next time you want to use it, go to the Brushes Palette again, click on the folders icon at the bottom and choose Open Brush Library.

You can make lots of interesting tapered brushes in the same way. Simply vary the shape you draw out to begin with. Instead of a circle, try a triangle or a simple leaf shape. Here’s a few others I made using the same steps.

If you’re new to Illustrator and would like to learn more about the drawing tools, check out the series I wrote earlier this year.

• Illustrator Drawing Tools, Part 5: Pen Tool – Curves

• Drawing In Illustrator, Part 4: Pen Tool – Straight Lines

• Drawing In Illustrator, Part 3: The Pencil Tool

• Drawing In Illustrator, Part 2: The Shape Tools

• Drawing In Illustrator, Part 1: The Line Tools

A reader asked me if I could explain to him how to create the Bavarian flag in Illustrator. Instead of explaining this with text and images I decided to capture another screencast tutorial instead.

As usually there are probably other ways of doing this. I’m only showing one way. It basically comes down to these simple steps:

1. Draw 2 squares: 1 black and 1 white
2. Turn them into a Symbol
3. Apply Transform effect to repeat them horizontally
4. Apply Transform effect to repeat the line of squares vertically
5. Expand everything and move squares to make 1 prefect rectangle
6. Skew and resize the checkerboard (to match the Bavarian flag)

• Download the video tutorial from Xtreak (1130 x 860 pixels)
• Download the video tutorial from Vimeo (1130 x 860 pixels)

How to create a skewed checkerboard pattern in Illustrator from Veerle Pieters on Vimeo.

Maybe turning the squares into a Symbol (step 2) might not be needed if you’re expanding the squares again, but I thought I show this anyway. If you don’t expand the the Symbols and you only expand the Transform effect you can change the color of the squares in one instance by changing the color of the symbol. However, if you decide to expand all the Symbol’s instances, all squares become editable and so you can give each one of them a different color.

Brett Helquist is best known for his illustrations for the popular A Series of Unfortunate Events children’s books by “Lemony Snicket” (Daniel Handler).

Helquist was born in Arizona, grew up in Utah, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Brigham Young University, and currently lives and works in New York City.

He cites as his inspiration some of the all time great American illustrators like Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Dean Cornwell (also here).

Helquist’s first job was as an intern for illustrator Robert Neubecker, he then went on to do editorial illustrations for newspapers and magazines. Lemony Snicket’s The Bad Beginning, the first in the series, was his first book illustration assignment.

Since then he has done both cover and interior illustrations for many other books in the series, as well as many in the Tales from the House of Bunnicula series written by James Howe, and cover illustrations for the recent reprinting of the Green Knowe series, along with a number of others. (It’s easy to miss the small navigation to the second page of his portfolio.)

In addition, Helquist is both the author and illustrator of Roger, the Jolly Pirate (above, bottom, right).

Following on from yesterday’s post on how to draw a vector iPhone, here’s how to make an iPhone style icon in Illustrator.

1. Use the Rounded Rectangle to draw a square with round corners. Hold down the Shift key as you drag to create a square.

2. Open the Gradient and Color palettes. Make sure the square is still selected. Create a linear gradient with 3 shades of the same color, starting with the lightest color on the left hand side. To change a color stop, first, click on the color stop, and then click on the color you want on the Color palette. To add an extra color stop, simply click under the gradient slider.

3. Set the Stroke color to None.

Here’s how my palettes and square look:

4. Make a copy of the square and paste it directly on top of the first square.

5. Draw a black-filled ellipse above the square.

6. Select both the square and the ellipse, then open the Pathfinder palette and click on the Divide icon.

7. Choose Object > Ungroup, to ungroup the divided objects then. Delete the top of the ellipse and the bottom part of the square.

8. Select the new top of the square and fill it with a linear black and white gradient. (White at the top grey at the bottom). Set the blending mode to Screen and the Opacity to 80%.

The button should look a bit like this:

Now you can add a logo or symbol to the button. Whatever you choose to add, make sure that is sits beneath the top gradient. I used a webding for the ambulance.

9. The icons sit on a dark screen and generally have some text underneath them. Use Helvetica or Arial if you don’t have that font on your computer.

10. Once you’ve made your icon you can select all parts and group them. Then add them to your iPhone vector image, or your web page if you want to use the icons for that.

Related Reading:

• How To Draw A Vector iPhone In Illustrator

I wanted to follow up on the series I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the drawing tools in Illustrator. Using mainly vector shapes and some gradients, I’m going to create a vector drawing of an iPhone in Illustrator. The joy of creating it as a vector is that once you’ve drawn it once, you can reuse it, and scale it up and down without any loss of quality. Let’s get started.

1. Start a new document in Illustrator. If the vector is going for print, choose CMYK and a high resolution of 300 ppi. Otherwise choose RGB.
Set the stroke colour to black and the fill to none.

2. If you don’t own an iPhone (I don’t), then you’ll need to look at a picture of one while you draw. Copy and paste an iPhone image into Illustrator.

3. We’re going to draw the shape of the phone using the rounded rectangle tool. Select it from the toolbox and then click once so the rounded rectangle tool dialog box appears. The first rectangle will be 433px wide, 795px high and will have a corner radius of 45px. Click Ok.

