Using the design principles of alignment, proximity, consistency and contrast, we’ll create a basic magazine cover with information on a prominent cover story and two other feature stories.

Download support files

download support file Word document to place and format

This is a short Adobe Illustrator tutorial on how to have text flow on a path, whether it’s on a path drawn with the pen tool or a shape such as a circle.

by Chad Neuman

The Pathfinder palette is a useful to when using Adobe Illustrator. Here’s a tutorial on creating text and gradient clouds using this palette.

Step One
Open Adobe Illustrator and open a New Document. Select the Text tool. Type out the word, “Clouds” and highlight it and change the font to one that is thick. I used Cooper. Set the Fill color to Black and the Stroke should be set to None.

Step Two
With the Selection tool selected, hover over the “Clouds” text and right-click over it. Click Create Outlines. This will outline the text.

Step Three
Hover over “Clouds” again and right-click. Click Ungroup.

Step Four
Now we can move the various letters and re-size them with the Selection tool. Click-and-drag a corner bounding box to resize it and click-and-drag over the letter to move it.

Step Five
Click-and-hold the Rectangle tool on the toolbar and click the Ellipse tool. Click-and-drag a few circles. Hold Shift to make perfect circles.

Step Six
Choose the Rectangle tool and click-and-drag along the bottom of the circles.

Step Seven
Cover up any areas in the middle that aren’t covered, using the Ellipse, Rectangle, or Rounded Rectangle tool.

Step Eight
Go to Window>Pathfinder to open the Pathfinder palette.

Step Nine
With the Selection tool, click-and-drag around all the shapes and click the Add icon on the Pathfinder palette (the top-left corner of the palette). This will make all the shapes one shape.

Step Ten
Click-and-drag the various letters with the Selection tool and place them so they’re partially covering the cloud shape we created.

Step Eleven
Click-and-drag around all the letters and objects with the Selection tool. Click the Add icon on the Pathfinder palette.

Step Twelve
Change the Fill color to the gradient swatch on the Swatches palette. You can change the angle of the gradient by using the Gradient tool from the toolbar. Click-and-drag over the object to set the angle. Change the two colors in the gradient by clicking-and-dragging them from the Swatches palette onto the Gradient palette.

Step Thirteen
Add a few birds by drawing them with the Pencil tool.

Step Fourteen
Draw a few with the Pencil tool and move them over the cloud object by clicking-and-dragging with the Selection tool.

by Chad Neuman

Combining two photos to create a new look is a fun way to learn various techniques. We’ll learn how to use the Circular Marquee tool from the center, adjusting the opacity of a layer, creating a path from a selection and adding text along it in the process. Let’s get started.

Step 1
Open the support file in Adobe Photoshop, an image from NASA in the public domain.

 Step 2
Open an image of a person holding a circular object, such as a ball. This one is by Ronald Bloom and available through iStockPhoto.

Step 3
Now in the earth photo, click-and-drag a ruler guide from the top and bottom, halfway across so it’s in the middle. In the earth photo, subtract the entire length by 2 to get where the cursor needs to be exactly. Note: if rulers aren’t showing, press Command-R (PC: Control-R).

 After drawing the ruler guides, hover the cursor over the center of the photo, where the two guides cross. Hold Option (PC: Alt) and click-and-drag the mouse. Hold Shift to maintain proportion. Once the Elliptical Marquee tool is around the earth, release the mouse button then the keys.

 
Step 4
It should look like this.

Step 5
With the Move tool, click-and-drag the earth photo selection onto the other photo.

 
Step 6
Click-and-drag a corner of the earth layer. If there’s no transform controls on the corners, make sure Show Transform Controls is checked in the Control palette. Lower the opacity of the earth layer in the Layers palette to be able to make it the correct size.

Step 7
The earth needs to be a little bit bigger than the red ball here, since the ball isn’t completely round.

Step 8
Raise the opacity of the layer back to 100% in the Layers palette.

Step 9
Click and Eye icon next to Layer 1, the earth layer to turn its visibility off for now. Use the Quick Selection tool and select the area that overlaps the earth and where we’ll need to bring in front of the earth.

 
Step 10
Click the Eye icon next to Layer 1 again to make it visible. Go to Select>Inverse.

 
Step 11
Now we need to mask out the area of the earth photo where the arm is. We mask out the area instead of erasing so that if we mess up, the pixels can be brought back instead of removing them. With Layer 1 selected, click the Add Layer Mask icon on the Layers palette.

Step 12
The mask automatically masked out where we had a selection.

Step 13
Now for a few touch-ups. The levels seem off on the photo of the girl, so go to Image>Adjustments>Levels. Drag the black arrow to 34 as shown here.

 
Step 14
Now the color levels are a bit richer and better adjusted.

Step 15
Now let’s add a text on a path to the photo. Command-click (PC: Control-click) the thumbnail preview of the Layer 1 on the Layers palette. This will create a circular selection around the pixels in the earth layer.

