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NOTE: Tech­nique for the latest ver­sion of Illus­trator CS3 

Adobe Illus­trator 10 has a col­lec­tion of new Warp­ing tools. These tools do not dir­ectly work with text. At first, this looks like a ser­i­ous ommis­sion. But hark! There is a little tech­nique that will serve us well.

Firstly, let’s assume you have cre­ated some text in your Illus­trator document.

Cre­ate a rect­angle that bounds the text exactly. This rect­angle will not be vis­ible: its used for the Envel­ope tool…

Select both the new rect­angle and the text frame under­neath. Go to Object>Envelope Distort>Make with Top Object.

This will take the under­ly­ing text and ‘dis­tort’ it into the shape of a rect­angle. The text prob­ably hasn’t changed that much. But the beauty of Illus­trator 10 is that we can now Warp the envel­ope shape.

Voila! we can now warp text!

To edit the text, you can select this object and go to Object>Envelope Distort>Edit Con­tents. Here you can edit the text rather than the envel­ope shape itself.

In this simple example, we are chan­ging the shape of the envel­ope that the text is being stretched into.

Now, this alone is inter­est­ing and worth­while. But there is another “thing” we can do…

By simply adding a Warp Envel­ope to our text object by going to Object>Envelope Distort>Make with Warp

We can change the shape the text is ‘envel­oped’ into. These warp styles closely reflect the style in Pho­toshop 6.0. How­ever, what is dif­fer­ent is that there is an under­ly­ing shape that we can manip­u­late the effect the shape the text is warped into.

Apart from using the ‘white arrow’ (dir­ect select tool) to change the envel­ope, or we can use the Warp­ing tools to change the shape.

Sweet.