Warping Text to Fit into Shapes with Illustrator
Depending on your design theme, there will probably situations where you want to integrate your text and warp them to fit certain shapes. This is a very creative and eye catching move that helps certain web and print designs to get more people to start reading their material.
In this guide, we will teach you how you can do this kind of text warping into shapes in Illustrator. You can use this to create a more impressive graphic or title effect on your print booklet designs or brochure printing template, or in various printed materials. Let's begin.
1. Now, for our guide, we will be integrating text into a heart shape. This is reminiscent of past nostalgic eras where warped text and typographic art was the rage. So the first step is to create our Heart. Using the pen tool (Shortcut P), create your heart into the art board. You will probably want 3 anchor points on top, 1 each on both sides and one at the bottom to achieve this. Color it the way you want. Just look at the image below.
2. Make a backup for your heart now by pressing CTRL+C and CTRL+V in your keyboard. Hide and lock this in the layer palette for use later.
3. Next, using the Pen Tool we will divide our heart. Make sure first that you set its fill to no fill at all, and the stroke to a 5 pt thickness with a white color. Then inscribe two lines (with a bit of a curve if you want) across the heart. Make sure that the ends go beyond the heart shape.
4. Once done, use the selection tool to select both lines you created. Then go to Object -> Path -> Outline Stroke.
5. Afterwards select all your shapes in the art board by just drag selecting all the shapes. Then, go to the pathfinder window and look for the option “Minus Front”. This should cut the heart into three parts.
6. Ungroup the divided heart shape by just right clicking on it and selecting “Ungroup” on the context menu that appears.
7. Now, we are ready to type in our text. Simply use the text tool and just type in the text that you want to inscribe to the heart. Use a fancy creative font if possible. For our example we are going to put one word on top of the heart, and another below.
8. First move your top text to the back by right clicking on it to bring up the context menu and selecting Arrange -> Send to back.
9. Next with the text and the top heart shape selected go to Object -> Envelope Distort -> Make with Top Object.
10. Great! Now you can see that we have warped the text in the shape of the top heart shape.
11. Duplicate the process for the lower text and the middle heart shape.
12. Afterwards, unhide our backup heart we created earlier. Simply go to the layer panel and click again the box to unhide the backup heart shape.
13. Now you have the heart below our warped text vectors. Now add some styling by adding a gradient color to our heart shape.
14. You might also try adding gradient colours into the text.
15. Add gloss effects by duplicating the heart, turning it into a light grey color, and then adding the special effect, Effects -> Blur ->Gaussian Blur. Adjust the transparency too as necessary.
16. Finally add a good creative background to reinforce your designs.
And voila! Now you know how to warp text into shapes.
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