Tutorial: How-To Fill Type with Artwork in InDesign

How would you fill type with artwork or imagery? Would you do it in Photoshop or Illustrator? If the artwork-filled type is going to end up in your InDesign layout anyway, why not just fill the type directly within InDesign?

Lord knows I love Illustrator and Photoshop, but one of the most fre­quent time–eaters in pub­li­ca­tion lay­out is jump­ing over to vec­tor draw­ing or image-editing pro­grams. Too often we think cre­at­ing or tweak­ing sim­ple effects like fill­ing text with an image (or mul­ti­ple images) requires Photoshop or Illustrator. Although it’s a quick trip to one or the other–especially with the Creative Suite short­cut but­tons on InDesign’s PageMaker toolbar–it’s a trip most InDesign users make far more fre­quent­ly than they need. Staying in your lay­out appli­ca­tion when­ev­er pos­si­ble will save time and keep your mind on your InDesign work­flow with­out break­ing con­cen­tra­tion to switch over to Illustrator or Photoshop.

The type in Figure 1 was filled with­out the aid of Illustrator or Photoshop. It was cre­at­ed sole­ly in InDesign CS2, though the tech­nique in this tuto­r­i­al works just as well with InDesign CS. In a few quick steps I’ll show you how to not only fill a typed word or phrase with a sin­gle image, but also how to fill each char­ac­ter or glyph of a word with its own sep­a­rate artwork.

Figure 1: Each let­ter is filled with a sep­a­rate picture.

Fill a Word with Artwork

1. With the Type tool, click and drag to cre­ate a new text frame. Type in your word or single-line phrase. This tech­nique will work with multi-line text, but let’s keep it sim­ple for the moment.

2. Apply your text for­mat­ting. For best results, choose a thick, beefy, or bold type­face at a large point size. In Figure 2 you’ll see that I’m using Futura Xtra Black Condensed from Bitstream. Because we’re work­ing with just a sin­gle line of text, lead­ing is irrel­e­vant, but adjust the kern­ing, scal­ing, OpenType, and any oth­er styling options as needed.

Figure 2: Set a sin­gle line of text in a new text frame.

3. Select the text frame with the Selection tool, and then choose Type > Create Outlines. Now, instead of a text frame with live, editable type, you have a text-shaped image frame (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: The text has become a frame–evident by the appear­ance of the shapes’ paths when select­ed with the Direct Selection tool.

Note: InDesign will not cre­ate a new copy of your text frame. If you might–if there’s even the slimmest chance you might–need to edit the text, make a copy of the orig­i­nal text frame before con­vert­ing to out­lines. Place the copy on the paste­board, or where I often store “back­up” objects, an “unused ele­ments” lay­er, which remains in my doc­u­ment until just before going to press.

4. With the text-shaped frame still select­ed, choose File > Place and import an image. The image will appear inside the text-shaped frame just as it would in any oth­er image frame (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: A placed image appears inside the text-shaped frame.

5. To resize or dis­tort only the placed image instead of the text-shaped frame, grab the Direct Selection tool (the white arrow), and click once inside the path. If you see the paths of the frame, you clicked too close to the path edge. When the cur­sor is over the cor­rect spot, inside the path and over the placed image fill, it will turn into a hand. Once select­ed, the image’s bound­ing box will appear, defin­ing the dimen­sions of the placed image, and allow­ing it to be repo­si­tioned or trans­formed (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Selecting the placed image fill with the Direct Selection arrow acti­vates the fil­l’s bound­ing box.

Depending on your frame and placed art­work, it may be dif­fi­cult to dis­cern the fil­l’s bound­ing box from the path of the text-shaped frame. An easy way to tell them apart–not just in this case, but with any filled frame–is to com­pare the col­or of the bound­ing box with the lay­er col­or. The paths and bound­ing box­es of frames or oth­er con­tain­ers will be the same col­or as the squares beside their con­tain­ing lay­ers’ names in the Layers palette; bound­ing box­es belong­ing to the con­tents of con­tain­ers, how­ev­er, will be the inverse col­or. For exam­ple, the default Layer 1 col­or is Light Blue, thus the fill bound­ing box will be brown. (Haul out that col­or wheel from art school; you’ll see I’m not total­ly nuts.)

Position and trans­form your image to fill the text-shaped frame–or not to fill it, if that gives you the effect you want. Figure 6 shows my sized and posi­tioned image fill­ing the “art­media” logotype.

Figure 6: The fin­ished artwork-filled-text.

