How to tilt, skew or slant text in Illustrator
Select the text and use the Shear tool (under Scale) or Object › Transform › Shear with an angle, which keeps it live. For a fake italic, set Shear to about 12° with the axis on Horizontal. JuicyType's Party! effect shears every letter as a slider.
The manual way, in Illustrator
- Select the text with the Selection tool.
- Go to Object › Transform › Shear…, enter an angle (12° for an italic look), keep the Axis on Horizontal, tick Preview. The Transform panel (Shift+F8) has the same Shear field.
- Or pick the Shear tool from the Scale tool group and drag across the text; hold Shift to constrain.
- To take it off later, apply Shear again with the negative angle, or Undo. Reset Bounding Box only squares the handles; it does not unshear.
Shear changes the object transform, so later text edits keep the slant; that is usually what you want.
Menu paths checked against Adobe's current Illustrator documentation; hands-on verification and screenshots are still to come.
2 effects in JuicyType
Party! with Random off gives an even shear you can undo with a slider; with Random on, each letter leans its own way.
Common questions
Is there a proper italic instead of a shear?
Use the font's italic style from the Character panel if it has one, or the Slant slider behind the Variable Font icon if the font is variable and has a slant axis; not every variable font does. Illustrator has no faux italic; shear is the fallback.