You should read about the appearance panel which will give you  lot of freedom and expand ypur abilities to do things seem like impossible.

Here is a video o how to do this, keep in mind if you wish to add text or remove text the the black background will expand or contract accordingly, all you have to do is type as long as the type size and font are the same.

You can do it with different fonts as well but you will have to adjust the font size baseline shift etc o make them match but it can be done.

here's the video

http://www.wadezimmerman.com/videos/NegativeType.mov

What what what . . .

Either I'm not following this very well (it is 1:15a here so cut me some slack heh) or all you need to do fill your paths with a pattern, right? In this case, just fill the implied rectangle "behind" the word "-NEGATIVE.", filled with white, with a hyphen lookin' pattern.

Why bother with Area Type?

-IF-   you're wanting to fill the black areas in your design with little hyphens that never get cropped/covered up and that look like they follow the shapes they're seemingly filling, that's another matter. Unfortunatley, I have to suggest a blockier font than Futura so that the negative spaces within have a more naturally square area to populate. I think it'll work better, Plus, I think just kocking out the word "NEGATEIVE" from a rectangle sufficiently conveys the concept of negative space. . . . but this isn't the design crit subforum.

Wayne—

It looks like you've solved this method, so I didn't spend any more time on the whole text wrap idea, but I thought you might like to see another approach to the whole negative / positive space thing ... first, in black & white: (click image to enlarge)

And in color:

Best regards,

Ron