Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♪music♪]
[ADOBE TV Presents Colin Smith in...]
[No Stupid Questions]
All right--let's get to work in Illustrator and create some cool-looking type.
I think people call this "Web 2.0 Type."
You know the type, with the reflection underneath?
Well, you can see this stuff everywhere,
and if you look at this, everybody would do this the exact same way--
They would create the background, they'd create the type, they'd create the reflection.
The problem is if you go to update this and make a change,
you've got to update it in multiple places and reorganize it.
Have a look at what I created here.
This is all live text inside here,
so I'm just going to start typing
LIVE TEXT UPDATE.
Much, much easier, much faster.
So how do we get this?
Well, let's start just by using some text,
so THIS IS TEXT
and if we look at the appearance panel
over here on the right-hand side,
we can see that we've got Characters and Opacity.
So although this text is colored black, we need to first start by adding white to it.
You don't color the characters--just leave them alone.
Forget about them, so we will.
Down at the bottom of the appearance panel,
there's a little button here that says Add New Fill
and you can see it comes up
and it also adds a new stroke inside here.
We're not going to worry about that.
We'll just click on white, and it's there--don't worry about it.
So that's our white text.
We need to add the other text, which is the Gradient text,
and one of the cool new things you can do in Illustrator CS5
is have a gradient go from 100% opacity
to 0% opacity, which means completely transparent,
and it stays as live text.
So, you'll also notice that we can see a little bit of the black text behind there.
Don't worry about that--the blue background is going to hide all that.
We'll layer it correctly, so don't worry about that.
Okay, so now we have white text.
We're going to add another fill, and this fill, when we click on it,
I've got the transparent text here and this is something I just call a Gradient type
and you can see it shows up right up there.
The only problem with this is it's the wrong orientation,
so I will just type 090 degrees in there so it's going the right way.
The next thing to do is to add a reflection,
and you do that in the Effect menu, Distort & Transform and Transform.
And we need to reflect the Y and this is the most important one--
this little position dialogue--we need to click on there,
Preview, and we can see now the text is reflecting and it's live.
Remember, all of this is dynamic--it's all connected to the first text element
that we have--type new text, and the reflection's going to change,
instead of having 2 separate things.
That's not the best way to work.
All right, so how do we add this rectangle in the background that grows?
Well, this is pretty darn easy--watch this.
Back in the Appearance panel,
down at the bottom,
the second button,
which is the Add New Fill
it looks like it's just doing the same thing--adding the new fill,
and it looks like it's text.
I'll grab another gradient that I've got there,
and it's also 90 degrees, and you'll see it's in the same position as before.
I'll make sure that Transform Reflect is off,
and what I need to do is go back to my Effects, Convert to Shape.
So we added a fill and the very first time you add the fill, it adds a text fill,
but we can convert that to a rectangle or rounded rectangle or an ellipse.
And when we get this dialogue box, this one comes up
and it's asking us how we want this shape.
You can do an absolute shape; the problem with that is if you start to scale the type,
the box is going to stay small, so we can do a relative size here
and I'm just going to use the default, 18 points.
And you can see, there it is,
and we've got to make sure that we have the right order of things inside here,
so sometimes you have to turn things on and off
and make sure, oh--you know what?
I think we got rid of the reflection.
See this is one of those things, where did my reflection go?
Oh, yeah, I think I turned off the wrong one--Reflect Y--okay.
Boom--there's my reflection.
It happens to the best of us.
So I select this, and THIS IS LIVE
or LIEV--whatever you want,
so it's live text, so one object--if we look at this in Artwork mode,
look at this.
Illustrator thinks this is just a straight-up text mode,
but it's live as you update it.
And you can save this as a graphic style,
you can simply grab this and drop it into your graphic styles down in here,
and then when you type new text 3 weeks from now,
you apply that graphic text and it drops everything inside here.
Keep doing things dynamic in Illustrator because that's the kind of person you are.
[♪music♪]
[ADOBE TV Productions]
