How to personalize a text effect

In this tutorial we're going to create a text effect and personalize it afterwards so that it satisfies our designing tastes. Don't forget to have the Creative TextFX extension installed in order for the tutorial to work; if you encounter any problems installing it, please refer to the “How to install an extension” tutorial.

Click here to download the source file and the required files for solving this tutorial.

1. Firstly, let's open Flash and create a new file.

2. Insert an instance of Creative TextFX on the stage, convert it into a movie clip (let's call it „myEffect”) and align the clip on the stage centered vertically and horizontally. Don't forget to check if the movie clip's coordinates are integer numbers; if not, just delete the digits which exist after the comma.

3. Next let's start to personalize a bit our effect. Apply the following changes to the effect's properties in the General tab of the Component Inspector (don't forget that the instance is now inside the movie clip so you have to enter symbol mode by double clicking at first).

4. We observe a funny thing. Although we aligned the clip in the previous step, because we changed the text inside, it changed the position as well, being aligned with respect to the left side of the symbol. Let's check out the other tabs in the Component Inspector and, after we change some parameters, realign the clip on the stage so that it's centered and it keeps integer coordinates.

5. What I did before is this: I just opened the Effect Details tab without changing anything just to show you that we have options regarding the loop attribute and as well some other parameters that modify the effect. About the Colors tab, I tried to make the text look less formal by applying a blue gradient on it. Just set-up the way that I did and preview the image; you should see something like this:

Thank you for your time and I hope this tutorial was useful to you. I invite you to read the rest of our tutorials and check out our other products on www.extendstudio.com. If you have any questions please contact us at support@extendstudio.com.