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Adobe Illustrator CS5 Tutorials

Project: Cafe Menu / Cafe Menu Text




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Subtitles of the Movie

Alright, now it's time to add some Text. The first thing we'll do is create a brand new Layer and I'm going to double-click and call it Name, or you can call it Logo, or whatever you'd like. I'm going to grab my regular Paintbrush Tool and with this tool selected I'm going to choose a color like red, it's going to be something like a hot pink or whatever color that is. I'm going to increase the size of the Stroke to maybe 4 point and just do a test stroke, like so. I'll undo that because I want to add this as well, a nice little Chalk Scribble that's in our Styles here, we can go over here and choose something like this. Once again I'll do a quick scribble to see what I have. I think that looks good. I'm going to write the word Cafe. So, don't forget, guys, I write sideways, I can always rotate it later, so I'm going to just go ahead and do something like this and I'm going to try it again, a little larger this time. OK, great. Now I'm going to grab my Direct Selection Tool and I'm going to click and I'm going to fix this a little bit till I get a more human-looking A. I kind of did mine like a Cro-Magnon cave man. I'm going to rotate now, OK, so I'm going to grab this logo, rotate it and I'm going to resize it and put it into position like so, right in the middle, OK? Now, it's a little boring like this so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in Back and I'm going to change the Stroke color to white. Then, on my keyboard, I'm going to use the Down arrow to nudge that down like so and now I can read that. Well, kind of. Of course, you'd have to tweak that a little bit. You don't have to use this, the tool, you can use the Blob Brush if you want to. You know, you can change the Stroke color to whatever you need to and you can type your text with that, so you can go ahead and work with whatever tool you want to, but for now I kind of like this logo here. So I'm going to actually get rid of the stroke I created back there until I can clean this up a little bit better, so I'm going to grab my Direct Selection Tool and I'm just trying to open up that hole in the A so it's more readable. OK, so it has this really kind of cool, funky feeling to it and I'm going to, once again, look at it and that looks kind of cool. A little hard to read, still but that's what the drop shadow's for and then I'm going to put that Drop Shadow back, Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in Back and I'll make the color white, nudge it down and to the right just one time and I'm going to grab both of these and Group them. I'm also going to lock that. Create another Layer and this would be the Menu Items. OK, so this is going to be the Menu Items and now we're going to go ahead and grab our Type Tool and we're going to make sure that we don't have anything fancy going on here. We turn all that stuff off, just in case. I'm going to go to my Stroke here and I'm going to type in Coffee, put a couple of the little dots there, and grab that; a couple of periods, like so and I'll put a price of 2.99, like so. Then I'm going to drag-select and copy this sentence and I'm going to go to the end with the insertion point and hit the Return or Enter key to go to the next line and Paste and I'll do the same thing. Enter or Return, Paste, Enter or Return, Paste, Enter or Return, Paste and I'm also going to resize this, and I'll put it right about here and I'm going to Copy and Paste this whole sentence and put it over here. I'll go ahead and move this down and I'm going to paste again and move this over here and I'll put one over here as well. So we have these menu listings here. Now what we're going to do is change the Header for these guys because these are all the same font. So I'm going to go and create another Text object and we'll call this Breakfast and I'm going to drag-select it and I'm going to change the font. Now I'm not sure if you guys have this font but I have something called Papyrus, choose whatever font you have that looks cool for you. So I'll choose Papyrus and I'm going to increase the size of this text here, like so. As you could see, it's kind of a fancy font that kind of matches this almost as far as being jaggedy and I'm going to do the same thing I did before, I'm going to Copy and Paste this and put it into position under the rest of the items, or over the rest of the items, rather, like so and I'm going to change the text after I move some of these things down. This will be called Lunch and, as you could see, guys, I'm doing a lot of copying and pasting because once you format something, you choose a font that you like and a size you don't have to retype it, just change the name of it. This will be Dinner and this will be Snacks or Dessert or whatever makes you happy. Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and move this over like so and once again, to give these guys a little bit more punch I'm going to Shift-select all of the Headers and I'm going to change the Fill color, or the color of that text to a brownish color, like so, to give it a little bit of a different taste. And with them selected I'm going to copy them. Edit, Copy and you guessed it, Edit, Paste in Back and I'm going to change the Fill color of that type to a brighter brown. Use my Arrow keys, nudge it down once, nudge it to the right once and I'll deselect it and now you have yourself a pretty cool menu. Feel free, by the way to change that color to white or whatever makes you happy. So, let's review very quickly. We sketched some artwork, we did a nice arrangement of the food but, of course, feel free to change that. We added our logo, gave it some drop shadows, added our text and the Header text, and we used a whole bunch of menus, pattern and all kinds of stuff to create a cool Cafe Menu. I'm going to hit the Tab key on my keyboard to hide all of the tools and the panels so we can enjoy our work. I hope you enjoyed this project. Take care.

Tutorial Information

Course: Adobe Illustrator CS5
Author: Dwayne Ferguson
SKU: 34146
ISBN: 1-936334-40-2
Release Date: 2010-07-26
Duration: 8.5 hrs / 107 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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