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A rectangle appears on the artboard.

4. Repeat step 3 twice more with the following dimensions:

• 398px wide, 763px high, corner radius of 40px
• 386px wide, 749px high, corner radius of 35px

You should now have three rounded rectangles on the artboard, something like this;

5. To line them up correctly, select each rectangle by holding down Shift and selecting them with the Selection tool (V). When more than one object is selected, the options bar displays the alignment options. Click on the Align Horizontal Centre icon and the Align Vertical Center icon.

Your rectangles should now be nicely lined up.

6. On the Swatches palette menu, choose Open Swatch Library > Metal to open up Illustrator’s Metal color palette.

7. While we’re at, again choose Open Swatch Library > Gradients > Metals.

9. Select the inner rectangle, and set the fill colour to #090909.

10. Select the middle rectangle, and set the Fill to the metals gradient called Silver. Then set the Stroke to None.

11. Select the outer rectangle and set the Fill color to Dark Grey (it’s in the last row of the Metal Swatches), or just choose your own dark grey. Again, set the Stroke to None. So you should have something like this:

If you squint really hard, it looks a bit like an iPhone. Ok, It’s a bit flat, so we can use the Mesh tool to make the dark grey outer rectangle look more realistic.
12. In the layers palette, hide the inner and middle rectangles.

13. Select the Mesh Tool (U) from the tool box.

The Mesh Tool lets you create a mesh on an object to manipulate the colors and transition smoothly from one point to another.

14. Click in the top left corner to add a node. Then click on the color picker and choose a darker grey colour.

When you have a node selected and then change the colour with the colour picker, Illustrator creates a very smooth blend from one colour to the next. This gives you much more control than just using the Gradient tool.

15. Add more nodes with the Mesh tool, and as you add them, vary the colour between light and dark greys to give the impression of glossy chrome.

Spend a good bit of time working on the mesh, and zoom right in so that you can see what you’re doing. You can add as many nodes as you want.

16. When your’re happy with the glossiness of the outer rectangle, turn on the visibility of the other two rectangles.

17. Select the middle rectangle. It’s still looking a bit flat, even with a gradient, so we’ll add a subtle drop shadow behind it. Choose Effect > Stylise > Drop Shadow and add the values shown below.

The phone has a number of small buttons on the edge. We can add those using another rounded rectangle, set to match the colour on that part of the phone. The buttons will appear on top of the phone, so select them and then choose Object > Arrange > Send To Back to make them appear more realistic and not stick out so much.

18. Now the screen needs a few details and effects. Select the rectangle (not the round one), set the Color Picker to a very dark grey Fill, with a lighter grey Stroke of 1px. Now draw out a rectangle.

19. The “earpiece” can be drawn in a similar fashion using the Round Rectange tool. This time add a slight gradient of dark grey to black to the Fill.

20. To create the main button, use the Ellipse tool to draw out a circle with a light grey to black gradient and Stroke set to None.

To complete that button, draw another rounded rectangle with no Fill and a white Stroke of 1px.

21. The font for text on the phone is Helvetica, if you don’t have that, Arial is pretty close. I’m adding the time and date and the service provider on the screen:

22. To add signal strength, it’s back to the Rectangle tool, then draw out five little boxes, and behind that add a strip of black.

23. The time and date also sits on a semi-transparent gradient, so draw out a black rectangle, and send it backward so it sits behind the text. Then select the Gradient and set up your palette as below. The using the Gradient tool (G), drag down through the black rectangle.

Once you’ve applied the gradient, set the rectangle opacity to about 75 – 80% and set the blending mode to Multiply. (Blending modes are on the transparency palette in Illustrator).

This is how the phone looks now:

At this stage, you could of course, add some wallpaper, but I’m leaving the phone with the dark screen.

24.Using the ellipse tool, draw a shape with a white fill at the bottom of the phone. Then on top of that, draw a second smaller elliptical shape in black. Select both shapes, then choose Object > Blend > Make to create a subtle blend.

25. To complete the drawing, send the blend to the back by choosing Object > Arrange > Send To Back. The final vector looks like this.

There were quite a few steps in this, and it does take a bit of time, but most of the tools used for drawing here are the fundamentals, spiced up a bit with the mesh and gradients. We could certainly continue to add things like reflections on the screen and more icons. I think your own iPhone vector is a useful thing to have and if you draw your own you can add all sorts of icons and embellishments.

Related Reading:

• Illustrator Drawing Tools, Part 5: Pen Tool – Curves
• Drawing In Illustrator, Part 4: Pen Tool – Straight Lines
• Drawing In Illustrator, Part 3: The Pencil Tool
• Drawing In Illustrator, Part 2: The Shape Tools
• Drawing In Illustrator, Part 1: The Line Tools

When using Photoshop or Illustrator on a regular basis, whether you are a beginner, intermediate or pro user, you often bump into small problems that you would associate with illogical behavior and where you wonder “Why does this happen? Why doesn’t it just do what I want it to do”. They become little annoyances if you don’t know the immediate answer to.

