Illustrator Tips 2

I have been asked many times through my career how it is that we do certain things with different programs. The most interesting, to me, is Illustrator and often it is also quite easy to work with. In this lesson we are going to cover how to create shadowed text. It is fairly simple and can be done quite quickly. So, without further ado, lets get to working.

First, open illustrator and create a new document. (Just use the default settings as you can resize anything within Illustrator without much problem after you have built it.) Next, make sure that the tools pallet is opened and that the typing pallet is open, of which both of these are in the Window drop down menu, which you can simply drop down and click on either of these if they are not already opened.

Now that we have them opened and are ready, go to the tools pallet and click on the type tool. It has a drop down menu and many other tools beneath it, but for this tip we are only focusing on the one. So, now that we have this tool selected, click on the page somewhere in the middle. It will depend on how much text you are planning on shadowing as to where you chose to start, in this case we are doing a simple slogan so it will not take much room. Click in the middle and type "Illustrator Tips!". Then we want to center this text because we may choose to type more under it later and we want it all to be centered. (We will not be adding extra words in this tip, but it will be helpful in later uses.) Go to the character dialog box (You can press command+T to open this if you choose, or go to the Window and open it that way if it is not already opened. Most Illustrators default with it open as long as you have not changed it.) In the dialog box you will see two to three different tabs, and one of them will be the paragraph tab, which is actually a dialog box of its own, but it is always grouped with the character dialog so it is just as easy to click on either one.