Step 16
Click the Paths palette tab and click the Make Work Path from Selection icon on the bottom of the Paths palette.

 
Step 17
With the Text tool, click on the left top side of the path we just made.

 
Step 18
Type in some text that matches the photo.

Step 19
With the Move tool, click-and-drag a corner of the text area and expand it so there’s some room between the earth and the text. Now we have a combined photo with some text.

by Chad Neuman

Adding a stroke to some text in Adobe Photoshop can be an effective technique, but most strokes stop at just one. Some designers may try to add another stroke and end up just editing the original one. But there’s an easy technique to add a stroke onto another stroke, and three or four or more strokes on the same text.

Step 1
Open Photoshop and go to File>New for a new file at this size and click OK.

 
Step 2
Click the Text tool in the toolbar and click anywhere and type in some text. Don’t click-and-drag a text box, but instead just click once and then type so we can click-and-drag a corner to resize it later. I set the color of mine to #4891dc by highlighting the text and then clicking the color on the Options palette.

Step 3
Change the font to something that will look good with strokes, such as an san serif font (arial or verdana instead of times new roman). I set it to Maiandra GD. Then click the Move tool and click-and-drag a corner to make it a little bit bigger. Remember to hold Shift to maintain proportion. After resizing, press Return (PC: Enter) to apply resize.

Step 4
Go to Layer>Layer Style>Stroke.

Step 5
The Position should be set to Outside and set the size to 3. Change the color to one that looks good with the original text color.

Step 6
It should look something like this, depending on the colors you selected.

Step 7
Now if we went to Layer>Layer Style>Stroke again, we’d just bring up the options to edit the original stroke. Instead, click-and-drag the text layer to the New Layer icon the Layers palette (or press Command-J (PC: Control-J)). This duplicates the text layer.

Step 8
Now we need to edit the stroke on the lower, original text layer to make it larger. Double-click on the Stroke effect listed on the bottom text layer.

Step 9
Set the size to something larger, such as 6 pixels, and change the color to something that looks good with the other two colors. You could use Adobe Illustrator’s Color Guide palette or just wing it by sight or use a color wheel. Click OK.

Step 10
It should look something like this.

Step 11
Repeat the steps of duplicating a layer and changing the size and color of the stroke to add a third, fourth, or fifth stroke. Remember to edit the lower layer when wanting to make the stroke larger to show past the layer on top of it. Click-and-drag a layer below another if they get arrange in the wrong order. In this example, I gradually went from a royal blue to a different hue blue, creating a retro gradient.

Step 12
Of course, each stroke doesn’t have to have a color, just one to hide the color behind it. Try setting the first stroke to white, and then setting the second stroke to the same color as the text by hovering over the text when selecting the color (it will convert to an Eyedropper tool).

Text layout doesn’t have to be boring. Designer David Carson became famous using unique typographic effects, one of which was flowing text in an unusual way. In many magazines, text not only conveys information but joins the photos and colors to become art and part of the style of the magazine as well. Here’s a way to thread text on paths, which has many possibilities once you get the basic concept. Let’s thread text on path shapes to create unique magazine layout designs.

Step 1
Open a new Illustrator file and place a raster image, or open a vector image. This will provide as the background to our mock magazine layout. Optionally, pick one which curves or straight lines to flow the text around.

Step 2
Next, let’s create a path the text will initially flow on. You can create Circle, or us the Pen tool, but for this example I drew a curvy line with the Pencil tool. Optionally, make the Stroke black to see it; make the Fill None.

Step 3
Now we’ll insert the text. Click-and-hold the Text tool to bring out the other options. Click the Type On a Path tool. Click on the path where you want to have the text begin to flow.

Step 4
Go to File>Place and select a Microsoft Word document or another text document to insert. Once it is selected, click Place. Click OK in the next dialog. The text will flow from the point we selected.

Step 5
Select the text you want to change (font style, size, for example) and change it by selecting a new style with the Control Palette. I changed the title to a little bit bigger size font for emphasis.

Step 6
Now let’s flow the text from the path to another area. With the Selection tool, click the little red box in the lower right-hand corner of the path. Where we click next, the text will begin where it was cut off from our path (assuming your path was too short for the entire text document’s contents). Click-and-drag an area to have the text flow into a rectangle shaped text box.

Step 7
To make a unique text flow, with the Selection tool, hover over a corner of the new text box and click-and-drag to rotate it. If there is still text to be flowed, click the red box again, this time in the new text box. Click-and-drag to make one or two more text boxes, repeating the steps to link the threaded text.

Step 8
With the Selection tool, click-and-drag the boxes or paths to move the text to your liking. What’s cool about this technique is that the text flows automatically if you insert or delete text. For example, if you added more to the title, the text would flow to the next text box. There are many possibilities with flowing threaded text: try flowing text from a Circle to a Spiral, or from two block paragraphs into a wave shape drawn with the Pencil tool. All of these can create unique and unusual magazine-style layouts.