Creating Circular Text On Your Mac With Acorn

If you need to draw text along a circular path on your Mac, you'll find you need a third-party app to do it. One general image editing app that will do it is Acorn, available in the Mac App Store at a much lower cost than anything from Adobe. You can easily add text outside or inside of a circle, and make adjustments to the text afterward. You can then export the result to use in any app.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create circular text on your Mac.
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So creating circular text on your Mac can be very frustrating is you don't have expensive Adobe apps. However there are other apps that can do it. The Mac App Store has several. One good option is to use Acorn which is an image editing tool you may have already have bought to use for other things. Acorn has a great circular text tool. You can build circular text in Acorn and then export it to use elsewhere.
I'm using Acorn version 6.5.3. Make sure you're using that version or something newer. I got it in the Mac App Store. I'm going to create a new document and set it to be something square. Let's do 800 X 800, Transparent and hit OK. Then I'm going to expand the window here so I can see the drawing area clearly. Creating circle text is actually pretty easy. You've got a text too herel. Now you probably have it set to plain text like that. But if you click and hold this tool you can select Circle text or Path text. 
So we'll select circle text and I'll click near the middle and it will create the circle and there will be a text cursor at the top. Now I can simply just type. I'm going to use all caps because capital letters seem to work better around a circle. So you can see how it added the text here and kept it centered on the circle with the center being here at the top. I can select all, Command A, and I can change this text just like any other. So I can make it a larger size. I can left justify it instead of right justified so it starts here at this dot. 
We have three control dots here. This dot is the rotation dot and it starts here. But if I do centered then it's centered with that dot kind of being that as the left side of the text box. Now this dot here you can click and drag and move that point so you can change where the text starts. This dot here you can change the size. This dot here changes whether or not the text is on the outside of the circle or if you click it then the text is on the inside of the circle which is going to come in handy here in a minute. But I'm going to use this text on the outside of the circle.
I'm going to select the Move tool here and I'm going to drag this around. I'm going to make sure it's centered here on this document. Then I'm going to create another text circle. So I'm going to click there, click in the middle, and I'm going to type the text I want to be at the bottom. Now what I'm going to do here is I am going to click this black circle here to move the text into the inside. Then I'm going to click here and rotate this around to be zero degrees. So this text is on the inside and at the bottom.
Now I want to enlarge the circle because notice how, with this text being on the inside and this being on the outside, they don't line up. But if I use this dot here I can move the circle so it matches the top of the text here. You can see now how it basically puts both pieces of text in the same circle. I can select All and let's increase the size of this text here at the bottom. Also I want to increase the kerning a bit just to move those letters across. Sometimes the letters get a little smushed together because of it being on a circle. So increasing it just slightly, like that, can make a big difference. Lets do it like 5. 
So now I've got something pretty much ready to use except that I really want to actually have a kind of circle background on this. So I'm going to select the circle shape here. Click and drag to create a circle. I'm going to use the Shift key to make sure it stays circular and not oval. Then I'm going to leave it there. Switch to the Move tool and center it right there. I did a pretty good job of guessing the outside of the circle here. Let me go and change the Fill color. You can see there's Fill and I can click the color there. Make it completely Opaque. Let's make it red for now. Then I'm going to go to Shape and then Arrange and then send it back. So it will be behind this text here.
Then I'm going to duplicate it. So I'm going to do Copy and Paste and I have this other circle here. I'm going to shrink this down. I could just grab the corner of it here. Actually if you hold the Shift key it'll do a good job of keeping it in kind of the same ratio. Change the Fill color of this to say black here. Then I'm going to move this in the center. It's not quite the size I want. I'm going to continue to shrink it down and recenter it to get it to about the size I want. A little bit more. There. That's good. That's what I want to cut out.
Now that I have that selected I'm going to Shift, Select the outer circle. So now I have both selected. I can tell because I can drag them both like that. Just Undo to put them back. I'm going to do Shape and then Exclude Paths which will then cut a hole out in the middle. I need to reapply the color there and then move it back. So I'm going to do Arrange, Send it Back. Now the red it behind there. Now I can do further adjustments. I can see that this text here seems to be pretty well centered. But this text at the bottom here, I'll click Away and then click there. I need to maybe just enlarge that circle there just a little bit to get it right there in the middle. There we go!
So now we've got some text that we can use. Since this is a transparent image I can now go to File, Export and then do Export. Then do a png so it remains transparent and Save it out. So I have a transparent image I can use in other apps. I can also, for course, just use this in Acorn. Be sure to Save it as an Acorn document as well so then you'll be able to open up the document again in Acorn and edit the text and other elements if you want.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Creating Circular Text On Your Mac With Acorn”

Caroline Myddelton

4 years ago

Neat! I've had a look at your list of tutorials under subject, and I don't see a heading for Acorn (though there's one for Pixelmator). Any chance of your doing a number of tutorials for Acorn some time?

Gary Rosenzweig

Caroline: Yes. I think I'll be adding that as a category soon.

Jim Goddard

Thanks for the brief tutorial on creating a circle text in Acorn. Acorn is a great basic graphics editor.
I downloaded it one day when I noticed you had it on your taskbar, and I thought well if Gary is using it. the app must be pretty good :-) :-) :-) I also downloaded Screenflow for the same reason.

Vaman Kale

Wow! That opens a new line of thought for the occasional videos I make.

Bradley Smith

In Australia's App Store, Acorn retails for $46.99. An expensive circle. I'd consider Photoshop Elements, first.

Comments Closed.

Creating Circular Text On Your Mac With Acorn

Comments: 5 Responses to “Creating Circular Text On Your Mac With Acorn”

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