Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do to manipulate text.

Select the text tool from the left hand panel and create a piece of text in your illustrator file. If you wanted to create some custom effects to this text, you would need to expand it first. To do so, select the text, then click on Object and select Expand. Now the characters in the text have been converted to vector objects.

Notice that if you double click on one of the letters it takes you inside a ‘group’. The group is determined here by the letters ‘PRACTICE TEXT’. Once inside this group you can edit each object independently, however it’s simpler to just ungroup the characters for editing. Select the group and then click on Object and select Ungroup. Now you’ll notice you can select letters individually and move it away from the rest.

Because the characters are now vectors, you can manipulate anchor points and vector placement to distort the text in any way you like.

So you could take the first text and turn it into the second one in a few simple steps.

There are other options you could pursue as well when editing text that has been converted to vectors. Once you expand text into vector objects, you can edit their color scheme, as well as create contour. So in a few simple clicks you can transform the text to do the following:

The effects added here are a contour color and a default pattern in illustrator.

Text can also be wrapped around vectors, thus for example you can create a swirly line with a paintbrush tool and use the text tool right on that stroke. Simply select the text tool and click it onto the vector. Whatever you write follows the curve of the stroke.

If you select the text, you will see a few lines sticking up, you can see them in the picture here.

If you select one of those lines and drag it below the paintbrush stroke, the text will inverse, alternatively you could do so by rotating the bounding box above by 180 degrees. Remember however, that in order to use any of the effects under the Effect menu option, you need to expand the text to a sequence of vector objects.

With these methods, you should be able to create a wide variety of banners and stylized texts for any documents or presentations you’re working on.

In a following article, we will be reviewing using gradients and clipping masks, stay tuned! 

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