Using Envelope Distort in Illustrator for Fitting Words in Shapes

In my t-shirt design, I’m using Envelope Distort in Illustrator for tweaking the shape of the words. Envelope Distort is awesome for getting words to fit into weird shapes. There are a few ways you can use Envelope Distort in Illustrator CS2 — I’ll show you what I did for the t-shirt design. Then, I’l show you how to make the “totally awesome wavy text effect” graphic.

Start with some text. You want your font, colors, etc. to be completely set, as applying the Envelope Distort command will make the text uneditable. (If you need to, create a copy of the text field just in case you need it later!)

By the way, you can distort any vector object or group of vector objects, not just text!

Go to Object > Envelope Distort. There are three options:

• Make with Warp gives you a dialog box similar to the Text Warp feature that you might be more familiar with in Photoshop. You can choose from several pre-set warp shapes (which allow you to tweak “how warped” the text is), and also modify the warp shape manually using the Direct Selection Tool (aka white arrow tool).
• Make with Mesh is similar to Make with Warp, except that you get to define how many grid points you want to start with and then tweak it yourself. This is the one I’m choosing.
• Make with Top Object assumes that you have already created a funny-shaped vector object that you have laid over the text.

After choosing the “Make with Mesh” option, you can choose how many rows and columns to have for your mesh grid. I just want a very simple shape, so I’ve set the options to 1×1.

This results in a basic rectangular shape, with four anchor points forming the corners. Each anchor point has bezier control handles that you can manipulate with the Direct Select Tool. In the diagram below, I’ve simply dragged the point itself out and to the left.

My final shape involved some additional tweaking of the corner point positions as well as the direction of the control handles:

Here’s one more example of using the “top object” envelope distort option. I’ve started with four separate text boxes, underneath a rectangle that I sliced into curvy shapes using the Knife tool. The curvy shapes are outlined in red so that you can see them more easily. (Remember to set your font colors and fonts before performing the Envelope Distort!)

Selecting the top text box and top shape, go to Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Top Object.

Immediately, the text is warped to fit the shape, and the shape outline disappears.

Repeating this for each shape/text box, here’s my final result, which took about fifteen seconds to create (not including my grabbing screenshots time, of course):

Have fun!

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• Work and Design