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Bold text gets the reader’s attention, which is why it highlights important text that the writer wants you to know. In the same way, designers may also use this bold text as a visual effect to make the text seem more important. Illustrator also allows us to highlight important text with the Bold effect. But how can we bold the text using Illustrator?
We can bold text in Illustrator in three ways. You can use the stroke effect, choose a thicker font style, or you can use the Offset path. Although you can not use “Ctrl + B” to make the text bold in one click, you can still bold the text using these other methods.
In this article, we will show you how you can learn to use the stroke effect and the Offset path to make your text bold. We will discuss how you can choose a font style that doesn’t require any bold effect.
Ways You Can Bold Text In Illustrator
You can take full advantage of the control that the Illustrator app gives you by using its tools to manipulate text in almost any way you want. It is easy to bold text even if you don’t have the standard “Ctrl+B” for this exact reason. You can do this using the following ways:
The Stroke Effect
The stroke effect lets you adjust the weight of your text. You first need to head to the “Appearance” panel and then add a border stroke to your text. There will be a drop-down menu that will let you choose the stroke weight.
It is possible to change your font without disturbing the stroke effect that you set. This feature can be even more useful than a default “Ctrl+B” bold standard, as it allows us to adjust just how bold we want the text to be.
You can also refer to the following video for better understanding of these effects:
The Offset Path
In this method, you could risk losing your offset settings, unlike the stroke effect, if you change your font after editing it, so make sure you are satisfied with the initial font.
To use the offset path, you create an outline of the text using a keyboard shortcut, which is “Shift + Command O,” after selecting the text. You can then head over to the overhead menu and click “Offset Path” under Effects > Path. Enter an Offset Value; this will determine how thick your text will be.
Font Style
This option to bold text may give you lesser control over the boldness compared to the other two options. You can change the characteristics of the font style. It gives you options to choose the “Bold” and “Black/Heavy” version (which appears the same as bold text) of the font style.
Conclusion
Many fonts might already have thick enough boldness that they don’t need to embolden further, but other fonts can be quite thin, hence requiring the bold feature.
Our article explains how you can do this by either changing the characteristics of your font style, using the offset method or by the stroke effect. But the most important thing is to pick whatever works best for you!
