Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. Creating Artistic Text

Text has the power to make or break a design, and Photoshop CC has a veritable smorgasbord of text-creation and formatting options—heck, it even has its own Type menu! But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should: The act of creating text is something of an art form (called typography), as it’s all too easy to get carried away with decorating rather than creating legible prose.

Keep in mind that Photoshop isn’t always the right place to be wordsmithing in the first place. (The box on Printing Photoshop Text can help decide whether to hunt and peck in another program.) Nevertheless, Photoshop has plenty of tools that, when used tastefully, can help you create beautiful text. Some of these tools are easy to find, while others are hidden so deep in the program that you’d need a treasure map to find ’em. This chapter guides you in the right direction, and more importantly, teaches you when and how to use each tool. You’ll also learn quite a lot about the art of type in the process.

Note

Photoshop CC 2014 lets you access a special collection of online fonts through a service called Typekit, which is free with any Creative Cloud subscription. Once you download a font from Typekit, you can use it in any program you want—even Microsoft Word. Meet Adobe Typekit has more.