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Warping Text using Illustrator 10’s Warping Tools

By Nick Hodge | December 26, 2001

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.

[1000] 01 initial text

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

[1001] 02 rectangle

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.

[1002] 03 warp

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

[1003] 04 envelope 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.

[1004] 05 warp envelope warp

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.

Topics: adobe, illustrator, mungenet | 13 Comments »

13 Responses to “Warping Text using Illustrator 10’s Warping Tools”

  1. Jennifer Says:
    September 15th, 2007 at 3:10 am

    Thank you!!! This answers so many ques­tions. I didn’t even know where to start with warp­ing text in Illus­trator and I’m excited at all of the things it can do! :)

  2. Nick Hodge Says:
    October 4th, 2007 at 1:13 pm

    Also try later ver­sions of Illus­trator; there’s a whole lot of warp­ing good­ness in there, too

  3. Warping Text using Illustrator CS3 | www.nickhodge.com Says:
    October 8th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

    […] Strangely, the most hit page dur­ing the most recent week has been my “how-to” warp text with Adobe Illus­trator 10. […]

  4. Warping Text using Illustrator CS3 : DPE Australia Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

    […] Strangely, the most hit page dur­ing the most recent week has been my “how-to” warp text with Adobe Illus­trator 10. […]

  5. novice Says:
    October 14th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    Oh.. my.…my.… You saved my time! Thank you so much for shar­ing. It was for one of my school pro­jects and it worked! So worldy of you. Thank you!

  6. rachelle Says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 12:45 am

    Have you figured out a way to change the color of the warped text after warp­ing it? thx.

  7. Nick Hodge Says:
    October 26th, 2007 at 7:35 pm

    Using the Lay­ers palette, you can dir­ect select the text ‘layer’ (in fact object) and change it colour

  8. alooper21 Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    ima­gine sone circles, one inside another, hav­ing the same cen­ter. on each cis­cle there is a phrase, shorter and shorter. the size of the font is the same for each phrase, and each phrase is ended with a dot. all dots are inline with the dot in the cen­ter of all circles.
    i tryed to do that with pho­toshop, or with word, i didn’t figured out how to get to what i ima­gine. i ask for this spe­cific thing because i want for some years to make a visual poem. can you make a tutorial on this one too and give a link here?

    thank you in advance :)

  9. ProductionMusic Says:
    May 13th, 2008 at 3:39 pm

    Is there a way to bend text to fit using a tool like ‘dis­tort’ in photoshop?

  10. Las-Vegas-Weddings Says:
    May 24th, 2008 at 3:40 am

    Thanks for this tutorial and the help. It was just what I needed for devel­op­ing our new brochures.

  11. Pam Says:
    September 3rd, 2009 at 10:39 pm

    How do you cre­ate out­lines on your text once it is envel­oped, my silk­screener requires all text be con­ver­ted to outlines.

  12. Jen Says:
    September 4th, 2009 at 5:19 am

    In Illus­trator, select the text and go to type>create outlines.

  13. Sharon Says:
    October 21st, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    Do you know if Adobe Illus­trator 9.0 is sup­por­ted by Win­dows Vista Home Version?

Comments