Topics
For your introduction to type in Illustrator, we’ll set the type for a half-letter sized advertisment for Adobe Illustrator in Adobe Illustrator. Pretty meta, eh? We’ll use this layout to discover how to set point type and area type. We’ll put text in columns. The appearance of the text will be controlled with Paragraph Styles.
We’ll use fonts you already have on your computer. They’re part of the Myriad Variable Concept Condensed.
Document Setup
The document is half a letter page horizontally. There are three columns that have 1/8” gutters. The margins are a quarter inch all around. InDesign can do all this for you. In Illustrator, we draw our grid with stroked boxes, then convert them to guides.
How Bleeds Work
If any artwork on the page is going to touch the edge of the page, we need to extend it to the bleed line. Bleeds are always 1/8” or 0.125”. Be precise.
Paragraph Styles
Paragraph Styles store the appearance of block-level text so that appearance can be applied to various instances of text throughout your document. If the attributes of a paragraph style is edited, all the text with that paragraph style applied will change. This is very convenient when you have a lot of text to format. Edits can be done globally with only a few clicks.
Use the guide above to create on paragraph style for each different text formatting definition.
Units of Measure
It’s best to use points as a unit of measure when doing page layout since type is measured in points. This gives you one common measuring system.
Formative Activity
Open the provided Illustrator file, then copy & paste each block of text as either point type or area type as is appropriate. Make sure all the text has a paragraph style attached.
We’ll use fonts you already have on your computer. They’re part of the Acumin Variable Concept Wide.
