How to distort bend shapes & type in Adobe Illustrator CC

Course contents
SECTION: 3
Keyboard Shortcuts 11:05
SECTION: 14
Web UI design 15:17

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Course info

58 lessons / 9 hours 11 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, welcome to this Adobe Illustrator advanced tutorial. 

My name is Dan. I’m an ACI & ACE for Illustrator. 

This course is a more advanced look at Illustrator. It’s not designed for people who are brand new to Illustrator.

This course is for people who can already understand the fundamentals of Illustrator. If you already know what an anchor point is and how to adjust it this course is for you.

This course will speed up your productivity & workflow. It is project based, so you will learn the tools & tricks to create some really beautiful current design styles.

Even if you consider yourself an experienced user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your Illustrator mind.

You’ll learn advanced anchor point & pen tool tricks. There is a really fun section on mastering lines & strokes. You’ll learn the quick way to take hand drawn sketches and vectorize & color them.

You’ll master depth & perspective in Illustrator, creating semi-flat presentations. We’ll set permanent defaults for fonts, colours & learn how to turn hyphenation off once and for all.

We’ll make beautiful charts & graphs for your indesign documents. There is a colour mastery section where you will learn to make quick colour adjustments, gradients meshs & how to blend it all together.  

Your creativity will be doubled once you finish the transform, distort & blending section of the course.

There is an entire section dedicated to learning how to speed up your personal workflow & how to speed up Illustrator and get it running super fast. 

If you’re ok in Illustrator but you know there is so much more in there to be unlocked then please  join me and become an Illustrator super hero.

Course duration 8 hours + your study.

Get the completed files here
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

How to earn your certificate

Work your way towards your certificate for this course by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz (Merit level courses only)
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project (Distinction level courses only) - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Request your certificate when you've completed the requirements for the certificate level you're working towards

Good luck!

Pass certificates

We're awarding 'Pass' level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your 'Pass' certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Don't forget to request your certificate when all your projects are complete

Good luck!

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at distorting, pulling, and pushing using Illustrator's Envelope Distort. We're going to turn our Gradient into some kind of weird looking fish. And we'll even combine the bottom two graphics to turn them into the love heart. All right, let's go do that now in Adobe Illustrator. Oh yes, a little side note. At the beginning of this tutorial I forgot to tell you to open up the file called 'Envelope Distort.ai', it's in your Exercise Files. Do that first. All right, see you in there. 

So to make our Envelope Distortions we're going to start with this guy at the top here. You can use anything. It has to be vector though, can't be a picture, that's a Photoshop job. So with all of this selected, I'm going to go to 'Object' and I'm going to go down to 'Envelope Distort'. We're going to look at all of these. We're going to look at this first one called Make with Warp. Now Warp is kind of like, just some basic pre-defined style, so 'Arc', make sure your Preview's 'on'. 'Arc', I'm not going to go through every single one of them, except my favorite, where is he? Fish. And there is some adjustments you can do with these guys, deciding on what you want to do. It's just like, if I were to draw that with the Pen Tool, it does the same. So there's some cool uses of this fish, maybe not, but there's some cool stuff in here. So that's how to do that. 

One thing that will happen though is if I click out, and click back in, like, how do I get in there? You can go over here, to 'Warp Options', which is the newer version of Illustrator, otherwise you can click on it, and at the top here it's going to spread out along here, where you can say, actually I'd like to go back to my favorite, fish. Vertical fish, and all the options along the top there. 

The next one I want to show you is using a shape to distort it. I'm going to grab some Type. Click once, and I'm going to type "I Love You." These are heart, and stuff, you know. I'm going to use this font here called Hubro. I can't even spell it, is that Hubrus? I can't spell it, or say that, anyway, it's a cool font, it's on TypeKit, free to use, it's commercial, but it's free as part of your Creative Cloud license. I'm going to use this because it looks kind of cool. I'm going to use my shortcuts to play with the Leading. Now the best bet is to play around with your Tracking, Leading, everything before it gets into the heart because it's going to be problematic. 

I'm holding down the 'Alt' key on a PC, or 'Option' key on a Mac and just using my other, to play with the Leading, or the Line Spacing. I'm happy with that. Now I'm going to get it kind of roughly to the right shape. Don't worry about it too much because the first thing that needs to happen is that the shape that you want to use to bend the Text needs to be at the front. Select both of them, and go to 'Object' 'Envelope Distort'. And that's why it needs to be on top, 'Make with Top Object'. Kind of bins it in there. 

What I might do before I do that is copy and paste it, or copy it at least. Do the 'Envelope Distort'. Then I get to paste. 'Command F' to put it straight where I got it from, or 'Control F' on a PC. I want to send that to the back. And I might do something with it just to kind of-- I feel like it's been lost a little bit in there. You can do with any shape on top. The more complex it is, the more kind of chance of it going a bit crazy, but yes, give it a go. 

We're going to look at that last one in the next video, which was Make with Mesh. We'll do that in the next video because it's a little bit longer, and a little bit more detailed. All right, let's check it out in the next video.

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