“Texting”

Papers: Basic Backgrounds and Sidewalk Chalk Pastels; Photo edges: French laundry v. 5; Tag, arrow and wordart: Beach culture word art; Brads: The Basics-Brads v. 2 all by Sande Krieger for twopeasinabucket.com; Twine bow: “Reef” kit by 7gypsies @ pcLayers.com; doodled frame by Aly Dosdall

No, I’m not talking about the kind of texting your teen ager is into. I actually mean adding a little more interest to your text/journaling by playing around with the font size, leading, justification, and tracking. Let me explain. The style of journaling on my layout above would not be nearly so interesting if it were all the same font size, the same amount of space apart, or if it were all justified or centered. I changed the font size on each word or phrase never repeating the same size twice. In Photoshop you achieve this by selecting the text you’d like to change and clicking on the desired size in the font size drop menu, or selecting and retyping the size you’d like in the character pallete. (If you can’t find your character pallete, click on “Window” and select “Character”.)

You can see how to adjust the text size in the screen shots above. Adjusting the leading of text means increasing or decreasing the amount of space between lines of text. You can achieve this by selecting the lines you’d like to adjust, and either using the leading drop down menu or selecting and replacing the value of the leading in the character pallete as seen below.

The tracking refers to the amount of space between text characters. You can adjust that in the character pallete just below the leading. Varying the justification and centering in a paragraph can also add interest. On this layout I wanted the top two lines left-justified. Before selecting those two lines, I hit enter with my cursor at the end of the second line so that the entire paragraph wouldn’t automatically left-justify with the top two lines.

Then I selected the top two lines and clicked on the left-justify icon at the top of the screen as seen above. I hope this tutorial has been informative and inspiring for you. Give it a try, and link me up to your creations! Happy “texting”!!