Once you have this tech­nique down, you’ll prob­a­bly won­der if there’s a way to place a sep­a­rate image inside each letter–without hav­ing to repeat the entire process for each let­ter, cre­at­ing indi­vid­ual text frames and con­vert­ing them to image frames. Would I tease you like that if there weren’t such a way? Pshaw!

Fill Each Character with Separate Artwork

1. Follow steps 1–3 in the pre­vi­ous sec­tion to cre­ate your text-shaped frame, but stop­ping short of plac­ing your first image.

2. With the text-shaped frame select­ed, choose Object > Compound Paths > Release. Notice that not only is the word bro­ken into sep­a­rate glyphs, but each glyph’s con­stituent com­pound paths are also released to inde­pen­dent paths. Paths such as the coun­ters (holes) in my As, R, and D (see Figure 7) become free-standing objects.

Figure 7: With the Object > Compound Paths > Release com­mand, all com­pound paths are released, includ­ing counters.

By cre­at­ing sep­a­rate frames from each path, InDesign opens the door to inter­est­ing cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties. In this par­tic­u­lar design, how­ev­er, I don’t want to fill the coun­ters with their own sep­a­rate art­work; I want them to be neg­a­tive space holes like they are in real type.

3. To knock out the coun­ters again, select the out­er and inner paths of just one glyph–the out­er path and counter path in my first A, for exam­ple. And then choose Object > Pathfinder > Subtract to sub­tract the fore­most path (the counter) from the back­ground path. Repeat this step for any oth­er glyphs that should be com­pound paths.

Note: Depending on how the font was drawn by the type design­er, counter paths might actu­al­ly be behind the out­er glyph path upon release. As you can see in Figure 8. releas­ing the com­pound paths on my text-shaped fame places the coun­ters of the As in front, though the coun­ters in the R and D end up behind their cor­re­spond­ing out­er paths. If this hap­pens in your art­work, sim­ply select only the out­er path and send it back­ward before Shift-clicking on the counter path(s) and using the Object > Pathfinder > Subtract command.

Figure 8: Releasing com­pound paths in this font results in some counter paths appear­ing in front of the out­er paths and oth­ers behind.

4. Once you have all req­ui­site com­pound paths restored, click on one glyph-shaped frame and place an image into it with File > Place. Keep going, one glyph-shaped frame at a time, to place, size, and posi­tion the sep­a­rate fill art­work for each glyph.

When you’ve fin­ished fill­ing, select all the glyph-shaped frames and group them with the Object > Group com­mand, which will enable you to once again move and work with the word or phrase as a uni­fied object. Apply your fin­ish­ing touch­es, and you’re done!

You can see my fin­ished project, a logo for an art sup­ply store, in Figure 9. Although I applied a gra­di­ent stroke and drop shad­ow to the grouped glyph-shaped frames, none of it is unchange­able. Because I did every­thing in InDesign, I can eas­i­ly move the art­work to any lay­out, size and trans­form it, and even change its fill, path shape, or style attrib­ut­es with­out load­ing up Photoshop or Illustrator.

Figure 9: The fin­ished project.

Last Words

InDesign will con­vert mul­ti­ple lines of text to outlines–an entire page, includ­ing mul­ti­ple frames could be con­vert­ed at once–and each line will become a com­pound path that may be filled with placed images. In that case, there’s one added step: When con­vert­ing more than a sin­gle line to out­lines, InDesign will auto­mat­i­cal­ly group the result­ing com­pound paths (one com­pound path per line). Simply ungroup pri­or to plac­ing artwork.

Alternative to using the Object > Pathfinder > Subtract com­mand (which, let’s face it, is wrist-intensive) is the same com­mand in but­ton form on the Pathfinder palette. With the counter and out­er paths select­ed, just click the sec­ond but­ton from the left along the top row of the Pathfinder palette.

Filling words with pic­tures can pro­vide dra­mat­ic effect, but, like any oth­er cool tech­nique, it’s eas­i­ly abused. Use this tech­nique only when a project war­rants it; don’t try to fit artwork-filled text into a project just because you now know how. That said, it’s easy to cre­ate tremen­dous impact through sub­tle­ty. Consider fill­ing large head type with a low-contrast monot­o­ne image or pho­to­graph iso­la­tion. For some­thing even sim­pler, try cre­at­ing a flow­ing, non-linear gra­di­ent in Photoshop or Illustrator and using that image to fill type in a way InDesign’s native gra­di­ents can’t. Freedom to explore and exper­i­ment is, after all, what the but­ter­fly is all about.

Want to learn how to fill type with art­work in QuarkXPress?

Howto, tuto­r­i­al, InDesign, CS, CS2