As soon as you know how to solve them, you see things clearer and differently. Today I though I share a solution to a few problems I encountered myself recently or in the past :

Photoshop CS4

Problem

When you move layers from one document to another in Photoshop, the angle of styles are changed to the default value of 120°.

Solution

Make sure the checkbox ‘Use Global Light’ is unchecked in the styles options before you start dragging the layers to another document. By default this option is always checked and so Photoshop changes the angle to the default angle is 120° if you drag the layers into a new document. If you’re using another angle in your document and you leave this option checked then Photoshop will assume that the value you’ve entered is the global light angle for your entire document. Dragging layers with this option checked will change the angle to the value that is set in this document.

Problem

When you add a Layer Mask to a Layer that has Layer Styles applied to it, the styles are applied to the way the object is masked, but what you want is that the mask also hides the effects.

Solution

In the Layer Styles options, you can check an option ‘Layer Mask Hides Effects’ under the Blending Options.

Problem

Hm, maybe not such ’small’ annoyance’ is when you hit cmd/ctrl + option/alt + shift + S (or go to File > Safe for Web) and you get an error message ‘The operation could not be completed’

Solution

I haven’t found yet what causes this error because it pops up out of the blue. The only solution I’ve found so far, well, if you can call it that, is saving your document and relaunching Photoshop. Maybe this is just a bug I don’t know?

Problem

When you duplicate layers in Photoshop the name of the layer will be changed with the word ‘copy’ at the end.

Solution

I don’t have a ‘good’ one I’m afraid. At a certain version (not sure which one, CS maybe?) Adobe didn’t touch the layer naming when you duplicate layers, but then in the next version they undid this change and I really wonder why. Why the hell would you want the word ‘copy’ (plus a number) in the layer name? Not sure about you, but I find this annoying. I always name my layers and keep things very organized. What I sometimes do now to avoid this from happening is: create a new document, drag the layers I want to duplicate in the new document and then drag the layers from this document back into my original document. Ridiculous, right? Call me obsessive, but I just can’t stand the ‘copy’ in the naming and so I do this extra effort if if need to duplicate a bunch of layers.

Illustrator CS4

Problem

For some reason you don’t see the gradient annotator anymore and you have no idea why and you don’t know how to get it back.

Solution

Choose ‘Show Gradient Annotator’ under the ‘View’ menu. For a while I didn’t know this was there (was looking in the wrong place, the palette options) and it drove me crazy because I didn’t understand why it suddenly didn’t show up anymore. I think I was just accidentally hitting cmd/option + G somehow while I probably thought I was ungrouping an object, I’m not really sure. Anyhow it’s good that you can hide and show this as it can be in your way sometimes.

Problem

You’re trying to join 2 anchor points but you get an error message saying that you must select 2 open end points.

Solution

It is annoying when you get this message, but the message is right: 2 open anchor point is what you need to select otherwise this won’t work. If you have selected more then 2 points because there are 2 or more anchor points on top of each other, than here is what I usually do: I temporarily move this extra point out of the way by using the arrow keys, then select the 2 points I want to join and join them, and then move the other point back into its position using the arrow keys. Another option is to temporarily lock (cmd/ctrl + 2) the other anchor points or to hide (cmd/ctrl + 2) them. To unlock hit: cmd/ctrl + option/alt + 2 or to reveal hit: cmd/ctrl + option/alt + 3. Another thing, you can check the ‘Don’t Show Again’ checkbox in the message, but I never do because I want to be informed when this happens.

Interaction between Photoshop and Illustrator

Problem

When placing a SmartObject from Illustrator into Photoshop via copy and paste, some transparent effects are gone. Transparency in gradients are opaque and some transparent modes are changed to normal (instead of multiply, overlay etc.)

Solution

The solution I found is to simply select and drag the illustration from Illustrator directly into your Photoshop document instead of copying and pasting it.

There you have it. Hope some of you had an ‘aha’ moment when reading this. I’m sure there a lot more of these little problems where it took you a while to get around them. Please don’t hesitate to share them with us.

It is weekend so the ideal time to have some extra fun in Illustrator and learn something along the way. I’ve talked about writing a tutorial for Vectortuts+ a few days ago. The article has now been published as part of the Graphic Design week that was going on.

Blend and Mask Yourself a Great Poster

In this tutorial, we’ll be creating a poster with a strong geometric central design, which utilizes flowing blends, masks shapes, and subtle gradients, to create a sophisticated final piece. Learn each detailed step in creating this poster by following the 30 steps. Let’s get started!

A reader wanted to know how I created this pawn looking shape for the Devia logo. He especially wanted to know how you connect the two circles. What better way is there than to show this in a video…

Drawing a pawn all wrapped in a movie

As usual, there are probably different ways in doing this, but I’m happy to show you mine. Hope you enjoy the movie and learned a thing or two.

• Download the video tutorial (1130 x 860 pixels)

Be inspired, but don’t steal or copy

The way the shapes are organized in the example of the Devia logo icon may not be copied or used. The Devia logo and its icon is copyright protected and may not be copied or used in any way. Being inspired by this technique is fine, but do not steal or copy. Inspiration should lead to new ideas, new creations.