Bending artwork with warps and envelopes in Vectornation

A flat word on a straight baseline is fine for body text, but badges, labels and logos often want lettering that arches, bulges or flags in the wind. Vectornation by Zaweba gives you two related ways to get there: warps, which bend artwork into one of 15 preset styles, and envelope distort, which pours artwork into a shape and keeps it there until you decide otherwise.

Both leave the original artwork intact underneath, which is the reason to use them instead of dragging points about by hand. You can change your mind about the bend long after you have made it.

The 15 warp styles

A warp takes whatever you have selected and pushes it through a preset curve. There are 15 styles to pick from, and each has two controls that matter: bend, which sets how strongly the curve pulls, and distortion, which skews the effect so one side or one end takes more of it than the other.

Start with a small bend and raise it slowly. A gentle arch on a shop name reads as confident; a strong one quickly looks like a novelty. Distortion is best used sparingly too. A touch of it can give lettering a sense of perspective, as if the word were leaning back from you, but too much makes the letters on one side hard to read.

Three ways to make an envelope

Envelope distort lives under the Object menu and comes in three forms, each with its own shortcut.

Make with warp (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+W) builds an envelope from one of the warp styles. The difference from a plain warp is that you now have an envelope object you can edit, release or expand later, which is handy when the bend is part of a design you will keep tweaking.

Make with mesh (Ctrl+Alt+M) lays a grid over the artwork. Moving the grid points drags the artwork with them, so you can bulge one corner of a label, pinch the middle of a word or shape a graphic to sit on a curved surface in a mock up.

Make with top object (Ctrl+Alt+C) is the one people reach for most for logos. Draw the outline you want, such as a shield, a banner or a circle, place it above your text or artwork, select both and run the command. The artwork beneath is fitted inside that top shape.

Release, Expand and Edit contents

Once an envelope exists you have three ways forward. Edit contents lets you change what is inside without undoing the distortion, so you can fix a spelling mistake in an arched name or change a colour, and the envelope reshapes the new content straight away. This is the main reason to prefer an envelope over a one off distortion.

Release takes the envelope apart and gives you the original artwork back alongside the shape that was doing the distorting. Use it when the idea has not worked and you want to start again from clean material.

Expand turns the distorted result into ordinary paths. Do this only when you need to, for example when a cutter or engraver needs plain outlines, or when you want to edit individual points of the bent shape. After expanding, the text is no longer text and the envelope can no longer be changed, so keep an unexpanded copy on a hidden layer or a spare artboard.

Getting cleaner results

Simple artwork bends better than busy artwork. A short word in a heavy typeface takes a warp well, while a long line of thin type tends to look stretched at the ends. If a mesh envelope is producing lumpy curves, use fewer grid points and move them in smaller steps.

When fitting into a top object, draw that shape with as few points as you can. Every extra point in the outline is something the artwork has to follow, and small wobbles in the shape become visible ripples in the lettering.

Envelopes also combine well with the rest of the effects in Vectornation. A warped word can still take a drop shadow or a glow, and because both stay live, the shadow follows the bend if you edit the contents later.

Mistakes worth avoiding

The most common mistake is expanding too early, then finding a typo in a word that is now a set of outlines. The second is warping a word and a separate graphic separately when they should bend together; group them first or put them in one envelope so the curve runs through both. Keep those two habits and warps and envelopes become a quick, low risk way to give flat artwork some shape.