Designing Type & Layout - The Adobe Illustrator - page 97

Arcing Type
Transforming Type with Warps & Envelopes
Overview: Create and color a title using appearances; explore the three Envelope dis-
tortions for creating an arc effect; use an Arc Warp effect to arc the type; create a
graphic style and apply arc effect to other title elements.
Adding an arc effect to a headline turns boring type into a dynamic engaging
headline that grabs the viewers' attention. With Illustrator you can explore a
number of ways to create arcing text; using effects and graphic styles, you can
quickly create an arcing effect easily applicable to any other titles or subtitles!
(See the Reshaping Dimensions chapter for more about warps, blends, and
graphic styles.)
1 Creating your headline text. To create headline text, choose a font with dis-
tinct, bold characteristics. For his headline text, Ryan Putnam chose 50-point
Cabaret font.
Amongst the many ways to create an arcing effect in Illustrator, there are
three different Envelope distortions that you can apply to your text: Warp,
Mesh, and Make with Top Object.
First, Putnam applied Object> Envelope Distort> Make with Warp. Next, he
chose Arc from the Warp options, and changed the Bend to 20%. For a
second option, he then applied Object> Envelope Distort> Make with Mesh,
set the number of Rows and Columns to 1, and edited the anchor points with
the Direct Selection tool. For the final option, he used the Pen tool to draw a
separate arc-shaped object over the type, selected the type and arc-shaped
object, and applied Object> Envelope Distort> Make with Top Object.
Putnam's 50-point Cabaret font headline