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Let's talk about letters, words, sentences and
paragraphs this week. No, you don't have to diagram sentences,
and this is not an English lesson. But words and type are a huge
part of design. You probably already knew that. As far as web
design goes, you can't even begin a design without thinking
about what font you will use, what size, what weight, etc... So
let's talk a tad bit about what Photoshop 6 can do when it comes
to type.
Above you can see a palette that contains some
drop down boxes and such. There are actually 2 palettes there.
One is the Character Palette and the other is the Paragraph
palette.The first one, which happens to be on the top here, is
the Character palette. It is where you decide what typeface you
want, what font, what weight and what color and so forth. The
Paragraph palette below is where you control the way in which
paragraphs and sentences are margined, align and what not. I
have labeled them with letters. I will discuss each area around
the letters from the top down. Some of these features you will
use constantly, such as color, size and the type face. Others
you may never use, such as the baseline shift and the kerning
feature. There is another way to control kerning that I will
show you later. Let's begin. First select the type tool and
click on the palette button at the upper-right corner of the
screen.
Letter A:
This is the area where you control what type
face/font you want, and what weight you want it. You can use the
drop down boxes to choose your font. You are of course limited
to the fonts you currently have on your system, but you can add
new ones if you so desire. The drop down box will tell you which
font you currently have chosen. It will use the last font chosen
as the default. At any time, you can change this font. Once you
put type on a layer, you can change this and it will change the
type. You do not have to select the type in order to do this. I
love this feature, since it saves the time of having to select
the type prior to changing the face. To the right of this box is
the actual font style box. Here is where you would choose bold,
medium, italic or whatever fonts you have associated with your
particular type face. If you only have one option in this drop
down box, it means you only have one option to choose from.
Makes it easier to choose that way huh?
Letter B:
There are four boxes in this area. Here you
control the following things:
Type size
Line-Spacing
Individual Kerning of letters
Tracking of letters/ words
Type size can be measure in a number of ways.
You control that in your preferences. I am using pixels here. I
almost always use pixels since I work on the web and it is much
easier for me to deal with. Line-spacing is the same
measurements for the most part. Again I am using pixels. Kerning
is the spacing between individual letters. You can increase or
decrease spacing between two letters by putting your cursor
between them and increasing or decreasing this number. I find
that it is easier to do this however:
Hold down Alt/Option and Shift -> Then use the
cursor keys to move the letters closer or further apart. Watch
what happens in the kerning box.
Finally we have tracking. That simply gives
spacing between entire words either breathing room or
claustrophobia. Look below.
Unfortunately I am out of time for this week. I
will finish this up next week. Sorry to leave you with a
cliff-hanger. If you need some fonts to play with, hop over to
fontsource.jlswebsource.com. You will find a heaping helping of
new fonts for you to jam up your hard drive with. Also stop by
jlswebsource.com for some more Photoshop. |