Have you ever wanted to put text along a spiral in InDesign? It’s not hard, but there are some tricks that make it much easier! The basic steps are: find a spiral, use the Text on a Path tool to add the text, adjust the spiral to make the text go the right way, and then adjust the text to fit. Let’s see how to do each of those:
Find a Spiral
Don’t try to draw a spiral with the Pen tool… you’ll drive yourself mad. Instead, use one of these techniques:
- Adobe Illustrator: Illustrator has a Spiral tool which is pretty cool. (You can find instructions in this old “how to draw in Illustrator” PDF.) Once you have a spiral path, you can copy it to the clipboard and then paste it into InDesign.
- Spiral Script: Marc Autret wrote an awesome little spiral-drawing InDesign script some years ago, which is super helpful.
If you need help installing and running a script in InDesign, see this article.
Text on a Path
To put text on a path in InDesign, you need to click on the path with the Type on a Path tool (which is “hiding” under the Type tool). Read more about this tool and how to use it (and it’s important Options dialog box) in this article.
Adjusting the Spiral
Often, when you put text on a spiral, the text is starting in the wrong place, or the spiral doesn’t begin where you want it to. No problem! You can adjust the path using all the options in the Control, Properties, or Transform panels.
For example, in the image above, the text starts in the middle of the spiral. I want it to start on the outside, so I choose Object > Paths > Reverse Path.
Super important tip: After you select the spiral object with the Selection tool, switch to the Direct Selection tool! That selects the path separate from the text! So, for example, if you flip or rotate now, it will affect the points on the path, and the text is still readable.
Here, I’ve reversed the path and then flipped the spiral’s points:
Adjusting the Text
Finally, you just need to tweak the text formatting to make it look like you want. Remember that you don’t have to use the Type on a Path tool for this; the regular Type tool works fine. (You only need the Type on a Path tool to place text on a path.)
Adjust the font, size, and other text formatting features until it looks just right. If the path still has a visible stroke, set the stroke color to None so it disappears.
Or, to make the text look like it’s spiraling away from you, use this other script to adjust the characters so that they get smaller and smaller:
This article was last modified on April 1, 2024
This article was first published on April 1, 2024
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