- In this movie, I'll show you how I created
this specific type treatment using a font called Bangla MN.
Again, this is an Indo-Chinese font
designed to provide a Bengali character set
even though it offers Latin characters as well.
I'm using it as opposed to one of the other MN fonts
because it appears first in your Font Menu
in alphabetical order but, and I want to stress this,
only on the Mac.
It was licensed by this guy, Muthu Nedumaran, hence the MN,
exclusively to Apple, so it doesn't even exist on Windows.
So you might naturally wonder how it is
that I'm showing it off on the PC.
And the answer is that I converted Bangla MN
to a universally compatible Open Type Font
using a program called TypeTool from FontLab.
But, because digital fonts are considered to be software,
and therefore protected by copyright law,
I can't give this font to you.
So, again, if you use a Mac, you can follow along,
no problem; if If you use Windows,
you may prefer to skip to the next movie,
although, then again, you might find this
to be very interesting.
Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and switch over
to our design so far, that features this one-path outline
that traces both the planet Saturn and the rocket
carved into it, and I'm gonna create a New Layer
by dropping down to the little Page Icon at the bottom
of the Layers Panel, and Option clicking on it.
And, by the way, because this is really only possible
on the Mac, I'm gonna stick with
the Macintosh keyboard shortcuts.
I'll go ahead and call this layer, let's say,
"Type Treatments," because there's gonna be
a few of them, and I'll change the color
of this layer to light red, and click OK.
Alright, now I'm gonna switch over to my Type Tool
which I can get here in Illustrator by pressing the T key,
and I'll click someplace under the graphic.
And you can see, that by default, the type face is
Myriad Pro, and the size is a very small 12 pt.
I'm gonna take the size value up to 64 pt,
I just found that that happens to work well for this effect.
And now I'll go ahead and type in
the name of our client which is "frontiers", plural
for what it's worth, "unlimited" like so
and then I'll press the Esc key in order to create
that new type layer.
Now I want to make a few stylistic changes to my text.
For one thing, I want the text to be centered.
So I'll go up here to the Control Panel
and I'll click on the Align Center icon..
Now the other options I need are only available
in the Character Panel, so I'll go up
to the Window Menu, choose Type,
and then choose Character, or you can press
that keyboard shortcut Command T for type,
and the first thing I'll do is click
on this Leading icon to select a Leading Value,
which, of course, affects the distance
between lines of type, and I'll go ahead
and take it down to 52 pt.
Now I also want my text to be all caps,
so I'll go ahead and expand my Character Panel,
if necessary, by clicking on this tiny Double Arrow icon
to the left of the word Character,
and then I'll click on this first icon
in the bottom left corner, which changes
my text to all caps.
Alright, now I want to change the font,
and so I'll go ahead and bring up the Font Pop-up Menu,
either here inside the Character Panel,
or up here in the Control Panel,
and I'm gonna go ahead and scroll up my list
to the beginning of the Bs, which is where
I'm gonna see Bangla MN, right there.
You do not want this second option, Bangla Sangam MN,
because it represents a totally different font style.
And assuming that you're working in Illustrator CC,
go ahead and twirl open this option right there
and choose Regular in order to apply the regular style,
and you'll end up seeing this effect right there.
And then finally, drop down to this little Kerning option,
and change it from Auto, which goes ahead
and accepts the spacing metrics that are provided
inside the font file, to Optical, which tells Illustrator
to adjust the character spacing on the fly.
Alright, now I want to adjust the top line
independently of the bottom one, so I'll go ahead
and double click inside that type,
with my Black Arrow Tool, to position
the blinking insertion marker as well as automatically
switch me back to the Type Tool, and now I'll click
three times on this text, 1-2-3,
in order to accept the entire first line.
And I'm gonna switch this time, from the Regular style,
to the Bold style, like so, and I'm also gonna take
the type size up from 64 pt
to 110 pt,
and of course, as you might expect, I arrived
at this value through trial-and-error.
Alright, now I want to move the characters
closer together and, if you're working along with me,
you might want to go ahead and press Command K
in order to bring up the Preferences Dialog Box,
and then switch to Type, and make sure
that these first three values are set to their defaults.
Specifically, we want the Tracking value
to be set to 20/1000 em and, assuming that's the case,
you can just Cancel out, or change it to that value
and then click OK.
And now I'm gonna press Option Left Arrow,
in order to move the characters together.
And what I've done is I've changed the Tracking value,
which affects the additional Kerning applied
to the selected characters to -20.
Now I want to spread the text associated
with the word "unlimited," so I'm gonna go ahead
and click inside that word, and then click three times,
1-2-3, in order to select that entire line of type,
and now I really want to move these characters apart,
so I'm gonna press Command Option Right Arrow
in order to increase the Tracking value by an increment
of 100, and I'm gonna do that two more times,
so Command Option Right Arrow twice more,
and that takes the Tracking value up to 300.
And then I'll press Option Right Arrow three more times,
so without the Command key, in order to expand
the Tracking value to a total of 360,
again, these are measured in 1000ths of an em.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and press the Esc key
in order to accept that change,
and I'll hide the Character Panel as well.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and Zoom In
by Command Spacebar clicking, in order to get the Zoom Tool
on the fly, then I'll nudge my text down until
it's just a tiny gap between the bottom of the graphic
and the top of the T that you're seeing here.
Then press Shift Down Arrow twice,
in order to move the text 20 points away from the graphic.
Now I'll press Command 0 in order to center my zoom,
and I also want to center the text.
And I'm gonna do that by clicking on the word Align
over here on the right side of the Control Panel,
and then make sure the Align To option is set
to Align To Artboard, and now you can click
on the second icon in, Horizontal Align Center,
to center the text on the page.
Alright now, I'll press the Return key to hide that Panel.
And, presumably, you wanna make this file compatible
with folks that are working on other platforms,
such as Windows right here, and that means we need
to convert the type to Outlines.
Now we don't want to convert the original text,
we want to leave it editable, so go ahead
and press Command C in order to copy the text,
and then press Command F in order to paste it in front.
And you're not going to see any difference
here inside the Document Window.
So what you need to do is move over
to the Layers Panel and click on this little triangle
to twirl the Layer open, and then turn off the bottom Layer,
which represents the editable text.
Make sure the top Layer is still selected,
and then go up to the Type Menu
and choose Create Outines, and that will convert
that text to outlines like so.
And now, just so I know what's going on
with this new text, which is represented
as a group of paths, I'll go ahead and double click
in the word group here inside the Layers Panel
and I'll rename it "Outlines" like so,
and then I'll go ahead and click
off the text to deselect it.
And that's how I created my initial text treatment
using a Macintosh OS level MN font,
specifically Bangla MN, here inside Illustrator.