Perspective Text
Ever have a wall, floor or ceiling on an icon and want your text to look written on? But when you rotate your text or put it on the wall it doesn’t look -quite right-? Perspective helps your text look like it is more realistically on the image.
Select your image of a wall, ceiling, or floor. Perspective works best if the surface is “going back” in the icon IE you’re looking from an angle. I’d work with a large image your first time because icons are so small. Mine is 300 x 425. Preview
Go ahead and click the Text button (the “A”) and enter your text. Choose your font face and size: a simple easy to read face and a large size. Also on the Text Palette, make sure “Create As:” is set to vector. Click “Apply” so your vector text appears on the icon. If your text is still pretty small compared to the image, resize it. Preview
Now, often times you will see icons where there is some area with perspective but the text is just rotated like this. If you look, it doesn’t actually look like the text is on the wall; it just looks rotated. Preview
Now what you want to do is to hold down the Control key and “grab” one of the corner nodes with the mouse. Experiment a little and pull the vector text up down and side to side. This adds perspective. To add perspective to our wall, I “Grabbed” the top left node and pulled up. You can tell which way your perspective needs to go by which way the surface perspective is IE the wall is larger “toward” us and smaller away so we want our text to do the same. I pulled up so the bottom edge of the vector box was about parallel to the wall/floor line. Now our text looks authentic. Preview
For effect I lowered the opacity and added a drop shadow. Voila! Perspective text. Preview
But let’s experiment some more and add text to the right wall and the floor, too.
Follow the first two steps again for text on the right wall. This time, we’re going to grab the top right mode and holding down the Control key, pull up until the bottom edge of the vector box is about parallel to the wall/floor line. I added text and adjust opacity again.Preview
Follow the first two steps again for the floor text. This time I switched to a light green to, er, match the carpet? -lol* This time grab either the bottom left or bottom right nodes and holding down the Control key, pull to the left or right, respectively until the side of your text box is about parallel with the wall/floor line. You might find your text isn’t tall enough, like I did so release the Control key and pull the top middle node up to make your text the height of the floor. You’ll probably have to readjust your perspective again. Preview
Just for fun, let’s add some ceiling text! Following the first two steps we add our text; this time I choose a light grey for the colour. This time, we grab the top right or top left node and holding down the Control key, pull the bow either right or left, respectively. You can actually adjust your text height first and then add the perspective or add perspective, adjust height and adjust perspective. I adjust opacity and add a shadow and voila! Preview
You can also flip the text anytime so that is is “going away from you” or “coming toward you” by going to “Image” menu and selecting “Flip” (or hitting CTRL + I) but do this before you add perspective.
Here are some examples of perspective text in icons
