How to Use Text Effects in Illustrator

Illustrator Text Effects are a great way to add personality to your artwork. You can easily apply them to your text with a single click to produce a great variety of colorful designs.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to use pre-made text effects in Illustrator.

We will use the Pop Pastel Text Effect and Awesome Groovy Font from Barcelona Design Shop.

Step 1 - Open or Import the Text Effect in Illustrator

First, we need to bring the text effect into Illustrator to apply it to your text. There are a couple of ways of doing this. You can open the file directly into Illustrator, or load it through the Graphic Styles panel.

Open the Text Effect File In Illustrator

Just click Open in Illustrator and navigate to where your file is saved and select it.

If you want, select the example text on the document and head to the Graphic Styles panel to save it as a new style for future use by clicking on the small icon at the bottom of the panel.

You can now modify the example text and/or change the font to the one you want to work with.

Import the Text Effect Through the Graphic Styles Panel

You can also add your text effects by going to the Graphic Styles panel and clicking on the small menu on the top right. Navigate to Open Graphic Styles Library > Other Library and then to where your file is saved to open it.

Or, place it in Illustrator’s Graphics Style folder, so you can open the file from within that palette directly. You can find the folder going to Applications > Adobe Illustrator > Presets > en_US (or other language) > Graphic Styles.

Then, with your text selected, head to the Graphic Styles panel and click on the new style to use it on your text.

Step 2 - Modify the Text Effect

You can also see the contents of the layer if needed.

To do this click on the small arrow on the left side of the layer thumbnail in the Layers panel. This will show its content and maybe hide or get rid of some elements.

Now, you can leave your text as it is, or maybe change some details and adapt it to your needs.

To do it, make sure it is selected, and head to the Appearance panel where you will see all the different text effect elements.

You may also check the Swatches panel. Some text effects files include different colors, patterns, etc. that you can use on your design.

You can double-click on any of the text effect elements to open the settings windows and modify them if needed.

Like for example here, where we changed the Blending Mode on the pattern.

And, here’s some text with color and pattern variations.

You have now successfully applied a text effect in Illustrator!

If you prefer to make your own text effects from scratch, we have some great tutorials on making a neon text effect, a sketch text effect, and a bevel text effect all in Adobe Illustrator.